Fair Use Policy

A membership is for one household and the animals that live in it. Every animal in your home is included, however many that is, and it does not matter whether you had them when you joined.

It belongs to you personally. You cannot hand it to somebody else, sell access to it, share the sign-in link, or use it to answer questions for other people’s animals. That last one is not a technicality: the professional answering is licensed, they are told who they are writing to and about which animal, and an answer written for one animal and passed on to another household is exactly the kind of thing we will not be part of.

If you look after animals for a living — a practice, a rescue, a boarding or grooming business, a breeder — a personal membership is not the right thing and we would rather talk to you about it than catch you at it later. Write to us.

Membership renews at $65 a month and there is no charge for each conversation. What it buys is access to the service and the ability to start a conversation whenever you need one, about any animal in your household. The whole amount you are charged on the day you join is stated on the payment page before any card field, and again in the Terms of Service; this page is about what the membership covers rather than what it costs.

Unlimited is real, and it has one boundary: your own household’s own use. There is no cap on how many conversations that is. It does not buy a particular professional, a particular answer or a particular response time. It does not include a live phone call with a professional, which is a separate $19 charge you can choose or not, so a call is never counted against you here either.

These are the patterns that make us look, in the order we actually see them:

• Volume that does not fit one home. Enough conversations, about enough different animals, that the plainest explanation is that the membership is being used for other people’s animals or for a business.
• The same case again, barely reworded. Asking one question repeatedly to collect a stack of separate opinions is not what the service is for, and it takes a professional away from somebody waiting.
• More than one person on one account. Passing on the sign-in link we email you hands over your account and your conversations, so keep it to yourself.
• Anything automated. Scripts, bots and scrapers, or anything else that opens conversations without a person writing them.
• Getting round a step we have taken. A second account, a second email address, or any other way round something we have already written to you about.

The first two are about how much; the last three are about how. They are all in this policy because they all end the same way, with a professional spending their night on something a membership was never priced to cover.

Being clear about this matters as much as the list above, because a policy people are afraid of is a policy that stops them asking when they should. None of the following is, on its own, a reason we would do anything at all:

• Having several animals. Four cats and a dog in one house is one household, and we do not count animals.
• Following up in the same conversation. A conversation stays open for seven days and everything you write in it is part of the one conversation, counted once.
• One animal having a bad month. A new finding from your own vet, a recovery that is not going to plan, an old dog in their last year: that is precisely when people need to ask more, and it is what we built this for. A busy month for one animal will not by itself change anything about your membership.
• Asking about something that turns out to be nothing.
• Anything we told you to go to a clinic about. See emergencies.

Being straight about the mechanism, because you are entitled to know it: what we count is conversations, not animals and not outcomes. A run like the one above can still put a month above the volume described in use beyond one household, and if it does, the only thing that happens is the first step — we write to you and ask. One animal having one bad month is an answer we accept, and it ends there.

There are three steps and they happen in this order. We do not skip one, and nothing happens at all on the strength of a single busy week.

1. We get in touch

First, always, we write to you. We tell you what we have counted, how we counted it and what we are comparing it against, and we ask you about it, because the explanation is often something we could not have guessed. Nothing about your service changes at this step: your membership carries on, and any conversation that is open stays open.

2. We write to you again

If, after 14 days, use is still well beyond what one membership is priced to cover, we write to you a second time: what we have counted since, and what would happen if nothing changes. Your membership stays exactly as it is while you reply, and any conversation that is open stays open.

3. Only then, we may end the membership

If another 14 days passes, nothing has changed, and the use is still far enough beyond one household that the membership is costing us more than it pays, we may end it. Use that is above what the plan is priced for but not beyond that point does not get to this step at all: it stops at step 2, and your membership carries on. If we do end a membership:

• We tell you before it happens, not after.
• We refund the part of the month you have paid for and have not used, worked out by the day and rounded up in your favour.
• Conversations already open stay open, and the written summaries of your past conversations stay in your account.

That refund is the difference between this and cancelling. If you cancel, which you can do yourself in one step from your account page at any time, you keep the service until the end of the month you have already paid for and there is nothing to refund. If we end it, we are cutting a month short that you paid for, so we give the unused part back.

Conduct rather than volume — threats to a professional, unlawful uploads, using the service for human medical questions — is dealt with in the Terms of Service and can move faster, because those are not questions of how much anyone is using a membership.

If our intake assistant thinks your animal is in an emergency, it tells you to go to a clinic now and it does not ask you for payment. Those cases are never billed, and they are never counted anywhere in this policy.

This is written into the code, not left to judgment: a case flagged as an emergency is thrown out of the count before any of the arithmetic on this page runs, whatever its state or history. A member who reports ten emergencies in a month is in exactly the same position as one who reports none.

We look at a pattern, not a moment. Before we say anything at all we want at least 14 days of a month to have run, and we count what has actually happened rather than projecting a busy first week across a whole month.

We count a conversation only when all of this is true:

• A professional actually replied to it.
• It was covered by your membership.
• It was not an emergency.

So an unfinished question, a conversation nobody has picked up yet and one we gave you as a goodwill gesture all count for nothing here.

We apply this the same way to everybody, and we write the numbers down before we act on them. It is never applied because of who somebody is: race, colour, national origin, ancestry, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, medical condition, marital or family status, military or veteran status, the language somebody writes in, the state they live in or the species of the animal they are asking about have nothing to do with how much a membership is used, and none of them will ever be a reason we do any of the three things above.

Reply to the email, or write to hello@talktoavet.com from the address on your account. A person reads it, and they can see the same numbers we are looking at.

We would rather be wrong in your favour than lose a member who was using the service exactly as it was meant to be used. If your household is genuinely a busy one, say so and we will leave you alone.