Half Five
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Half Five — Terms of Use

Last updated: 18 September 2026

1. Who you are agreeing with

Half Five is provided by Spark Curiosity Ltd, a company incorporated in Jersey, registered office 5 Fremont Perle, St John, Jersey, JE3 4DN ("we", "us"). By downloading or using Half Five you agree to these terms.

2. You must be 18

You must be at least 18 years old to create a Half Five account and to buy a subscription. Half Five is set up by the adults who run a household. Children don't have accounts.

3. Your household

  • What a household shares. Everyone in a household sees:
    • its meals and recipes;
    • each evening's suggestions and who answered what;
    • what was cooked;
    • the week's shopping list;
    • the first names of the people in it, and, if the household has chosen to keep one, its list of allergens to avoid.
  • Inviting someone. Anyone who opens your household's invite link and signs in joins it. Only send the link to people you want in the household. You can remove someone in Settings › Household.
  • Adding a child. When you add a child, you confirm that you have parental responsibility for them, or the permission of someone who does. Half Five holds their first name, and nothing else about them. It never shows numbers about a child.
  • Consenting for the household. A household's allergen list is health data, and the only lawful basis we have for holding it is explicit consent. Where the list reflects a child's allergies, that consent has to come from an adult entitled to give it, and by giving it you confirm you are that adult. If you aren't, don't give it. The list belongs to the household rather than to any one person, and everyone in the household can see it, so tell the others before you add something that reflects their health.
  • Deciding together. One yes settles tonight, unless your household chooses "Both agree", in which case a second adult's yes settles it.

4. What Half Five is, and what it isn't

  • Suggestions. Half Five suggests dinner from your household's own meals and, when you ask for something new, from recipes in our library. It gives no dietary, nutritional or medical advice, and nothing in it replaces advice from a doctor or dietitian.
  • The allergen filter is a convenience, not a safety system. Half Five leaves out new recipes from its library that list what your household avoids. It doesn't check your own meals, or the familiar meals it offers while you set up, because nobody has recorded what's in those. You must not rely on it to keep anyone safe. Always read the actual ingredients and the actual packaging before you cook and before you serve, especially for anyone with an allergy. Recipes describe ingredients in ordinary language; ingredients change, brands change, products get reformulated, and the same dish means different things in different kitchens. We take reasonable care over the allergen information in our own recipes, but we don't warrant that it's complete or correct for every product you might buy.
  • Allergen labels in our library are taken from each recipe's ingredients and checked by a person. They describe the recipe, not anyone in your household. The same warning applies to them.
  • Recipes read from what you add can be wrong. When you add a recipe from a photo, some text or a link, Half Five reads it automatically, and it can make mistakes. Check the recipe before you rely on it. Half Five doesn't treat anything a model reads out of your recipe as an allergen claim, and doesn't match it against your household's allergen list.

5. What's free, and the subscription

  • The evening is free, always. That includes:
    • tonight's card;
    • answering it;
    • choosing from your own meals;
    • marking what you cooked;
    • leftovers;
    • the Live Activity.
  • The free meal limit. A free household can keep up to 15 active meals.
  • What the subscription adds:
    • more meals than that;
    • "Something new" from our recipe library;
    • reading recipes from photos, text and links;
    • the shopping list.
  • Price and trial. The subscription is monthly or yearly, at the price the app shows before you buy, in your own currency. A new subscriber may be offered a free trial on the yearly plan, and the app shows that before you buy too.
  • Whole household. One subscription covers everyone in the subscriber's household.
  • If it ends. Your household keeps every meal it has. It just can't go above 15 active meals until someone subscribes again.
  • Apple is the merchant of record. You buy from Apple, Apple charges your Apple Account, and Apple's terms govern the payment.
  • Renewal and cancelling. Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each period unless you cancel at least 24 hours before it ends. Cancel or manage it in Settings › Apple Account › Subscriptions. We can't cancel it for you, and deleting your Half Five account doesn't cancel it.
  • Family Sharing is on. The people in your Apple family can use your subscription without buying their own.
  • Refunds are handled by Apple, under Apple's policy, not by us.

6. Your meals, recipes and photos

  • They stay private to your household. We use them only to run Half Five for you. That includes sending a recipe you add to the service that reads it, as the Privacy Policy explains. Your household's allergen information is never sent to that service, or to anyone else.
  • You keep ownership. You give us permission to store, copy and process what you add only so we can provide Half Five to your household.
  • Only add what you have the right to use. Half Five is for a household's own cooking: a photo of a recipe from your own cookbook, for use in your own kitchen, is what it's for. Don't use it to copy or pass on other people's recipes.
  • Our recipes. The recipes and images in our library are ours, or licensed to us. Use them for your household's own cooking; don't copy or republish them.

7. What you may not do

You may not:

  • resell or redistribute Half Five or its recipes;
  • upload anything you don't have the right to upload, or anything unlawful, abusive or obscene;
  • photograph people when you add a recipe;
  • try to break, probe or get around the app's security, or reach another household's data.

8. Your account, and ending it

  • Deleting your account. Do this at any time in Settings › Your data › Delete account and data.
    • Your account goes.
    • If no other adult who can sign in is left in your household, the household and everything in it go too.
    • If other adults stay, the household's meals and history stay with them, and your name is replaced with "Former member".
  • Withdrawing allergen consent is separate from deleting your account, and you can do it at any time in Settings without losing anything else. It erases every avoided food in your household at once.
  • Exporting first. You can take a copy of your household's data before you delete: Settings › Your data › Export my data.
  • Leaving a household is Settings › Leave the household. The meals stay with everyone else, and you start again with a household of your own.
  • If you break these terms. We may suspend or end an account that breaches these terms. If we do, we will tell you why, and Apple will handle any refund question.

9. Availability

We do our best to keep Half Five working, but we don't promise it will always be available or free of errors, and we may change or withdraw features. Notifications and Live Activities depend on Apple's services and your phone's settings, so a card can arrive late or not at all. Tonight's card is always in the app.

10. Our liability

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that, and because Half Five is a low-cost consumer app rather than a professional service:

  • we are not liable for losses that were not reasonably foreseeable;
  • we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, like lost data you hadn't backed up, or costs you incur elsewhere because of an outage;
  • our total liability to you in any twelve-month period is limited to what you paid for Half Five in that period.

Suggestions, the allergen filter, allergen labels and recipes read from what you add are covered by clause 4, not this one. Clause 4 sets out that Half Five gives no dietary or medical advice, that the allergen filter and our allergen labels are a convenience and not a safety system, and that you must check the actual ingredients and packaging yourself. That applies whatever else this clause says, and nothing in clause 10 widens what we're responsible for there.

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to keep your data secure, in line with the standards our processors themselves have committed to (see our Privacy Policy). No online service can guarantee absolute security, though, and we are not liable for a security incident caused by something outside our reasonable control, or by a third party acting despite those measures.

Neither of us is liable for a delay or failure caused by something outside our reasonable control (a "force majeure" event), such as a widescale internet, App Store or payment-processor outage.

Nothing here affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

11. Changes

We may change these terms. If a change matters, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use Half Five after that means you accept the change.

12. Law

These terms are governed by the law of Jersey, and the courts of Jersey have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident in the United Kingdom or the European Union, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer law of your own country, and you may bring proceedings in your local courts.

13. Contact