Legal

Terms of Service

Last updated: 13 September 2026

These terms are the agreement between you and Little Lantern when you use the site, create an account, or subscribe to Little Lantern Premium. Please read the sections on payment, renewal and refunds before you subscribe.

1. Who you are dealing with

Little Lantern is a service operated as a sole trader by Jack Howling, trading as Little Lantern.

Our business address, for correspondence and the service of documents, is:

Email is the fastest way to reach us, and we answer billing questions first.

If these details change — for example if Little Lantern later becomes a limited company — we will update this page and tell existing subscribers by email.

2. Your account

You need an account to save words, track progress and subscribe. Keep your sign-in details to yourself; you are responsible for activity on your account. You must be at least 16, or have permission from a parent or guardian.

3. Free and Premium

Little Lantern has two plans:

• Free — HSK courses and grammar, free stories and podcasts, the dictionary, pinyin tools and YouTube subtitles. No card needed.
• Premium — £7.99 per month — everything in Free, plus saving and tracking words, the full story and podcast library, adaptive Review, progress synced across web, app and YouTube, and new content every week.

Prices are in pounds sterling and include any applicable tax. We may change the price of Premium, but never for a period you have already paid for: we will email you at least 30 days before a change, and you can cancel before it takes effect.

4. Payment and renewal

Payments are handled by Stripe. We never see or store your full card details.

Premium is a rolling monthly subscription. When you subscribe, you authorise us to charge your payment method £7.99 immediately and then automatically every month on the same date until you cancel. If a payment fails, Stripe may retry it; if it keeps failing, Premium access will pause.

5. Cancelling

You can cancel at any time from your Profile page, or by emailing us. There is no cancellation fee and no notice period.

When you cancel, you keep Premium until the end of the month you have already paid for, and you are not charged again. Anything you have saved — your words, decks and progress — stays in your account, and the free features keep working.

6. Refunds and your right to change your mind

Our promise: if you subscribe and decide Premium isn't for you, email us within 14 days of your first payment and we will refund it in full, whether or not you have used it.

After that, subscriptions are not refundable for part of a month, but you can cancel at any time to stop the next payment (see section 5).

This sits alongside your legal rights as a consumer, including the 14-day right to cancel a distance contract under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. Nothing in these terms removes those rights. If something is faulty or not as described, your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 also apply.

7. What you can do with the content

Your subscription is a personal licence to use Little Lantern's stories, audio, courses and tools for your own learning. Please don't republish, resell or redistribute our content, or share your account with others. Teachers using Little Lantern with a class are welcome to get in touch.

8. Your content and acceptable use

The My Content feature lets you upload your own documents (PDFs and images) to read with our learning tools. When you upload content, you confirm that:

• You own it, or have permission or a legal right to use it; and
• It does not contain illegal material, and does not infringe anyone else's rights.

You must not upload anything unlawful, or anything you do not have the right to use.

9. Your uploads are private

Content you upload is private to your account — other users cannot see it. We store it securely and use it only to provide the reading and learning features to you. This includes automated text recognition (OCR), which is processed by our OCR provider, Google Cloud Vision.

10. Your data and privacy

We collect only what the service needs: your email address and sign-in details, the words and progress you save, and your subscription status. We use these processors, who each hold data on our behalf:

• Supabase — accounts, saved words, progress and uploaded content.
• Stripe — payments and subscription status. Stripe holds your card details, we do not.
• Google Cloud Vision — text recognition for documents you upload.
• Cloudflare — hosting and delivery of the site.

We do not sell your data or share it for advertising. You can ask us for a copy of your data, or ask us to delete your account and everything in it, by emailing contact@littlelanternchinese.com. We will action deletion requests within 30 days.

11. Removal and account action

We may remove content, and suspend or terminate accounts, that breach these terms or the law. If we end a paid subscription for a reason that isn't your breach of these terms, we will refund the unused part of the month.

12. Reports, takedowns and complaints

If you believe content hosted on Little Lantern infringes your rights (for example, copyright) or is otherwise unlawful, please contact us with details and we will review and act promptly. Rights holders may request removal of infringing material via the same address.

If you are unhappy with anything, email us first — we would much rather fix it than have you dispute a payment with your bank.

13. Deleting your content

You can delete your uploaded content at any time from the My Content page. Deleting removes the file and its processed data from your account.

14. Availability and changes

Little Lantern is offered as it is, and is a small and growing service. We add and occasionally change features, and there may be times when the site is down for maintenance or for reasons outside our control. We don't limit our liability for death, personal injury or fraud, and nothing here affects your statutory rights.

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects paying subscribers, we will email you before it takes effect.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes may be brought in the courts of England and Wales. If you live elsewhere in the UK, you keep the right to bring a claim in your local courts.