Terms of Service

Before you sign up, here's what matters:

Abide is AI-assisted coaching, not therapy. We're not a substitute for a therapist, a doctor, a pastor, or emergency services.

You own what you share with us. We also get to use it. Both of us have rights. Details in Section 8.

If you're in crisis, call 988 or 911. Abide is not built for emergencies. Details in Section 4.

You must be 18 or older to use Abide.

This is V1 alpha. Expect rough edges. We're building this with you, not for you.

By clicking "I agree" during signup, you're agreeing to everything below. If anything below doesn't sit right with you, don't sign up — email support@abide.coach and we'll figure it out.

abide is an AI-assisted coaching platform for growers. It aligns the heart with the truth and challenges people toward fruit — in their work, families, faith, and character. The product uses the John 15 vine-and-branches picture. Abide, as named in this agreement, is operated by Barker Family Coaching LLC, an Ohio S Corp owned by Aaron Barker. Aaron is the founder, the only master account holder during V1, and the person ultimately responsible for what the platform does.

Abide has three tiers:

• Garden — free or low-cost tier for people exploring coaching for the first time
• Greenhouse — paid coaching surface for people working with an Abide-certified coach
• Vineyard — paid coach-tier for coaches running their own coaching practice through Abide

Pricing for each tier is shown at abide.coach/pricing and may change. You'll always get clear notice before any price change affects an account you already pay for.

This section is important. Read it twice.

Abide is not therapy. Coaching and therapy are different. If you have clinical depression, an anxiety disorder, trauma, or any other mental health condition that needs professional treatment, please see a licensed therapist or psychiatrist. Abide cannot diagnose, treat, or prescribe.

Abide is not pastoral counseling. Even though Abide shares biblical perspectives, Abide is not your pastor. For matters of doctrine, salvation, church discipline, or spiritual authority in your life, your local pastor and your church community are who you turn to.

Abide is not medical advice. Anything Abide says about your body, your sleep, your nutrition, your medications, your physical or emotional health is not medical advice. Talk to your doctor.

Abide is not legal advice. Talk to a lawyer.

Abide is not financial advice. Talk to a financial advisor or CPA.

Abide is not your spouse, your best friend, or your community. Abide is a tool. Tools work best alongside real human relationships, not as a replacement for them.

Abide's AI can be wrong. AI systems hallucinate. Abide can produce confident-sounding answers that are factually incorrect, theologically off, or just plain wrong. Always check important matters against trusted human authorities, Scripture, and qualified professionals.

If you are thinking about hurting yourself or someone else, or if you are in a mental health crisis, do not use Abide for help. Abide is not built for emergencies and is not monitored 24/7.

Instead, do one of these:

• In the United States: Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) — free, 24/7, confidential
• Crisis text line: Text HOME to 741741 — free, 24/7
• Medical emergency: Call 911
• Outside the U.S.: Contact your local emergency services or a crisis line in your country

Abide will not stop you from typing whatever you need to type. Anything you share is held under the data terms in Section 8. But Abide is not a substitute for trained human emergency responders. Please reach out to one of the numbers above.

You must be at least 18 years old. You must use Abide for yourself, not on behalf of another person without their explicit consent. You must use accurate information when you sign up. You're responsible for keeping your password safe and for any activity that happens under your account. You cannot share your account with anyone else. If you create an account that violates any of the above, we can suspend or close it.

When you sign up, you create an account. The account is yours, not transferable, not for sale, not for sharing. You can close it at any time by emailing support@abide.coach. If you close your account, some of your content will remain in Abide's Content Vault under the terms in Section 8. We'll explain what stays and what doesn't when you request closure.

You can: - Use Abide for personal coaching, growth, and reflection - Share Abide with friends, family, and coaching clients (within the limits of your tier) - Provide feedback, suggestions, and bug reports (we'll use these freely to improve)

You can't: - Use Abide to harm yourself, harm others, or commit any illegal act - Use Abide to harass, threaten, defame, or stalk any person - Use Abide to generate content that sexualizes minors, promotes violence, or incites hatred - Use Abide for any commercial purpose that competes with Abide itself (e.g., building a competing coaching platform using Abide's outputs) - Scrape, reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract Abide's underlying code, frameworks, or training data - Bypass any security feature, rate limit, or access control - Misrepresent yourself, your identity, or your relationship to anyone else - Upload content you don't have the right to share (see Section 8) - Use Abide in any way that violates U.S. law, Ohio law, or the law of your jurisdiction

If you violate this section, we can suspend or close your account without notice and without refund.

