Terms of Service

ForagePal is a product of Echofold, Dublin, Ireland. These Terms are between you and Echofold Ltd, a company established in Ireland — full company details are at the end of this page.

The app is offered to users in the 26 counties (Republic of Ireland). General contact: support@foragepal.com. Privacy and data protection: privacy@foragepal.com.

By creating an account, or by continuing to use the ForagePal app, you confirm that you have read and agree to be bound by these Terms, that you are at least 18 years old, and that you have read our Privacy Policy and the notices shown during onboarding.

If you do not agree to these Terms, do not create an account and do not use the app.

Before first use, onboarding links to the current Terms and Privacy Policy and displays the AI-safety and subscription notices. The app records the Terms and Privacy versions and acceptance time as contract agreements, separately from the optional exact-coordinate and analytics choices — accepting these Terms cannot grant either consent. It does not record locale or product-notice presentation and does not enforce re-acceptance when a version changes; those controls are not described as implemented.

You must be 18 years of age or older to create an account or use the ForagePal app. The current build does not yet ask for an age declaration or technically gate account creation by age, so this contractual eligibility rule is not presented as implemented age assurance.

We do not knowingly permit under-18s to use the app. If we learn that an account belongs to a person under 18, we will suspend and delete it.

The reason is kept in plain sight rather than buried: foraging is a safety-critical activity involving potentially lethal wild organisms, and the app can process precise location data. Both are why we set an adult-only threshold.

ForagePal helps you learn about Irish mushrooms and trees. It provides a tree-species and habitat map, a fruiting forecast, a reference library, a photo-based AI identification suggestion, and a private personal logbook.

ForagePal is a discovery aid, not an identification authority. Never eat anything based on an app ID alone. Always verify with an expert — the only safe standard before eating any wild mushroom is positive identification by an experienced forager or mycologist, never an app result on its own.

The app is an educational and reference tool. It is not a safety device, it is not a medical device, and it is not professional foraging, dietary or medical advice.

ForagePal never states the edibility of a wild mushroom, and it never will. No output of the app — no identification suggestion, confidence score, forecast, map or reference entry — determines the edibility or toxicity of any organism.

Many wild fungi are toxic and some are deadly with no antidote. Some toxic species closely resemble ones people eat. Never eat, taste or prepare any wild organism on the basis of the app alone; always obtain in-person verification from a suitably qualified expert first. You are solely responsible for any decision to pick, handle, prepare or consume a wild organism.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury. Rather than attempting to disclaim safety liability, the app is designed so that it never asserts edibility in the first place.

Photo identification is AI-assisted and returns a confidence-scored suggestion, never a verdict — it is a suggestion, not an identification. When you use it you are interacting with an AI system operated by a third party. AI suggestions can be wrong, including confidently wrong.

We never ask that service about edibility, and no result it returns is presented as an edibility determination.

The fruiting forecast is rule-based, not a black-box model and never a guarantee of a find.

You are responsible for keeping your login credentials secure and for activity carried out under your account. Authentication is provided via Amazon Cognito, as described in our Privacy Policy.

Tell us at support@foragepal.com if you believe your account has been compromised.

You agree not to use ForagePal for any unlawful purpose, or in breach of any applicable Irish or EU law.

You agree not to disturb protected habitats or protected and rare species, and not to forage where you have no right to — for example without the landowner's permission, or contrary to Coillte, National Parks and Wildlife Service, or other applicable rules.

You agree not to attempt to identify, de-anonymise or extract another user's find locations or personal data.

You agree not to upload content that is unlawful or infringing, or that you have no right to upload.

You agree not to probe, scrape, overload, reverse-engineer, or attempt to circumvent the app's security, rate limits or usage quotas.

ForagePal Premium is one yearly subscription. A 7-day store trial where eligible is available only when the App Store or Google Play confirms that the store account is eligible. The trial includes the same access as the paid plan; after it, the annual total and renewal price is €24.99/year for the Irish launch offer, with the authoritative local and tax-inclusive price shown by the store before confirmation.

There is no full free product tier or recurring free allowance. When an eligible trial ends without an active subscription, paid features stop being available until the store confirms a subscription. Your saved finds remain in the account. Poison, toxicity, dangerous-lookalike and safety guidance remains accessible without an active subscription. Safety warnings, expert-verification guidance and toxic-lookalike information are never hidden behind the subscription gate.

Subscriptions are purchased only through the App Store or Google Play, inside the app. This website never takes a payment: there is no checkout here, no payment form, and no other payment provider. The store, not Echofold Ltd, is the seller and merchant of record for that purchase, and store purchases are subject to the relevant store's terms in addition to these Terms.

Unless cancelled before the trial or current billing period ends, the subscription renews automatically for another year at the price shown by the store. The store shows the exact billing date and asks you to confirm before anything begins. Manage or cancel it in your App Store or Google Play account — because the store is the merchant, it takes payment and handles billing, cancellations and refunds, not us. Turning off auto-renew stops the next renewal; paid access continues until the end of the current paid period, then expires unless the store records a renewal. Cancel an eligible trial before it ends and the store does not take the first annual charge.

If an active purchase is not recognised after a reinstall, device change or account refresh, use "Restore purchases" on the app's paywall. The app reconciles the store purchase before deciding access. An account with an active entitlement is shown management controls, not another subscribe prompt; do not buy the same subscription again merely because local state was lost. If restoration fails, contact support@foragepal.com.

