Ostler Terms of Service

Ostler — Terms of Service

Version 1.0 · Last updated 21 August 2026

1. Agreement and eligibility

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of the Ostler mobile application and related services (the "Service"), operated by Mario Noriega, an individual established in Guatemala City, Guatemala, trading as Ostler ("Ostler", "we", "us"). By creating an account or using the Service you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you are under 18, you may use the Service only with the involvement and consent of a parent or legal guardian, who must read and accept these Terms on your behalf. That parent or guardian is responsible for your use of the Service, for supervising every care decision made with its help, and for any subscription purchased through your account. If you are a parent or guardian and you did not consent to your child's use, contact us at support@ostlerapp.com and we will close the account.

Where Ostler is available. The Service is sold through the Apple App Store in the territories we select there, and it is not offered in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland. We do not market or direct the Service to people in those territories, and you may not use it if you are located in one of them.

2. What the Service is — and is not

Ostler provides general pet care information and guidance, including help deciding whether and how urgently to contact a veterinarian. Some features use artificial intelligence to generate responses.

Ostler does not practice veterinary medicine. The Service does not diagnose illness or injury, does not prescribe or recommend medication or dosages, and does not provide treatment.

If you believe your animal is experiencing a medical emergency, contact a veterinarian or an emergency veterinary clinic immediately. Do not wait for a response from the Service.

3. Your responsibility for care decisions

You are solely responsible for the health, welfare, and care of your animals, and for every decision you make about them — including whether, when, and from whom to seek professional veterinary care. You agree to consult a licensed veterinarian for diagnosis, medication, and treatment, and to exercise your own judgment about anything the Service tells you.

4. Accounts and household sharing

You are responsible for your account credentials and for activity under your account. If you invite others into a shared household, they can see the pets, activity logs, and reminders in that household. Chat conversations remain private to the account that created them. Only invite people you intend to share that information with.

5. Subscriptions and billing

Paid features are sold as auto-renewing subscriptions through the Apple App Store. Payment is charged to your Apple ID at confirmation of purchase, and renews automatically at the then-current price unless canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Manage or cancel in your Apple ID settings.

Canceling stops future renewals; it does not refund the period you are already in, and you keep access until that period ends. Refunds are handled by Apple under its policies; we cannot issue App Store refunds directly.

If we offer a free trial and you do not cancel before it ends, the subscription converts to a paid term automatically. We may change subscription pricing prospectively; changes take effect at your next renewal after we notify you, and your continued subscription constitutes acceptance.

Usage limits apply to AI features and are described in the app. We may adjust these limits for fair use.

6. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

7. Your content, and the rights you promise you have

You keep ownership of the content you submit (messages, photos, PDFs, logs). You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, and transmit it for one purpose: operating the Service for you. That license extends to the providers we use to run the Service — including sending your content to our AI processor to generate a response, as described in the Privacy Policy — and it ends when you delete the content, except for copies in routine backups that expire on their own schedule.

What you promise about your content

Each time you submit content, you represent and warrant that:

This comes up more often than it sounds. A studio portrait of your own dog is usually still the photographer's copyright; veterinary records, invoices, and lab results may carry the clinic's own terms; pedigree and registry papers, breeder or purchase contracts, and screenshots of another app or website all belong to someone. If you are not certain you may upload something, describe it in your own words instead — Ostler can answer either way.

We do not pre-screen, and we may remove

We have no obligation to monitor what you submit and do not review it before it is stored. We do reserve the right to review, remove, or disable access to any content, and to suspend or terminate an account, at any time and without prior notice — on receipt of a complaint, where we believe content breaches these Terms, or where the law requires it. We are not liable to you for doing so, and removing some content puts us under no obligation to remove any other.

Responsibility for your content stays with you. If a claim is brought against us because of something you submitted, Section 13 applies.

Reporting content, and removing someone from your household

If you see something objectionable, report it. Write to support@ostlerapp.com with enough detail to find it — the pet, the household, and roughly when it appeared. We aim to review every report within 24 hours, and we remove content that breaches Section 6 and remove the accounts responsible.

