Membership terms

A plain-language description of what Emergent Life Lab membership includes, once billing is live. This is not formal legal advice; it is what the product actually does and what it will actually charge.

What membership is

A recurring digital subscription, intended at £6/month, to Emergent Life Lab: advanced observation and analysis tools layered read-only over the Emergent Life simulation. Full historical telemetry with custom ranges and export, a complete lineage ancestry explorer, a personal watchlist, and a saved controller snapshot archive with comparison.

What membership is not

• It is not a donation, contribution, or reward tier. It is a subscription to defined software and data services.
• It grants no influence over the simulation: no organism's survival, behaviour, or reproduction changes because someone is or is not a member.
• It does not change any public universe's founding or status, described at Universe 2 and Universe 1.

Billing, once live

• Monthly billing only at launch, intended at £6/month, one plan.
• No free trial. The public demo at /membership/demo exists instead, so you can see real tooling before paying anything.
• You will be told the price plainly before any payment is taken.

Cancellation

Once billing is live, cancellation is self-service: sign in, go to your account page, and choose Cancel or manage your subscription. That opens the payment provider's own hosted billing portal, where cancelling takes one click. Membership access continues until the end of the period you already paid for; there is no penalty for cancelling, and you never have to email us to do it.

Refunds

Three rules, in plain terms. They are deliberately more generous than the legal minimum, because a disputed £6 charge costs everyone more than simply refunding it.

• First 14 days: full refund, no reason needed. If you cancel within 14 days of your first payment, email us and you get all of it back, even if you have used Lab in the meantime. This is your statutory right to cancel a distance contract, and we do not ask you to waive it.
• Forgot to cancel? Tell us within 14 days of a renewal and we will refund that renewal. An unwanted renewal is a mistake, not a sale.
• Otherwise, no partial-period refund. If you cancel mid-period, access simply continues until the period you already paid for ends, and nothing further is charged.

To request any of the above, email hello@emergentlife.co.uk from the address on the account. If something has genuinely gone wrong outside these rules, say so and it will be looked at individually.

Who you are contracting with

Emergent Life is the trading name of Lewis Downey, a sole trader.

Contact for any question about a subscription, a refund, or this agreement: hello@emergentlife.co.uk. We aim to reply within a few working days.

Card payments are processed by Stripe on Stripe's own hosted pages. No card details are ever entered on, transmitted to, or stored by this site. Depending on how the payment is routed, Stripe may act as merchant of record and appear as the seller on your statement and receipt; your subscription and access are with Emergent Life either way, and the refund rules above apply the same way.

Your account and data

• Signing in needs only an email address. See the privacy policy for what is stored and how to have it deleted.
• If a subscription lapses, your account and anything you saved are kept, not deleted, so you can resubscribe into the same account later.
• You can delete your account at any time from your account page.

Acceptable use

Lab access is for personal, non-commercial observation and analysis of the simulation. Automated scraping of Lab endpoints outside normal interactive use, or attempting to access another member's saved data, is not permitted and may result in access being revoked.

Service availability

Emergent Life runs on a single server. It aims to be available continuously but, like any small project, is not guaranteed to be available every moment; the underlying universe keeps running and its recorded history is not lost by a temporary outage of the website in front of it.