The terms for your booklet

1. Who we are and what you're agreeing to

Mark My Life ("we", "us") is the Etsy shop MarkMyLifeBooklets. We design memorial and funeral program booklets, and we run the online editor at app.markmylife.com where you personalize the booklet you bought.

By buying a booklet or using the editor, you agree to these terms. If you're using the editor on behalf of a family, you're confirming that they've asked you to and that you're allowed to share the photos and information you add. You must be at least 18 to buy.

2. Buying through Etsy

Every booklet is bought through our Etsy shop. Etsy handles your payment, your receipt and your order history, and Etsy's own terms apply to the purchase itself. We never see your card details.

A booklet is a digital product: what you buy is the right to personalize our design and download a print-ready PDF. If the editor doesn't work for you, or you can't get into your booklet, message us on Etsy within 3 days of your order and we'll fix it or refund you through Etsy. We can't refund a booklet after its PDF has been downloaded, except where the law says otherwise.

Etsy is a separate company. The term "Etsy" is a trademark of Etsy, Inc. This application uses the Etsy API but is not endorsed or certified by Etsy, Inc.

3. Your booklet link and your account

After you order, enter your Etsy order number at markmylife.com/start and you get a personal link to your booklet (we may also send you one in an Etsy message). Tapping it opens your booklet on any phone or computer, with no account to create. Your order number and your link are your keys. Anyone who has either one can open and edit your booklet, so please keep both to yourself and don't post them anywhere public. Entering your order number again gives you a fresh link and turns the old one off. If you think someone else has your order number or link, message us on Etsy and we'll help.

A link works for 30 days from the day your booklet's first link is made, and a fresh link doesn't add to that. It signs you into an account we make just for that order (a "guest account"), which has no password and no email address of its own.

You're responsible for what happens in your booklet through your link or your account. We may turn a link off if we believe it's being misused, and we'll send you a new one if you're the buyer.

4. What you get: the design

Our booklet designs, layouts, sample text and the editor itself belong to us. When you buy a booklet, we give you a personal, non-transferable license to personalize that design for one person's memorial and to print as many copies of your finished booklet as you need, for as long as you like.

You may not sell, share or give away our designs or templates, use them to make booklets for other families as a business, or copy the design outside of your own booklet. The fonts we use are licensed for this purpose; you don't need to do anything about them.

The finished booklet, with your photos and words in it, is yours to keep, print and share as you see fit.

5. Your content: photos, words and service details

Everything you add to a booklet, including photos, the obituary, tributes, names, dates and service details, is your content, and it stays yours. So that the editor can work, you give us permission to store it, show it back to you, process it (for example, resizing a photo or laying out the text), and assemble it into your PDF. That permission ends when your content is deleted, except as described in section 7.

Please only add content you have the right to use. In particular:

• Photos. Photos taken by a professional photographer, a school or a studio usually belong to the photographer, even when they're of your family. Most are happy to give permission for a memorial; if in doubt, ask them.
• Obituaries written by others. An obituary that appeared in a newspaper or on a funeral home's site may be theirs to license. If you or your family wrote it, it's yours to use.
• Poems, prayers, hymns and song lyrics. Many are free to use; some are still under copyright. Short quotations for a family memorial are generally fine; a whole copyrighted poem or lyric may not be.
• Other people's information. A booklet naturally names the people who loved the person who died. Please make sure the family is comfortable with what you include, and don't add contact details, addresses or health information about living people.

We don't review what you add, and we're not responsible for it. If we're told that a booklet contains content that is unlawful, that infringes someone's rights, or that the deceased's next of kin object to, we may remove it or the booklet, and we'll let you know if we can.

You're also responsible for checking your booklet before you print it: spellings, dates, the order of service. We'll help you get it right, but we can't verify facts about a person we never knew.

6. How long we keep your booklet, and deletion

A memorial booklet is needed for a short time, so we don't keep your content around for long.

