Terms of Service

HelloMates: Solo Travel App, operated by Yiriba LLC. Last updated: 2026-09-30.

1. Agreement
2. Eligibility
3. Your account
4. Conduct, reports and blocks
5. Enforcement and appeals
6. Your content and Moments
7. Rooms, presence and reputation
8. The women's lane
9. Subscriptions and purchases
10. Invite codes and partner benefits
11. Home and HelloMates Family
12. Arm it
13. Third-party services and links
14. Our rights and your licence to use HelloMates
15. Ending your account
16. Disclaimers
17. Limitation of liability
18. Indemnity
19. Governing law and disputes
20. Changes to these terms
21. Contact

1. Agreement

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a contract between you and Yiriba LLC, a Texas limited liability company with its address at Pearland, TX, United States ("Yiriba", "we", "us"). They govern your use of the HelloMates apps for iPhone and Android, the website at hellomates.app, and the services reachable through them (together, "HelloMates" or the "Service"). By creating an account, tapping "Continue" on the sign-in screen, or using HelloMates you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. Before you first use the check-in feature the app shows you the Arm it terms and asks you to confirm them; they are part of these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use HelloMates.

Neither Apple Inc. nor Google LLC is a party to these Terms. Where you obtained HelloMates through the App Store, Apple's Licensed Application End User License Agreement also applies to the app on your device, and Apple has no obligation to provide maintenance or support for HelloMates. Where you obtained it through Google Play, the Google Play Terms of Service also apply, and Google has no obligation to provide maintenance or support either. Support for HelloMates comes from us, at the address in section 21.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old to use HelloMates. That is our rule rather than a store age rating: the app carries chat between people who have not met, with automated filtering and human review but no pre-screening, and we consider it unsuitable for minors whatever rating a store's questionnaire produces. By using HelloMates you confirm that you are 18 or over, that you are allowed to use the Service under the laws that apply to you, and that you can enter into a binding contract. If we learn that a user is under 18 we will close the account and delete its data as described in the Privacy Policy.

3. Your account

• You sign in with Apple, Google, an email code or a phone code. One person, one account. You may not share an account, sell an account, or create an account for someone else.
• Give us accurate information: a real first name or the name you go by, a photo of yourself, and a working phone number or email. A profile photo must show your face; the app checks for a face when you add one.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account. Keep your device locked and tell us at once if you think someone else has used it.
• We may need to contact you about your account, a report, a purchase or a safety matter. We do this in the app, by email or by SMS at the address or number you gave us.

4. Conduct, reports and blocks

HelloMates is for people travelling alone who want company for an evening, a taxi or a plan. It is not a dating app and it is not a marketplace. When you use HelloMates you agree not to:

• harass, threaten, stalk, insult or demean anyone, or send unwanted sexual content or advances;
• post content that is illegal, hateful, violent, pornographic, or that infringes someone else's rights;
• misrepresent who you are, your age, your gender for the purpose of the women's lane, or your location;
• use HelloMates to sell anything, recruit for anything, run tours or promotions without a partner agreement with us, or send spam;
• use HelloMates to follow, locate or monitor another person without their knowledge and consent, including through Arm it or the Home role;
• scrape, copy, automate, reverse engineer or interfere with the Service, or try to get around a limit, a paywall, a block or a ban;
• collect other users' personal data or share a screenshot of a private conversation to embarrass someone.

Zero tolerance. HelloMates has zero tolerance for objectionable content and abusive users. Content that is hateful, harassing, sexual, violent, illegal or otherwise objectionable is not allowed, and neither is abusing, threatening or impersonating other people. The app asks you to agree to these community rules before you use its community features (chat, rooms and Moments), and you need a first name and a photo of yourself on your profile before you can post in them, so nobody posts anonymously.

We filter what people post. Names, bios, profile photos, messages, room titles, Moments and the photos sent in chats go through automated checks, and content that fails them is refused or held so that only the sender sees it until a person reviews it.

You can report a profile, a message, a room, a Moment and a reply to a Moment. You can block a person from their profile, from a message they sent, from their Moments and replies, and a room's host from the room. Blocking someone removes their messages from your view and stops them opening a direct thread with you. Reports go to a person on our team, not only to a filter.

