1. Acceptance of these terms
By creating an account or using Kinli, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the service. These terms are a binding agreement between you and Kinli Circles Limited (“Kinli”, “we”, “us”), a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17394471.
2. What Kinli is
Kinli is a referral-only community for trusted regional groups. Members are admitted to a circle when an existing member refers them. Each circle is private to its members. A feature called Ask Kinli can help answer questions by drawing on posts within your circles. The service is provided through our mobile apps and the website at kinli.co.uk.
3. Eligibility and membership
You may only use Kinli if:
- you are at least 18 years old;
- you have been referred by an existing member, have created a circle through an invitation, or have been admitted as a founding member on an invitation from Kinli directly, in line with how the service works at the time; and
- you provide accurate information and keep your account details secure.
You are responsible for activity on your account. Let us know promptly if you think someone else has accessed it.
4. Member conduct and community rules
Kinli only works because members treat each other with care. You agree that you will not:
- post anything unlawful, harmful, harassing, hateful, or deceptive;
- impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your connection to a person or circle;
- share another member’s personal information, or content from a private circle, outside it;
- use the service to spam, scrape, or send unsolicited marketing;
- attempt to break, overload, or gain unauthorised access to the service or its systems; or
- use Kinli for any commercial purpose beyond the member-to-member marketplace described below.
Circles may set their own additional house rules. Hosts and co-hosts look after their circles and may manage membership and content within them.
5. Your content and the licence you give us
You keep ownership of everything you post. To run the service, you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, display, and distribute your content to the members of the circle you posted it into, and to operate features such as Ask Kinli. This licence exists only so we can show your content to the right people and run the service; it ends when your content is removed, except that:
- copies may remain in backups for a limited period before they are overwritten; and
- where you delete your account, your posts are not erased but are anonymised after a 14-day grace period. Your name is replaced with “Former member” so the circle’s shared knowledge is preserved while your identity is removed.
You are responsible for your content and confirm you have the right to post it. We may remove content that breaches these terms.
6. Subscriptions and billing
Kinli has a free tier (Friend) and paid tiers (Insider and Founder). There is also a separate Business plan for a directory listing, which businesses can hold on its own or existing members can add to a Founder membership. Business listings are described in Business listings and verification below.
Paid subscriptions can be taken out in two ways, and how you pay decides who bills you and where you manage it:
- On our website, processed by Stripe. You authorise us, through Stripe, to charge the applicable fee on a recurring basis until you change or cancel it. Manage or cancel from your Kinli account.
- In the iOS app, processed by Apple as an in-app purchase. Apple is the merchant of record, bills your Apple ID, and applies its own terms to the transaction. These subscriptions can only be changed or cancelled in your Apple ID subscription settings. We cannot cancel them for you, and cancelling in our app would not stop Apple charging you.
- Cancellation: you can go back to Friend at any time. If you subscribed on our website, do it from your Kinli account; if you subscribed in the iOS app, cancel in your Apple ID subscription settings and your tier changes automatically when the period ends. Either way you keep your account, your circles, and your history. You simply stop being on a paid tier at the end of your current billing period.
- 14-day cancellation right: if you are a consumer in the UK or EU, you have a legal right to cancel a new subscription within 14 days. Because the service is digital content supplied immediately, by subscribing you agree that we may begin providing it straight away; if you cancel within the 14 days after using it, we may charge a proportionate amount for what you have used.
- Refunds: beyond your statutory rights, fees already paid are generally non-refundable, but we will always honour your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and other applicable consumer law. If something has gone wrong, contact us.
- Founding member rate: if you joined through a founding offer, your reduced rate applies for as long as your paid membership continues without a break. It is a discount on your subscription rather than a separate price, so it moves with you if you change paid tier, but if you cancel, or switch back to Friend, the discount ends with the subscription. Subscribing again later is at the standard rate for your tier, and we cannot reinstate a founding rate once it has ended. Any free period offered at signup is stated on the page you signed up from and runs from the day you join.
