Version 1.1, October 2026
The short version
Using Circate means you accept these terms. If you don't accept them, don't use it.
You must be 18 or older. (Largely because of monetary factors like potential tax matters, etc.)
Circate is paid all the way through. Reading, listening and publishing all require a funded subscription.
Keep it secure. Use a password you don't use elsewhere, don't share your login, and tell us if you think somebody else has it. Everything done under your account is treated as done by you.
$15 a billing period, plus sales tax where your state charges it. Tax is added on top rather than taken out of the $10.50, so the allocation is the same number in every state.
Your period runs from the day you joined and renews on that day. There is no shared billing date and no proration. Every period is a whole period, because $10.50 covering one whole period is the number everything else rests on.
Cancel any time from your account. Access runs to the end of the period you've already paid for. We don't refund part of a period.
An open is one of two things: arriving at a piece of writing, because the words come with the page, or starting audio. Nothing else costs anything. Not browsing, not searching, not landing on a recording you never play.
Your $10.50 divides evenly across your opens in that period:
$10.50 ÷ your opens this period = what each open is worth
The top of that never moves. Opening more doesn't spend more; it cuts the same money into smaller pieces. If you open nothing, none of it goes anywhere and all $15 stays with us.
Repeats count, and nothing is deduplicated. Opening one thing fifty times takes fifty shares of your $10.50 rather than one. That includes coming back to a piece of writing you already read, and it includes reloading the page, because arriving is what delivers the words. There is no grace window and no second look that's free.
Opening your own shared work counts too, and we don't filter it out. Your own private work, the drafts and recordings nobody else can see, is never an open. A period spent entirely on yourself still returns at most $10.50 against $15, so it costs you the same $4.50 as everyone else.
The remaining $4.50 covers card processing, hosting and running the place. It is not a royalty pool and nothing is held back from it for later.
You earn from what you made, from the people who opened it. There is no pool, no minimum, no threshold and no period in which an open is worth nothing.
Earnings arrive as credit against your next bill. Your bill is $15 minus what you earned, minus anything carried over. Anything above your bill stays as a balance and goes toward the next one.
Once your balance passes $50 you can ask for it in cash instead. We pay on request rather than automatically, and we may need identity and tax details before the first one.
What you earn from someone settles when their period closes, not when yours does, and it appears on your first bill after that. Money from a period that closes the day after you were invoiced waits for the next invoice rather than adjusting the one already sent.
We don't guarantee any amount of earnings, and nothing here is a promise of income.
Money credited against your bill is probably still income to you even though no cash moved, and cash payouts certainly are. What you owe on it is yours to work out and pay.
We may be required to collect tax details from you and to report amounts we credit or pay. We can hold a payout until you've given us what's needed. This is not tax advice.
A failed payment puts the account past due within seconds. Opening stops, and your public work stops resolving for everyone else, because an unfunded account can't draw money out of a period it didn't pay into.
Nothing is unpublished and nothing is deleted. You keep your work, your ledger and anything you'd earned, you can still sign in, fix your card and manage your catalogue, and everything starts resolving again the moment the payment clears.
The same applies after you cancel. A balance you're still owed stays yours.
If you cancel holding less than $50 there is no bill left for it to come off, and the threshold would otherwise strand it. Ask and we'll pay it out anyway. If you don't, it stays on the account and we'll try to reach you before it goes anywhere.
You keep every right to everything you make and publish here. We claim no ownership of any of it, and this licence doesn't stop you licensing the same work to anyone else on any terms you like.
To run the service we need your permission for specific things, so here they are by name. You grant Circate a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence, for as long as the work is published here, to:
That grant covers both the recording and the composition in it, because streaming a piece of music uses both and a licence naming only one licenses half of it.
It exists to operate the service and for nothing else. We won't sublicense your work, sell it, put it in advertising, or use it to train models. The licence ends when you delete the work or your account, except that an open which already happened still has to name what was opened.
This is a direct licence between you and Circate. That is the whole of our arrangement about money, and it means Circate never pays a performing rights organisation, a publisher, or a mechanical collecting society for anything played here.
The allocation you receive out of subscribers' $10.50 is the complete and only payment for every use of your work on Circate. It is in full satisfaction of any performance, mechanical, reproduction, neighbouring or other royalty that might otherwise be claimed for those uses. Nothing further is owed by us to you or to anyone claiming through you.
You can be an ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, GMR, PRS or other society member and publish here. Those grants are non-exclusive, which is exactly what leaves you free to license directly. But being a member and owning your song does not on its own make a direct licence. This clause is what makes it one, so by publishing here you agree that:
If a society bills us for plays of your work, we'll send you the demand, and you'll deal with it and cover what it costs us.
Earning here is tied to authorship, so the question every upload has to answer is did you make this, not whether posting it would get you sued. Those are different questions and only the first one is ours.
That matters most where nobody's rights are at stake at all. Work nobody owns is still not work you made. Publishing a novel that fell out of copyright a century ago infringes nothing and is still not allowed here, and serialising it into forty chapters is the version of that we'd notice first.