• Booklets opened with a link (guest accounts): your booklet, every photo in it, every PDF you exported, and the guest account itself are deleted 90 days after its first link was made. The exact date is shown inside your booklet. Please download your PDF before then. After that date, we can't recover anything.
• Regular accounts: your booklets stay in your account until you delete them. You can delete a booklet at any time from your booklets list, which removes its photos and exported PDFs with it. To delete your whole account, message us on Etsy or email us (section 15).
• Backups: deleted content may remain in our providers' backups for up to 30 days, then it's gone.
• Order records: we keep the record of your order (your Etsy order number, what you bought and when, and the message we sent you) for bookkeeping and tax purposes. That record never includes your photos or the text of your booklet.

If you'd like something deleted sooner, message us on Etsy from your order and we'll do it, usually within a few days.

7. The Writing Tool and how we use tributes and obituaries

The editor offers writing help: tips beside each section, and the Writing Tool, which can check spelling and grammar, rewrite a passage in a different tone, or draft an obituary or tribute from the details you give it. This section explains how it works and what we may do with the words you write.

What the Writing Tool does

• It follows our house style, learned from obituaries we've written for families over the years, and it may draw on anonymized past texts in real time as examples of tone and structure ("retrieval"). It uses those examples for how to write, never for what to write: every fact in a suggestion comes from what you typed.
• Its suggestions are drafts. It can misread a detail or phrase something in a way that isn't right for your family. Please read every suggestion and change anything that doesn't sound like them. You decide what goes in the booklet, and you're responsible for its accuracy.
• To write a suggestion, it sends the text and details you give it to Cloudflare Workers AI, which runs Meta's Llama 3.3 model on Cloudflare's servers. Cloudflare uses it only to produce the suggestion and doesn't use it to train any AI model, and no copy of the request is kept, by Cloudflare or by us.
• Before it runs, Cloudflare Turnstile checks that a person, not an automated program, is using it.

How we may use what you write

We may keep an anonymized copy of obituary and tribute text you write or accept in the editor, to improve the Writing Tool and the examples it learns from. Before we keep anything, we remove the details that could identify anyone: names, dates, places, employers, schools, congregations, and other identifying particulars. We don't keep your photos, service details, contact information or anything from the cover for this purpose, ever.

• The anonymized text is used only for our own Writing Tool. We don't sell it, publish it, or give it to anyone else for their purposes.
• The Writing Tool is built never to reproduce a past text word for word in someone else's booklet. Its examples guide tone and structure only.
• You can opt out at any time, before or after you've written anything, by messaging us on Etsy from your order or emailing us. Opting out doesn't change your booklet or your service in any way, and we'll remove any anonymized copy that we can still connect to your order.
• When your booklet is deleted (section 6), the text in it is deleted with it. An anonymized copy, once the identifying details are gone, can no longer be traced back to you or to the person who died, and may remain in our example library unless you've opted out.

We do not use your photos, or anyone's likeness, to train or improve any AI system, and we won't without asking you first and getting a clear yes.

8. Printing and results

Your finished booklet downloads as a print-ready PDF, in either of two layouts: to print at home, with the pages arranged on US letter sheets to print on both sides and fold in half; or for a print shop, with each 5.5″ × 8.5″ page on its own, ⅛″ bleed around it and the trim size marked in the file. It looks the way the editor shows it, within the usual limits of printing.

How it comes out depends on the printer, paper and settings you use, which are outside our control. Colors on paper always differ a little from a screen, and home printers can't print to the edge of a sheet. Please print one copy first and check it before printing the rest; our printing tips cover the settings that matter. We're not responsible for the cost of copies printed with a mistake that was in the booklet when you downloaded it.

9. The service, changes and availability

We work hard to keep the editor available, especially in the days before a service, but we can't promise it will never be down. If you can't get in when you need to, message us on Etsy and we'll do everything we can, including finishing the file for you.

We may improve or change the editor and our designs over time, and we may retire a design or the service with reasonable notice. Your downloaded PDF is yours regardless, which is one more reason to download it as soon as you're happy with it.

10. Using the service respectfully

Please don't:

• make a booklet for a person whose family hasn't asked you to, or pretend to be someone you're not;
• add content that is unlawful, hateful, harassing, or that exposes private information about a living person;
• share your link, or try to open booklets that aren't yours;
• copy, scrape, reverse-engineer or overload the editor, or use it with automated tools.