- Changes to pricing and what each plan includes: we may change subscription prices, marketplace fees, and what is included in any tier or plan: including the Business plan and the Founder business add-on, and any monthly allowances, such as how many marketplace listings or posts are included. We will give you at least 14 days’ notice before a change takes effect, by email or in the app. The change will apply from your next billing period after that notice. If you do not wish to continue, you can switch back to Friend, or cancel, at any time before it takes effect. (This 14-day notice period is separate from the 14-day cancellation right described above.)
7. Marketplace
Members may list items for sale to other members within their circles. The marketplace is member-to-member: a sale is an agreement between the buyer and the seller. Kinli is not the seller, does not own or inspect the items, and is not responsible for the quality, safety, legality, or description of what is listed. We do handle the money: the buyer pays Kinli, we hold the payment until the sale is confirmed complete, and we then pay the seller. The collection-code handshake is how that confirmation happens: the buyer shows a code and the seller enters it. Always use your own judgement when buying or selling, and meet safely.
Getting paid through Stripe. Payment processing services for sellers on Kinli are provided by Stripe and are subject to the Stripe Connected Account Agreement, which includes the Stripe Terms of Service (collectively, the “Stripe Services Agreement”). By agreeing to these terms or continuing to operate as a seller on Kinli, you agree to be bound by the Stripe Services Agreement, as the same may be modified by Stripe from time to time. As a condition of Kinli enabling payment processing services through Stripe, you agree to provide Kinli accurate and complete information about you and your business, and you authorise Kinli to share it and transaction information related to your use of the payment processing services provided by Stripe.
Your payout account and withdrawals. Once a collection has been confirmed, and after a short delay shown in the app, we move your share of the sale, the price less our fee, into your payout account. Your payout account is held for you by Stripe under the Stripe Services Agreement; it is not a bank account and earns no interest. Money in it can take a few days to clear, and the app shows when it is ready. You withdraw it to your bank from the Money screen in the app. There is a minimum amount you can withdraw, and there may be a fee; both are shown in the app before you confirm. Where there is a fee, each time you confirm a withdrawal you authorise Kinli to take it from your payout account before the rest is paid to your bank, and if the payment fails or your bank sends it back, we refund the fee. We may pay money that has stayed in your payout account for a long time to your bank automatically, so that it is not held indefinitely.
Changing your bank details. When the bank account your money is paid to changes, we email you, and withdrawals pause for 24 hours. If you did not make the change, contact us straight away.
Messages from Stripe. Stripe needs an email address for your payout account. We give it a Kinli address rather than yours, so Stripe’s messages about your payout account come to us on your behalf, and we will tell you about anything in them that affects you or that you need to act on.
Disputed payments. If a buyer disputes a card payment with their bank, we may hold the payout for that sale and pause your withdrawals while the dispute is open. If a payment is disputed after you have been paid, we bear that cost and will not ask you to repay it, unless the sale was fraudulent or you broke these terms.
Deleting your account with money in it. Withdraw any money in your payout account before you delete your Kinli account. Once the 14-day window has passed we anonymise the account and you can no longer sign in to withdraw it, so if you delete it with money still there, sign back in within the 14 days to restore it, or contact us.
Your tier may limit how many listings you can create in a month; the current limits are shown in the app and on our membership page. We charge a fee on each marketplace sale, deducted from the sale price before the seller is paid. The fee depends on the seller’s membership tier, and is higher when the buyer pays with a card issued outside the UK than with a card issued in the UK. The current rates for each tier are shown in the app and on our membership page, and a seller sees the exact fee on a listing before they publish it and again when it sells.
If a sale goes wrong. Because we hold the payment until a collection is confirmed, there is a window in which things can be put right. Before collection a buyer can cancel and be refunded, and the item goes back on sale; we can also stop a payout while we look into something. Speak to the other member first: most of it turns out to be a misunderstanding about timing or collection. If that does not settle it, contact us or email support@kinli.co.uk. We can tell you whether a collection code was issued and whether it was confirmed, we can act on behaviour that breaks our community rules, and we can suspend a member who is misusing the marketplace.