5. Enforcement and appeals

We review every report within 24 hours. When content breaks these terms we remove it and suspend or close the account that posted it. More generally, if we uphold a report against you, or otherwise find that you have broken these Terms, we may hold or remove content, limit features, suspend your account or close it. When we do, we promise the following:

• A reason. You receive a notice in the app that says what happened and which rule applies.
• A human reply within 24 hours. You can appeal from the notice in the app or by email to hello@hellomates.app. A person, not an automated system, reads the appeal and answers within 24 hours of receiving it.
• No paid time lost without a refund path. If we close an account that has an active paid period, we tell you how to request a refund from the store you bought it from for the unused part. If the store declines and the closure was not for a serious violation (violence, sexual harassment, stalking, fraud or a threat to anyone's safety), we will make it right with you directly.

We may report unlawful conduct to the authorities where the law requires or permits it, and we may preserve content for that purpose.

6. Your content and Moments

"Your content" means anything you post or send through HelloMates: messages, room titles, Moments (photos and short posts in the city feed), profile text and photos. You keep every right you have in your content. You give Yiriba a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, translate, display and transmit your content for the purpose of running HelloMates, including showing it to the other users you send it to, translating it when a user asks, and running automated safety checks on it. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except where the content has already been shared with other users, where the law requires us to keep it, or where it is part of a safety report.

• Moments fade automatically 7 days after they are posted. A "here tonight" status expires 24 hours after you set it.
• Translations are produced by an automated service and may be wrong. Do not rely on a translation for anything important.
• You must have the right to post what you post. Do not post photos of other people without their consent, and never post a child's photo.
• We do not claim ownership of your content and we do not use it to train artificial intelligence models.

7. Rooms, presence and reputation

• A room is a plan made by a user: a time, a place and a cap on the number of people. Rooms are arranged between users. Yiriba is not a party to any room, does not vet the people in it, does not organise the activity and is not responsible for what happens at it. Use your judgement as you would with anyone you have just met: meet in public places, tell someone where you are, and leave if something feels wrong.
• A room's cost split is a ledger of who owes what. No money moves through HelloMates; settlement is between you.
• Rooms hosted by a hostel are announced by that hostel; the hostel, not Yiriba, is responsible for them.
• Your reputation level (new, regular, trusted, host) is derived from events such as showing up to a room you joined, hosting a room that happened, and verified checks, and lowered by no-shows and upheld reports. It affects which rooms you can join without host approval. We may change the rules that derive it.
• A free account can start a set number of new direct message threads a day; with Plus there is no limit. The daily limit on a free account is a design choice and is not a defect.

8. The women's lane

The women's lane is a filter on the tonight list, plans, Moments and rooms that shows only users who have passed a live selfie check. The check runs in the app, with your permission asked on the screen before the camera starts: it takes two pictures of your face, one looking at the phone and one with your head turned the way the screen asks, and an automated check judges whether they show the same live person and whether that person presents as a woman, looking at the presentation as a whole and never at one feature. Only a confident yes opens the lane on its own and only a very confident no closes it on its own; anything in between, including every case the automated check is not sure about, is decided by a person on our team within 24 hours. Every no, automatic or human, comes with the reason in the app and an appeal that a person answers within 24 hours. Pictures of a check that passed are deleted the moment it passes; pictures of a check waiting for a person are kept until that person decides; pictures of a check that was declined are kept for 30 days for the appeal and then deleted; deleting your account deletes them at once. They are never shown to other users, never become your profile photo and create no face template or biometric identifier. A checkmark next to a profile means a verification partner has confirmed that person; the selfie check does not add it. The lane is a screening step, not a guarantee of anyone's identity, gender, intentions or safety, and it does not replace your own judgement. Taking the check while misrepresenting your gender is a serious violation of these Terms.

The check is optional and we process the pictures on the basis of your consent. It runs only when you start it, and only after the screen has told you what the pictures are for, who sees them and how long they are kept. Nothing else in HelloMates depends on it: every other feature, free and paid, works without ever taking it. You can withdraw at any time by turning the women's lane off under Me, and deleting your account deletes the check's record with it.