This applies to the assistant as well as to people. If Ostler generates a response that is harmful, offensive, or dangerously wrong, report it the same way. We use those reports to correct the behaviour, and there is no penalty of any kind for sending one.

You can also act yourself, immediately. Ostler is not a public network — content is shared only inside a household you chose to invite someone into. If a member of your household behaves badly, the main account can remove them at once in Settings → Family, which ends their access to your pets, logs, and photos. Rotating the household access code stops any further joins with the old one. If the main account is the problem, write to us and we will act.

Feedback

If you send us suggestions or feedback about the Service, you grant us an unrestricted, royalty-free right to use it without obligation or compensation to you.

8. Intellectual property and copyright complaints (DMCA)

The Service, its software, and its branding are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by intellectual-property law. These Terms grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the app for its intended purpose — nothing more.

Ostler is a private service, not a publishing platform. What you upload is visible to you, to the household members you invite, and to the providers listed in the Privacy Policy. It is not posted publicly, indexed by search engines, or shown to other users.

Reporting infringement

We respond to notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If you believe content stored on the Service infringes a copyright you own or are authorized to act for, send a written notice to our designated agent at support@ostlerapp.com, or by post to Mario Noriega, 41 Avenida 15-49, Zona 5, Jardines de la Asunción Sur, Guatemala City, Guatemala, marked DMCA Agent, including:

We will remove or disable access to material that is the subject of a valid notice, and notify the account holder that we have done so.

Counter-notification

If your content was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, send a counter-notification to the same address giving your signature, identification of the material and where it was, a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief it was removed by mistake, your contact details, your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court for your district — or, if you are outside the United States, for any district in which we may be found — and your agreement to accept service from the complaining party. We may restore the material after ten business days unless the complaining party tells us it has filed suit.

Knowingly misrepresenting that material is infringing, or that it was removed by mistake, carries liability for damages, costs, and legal fees under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f).

Repeat infringers, and other rights

We terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe. If the right you are asserting is something other than copyright — trademark, privacy, publicity, or confidentiality — write to the same address describing the right and the material, and we will handle it under the same process.

9. Third-party services

The Service relies on third parties, including Anthropic (AI processing), Apple (payments and distribution), our hosting and database providers, and OpenStreetMap data for the vet finder. Clinic listings, hours, and contact details come from third-party data and may be inaccurate or out of date; verify before relying on them. We do not control these providers and are not responsible for their acts or omissions.

10. Apple App Store terms

These terms apply because the app is distributed through the Apple App Store:

11. Disclaimer of warranties

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any information or AI output is accurate or complete.

12. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Ostler and its officers, employees, and suppliers will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, goodwill, or for injury to, illness of, or death of any animal, arising out of or related to your use of or inability to use the Service — whether based in contract, tort, negligence, strict liability, or otherwise, and even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the Service will not exceed the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) fifty US dollars ($50).

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions or limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

13. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Ostler and its officers, employees, agents, and suppliers from any claim, demand, loss, liability, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your use of the Service, your care decisions, your breach of these Terms or of any law, and — in particular — any content you submit, including any claim that it infringes or misappropriates a copyright, trademark, trade secret, patent, or other intellectual-property right, or violates a right of privacy, publicity, or confidentiality.

We may assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter you are obliged to indemnify, at your expense, and you agree to cooperate with us if we do. You will not settle any such matter in a way that admits fault on our part, imposes an obligation on us, or affects our rights, without our prior written consent. This section survives termination of your account.

14. Resolving disputes

Start with Apple, or with us — it is faster than any legal process. Subscriptions, billing, and refunds are handled entirely by Apple, not by us: request a refund at reportaproblem.apple.com, which is something we cannot do on your behalf. For anything else, write to support@ostlerapp.com. Both of us agree to spend at least 30 days trying to settle a dispute this way before either starts a formal proceeding.