What we cannot do is decide which of you is right about an item’s condition or description: we did not own it, we did not inspect it, and we were not there when it changed hands. And once a collection has been confirmed and the seller has been paid, putting it right is a matter between the two of you. None of this affects whatever legal rights you have against the other member, or any rights you have against your card issuer.
Disputes between members. Kinli is not a party to any dispute between members, whether it arises from a marketplace transaction or otherwise. We have no obligation to mediate, arbitrate, or resolve disputes between members, and any legal claim arising from a transaction or interaction between members is a matter between those members alone. This does not change what we do with a payment we are holding, as described above, and we may still act on behaviour that breaks our community rules.
8. Business listings and verification
The Kinli directory lists local businesses and tradespeople. A listing usually starts because a member shared a contact card into a circle, so an entry may exist before the business knows about it. If a listing is about you, you can claim it free of charge, which gives you control of your own entry and nothing else, or ask us to remove your details using the link in the email we sent you.
The paid Business plan adds the features a listed business needs, including reading and replying to enquiries from members. A business account is a directory presence only: it is not a member of any circle, and cannot post, reply to posts, or sell in the marketplace, which stays member-to-member for physical items. Members can start a conversation with a listed business; a business cannot message a member first.
Verification. A verified badge records that we ran a specific check and it passed: a Companies House lookup for a limited company, or confirmation of the email address shown on the listing for a sole trader. The label says which was done. It is not an endorsement, a recommendation, or any assurance about the quality, safety, pricing, or conduct of that business, and we do not vet the work anyone does. A listing without a badge has simply not completed a check. As with the marketplace, any arrangement you make with a business is between you and them.
9. Ask Kinli
Ask Kinli generates answers from posts within your circles using AI. It can be wrong, incomplete, or out of date, and it is not professional, legal, financial, medical, or other expert advice. Always verify anything important and use your own judgement. We are not liable for decisions you make based on Ask Kinli.
10. Suspension and termination
You can stop using Kinli and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or end your access if you breach these terms, if your conduct puts other members or the service at risk, or where we are required to by law. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why. If your account is ended, the parts of these terms that should survive (such as content licences for content that remains, and the liability sections) will continue to apply.
11. Disclaimers and liability
We work hard to provide a reliable service, but we provide Kinli “as is” and cannot promise it will always be available or error-free.
Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability where it would be unlawful to do so. In particular, we do not exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot be excluded under English law: including your statutory rights as a consumer.
Subject to that, we are not liable for loss that is not reasonably foreseeable, for the acts of other members (including marketplace transactions and anything posted by members), or for loss arising from your failure to follow these terms.
Limit on our liability. To the fullest extent permitted by law, and subject to what is said above about liability we cannot exclude, our total aggregate liability to you for any claim arising from or related to these terms or your use of Kinli shall not exceed the greater of (a) the total fees you paid to us in the 12 months immediately preceding the claim, or (b) £100. This limit does not apply to money we hold for you from a marketplace sale, which we remain responsible for paying out or refunding as set out in section 7.
Data security. We are not liable for any loss or damage arising from unauthorised access to or alteration of your data where we have implemented reasonable and appropriate security measures. Our liability for any data security incident is subject to the limit above and to the terms of our Privacy Policy. This does not affect any rights you have under data protection law.
12. Your responsibility for claims
To the extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless Kinli Circles Limited, its directors, employees and agents from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses and costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your use of the service, your content, your breach of these terms, or your violation of any third party’s rights: except to the extent that the claim is caused by our own breach of these terms or our negligence.
13. Changes to these terms
If we change these terms, we will change the date at the top and, if the change matters, tell you in the app or by email. If you keep using Kinli after a change takes effect, you accept the new terms.
14. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales will have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the UK or in the EU, you may also have the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of the country in which you live, and you can bring proceedings in your local courts.
