ProudToBe — Terms of Service

1. Who we are

ProudToBe (the "Service") is operated by [legal name of the operator, legal form, registered address, VAT / tax number, business register] (the "Operator", "we"). You can reach us at hello@proudtobe.online.

The Service is available at https://proudtobe.online and at any subdomain or app we publish under that name.

2. What the Service is

ProudToBe gives every person one public page at proudtobe.online/<nick> and a place in a single global ranking of people. Visitors give votes to pages; each valid vote adds one point of User Power to the page that received it. People can also join clubs, whose power is simply the sum of their members' User Power.

The ranking is a game of visibility. It is not a measure of quality, truth, popularity outside the Service, or anything else. We make no promise about the position you will reach or keep.

3. Who may use the Service

You must be at least [18] years old to create an account.

You must be a real, individual person. Companies, brands and projects may be represented by a person who is responsible for the page, but each account belongs to one human being. One person may hold only one account. If we find that one person controls several accounts, we may treat all of them as a single account or close them.

4. Your account

You sign in with your e-mail address (a one-time code or link) or with a Google account that carries a verified e-mail address. There is no password. The e-mail address is the identity of the account: one address is always one account, whichever way you sign in.

You are responsible for keeping access to that e-mail address and for everything done from your account. In Settings you can see the devices signed in to your account and sign the others out.

5. Your nick and your page

Your nick is the last part of your address, proudtobe.online/<nick>. Nicks are assigned on a first-come basis, with two exceptions:

• some names are reserved for the Service itself (for example rankings, clubs, settings) and cannot be taken;
• names that belong to a widely known person, brand or organisation may be marked as claimable and require verification before they can be used. We may withdraw a nick that impersonates someone.

Your page shows what you choose to publish: a display name, photo, cover image, profession, location, links, text, images, video and other modules. You decide what is published; nothing on your page is visible until you publish it. The number of votes, referrals, your User Power, your position and the number of visits to your page are public by design.

Your page must comply with the Community Rules (a separate document that is part of these Terms).

6. Votes

6.1 Free vote

Every active account gets one free vote per calendar day, counted in the time zone set on the account (by default, the time zone of your device). Free votes do not accumulate and cannot be saved: an unused free vote is simply gone at midnight. There is also a minimum interval of six hours between two free votes. You may give your free vote to your own page or to any other active page.

6.2 Purchased votes

You can buy votes at one US dollar per vote (for example $10 for 10 votes). The price shown at checkout is the price you pay; where VAT or a similar tax applies, it is included in that price. Purchased votes go to your Available votes balance. From there you can give them to any active page, including your own, one or many at a time, whenever you like.

Purchased votes:

• have no cash value and cannot be exchanged for money, goods or services;
• cannot be transferred to another account or sold;
• are not refundable once purchased, except where the law requires a refund;
• do not expire while your account exists.

A purchase does not raise your own User Power. Only a vote that has been given raises the User Power of the page that received it.

6.3 A given vote is permanent

Once a valid vote has been given, it stays with the page that received it. You cannot take it back, move it to another page or ask us to move it. Think before you vote.

6.4 Invalid votes

A vote can be invalidated only in the situations described in section 11 (moderation) and section 8.3 (reversed payments). An invalidated vote is removed from the page that received it. Every invalidation is recorded and can be audited.

7. Referrals

You have a personal invite link. When a person joins through your link, creates a page and then stays active — at least three valid votes on three different days within their first seven days, spread over at least 48 hours — the referral becomes verified and adds five User Power to your page. A signup alone, a click or an abandoned account earns nothing.

Referring yourself, referring accounts you control, or paying people to sign up and vote in a scripted way is referral fraud (see section 11).

8. Payments

8.1 Checkout

Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card number.

8.2 What you are buying

Before you pay, the checkout tells you clearly: $1 = 1 vote; votes go to your balance and can be kept; a vote that has been given is permanent; votes linked to a reversed payment may be invalidated; a payment dispute may lead to the permanent closure of your account under these Terms. By paying you confirm that you have read this.

Because votes are digital content delivered to your balance immediately, you agree that delivery starts at once and acknowledge that this may affect any statutory right of withdrawal.

8.3 Reversed payments and chargebacks

If a payment is reversed — a refund we issue, a chargeback, a bank dispute or any other reversal — the votes bought with that payment are invalidated where they were given: if you gave 40 of them to Anna and 30 to John, Anna loses 40 and John loses 30. Votes still in your balance are removed.

A chargeback or payment dispute that you open with your bank or card issuer instead of contacting us is treated as a payment integrity violation. It may lead to the suspension of your account, the removal of your page from the ranking, a block on transferring your page, and permanent closure of your account.

A refund that we issue ourselves is not a violation and has no consequence beyond the removal of the votes.

8.4 Club unlock

Creating a club is unlocked either by five verified referrals or by a one-time payment of $10, which also adds ten votes to your balance. The unlock is consumed when the club is created.

9. Clubs

A club is a team of pages. A club has no votes of its own: its Club Power is the sum of its members' User Power at any given moment, and it changes when members join, leave or gain power.

You can be a member of one club at a time. Joining requires a request and the owner's approval. You can leave at any time; after changing club you must wait one day before changing again. The owner of a club cannot leave it while owning it. The owner decides who joins, may remove members, and manages the club's description and links to its external community. The owner is responsible for the content the club publishes and for the external links it points to.