Read this section carefully. It affects how any dispute between us is decided, and it limits your right to go to court or to take part in a class action.

Binding individual arbitration

If the 30 days above do not resolve it, you and Ostler agree that any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms, the Service, or your use of it — including its formation, interpretation, breach, or termination, and including claims that arose before you accepted these Terms — will be resolved by binding individual arbitration rather than in court, except as set out under “What is not covered” below.

The arbitration will be administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, available at adr.org. One arbitrator will decide. The arbitrator, and not any court, has exclusive authority to resolve any dispute about whether this section applies to a particular claim — except for the class-action waiver below, which only a court may rule on. The arbitrator may award the same individual relief a court could, and the award may be entered as a judgment in any court with jurisdiction.

Arbitration is less formal than a lawsuit. It uses a neutral arbitrator instead of a judge or jury, discovery is more limited, and review of the outcome is narrow. Where the AAA rules require us to pay the filing and arbitration fees for a consumer claim, we will pay them. You may choose to have the arbitration conducted by documents only, by telephone or video, or in person in the place where you live.

No class actions

You and Ostler each agree to bring claims only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims and may not preside over any form of representative or class proceeding. If a court decides this paragraph is unenforceable as to a particular claim or request for relief, then that claim or request — and only that one — will be severed from the arbitration and may proceed in the courts identified in Section 15; the rest of this section still applies to everything else.

Coordinated filings

If 25 or more similar arbitration demands are filed against us by or with the assistance of the same lawyers or coordinated group, you and we agree the demands will be administered in staged batches of no more than 50 at a time. Each batch is decided by a single arbitrator, and the limitation periods for the remaining demands are paused until their batch begins. This exists so that volume alone cannot be used as leverage; it does not reduce anyone's individual claim.

What is not covered

This section does not apply to: any claim that may be brought in a small-claims court, so long as it stays there and is brought on an individual basis; any request for an injunction or other equitable relief to stop misuse, infringement, or unauthorized use of intellectual property, which either party may bring in court at any time and without waiting out the 30 days; and any dispute over subscriptions, billing, or refunds, which Apple handles and which is governed by your agreement with Apple rather than by these Terms.

Your right to opt out

You can decline this arbitration agreement. Email support@ostlerapp.com with the subject “Arbitration opt-out” within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, and include the email address on your account. That is all it takes. Opting out affects nothing else — it does not change your subscription, your access, or any other part of these Terms, and we will not treat you differently for it. If you opt out, disputes go to the courts identified in Section 15 instead.

If we later change this section, the change does not apply to any dispute we already had notice of. This section survives termination of your account.

15. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Guatemala, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the courts of Guatemala City, Guatemala have jurisdiction — subject to the paragraph below.

Because the arbitration agreement in Section 14 concerns interstate commerce in the United States, the Federal Arbitration Act governs its interpretation and enforcement, including whether a dispute must be arbitrated. Guatemalan law continues to govern everything else in these Terms.

Your local consumer rights come first. Nothing in these Terms removes the protection of any mandatory consumer-protection law of the country where you live. Where a mandatory rule of your home country conflicts with anything in these Terms, that rule wins — and where the law where you live does not permit a pre-dispute agreement to arbitrate, or does not permit the class-action waiver, Section 14 does not apply to you and your disputes go to the courts named above or to the courts of the country where you live, whichever that law requires.

Ostler is offered in the countries listed on its App Store product page. It is not offered in the European Union, and it is not directed to people there.

16. Termination

You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time from Settings. We may suspend or terminate access for breach of these Terms, for abuse, or where required by law. Sections that by their nature should survive termination — including your content license, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and dispute resolution — survive.

17. Changes

We may update these Terms. Material changes will be notified in the app or by email, and continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance.

18. General

19. Contact

Mario Noriega (trading as Ostler)
41 Avenida 15-49, Zona 5
Jardines de la Asunción Sur
Guatemala City, Guatemala
support@ostlerapp.com