Writing your own book about characters nobody owns is completely different, and welcome. A new Dracula story is yours, or the parts you wrote are. You don't acquire Dracula, and the next person is free to write theirs.
No cover versions, and nothing whose rights sit with someone who hasn't agreed to this.
By publishing, you promise us that you hold or control every right you're granting above, in both the recording and the composition. If that turns out not to be true, you'll cover the cost of any claim that follows, including what we spend defending it.
Some rights never belonged to you at all. A master might belong to a label, a sample might be cleared for one use only, a composition might be controlled by your publisher. Those need the owner's agreement before you publish, not after. If you can't get it, don't upload it.
We may remove anything that breaks this, and repeated breaches cost the account.
Publishing is usually also a transfer. A journal contract often assigns your copyright outright; a book deal usually grants exclusive rights for the life of the copyright. If either happened, the work is no longer yours to license to us, however plainly you wrote it.
Academic work is the case that catches people. Most publishers do let you post a version of your own paper, and almost always only the accepted manuscript rather than the published PDF, only after an embargo of a year or two, and only somewhere non-commercial, meaning your own page or your institution's repository. Circate is none of those: you're paid per open, which makes it commercial by construction. So a paper you may legitimately post on your university page can still be one you can't post here. Read the agreement rather than the policy summary, and if it isn't clear, ask the publisher.
The same goes for anything written for an employer. If it was part of your job, it's probably theirs.
None of this applies to work that was always yours, like open-access papers you hold the rights to, anything self-published, anything a publisher has released back to you, and work nobody ever bought.
Your own work can contain other people's, and that part is still theirs. Think of a memoir quoting a song, an essay quoting a poem, or criticism quoting at length. The writing is yours and the quoted material isn't, and clearing it is your job. Brief quotation for comment or criticism is usually fine; reproducing something in substance usually isn't.
A translation is a new work built on someone else's. The labour is entirely yours and the permission still isn't. Translate something out of copyright freely; translating anything else needs the author's agreement.
The same goes for anything built on a work somebody still owns, whether a sequel, an adaptation, or a piece that reuses their world. Building on something nobody owns is the welcome case described above, and nothing here narrows it.
Don't invent things and attribute them to real people. A quotation nobody said, a study that doesn't exist and a citation to a page that isn't there are all the same offence, and any of them can cost the account.
This is a narrow rule and deliberately so. It covers one question: is the thing you cited real. It is not about whether you read it correctly. We don't referee interpretations, we don't remove work for reasoning we disagree with, and being wrong about what a source means is a disagreement rather than a breach. Fiction is fiction and invents whatever it likes.
A model used as a tool is a tool. Drafting help, editing, a suggestion you took and rewrote, the same as a thesaurus or a compressor. Nothing here is against using one and you don't have to declare it.
What doesn't work is a model as the author. If you prompted it and published what came back, you didn't make it, and the rule above is the whole answer, no different from posting a novel nobody owns. US law happens to draw the same line: work generated without a human author isn't copyrightable at all, so there would be nothing for you to license us even if we wanted it.
The test isn't how much of a model touched the work, it's whether the thing that makes it worth reading or hearing came from you. We won't run detection software or accuse anyone on the strength of a hunch. This is a rule for cases that are obvious or admitted.
Cloning someone's voice or singing style is a separate matter and not allowed, whatever made it.
You can publish something you wrote with other people without collecting their signatures first. The licence you give us is non-exclusive, and a part owner can grant one of those for the whole work.
What you can't do is keep the money. If you publish a co-write, you owe your co-writers their share of everything it earns here, and that obligation is yours whether or not they ever knew it was up.
Until Circate can split a payment, the whole share lands on the account that published it, and settling up is something you do yourself, directly, outside this. Keep track of it. We do hope to make splits possible in the system so each person will hold their own share, be paid at the same moment from the same figures, and be able to see the arithmetic. But right now we can't split payments like that, so it's up to you to keep track of for your co-writers.
Neither arrangement changes what follows. Everyone with a share still deals with their own collecting society, for their own share, on their own account. And if a co-writer would rather the work wasn't here, we suggest you take it down even though you might not technically have to.
Audio as mp3 or m4a, and writing. We're a text and audio only shop, no video and no images. There's enough of visual media other places on the Internet.
We don't transcode (yet). What you upload is what everybody streams, so the file you send is the one people hear.
Deleting puts something in the trash rather than destroying it (you can find the Trash in the SYS section when you're logged in), and deleting an outlet takes everything inside it. Trashed work stops resolving for everyone else immediately.
An open that already happened still owes money and still has to say what was opened, so the record of an open outlives the thing it pointed at, including the title it had at the time.
Closing your account is different from trashing something. Your work comes off the service and the files go with it, and that is not reversible.
Circate is not a backup service. Keep your own copies of your masters. We may eventually clear trashed files, and we don't promise to hold anything for you.
Memoir, essay and criticism are part of what this is for, and all three involve real people who never agreed to be written about. So please be truthful: don't state as fact something about an identifiable person that you know, or ought to know, isn't true.