This is the part where most ToS get sneaky. We're not going to be sneaky. Read it carefully.

"Content" means anything you share with Abide. That includes: - Words you type into any Abide surface (chat, builder, journals, notes, anything) - Documents, images, audio, video, or other files you upload - Voice memos you record into Abide - Coaching calls captured through Fathom, Fireflies, Otter, Plaud, or any other recording service that flows into Abide's Content Vault - Emails, messages, or other communications you forward into Abide - Any other material you submit to Abide in any form

You retain all ownership rights to your content. Signing up for Abide does not transfer ownership of anything you share. Your content stays yours.

By using Abide, you grant Barker Family Coaching LLC an irrevocable, perpetual, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use, copy, store, modify, distribute, reproduce, publish, display, make derivative works of, and aggregate your content — and any derivative works of your content — for any purpose related to operating, improving, growing, marketing, and securing the Abide platform.

In plain English: you still own your stuff. We also get to use it. Both of us have rights to the content you share. You don't lose anything by sharing with Abide. We gain the ability to learn from what flows through the platform so Abide gets better for you and for everyone who comes after you.

Under this license, Abide may: - Store your content indefinitely in Abide's Content Vault - Use your content to operate the coaching surfaces you interact with (this is the obvious one) - Use your content to train Abide's internal AI systems (the Aaron Oracle, the persona vines, the coaching engines) so the platform gets smarter over time - Use anonymized excerpts of your content in Abide's marketing, blog posts, social posts, and educational materials, with names and identifying details removed - Use your content as research data to improve Abide's product, frameworks, and methodology - Share your content with our subprocessors (the vendors listed in Section 12) to the extent needed to operate the platform

Under this license, Abide will never: - Sell your content or your personal information to any third party for any commercial purpose - Share identifying details about you (name, contact info, specific personal circumstances) with anyone outside Abide without your explicit consent - Use content disclosed during a self-identified mental health or safety crisis for any purpose other than your safety and continuity of care - Train third-party AI models (e.g., OpenAI's or Anthropic's foundation models) on your content beyond what's necessary to deliver Abide's services to you

If you share content that includes other people — a coaching call with someone else on it, an email someone sent you, a screenshot of a conversation, a story about a third party — you represent and warrant that you have the right to share that content. You are responsible for obtaining any consents needed from those third parties before sharing their information with Abide. If a third party objects to content you've shared about them being held in Abide's Content Vault, contact support@abide.coach. We will review the objection and, where appropriate, remove or mask the relevant content.

You can request that specific content be removed or masked from Abide's Content Vault by emailing support@abide.coach. We will honor reasonable removal requests, except where: - Retention is required by law - Retention is necessary for the safety of you or another person - The content has already been incorporated into derivative works (e.g., aggregate training data) in a way that cannot be unwound without disproportionate effort

Abide is built to support multiple coaches operating their own coaching practices on the platform. This means we have strict rules about who sees what.

Garden tier users: your content is private to you and to Aaron-as-platform-owner. No other coach sees your content.

Greenhouse tier users: your content is visible to you, to your assigned coach (the coach who invited you or whom you selected), and to Aaron-as-platform-owner. No other coach sees your content.

Vineyard tier users (coaches): your content is visible to you and to Aaron-as-platform-owner. Your coaching clients' content (in their Greenhouse seats under your tenant) is visible to you only as their assigned coach, not as content you own.

Aaron-as-platform-owner has visibility into all content across all tiers for the purposes of operating, securing, and improving the platform. This visibility is governed by the license in Section 8.

When a second master coach onboards to Abide (post-V1 alpha), their tenancy is logically separated. Coach A cannot see Coach B's clients' content. Aaron-as-platform-owner retains visibility across tenancies under Section 8.

Abide's platform, code, frameworks, methodology, naming, branding, the John 15 vine architecture, the Aaron Oracle, the persona vines, and every other system Abide ships are the intellectual property of Barker Family Coaching LLC. You're licensed to use them through Abide's interfaces. You don't gain any ownership of Abide's IP by using the platform.