If someone does, we may remove content, turn off a link or close an account, and we may involve the authorities where the law requires.

11. Your privacy

This section is our privacy notice: what we hold, who handles it for us, and what you can do about it.

• What we hold: your Etsy order number and username (from Etsy), the message we sent you, the photos and text you add to your booklet, your exported PDF, and, for regular accounts, your email address. Our servers also keep ordinary technical logs for security and troubleshooting, and if an order number entered at markmylife.com/start doesn't work, a scrambled, one-way form of your internet address for up to 30 days, so strangers can't keep guessing order numbers. We don't collect payment details; Etsy does.
• Where it lives: on servers in the United States, with our hosting providers (Cloudflare for the editor, PocketHost for booklet storage). They process it only on our behalf.
• The Writing Tool: the text you give it goes to Cloudflare Workers AI to write a suggestion and isn't kept there or by us (section 7). Cloudflare Turnstile checks that a person is using it, from signals your browser shares with Cloudflare.
• Your photos: the photos in your booklet are private to your account. They open only while you are signed in to it, and not for anyone who just has a photo's address.
• Faster loading on your device: to open your booklet faster, your browser keeps a copy of your booklet's photos (image files only, no text or PDFs) on your device, separate for each account, until you sign out or for up to 30 days. Closing the browser doesn't clear them. Anyone with access to your device's browser data could see those files, so on a shared or public computer, sign out and use a private window, or clear the browser's data, when you're done. If you came in through a booklet link, there is no sign-out button: clear the browser's data to remove them.
• The free demo: we count what each demo did (for example whether it added a photo or clicked Buy), where the visitor came from in broad terms (the site, Etsy, Pinterest and so on), and the kind of phone or computer and browser it used (for example iPhone and Safari, never the device's model). We never record what you type or your photos in these counts. A demo and its photos are deleted after about a day; the counts are kept for up to three years.
• What we don't do: we don't sell your information, show ads, or share your content with anyone except the providers that run the service for us, and we don't use your photos for anything but your booklet.
• Visits to markmylife.com: Google's advertising tag on the marketing site (not in the editor) counts visits and clicks to our Etsy shop or the free try-out, using cookies from Google. It doesn't see what you type or any photo, we don't use it to build advertising audiences, and it switches itself off if your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal.
• Help chat on markmylife.com: if you ask a question in the help chat on our website, it goes to Cloudflare Workers AI, the same service as the Writing Tool, which finds the answer in our help pages and writes a reply. Nothing you ask is kept, by Cloudflare or by us. Please don't share your order number or personal details in the chat; for help with your order, message us on Etsy.
• Cookies: in the editor, one, to keep you signed in, and no tracking cookies. On markmylife.com, Google's advertising tag sets its own cookies, as described above.
• Your rights: you can see, download, correct or delete your content at any time from the editor, or by asking us. Where you live may give you additional rights, and we'll honor them.

12. Disclaimers and limits on our liability

We provide the editor and our designs "as is". We don't promise that they'll be error-free or available at every moment, or that a booklet will print exactly as it appears on your screen. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties not stated in these terms.

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for anything arising from these terms or the service is limited to the amount you paid us for the booklet concerned, and we're not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential losses, such as the cost of reprinting, missed deadlines, or lost data that you hadn't downloaded. Some places don't allow these limits; where that's so, they apply only as far as they're allowed.

13. Your responsibility for your content

If someone brings a claim against us because of content you added to a booklet, for example a photo you didn't have the right to use, you agree to cover the reasonable costs, damages and legal fees that result.

14. Governing law and disagreements

These terms are governed by the laws of the United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. If something goes wrong, please tell us first: most problems are solved with one message. If we can't sort it out together within 30 days, either of us may take a claim to the federal or state courts of the United States, or to small claims court where you live.

15. Changes to these terms, and how to reach us

We may update these terms from time to time. If a change matters to you, we'll say so in the editor or in an Etsy message before it takes effect. The date at the top tells you when they last changed; using the service after that date means you accept the updated terms.

Questions, deletions, opting out of the Writing Tool's examples, or anything else: message us on Etsy from your order or our shop page, or email hello@markmylife.com. A real person will answer.