Terms of service

Last updated: 9 October 2026

1. Who and what

These terms apply to the use of Quak: the website quak.party, the web app, the apps, the CLI, the MCP server and the Quak API (together “Quak”). Quak is offered by Mike Lieser, Koblenz, Germany (“we”; the full address is in the legal notice). They apply to consumers and businesses alike, unless a section says otherwise. Terms of your own that differ from these don't apply, even if we don't object to them.

Quak is used in workspaces: a home, a family, an office or a company. Each workspace has its own plan, credits, speakers and members. Its admins buy plans and packs for it and invite others; members play. The contract for a workspace is with whoever created it, or with the company it was created for (section 10).

2. The service

Quak plays announcements on Sonos speakers: texts spoken by a voice, recordings, built-in sounds, your own clips, audio files and audio from the web. What a plan includes is on the pricing page. We keep developing Quak and may change, add or remove features, as long as what you paid for stays reasonably usable. We tell you about important changes in advance.

Some parts of Quak are marked alpha or beta on the features and apps and integrations pages. They work, but we keep improving them: how they sound, their names, steps and limits can change without notice, and such an option can go away. There is no claim to keeping an alpha or beta feature as it is. Features marked live only change in a compatible way or after we announced it.

Quak is not made, sponsored or endorsed by Sonos, Inc. Sonos is a trademark of Sonos, Inc. Playback depends on Sonos, your speakers and your network; we can't guarantee that every announcement reaches every speaker.

3. Your account

• You need an account with a working email address. You must be at least 16 years old.
• Keep your email account, logged-in devices and API keys safe. Anyone with an API key can play on your speakers and use your credits. If a key gets out, delete it or tell us.
• You are responsible for what happens with your account, also through people you invite or keys you hand out.
• As an admin you decide who is in a workspace and who else is admin. Everyone you invite has to accept these terms too.

4. Credits, plans and payment

• Announcements cost credits, depending on the kind, length and voice, as shown on the pricing page under What costs what. An announcement that is skipped (for example during quiet hours) or reaches no speaker costs nothing.
• Credits come in three ways:
  • Free: 500 credits to start with, without a subscription. They stay until you use them.
  • Packs: credits you buy once, whenever you need more. They don't expire either.
  • Subscriptions: fresh credits every month, with a yearly plan too. They're valid for their billing month, don't carry over and are used before pack credits.
• Credits belong to the workspace they're in. They have no cash value: they can't be paid out, exchanged for money or moved to another workspace.
• Home, Family and Team can be tried for 7 days. The plan's monthly credits come right away and last until the end of the first paid month; the next renewal tops them up again. Cancel during the trial and you pay nothing. Switching between these plans during the trial keeps it running; switching to Business, which has no trial, ends it, and Business is charged right away.
• There is one free trial per customer, payment card and Sonos system. If one of them already had a trial, the plan starts paid right away, at checkout or at the latest when you connect Sonos.
• Prices for Home, Family and packs include the VAT of your country. Team and Business are offers for businesses, their prices are plus VAT, and so are packs bought while one of them runs; with a valid EU VAT ID no VAT is charged (reverse charge). The checkout shows the final price before you buy.
• Purchases are handled through Stripe Managed Payments. The seller and merchant of record is Link, LLC (“Sold through Link”): it takes the payment, issues the invoice and receipt and handles taxes and refunds. Its terms apply to the purchase, including any right of withdrawal for consumers. In the EU, payments are processed by Stripe Technology Europe, Ltd.; on your statement the charge shows as “LINK.COM* QUAK.PARTY”.
• You can cancel a subscription at any time, without notice period, under “Payment and invoices” in the billing settings (at Stripe); it runs until the end of the paid period. Credits from packs stay in the workspace.
• Upgrades apply right away: you pay the difference for the rest of the billing period, and the workspace gets the difference in monthly credits in the same proportion. Downgrades apply at the end of the billing period; until then everything stays as it is. From then on the workspace has what the smaller plan includes. A downgrade is only possible once the workspace is within the smaller plan's limits (locations, users, schedules etc.): the billing page says what to reduce first. We don't switch off or delete anything of yours for it.
• On Family, Team and Business, packs cost less; the billing page shows the discount. Promotion codes and other discounts apply as stated with them, for example for how long, for which plans or for new customers only. They can't be combined and have no cash value. A plan's discount stays when you switch, unless it is limited to certain plans.
• If a payment fails, the plan and its credits stay for now and Stripe tries again for up to two weeks, with an email each time. If it still fails, the subscription ends as if it had been cancelled.
• If a purchase is refunded or charged back, its credits are taken back in the same proportion, as far as they're still there.
• Prices can change. For running subscriptions a new price applies from the next billing period, and only if we told you at least 30 days before; you can cancel before it applies.