10. Ownership, transfer and history

Your page (and a club you own) is an asset within the Service. You may transfer it to another person under the following rules, once the transfer function is available:

• The transfer keeps everything: nick and address, received votes, verified referrals, User Power, position, history and page configuration. The ranking belongs to the page, not to the person.
• The Service performs the technical transfer only. We do not value pages, negotiate, take a commission or run a marketplace. Any terms between you and the other party are your private affair and your responsibility, including taxes.
• History cannot be erased. A page keeps a visible record of when it was created, what it reached and when ownership changed. The new owner cannot present earlier results as their own.
• A transfer gives no guarantee of keeping a position; other pages keep growing.
• Transfers are not available for pages under moderation or with a pending payment dispute.

10a. Names, brands and trademarks

Your page name is your brand on ProudToBe. Names are given on a first come, first served basis, with two limits.

Reserved names. Some names cannot be taken at all, because using them would mean pretending to be someone else: well-known brands, public figures and similar. If you try one, the builder tells you the name is reserved.

Claims. If a name on ProudToBe is your brand or your own name, write to trademark@proudtobe.online. Tell us which page you mean, what right you rely on (a trademark registration number, a domain, an official account elsewhere) and how to reach you. We tell the page owner, who has [7 days] to answer. If the claim holds:

• the name is released and handed to the rightful owner if they have an account here;
• the page keeps everything else — its votes, its points, its referrals and its content — and gets a temporary name until the owner chooses a new one;
• the account itself is closed only where the use was plainly impersonation, or where the same person does it again.

We act on claims quickly, but we are not a court. Where a claim is genuinely disputed, we may keep the name frozen until the parties settle it between themselves.

Reviewer note: the list of reserved names can never be complete. This claim route is the part that protects both the rightful owner and the operator.

11. Moderation

We keep three kinds of problem strictly apart, because they have different consequences.

A. Content and conduct. Prohibited content, threats, harassment, hate, impersonation, or other breaches of the Community Rules that are unrelated to manipulating votes. The page may be hidden, suspended, removed from the ranking or closed. Valid votes that this account gave to other pages in the past remain: a content violation does not make an earlier honest vote false.

B. Fraud and system integrity. Bots, fake accounts, multi-account farming, referral farming, scripted voting, deliberately circumventing anti-fraud measures. We remove fake referrals, subtract the User Power they produced, and invalidate the votes generated by the fake accounts. If an account is found to exist only as a tool of fraud, its outgoing votes may be invalidated too. We prefer precise invalidation: where honest and fraudulent activity can be told apart, only the fraudulent part is reversed.

C. Payment integrity. Reversed payments and chargebacks, as described in section 8.3.

All moderation actions are recorded. We aim to act proportionately and to explain decisions when asked. You can contest a decision by writing to hello@proudtobe.online; we will review it and answer.

We may also remove an image you uploaded if we have reason to believe you do not hold the rights to it, or if it breaches the Community Rules.

12. Deleting your account

You can delete your account from Settings. We send a confirmation link to your e-mail address; after you confirm, your account enters a seven-day grace period during which signing in cancels the deletion. After the grace period:

• your personal data is removed and your page is anonymised (see the Privacy Policy);
• your nick is released and can be taken by someone else;
• votes you gave to other pages remain with those pages, because a vote is permanent and belongs to the page that received it;
• any votes remaining in your balance are forfeited without refund;
• if you owned a club, ownership passes to its strongest remaining member, or the club is frozen if no member remains.

13. Your content and our rights

You keep all rights to what you publish. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, display, reproduce and distribute your content as needed to run and promote the Service (for example showing your page in rankings, search results, link previews and share cards). The licence ends when the content is deleted, except for copies kept in backups for a limited time and for content already shared by others.

You confirm that you hold the rights to everything you upload, including photos, and that publishing it does not violate anyone's rights. When you upload an image you make this confirmation explicitly.

The Service, its name, design, code and databases are ours. You may not copy, scrape or reuse the ranking data or other users' pages beyond what the Service makes available for sharing.

14. What we do not promise

The Service is provided as it is. We do not guarantee that it will always be available, error-free or that data will never be lost, though we do keep backups. Positions, votes and power are numbers inside a game and have no value outside it. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect losses, lost opportunities or damage arising from the use of the Service or from your reliance on a position in the ranking. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for wilful misconduct or gross negligence, or your statutory consumer rights.

15. Changes to the Service and to these Terms

We may change, suspend or discontinue features. We may change these Terms; if the change is material, we will announce it on the Service or by e-mail at least [14] days before it takes effect, and you may delete your account before then. Continued use after that date means acceptance. We will keep the rules of the game — how votes, referrals, power and the ranking are counted — stable, and we will not retroactively change how past votes were counted except through moderation as described above.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of [Italy]. If you are a consumer, you also keep the protection of the mandatory rules of the country where you live. Disputes go to the courts of [the operator's seat], without prejudice to the consumer's right to sue in their own country. The European Commission provides an online dispute resolution platform at https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr.

17. Contact

hello@proudtobe.online — for questions about these Terms, reports, appeals and legal notices.

Last updated: [date of publication].