Aaron's proprietary coaching frameworks — the AIM Pattern, the Six Growth Dimensions, the Vinedresser's Promise, Identity-First Growth, Routine Easy Obedience, the Gospel Gap, and others — are owned by Aaron Barker personally and licensed to Barker Family Coaching LLC for use within Abide. You may reference these frameworks in conversation, but you may not commercialize them or build competing products around them.

Abide's full Privacy Policy lives at abide.coach/privacy and is incorporated into these Terms by reference. The short version: - Abide collects what you give us, plus standard technical data (IP address, browser type, usage analytics) - Abide stores your content as described in Section 8 - Abide does not sell your personal information - Abide uses the subprocessors listed in Section 12 - You can request a copy of your data or request masking at any time by emailing support@abide.coach

Abide operates on top of the following vendors, each of whom processes some user data in the course of operating the platform: - Supabase — database and authentication infrastructure - Clerk — user authentication and identity management - Anthropic — AI model provider (Claude) - OpenAI — AI model provider (GPT) - Voyage AI — vector embeddings for semantic search - Vercel — frontend hosting - Railway — backend hosting - Stripe — payment processing - Fathom — meeting recording and transcription - Resend or Postmark — transactional email

Each subprocessor is bound by their own terms of service and security commitments. Abide does not authorize any subprocessor to train their own AI models on your content beyond what's required to deliver services to Abide. The subprocessor list may change as Abide grows. Material changes will be reflected at abide.coach/subprocessors and notified to active users.

Paid tiers are billed in advance, monthly or annually, through Stripe. Prices are shown at abide.coach/pricing. Auto-renewal applies to all paid tiers unless you cancel. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We don't offer prorated refunds for partial periods. Disputed charges should be raised with support@abide.coach within 30 days. We can change prices with at least 30 days' written notice (email).

You can close your account at any time by emailing support@abide.coach. We can suspend or close your account if: - You violate these Terms - You harm or threaten another user - You attempt to bypass platform security - Your payment method fails and isn't corrected within 14 days - We're required to by law

If we close your account for violation, you're not entitled to a refund. If we close your account for any other reason (including discontinuing the service), we'll refund the unused portion of your current billing period. Content retention after account closure is governed by Section 8.

Abide V1 alpha launched on June 2, 2026, with Aaron Barker's existing coaching roster as the launch cohort. This is an early, evolving product. During the V1 alpha period: - Features may change, break, or be removed without notice - AI quality is improving but not perfect — expect rough edges - The platform may go down unexpectedly - Pricing, tiers, and features may change as we learn

By joining V1 alpha, you accept that the product is in active development. Your feedback shapes what Abide becomes.

ABIDE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE." WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, BARKER FAMILY COACHING LLC, AARON BARKER, AND ABIDE'S OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, AND AFFILIATES SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES ARISING FROM OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF ABIDE. OUR MAXIMUM AGGREGATE LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY CLAIM ARISING FROM OR RELATED TO ABIDE IS LIMITED TO THE AMOUNT YOU PAID ABIDE IN THE 12 MONTHS PRECEDING THE CLAIM, OR $100, WHICHEVER IS GREATER.

YOU AGREE THAT YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR DECISIONS YOU MAKE BASED ON COACHING CONTENT, AI OUTPUTS, OR INTERACTIONS WITH ABIDE OR ITS COACHES.

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Barker Family Coaching LLC, Aaron Barker, and Abide's officers, employees, and affiliates from any claim, loss, damage, or expense (including reasonable attorney's fees) arising from: - Your use of Abide - Your violation of these Terms - Your violation of any third party's rights, including IP, privacy, or publicity rights - Content you share that you didn't have the right to share

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Ohio, without regard to its conflict of laws principles. Any dispute arising from these Terms or your use of Abide will be resolved through binding arbitration in Franklin County, Ohio, administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules. You waive your right to a jury trial and your right to participate in any class action. Either party may seek injunctive relief in court for IP infringement or violation of confidentiality without first arbitrating.

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be notified to active users by email at least 14 days before they take effect. Continued use of Abide after a change means you accept the updated Terms. The current version is always at abide.coach/terms.

Questions about these Terms? Email: support@abide.coach

By clicking "I agree" during signup, you confirm that you've read, understood, and agreed to these Terms.