5. Fair use

Quak is for announcements you are allowed to make. Please don't use it to

• play on speakers you have no right to use, or to annoy, frighten or harass people,
• play content that is unlawful, hateful or infringes the rights of others,
• impersonate others in a misleading way, for example with voices meant to deceive, or pass off a generated voice as a real person's or as a genuine recording where that could mislead; where it matters, make clear that a voice is generated,
• overload, probe or get around the limits of Quak and the API, or resell it without our agreement. Reasonable rate limits protect the service for everyone.

If an account breaks these rules, we may block keys, suspend the account or, in serious cases, end the contract. We tell you why, unless the law forbids it.

6. Your content

What you announce, record or upload stays yours. You give us the right to process it as far as needed to run Quak: to turn text into speech, to mix intro, outro and effects, to cache the audio for the time you set and to play it on your speakers. You confirm that you have the rights to what you upload or link, for example music or recordings of other people. How we handle personal data is in the privacy policy.

The built-in sounds and voices are licensed to you for use within Quak only. Downloading them for other purposes isn't allowed.

7. Services of others

Quak works with services of other companies: Sonos for playback, the voice providers (such as ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Google and Amazon) for speech, Slack for the Slack app, Stripe and Link for payments. Their terms and usage policies apply as well to what goes through them; texts for a voice, for example, must also be allowed under the provider's rules. We choose these services with care, but we have no influence on their outages or changes.

8. Availability

We work hard to keep Quak running, but occasional interruptions can't be ruled out. For Home, Family and Free we provide Quak without a promise of a certain availability.

For Team and Business we promise an availability of 99.9% per calendar month, measured on our public status page at status.quak.party. If we miss it, the workspace gets a service credit: a share of the plan's monthly credits, added to its credits that never expire.

• Ask for it by email to hello@quak.party within 30 days after the end of the month; we may also credit it on our own. The same applies to yearly plans.
• Not counted as downtime: planned maintenance that we announce at least 48 hours ahead by email to the admins of Team and Business workspaces; outages of Sonos or of the voice providers; problems with your network or devices; and events beyond our reasonable control.
• The service credit is the only remedy for missing the availability; it isn't paid out. Our liability otherwise is in section 12.

9. Support

Without a plan there are the docs and the FAQ. With Home and Family we answer emails to hello@quak.party as soon as we can. On Team we reply within 24 hours, on Business within 12 hours, counted on working days (Monday to Friday, except public holidays in Rhineland-Palatinate). A reply is a first answer, not always the solution.

10. Companies

If you use Quak for a company, you confirm that you may agree to these terms for it. From the Family plan on, the workspace's admins create the data processing agreement (DPA) under Settings → General, as a PDF with the company's details; it applies without a signature. For more locations or users on Business, or anything these terms don't cover, we can agree on something separately.

11. Ending the contract

You can delete your account at any time in the web app or by writing to us; it is deleted with your data as described in the privacy policy. Credits that are left expire with the account. Admins can delete a workspace; a running plan then ends right away, its credits and packs are lost, and nothing already paid is refunded. We can end a contract without a subscription with 30 days notice, and any contract without notice for an important reason, such as a serious breach of section 5.

12. Liability

• We are fully liable for intent and gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under the product liability law and where we gave a guarantee.
• For slight negligence we are only liable for breaching an obligation that is essential to the contract and that you may rely on, and only for the damage typical and foreseeable for this kind of contract.
• Otherwise our liability for slight negligence is excluded. This also applies to the people who work for us.

13. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms, for example when Quak or the law changes. We tell you by email at least 30 days before the changes apply. If you don't object within that time, the new terms apply; we point this out in the email. If you object, either side can end the contract when the changes would apply.

14. Final provisions

• German law applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. For consumers this only applies as far as it doesn't take away the protection of the law of the country they live in.
• If you are a merchant, a legal entity under public law or a special fund under public law, the place of jurisdiction is Koblenz.
• If a provision is invalid, the rest of these terms remains valid.
• We are neither obliged nor willing to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.
• Questions about these terms: hello@quak.party.