Your statutory consumer rights, including any right of withdrawal that applies to digital content, are unaffected by this section. The store presents and administers the purchase terms that apply to an eligible trial.

The app, its reference content, software and branding are owned by Echofold Ltd or its licensors.

Reference and species content is provided for education. It is currently AI-drafted and not expert-verified; content may be incomplete, provisional or marked as unreviewed. We say so rather than implying a verification that does not exist.

Production map tiles are sourced from OpenStreetMap through the first-party proxy described in the Privacy Policy and retain the required attribution. Other map and habitat data may be derived from third-party datasets under their own licence terms.

You keep your rights in the photos and observations you create. You grant us a limited licence to store and process them only to operate the app as described in our Privacy Policy. We do not currently reuse account-linked observations for model training or a contributed-species dataset. Any future secondary use would require a documented purpose, lawful basis and updated notice before collection; it is not created by accepting these Terms.

We aim to keep ForagePal available but we cannot promise uninterrupted service.

Some features ship deliberately reduced at launch and are labelled as such: map coverage is limited to the survey data available, and the forecast is rule-based. We may add, change or remove features over time.

We may update these Terms. Material changes will be presented in the app for renewed acceptance.

Irish law — the Liability for Defective Products Act 1991 — makes liability for death or personal injury caused by a defective product strict and non-disclaimable. These Terms cannot exclude that liability, and do not try to.

Directive (EU) 2024/2853 extends the product-liability regime to software and AI systems. Member States must apply their implementing measures to products placed on the market or put into service after 9 December 2026. We reference it only as a forward-looking rule for relevant products, not as a claim that it applies before those implementing measures take effect.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or any other liability that Irish or EU law does not allow to be limited. Subject to that, and to the maximum extent the law permits, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of ForagePal.

Safety liability is not disclaimed here: the app is designed never to assert edibility, and the non-disclaimable liabilities stated above remain unaffected.

Nothing in these Terms limits your statutory rights as a consumer under Irish and EU law. Those rights cannot be excluded by any agreement, and we do not try to exclude them.

We aim to make the ForagePal app and website perceivable, operable, understandable and robust, including keyboard access, visible focus, text alternatives, readable contrast and reduced-motion support where relevant. If an accessibility barrier prevents you from using the service or reading these documents, contact support@foragepal.com; we will provide the information in an accessible form and work to remove the barrier.

Directive (EU) 2019/882 (the European Accessibility Act) can apply to consumer e-commerce services and requires information about accessibility. This section is a service commitment and route for feedback, not a claim of certified EAA or WCAG conformance or of a particular exemption.

You may stop using ForagePal and delete your account at any time. The in-app "Delete account" control performs immediate server-first hard erasure: every private S3 photo-object version and delete marker is removed before the active database and Cognito identity, then the subject-scoped device data — including home, onboarding and privacy caches — is cleared. There is no undo period. If you have uninstalled the app, use the email route on this website's account-deletion page.

The automated in-app transaction does not delete pseudonymised usage-analytics entries, non-account-scoped security counters, RevenueCat data or independent App Store and Google Play purchase records. The account-deletion page explains these limits and how to request manual handling of data Echofold controls.

Deleting your account does not cancel your subscription, and does not stop it renewing. Because the App Store or Google Play is the merchant, you cancel it in your store account — see "Subscriptions, trials and payment" above.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these Terms, or that we reasonably believe presents a safety, security or legal risk.

These Terms apply when you download ForagePal from the Apple App Store, with the additions below, which Apple requires. This agreement is between you and Echofold Ltd only — not with Apple — and we, not Apple, are solely responsible for the app and its content.

Your licence is a non-transferable licence to use the app on any Apple-branded device that you own or control, as permitted by the App Store Terms of Service. Apple has no obligation to provide any maintenance or support for the app; if you need help, contact us at support@foragepal.com.

If the app fails to conform to any warranty we give, you may notify Apple and Apple will refund the purchase price of the app to you. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation in respect of the app, and any other claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs or expenses attributable to a failure to conform to a warranty are our responsibility, not Apple's.

We, not Apple, are responsible for addressing any claim you or a third party makes about the app — including product-liability claims, any claim that the app fails to meet a legal or regulatory requirement, and claims under consumer-protection or similar legislation — and for the investigation, defence, settlement and discharge of any third-party claim that the app infringes intellectual-property rights.

You confirm that you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo, or designated by it as a "terrorist supporting" country, and that you are not listed on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

You must comply with any applicable third-party terms when using the app. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and, once you accept them, Apple has the right — and is deemed to have accepted the right — to enforce them against you.

These Terms are governed by the laws of Ireland, and the courts of Ireland have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

This is without prejudice to any mandatory consumer-protection right you have to bring proceedings in your own country of residence.

Company details required under Irish company law are below. Echofold Ltd is registered in Ireland under CRO number 786573, with VAT number IE 4410331WH and its registered office at Unit 1, Richview Business Park, Clonskeagh, Dublin, D14 W6X6, Ireland.

General enquiries: support@foragepal.com. Privacy and data protection: privacy@foragepal.com.

Postal: Echofold Ltd, Unit 1, Richview Business Park, Clonskeagh, Dublin, D14 W6X6, Ireland.