Terms of service.

Who you are agreeing with

HonorDawn is a product of Tunabear Inc., 11711 Hillcrest Rd., Dallas, TX 75230-3109, USA. On this page, we means that company, and you means the person who created the account.

You agree to this by creating an account, which is said on the signup form itself rather than buried in a footer link. If you do not agree with something here, please do not create one — write to us instead and tell us which part; that is more useful to us than you think.

You need to be 18 or over to hold an account, because an account can involve a payment. We do not ask for your date of birth and we have no way to check this — it is stated so the rule is known, not enforced by a form.

People who contribute to a memorial, or leave a tribute on one, are not covered by this section — see Contributors, tributes and visitors.

What we provide, and what “for good” means

HonorDawn is a place to make a memorial for someone who has died: a website at its own address, which you fill in — with help from an AI assistant while you are building it — and publish when you are ready. You decide what is on it and who can see it.

And then we host it. Not for a year, not while a subscription runs. When you pay for a memorial we keep it online, at its address, for as long as Tunabear Inc. operates HonorDawn, with no further payment of any kind.

We are a small company, so here is the honest version of “forever” rather than a word we cannot stand behind: if we ever have to stop, we will not do it quietly — see If HonorDawn stops. And what makes that a promise rather than an intention is that you can already download the whole memorial, at any time, as files that open without us.

What we do not promise is perfection. The site will occasionally be slow or unavailable, we will get things wrong, and features will change as the product improves. None of that narrows the paragraph above: a bad week for our servers is not permission to stop hosting your memorial.

What it costs, and refunds

An account is free. A memorial is a one-time $19.99, per memorial. There is no subscription, no renewal and no second invoice — if you ever get one from us, it is a mistake and we will refund it.

That payment unlocks exactly two things: the AI help while you build the memorial, and publishing it for the first time. Everything else is free, before and after — creating the memorial, every form, uploading your photographs, choosing how it looks, and seeing the real page before anyone else can.

Refunds. Write to us within 30 days of the payment and we will refund it in full. You do not have to give a reason.

What happens then is exactly this, and the last part surprises people:

• The AI help closes.
• Nothing you have made is touched or deleted. Every word, photograph and date stays where it is, and every form still works.
• If the memorial was already published, it stays online. We do not take a family’s page down because a payment came back.
• You can pay again later, and the AI help reopens.

If we change the price, the new price applies to new memorials. We will never charge you again for a memorial you have already paid for, and a price change is not a reason to take one down.

Payments are handled by Stripe on their own pages. We never see your card number — see Privacy.

Your content stays yours

You keep every right you have in your photographs, your words and your recordings. Putting them on a memorial does not give them to us.

To run the service we need your permission to do a short list of things with them: store them, re-encode them, show them on the memorial you made, and keep backups. (The re-encode is not housekeeping — it is how the GPS coordinates get stripped out of your photographs.) That permission lasts as long as the content is on the memorial and ends when you delete it.

It does not include, and we will not do:

• Training AI models on your content.
• Selling it, licensing it, or sharing it with anyone for their own purposes.
• Using your family’s photographs or your words in our advertising. If we ever wanted to show a real memorial in our marketing, we would ask the family first, every time.

What we need from you in return is that the content is yours to share: your own photographs, or ones you have permission to publish. If you are not sure about a photograph, the safest thing is to leave it off — and if the person who took it asks you to remove it, please do.

There is no total limit on what you upload. One photograph has to be under 15 MB; there is no cap on how many. If abuse ever forces us to introduce one, we will say so here first, and it will not apply retroactively to what you have already uploaded.

And you can always take it with you. Download everything, in your account, gives you the whole memorial as ordinary files — the photographs, a page that opens by double-clicking it, and the data. Free, at any time, whether or not you have paid for anything.

Whose memorial it is

The account that created a memorial controls it. Anyone that account invites can add photographs and memories to it; only that account can change its settings, publish it, or delete it.

We do not settle family disagreements. If two people each believe a memorial should be theirs, we are not in a position to know who is right, and a support inbox is the wrong place to decide it. What we will do:

• Act on the instructions of the account that holds the memorial.
• Act on a court order.
• Look at it ourselves, and act, if you are in a photograph or a story on a memorial and want it taken down.

So that the other side of that is not a surprise, here is what we will not do:

• Give anybody access to a memorial they do not own — not a relative, not somebody who tells us the owner has died.
• Edit a family’s memorial on a stranger’s say-so.
• Recover a password without the account’s email address, or move an account to a different address on request alone.

There is one hard edge here and we would rather name it than let you find it. If the person who made a memorial dies, we have no proper way yet to pass it on to somebody else — building that carefully is work we have not done, and doing it carelessly would undo the rule above. Write to us and we will do what we can. In the meantime, the download in the account is the answer, and it is worth doing today rather than needing it later.

What may not go on a memorial

The list is short, and it is the whole list:

• Content that is not yours to publish.
• A memorial for somebody who has not died, or for a person who does not exist.
• Abuse, threats or harassment — aimed at anyone living, or at the person being remembered.
• Sexual content.
• Anything unlawful.
• Using a memorial as a shopfront. The Giving section points at a cause the family names, and we take nothing from it; it is not a payments channel for anything else.

