Terms of Service
Last updated 3 August 2026
These terms cover your use of AskSociety (“the Service”), operated by MakeBelieve, LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company (“we”, “us”). By accepting an invitation and using the Service you agree to them.
1. What the Service actually is
AskSociety is a decision-rehearsal tool. You describe a question and an audience; the Service constructs a population of synthetic residents and puts your material to them; you get back a written read on how it landed and where people disagreed.
Residents are not people. Every resident is generated by software from demographic distributions, archetype profiles and a large language model. No resident corresponds to a real person, and no resident’s answer was ever given by a human being. Names, biographies, quotes and portraits are all fabricated by the system. Nothing in the Service is a survey, a panel, a focus group, or research involving human subjects.
2. What a finding is — and what it is not
A finding is a reaction: what this constructed population said when asked, and which parts of it said something different from the rest. It is an instrument for noticing objections, blind spots and splits you had not considered before you commit.
A finding is not a prediction, and we ask you not to use it as one:
- It carries no margin of error and no confidence interval, because there is no sampling frame to compute one against. A synthetic population has no population it is a sample of.
- It is not statistically representative of any real market, country, customer base or demographic group, however closely the audience you described resembles one.
- It does not tell you what your actual customers will do. It tells you what a model, prompted with a described population, produced. Those are different claims and we will not blur them.
- Where the Service produces numeric scales (0–100 ratings in the CSV export), those numbers are model-generated and are supplied for your own inspection and sorting. They are deliberately absent from the written report, because a generated number set in a report reads as a measurement and is not one.
- Runs are not reproducible. The same question asked twice will not return the same answers.
Decisions you make after reading a report are yours. The Service is an input to your judgement, not a substitute for it, and it is not a substitute for talking to real customers, for regulated research, or for professional advice of any kind.
3. Access, invitations and credits
There is no self-serve signup and no self-serve purchase. Access works like this:
- We invoice you. You pay the invoice.
- We create your account by hand and grant it a set number of credits, agreed with you on that invoice.
- You sign in with a link sent to your email address. There is no password.
- Credits are spent on studies and on the open-ended surfaces (asking a resident questions, running a deliberation). The cost of a study is shown before you submit it.
- Running out of credits does not close your account. Your material and past results stay where they are; you just cannot start new work until we grant more.
Credits have no cash value, cannot be transferred between accounts, and cannot be redeemed for money except where section 7 says otherwise. They never expire.
When a run does not deliver
The system charges at submission and reconciles afterwards. Specifically:
- If a run is halted part-way by our own spend guardrail, or dies outright, the audience credits for the people who were never asked are returned to your balance automatically, in the same whole units you bought them in.
- The setup charge is kept, because the work it pays for — the preview, the baseline, the synthesis — has already happened by then. A research pass, if you bought one, is also kept: it finishes before the first resident is asked anything.
- A run that fails is reported to you as failed. It will not sit in your studies list pretending to be pending.
Refunds
Beyond the automatic credit reconciliation above, purchases are final — there is no general refund policy. The reconciliation is not a goodwill gesture but a rule: you are never charged for residents who were not asked. If you are unhappy with what you got, tell us anyway; we would rather hear it than not.
4. Your material
You keep everything you own. Questions, uploaded documents, product copy, pricing, positioning — all of it stays yours. You grant us only the permission needed to run the Service: to store your material, to send it to the model providers listed in the Privacy Statement so that a study can run, and to show it back to you.
We do not use your material to train models, and we do not use it to build or improve products for other customers. Model providers process it under their own API terms, which at the time of writing do not train on API traffic; we do not control those terms and cannot guarantee them on their behalf.
Please do not upload material you are not free to share. In particular, do not upload personal data about identifiable people, health or financial records, or anything under a confidentiality obligation you would breach by sending it to a third-party model API. The Service has no need for any of it.
5. Acceptable use
You agree not to use the Service to:
- present its output as human research, survey data, a poll, or the opinions of real people — to investors, regulators, publishers or anyone else;
- generate material designed to deceive, defraud, harass, or target an identifiable individual;
- test content whose purpose is unlawful, or that you could not lawfully publish;
- resell access, share your sign-in link, or run studies on behalf of others without telling us;
- attempt to reach another customer’s societies, studies, residents or results, or to circumvent the access controls that keep them apart.
If you publish or circulate a finding outside your own organisation, say plainly that the respondents were synthetic. This is the one condition of use we care about most.
6. Availability, and what happens when things break
The Service is early software run by a small team, and you are among the first paying customers. We are not promising an uptime figure we cannot hold to. What we do commit to:
- Failures are reported to you as failures, with the credits reconciled as above.
- We are told when your run fails, at the same time you are.
- Maintenance, migrations and outages happen. A study in flight may be lost; the credits for the unrun part come back.
- Studies run in the background and take time — roughly twenty minutes for a standard read, longer for large audiences. One customer’s work cannot occupy the whole queue.
The Service is provided as is. To the fullest extent the law allows: we make no warranty, express or implied — including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement — and in particular no warranty that the output is accurate, complete, or predictive of anything. Neither side is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits or revenue. Our total liability arising out of or relating to the Service is capped at the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, or your obligation to pay invoices already issued.
7. Ending it
You can stop using the Service at any time and ask us to close your account; see the Privacy Statement for what happens to your data when you do. We may suspend an account for non-payment or for a breach of section 5, and will tell you why. If we terminate your account without a section 5 breach — including if we discontinue the Service — we refund your unused credits pro-rata to what you paid for them. If you close your account yourself, or we terminate for a section 5 breach, unused credits are forfeited.
8. Changes
We will email you before these terms change in a way that affects what you get or what you pay. Product-behaviour descriptions above are kept current with the software; if you spot one that no longer matches what the Service does, that is a bug in this page and we want to know.
9. The legal frame
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, excluding its conflict-of-law rules. The state and federal courts located in Wyoming have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or relating to the Service, and both sides consent to venue there. The contracting entity is MakeBelieve, LLC; legal notices may be served by email to the address below and are effective when received.
Questions about any of this: iamkirkperry@gmail.com. If anything here matters to your purchase, ask before you buy and we will answer in writing.