Opinion isn't covered by that, however unkind. Neither is criticism, nor an unflattering account of something that actually happened, nor your own experience of someone. Truth is a complete answer. What isn't allowed is invention presented as fact.
Be careful with genuinely private things about people who aren't public figures, like medical details, someone's sexuality, or an address. True and private can still be wrong to publish.
If someone tells us a piece of writing is false about them, we won't be deciding who's right; we have no way to. We'll put it to you, and you either stand behind what you wrote or take it down. Everything you publish is yours, which means a claim over it is yours too.
Circate is for work, fiction and nonfiction, and that can contain what life contains. Even the Bible depicts violence and sex and contains crude language (Judges 19, 2 Samuel 13, Song of Songs, Ezekiel 23:20, Galatians 5:12, Philippians 3:8).
That said, we operate according to Stripe's limit.
Stripe's restricted businesses list names pornography and mature-audience content, including literature, made for the purpose of sexual gratification. Every payment on this site runs through Stripe, and a business with one restricted line is treated as a restricted business. If Stripe decides Circate is an adult platform there will be no Circate, so work of that kind can't live here. Their list is at stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses.
Rules about intent are difficult, but we'll use our best judgment, and we expect you will, too. Our suggestion is, if in doubt, don't publish it here. And if you want a second opinion about whether what you want to publish is OK, feel free to email us: info@circate.com.
Circate is a place to think out loud. It's a place for reason. It's a place for the pursuit of truth.
Philosophy, theology, politics, criticism. That's all fine here.
Religious writing of every kind is welcome. You can make claims about God's existence (or your views to the contrary), truth, sin, love, kindness, judgment and salvation, reincarnation, and on down the list.
We believe it's hard to find the truth in silence. So please, engage in discourse. Speak your mind. Be willing to let it accord with the truth should you find it.
We aren't going to take your work down just because someone who is employed by Circate disagrees with it.
You don't have to soften a conviction to publish it.
We do suggest some basic epistemic virtues like intellectual humility, honesty, kindness. Listening is a good skill, too.
Steel-man; don't straw-man.
As J.S. Mill pointed out, the person who "knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."
Be bold. Make bold claims. The world needs more daring, but we don't need more jerks.
Beyond all that, nothing that:
The harassment rule is about conduct toward a person, not about positions. You can argue for anything here and someone can find it wrong or offensive; that isn't a breach. Going after a particular human being is.
Content that sexualises children is reported to the authorities and ends the account immediately, with no notice and no appeal.
If something here infringes your copyright, tell our designated agent:
Jeremy Sakovich
Circate Media Corporation
2491 N Mt. Juliet Road
Box 202
Mt. Juliet, TN 37122
(615) 547-8391
info@circate.com
A notice needs to identify the work, identify what is infringing it and where to find it here, give us your contact details, and carry your signature. It also needs two statements: that you believe in good faith the use isn't authorised, and, under penalty of perjury, that the information is accurate and you are the rights holder or acting for them.
We remove or disable what a valid notice covers, promptly, and we tell the person who posted it what happened and who said so.
If you think we got it wrong, send a counter-notice. It needs your signature, the material and where it was before we took it down, your name, address and phone number, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith it came down through mistake or misidentification, and your agreement to accept court papers from the claimant in the federal district where you live, or where we are if you live outside the United States.
We pass a counter-notice to whoever complained. If they don't tell us within ten business days that they have gone to court to stop you, your work goes back up, usually between ten and fourteen business days after you sent it.
Both of those statements are made under penalty of perjury, and the law makes knowingly false claims in either direction actionable. That applies to a takedown notice sent about work somebody plainly owns just as much as to a counter-notice.
Repeat infringers lose their account. A complaint that gets withdrawn or that you successfully answer isn't held against you. Notices that stand are, and it does not take many.
We can remove work that breaks these terms, suspend or end an account that breaks them, and change or retire parts of the service. We'll give notice where we reasonably can, and act first where something is harmful or illegal.
We can't and don't read everything published here, and hosting something is not endorsing it.
Circate is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind. We don't promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or right for what you want from it.
We're not responsible for what other people publish here, and we don't check whether any of it is true.
To the extent the law allows it, our liability for anything arising out of these terms is limited to whatever you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or $200, whichever is greater.
We're not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss, including lost earnings or lost work.
These terms, and whatever you agreed to when you published, are the whole agreement between us. Anything said anywhere else about how Circate works is description, not a promise.
If a court decides one part of this doesn't hold, the rest still does. If we don't enforce something straight away, that isn't us giving it up.
You can't transfer your account or this agreement to somebody else. We can transfer ours if Circate is ever sold or reorganised, and we'd tell you before it happened.
These terms are governed by the law of the State of Tennessee, USA, and disputes go to the courts of Tennessee.
We may update these terms. If a change matters we'll say so by email or on the site before it takes effect. Carrying on using Circate after that means you accept the new version.
Anything at all: info@circate.com