What we do about it. We remove the content, and we tell the account holder what we removed and why. We only close a memorial outright for the second item — a memorial that is not what it claims to be — or where the law requires it. We will not close a memorial you have paid for, for any reason not on this list.

What already happens, every time. Every tribute a visitor leaves and every memory a contributor shares is screened by an AI for abuse before a person sees it, and then waits for the family to approve it. Nothing a stranger writes appears on a memorial on its own. That screening is not something a family can switch off — it is a safety control, not a preference.

If you have found something on a memorial that should not be there, write to [email protected] and include the memorial’s address. We reply usually within two business days.

Contributors, tributes and visitors

A memorial is built out of people who never signed up for anything, so this section is for them.

If a family invited you to contribute, or you are leaving a tribute on a memorial, you are agreeing to this page by sending what you send — and what that means is narrow: you are confirming that what you share is yours to share, and giving that family permission to publish it on that memorial. Nothing more. You are not creating an account and you are not giving us anything.

Your memory or photograph is screened for abuse, and then the family decides whether it appears. You can ask us to remove what you shared, or to remove your email address, at any time.

If you are just reading a memorial, you agree to nothing. No account, no cookie, nothing to accept.

What the AI is, and is not

Everything the assistant writes about the person you are remembering is a draft until you approve it. We do not publish anything on your behalf. Where the assistant changes how the page looks — colours, the order of the sections — it does that immediately and you can undo it in one tap, because a colour is not a claim about somebody’s life.

It gets things wrong. It is a writing assistant working from what you told it, not a record of anyone’s life. What a memorial says is your account of the person, and the responsibility for it is yours — which is exactly why we put a person between every draft and the page.

What it writes is yours, on the same terms as anything else you write here. We claim nothing in it.

AI help is for building the memorial, and it closes when the building is done — the pricing page says exactly when, and how to reopen it once, free. Two things are not affected by it, ever: weaving in memories that family and friends share later, and captions for the photographs they send. That is the half of a memorial that has to outlive the week of the funeral.

Every section of a memorial stays editable by hand, forever, whether the AI is open or not.

Ending it — yours, or ours

You can end it at any time, and both ways are self-service. Please download everything first.

One exception, in the table on Privacy rather than in a footnote here: we keep the record of a payment for 7 years, because tax law requires it. The amount, the date and Stripe’s reference — never a card number.

We can end it only for the reasons printed in What may not go on a memorial, and if we ever do, we will tell you which one and the download will still work. There is no clause on this page that lets us close a paid memorial because we felt like it, and that absence is deliberate.

If HonorDawn stops

We intend to be here for a very long time. But you are trusting us with something irreplaceable, so the failure case belongs in writing rather than in our good intentions.

If Tunabear Inc. ever has to stop running HonorDawn:

• We will email every account holder at least 90 days before anything goes offline. Not a banner somebody might see — an email to the address on the account.
• The download will work for the whole of that period, free, and will not be gated behind anything.
• No price increase, no paywall and no “pay to keep it” on the way out.
• We will look for a way to keep the pages up, and we will tell you honestly whether we found one.

The reason this is a promise and not an aspiration: what you download is one file containing your photographs and a page that opens in any browser, offline, with nothing of ours involved. Whatever happens to us, that keeps working.

What we are responsible for

We provide HonorDawn carefully, but without a guarantee that it will never be unavailable or never lose anything, and to the extent the law allows, what we can owe you for anything that goes wrong is limited to what you have paid us — for a memorial, $19.99.

That is a small number, so here is what actually protects you, and it is not a clause. Download everything, in your account, at any time, free, gives you the whole memorial as ordinary files that open without us. We built it so that this paragraph never has to be the answer to anything. If you have not used it yet, please do — today, not the day you need it.

Nothing here limits anything that cannot be limited by law, and nothing here is intended to take away a right you have as a consumer.

Which law, and where a dispute goes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, and a dispute about them belongs in the state or federal courts of Dallas County, Texas.

There is no arbitration clause on this page, and no class-action waiver. That is a choice, not an oversight. Most terms of service take away your right to go to court; on a one-time $19.99 product, doing that would buy us almost nothing and would be the one paragraph here that treats you as a risk to be managed. If the amount is small, small-claims court is open to you, and so are we.

Please write to us first. Not because you have to — you do not — but because almost everything that looks like a dispute is a thing we can just fix. [email protected], and we reply usually within two business days.

Changes to these terms

If we change these terms in a way that matters, we will email the address on your account before it takes effect — not quietly edit a sentence and rely on you noticing the date at the top. Changes apply going forward, and the date at the top always says when this page last changed.

One thing we will not change for a memorial that has already been paid for: the hosting promise above. If we ever have to narrow it, that will apply to new memorials only, and the single exception is the wind-down case, which is written out in full in If HonorDawn stops rather than left to a sentence reserving our rights.

Questions about any of this — [email protected], or Tunabear Inc., 11711 Hillcrest Rd., Dallas, TX 75230-3109.