9. Subscriptions and purchases

Chat, rooms, Moments, presence and Arm it are free, with one exception. When two people like each other in Near me, the direct thread that opens between them needs Plus to read, for each of them separately: the thread stays in your chat list with the person's name and photo, and their profile is still one tap away, but the messages in it are covered while you are not subscribed. Nothing is deleted, and the whole conversation comes back if you subscribe again. Every other chat in HelloMates, including any direct thread you open yourself, is free.

Everything in this section is optional and is sold through the store you installed HelloMates from: Apple's in-app purchase system on iPhone, charged to your Apple account, or Google Play's billing on Android, charged to your Google account. Yiriba never sees your card details.

What is sold

• HelloMates Plus is an auto-renewing subscription, offered weekly, monthly and yearly. Plus unlocks the full list of who is here tonight, the landed-this-week list with plan tags, who viewed your profile, who liked you, the Near me swipe stack and the messages in a thread a match opened, the All / Women / Men filter, unlimited new direct threads a day, direct messages before you land, following a city you are not in (its plans, people and events) and unlimited translation. The city you chose when you joined and the city you are in are always free.
• Trip Pass is a one-time, non-renewing purchase that gives you Plus for 30 days from the moment of purchase. It does not renew and it cannot be paused.
• Lifetime is a one-time purchase that gives you Plus for as long as Yiriba offers HelloMates. It is a licence to the Service, not a promise that the Service will exist forever; see section 15.
• HelloMates Family is an auto-renewing yearly subscription described in section 11.

Renewal and cancellation

• Subscriptions renew automatically at the same price and period unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. The store charges your account within the 24 hours before renewal.
• You cancel with the store you bought from, not with us. On iPhone: Settings, then your name, then Subscriptions. On Android: the Google Play Store app, then Payments and subscriptions, then Subscriptions. Deleting the app does not cancel a subscription. You keep access until the end of the period you have paid for.
• Prices are shown in the app before you buy and may differ by country. If we raise the price of a subscription you already have, the store will tell you in advance and, where the law requires, ask for your consent before the new price applies.
• We do not offer free trials by default. If a trial is ever offered it will be stated clearly at the point of purchase, and you will be reminded before it converts to a paid period.
• Restore is available on every paywall and in Settings. Your purchases follow the store account you bought them with, your Apple ID or your Google account, not your device.

Refunds

Refunds are handled by the store you bought from, under its own rules. For an App Store purchase, request one at reportaproblem.apple.com. For a Google Play purchase, request one in the Google Play Store app under Payments and subscriptions, or at play.google.com/store/account/orderhistory. Yiriba cannot issue a store refund directly, except as promised in section 5. When a store refunds a purchase, the related feature ends at that moment.

No paid feature depends on location or identity

You can buy and use every paid feature without granting location access and without any identity check. Without location, the tonight list works at city level. Where a verification step is offered to paying users it runs after purchase and is never a condition of purchase.

10. Invite codes and partner benefits

• Partners (hostels, creators, communities) may give out an invite code or a link of the form hellomates.app/c/<CODE>. Entering a code records that partner as the one who introduced you, permanently, and may give you a stated number of days of Plus as a benefit.
• One code per account, applied once. A benefit is a perk, not a purchase: it has no cash value, cannot be transferred, exchanged or refunded, and ends on its stated date. A benefit does not create a subscription and nothing renews when it ends.
• We may withdraw a code or a benefit if it was obtained by fraud, shared against the partner's agreement with us, or used by automated accounts. Partners receive reports about redemptions and revenue attributed to their code in aggregate; they never see your messages.

11. Home and HelloMates Family

Home is a role for a parent, partner or friend who follows a traveller in the same app. A Home link exists only when the traveller creates a single-use invite (valid for 7 days) and the Home user accepts it. A traveller may have up to three Home contacts; a Home user may follow up to three travellers.

• What Home sees for free, always: whether the traveller has checked in, whether an Arm it timer is armed, when the check-in is due, and when the last check-in happened. When a check-in is missed, Home receives the same message as the traveller's other contacts, and a "checked in" notice when the traveller disarms. These notifications never contain a location.
• What HelloMates Family unlocks (one yearly subscription, bought by either side of the link): for Home, the traveller's last known location during an active or fired timer, the traveller's flight and landing time, the city's emergency numbers and the last ten timers. It also grants Plus to every traveller linked to the buyer while the plan is active; a traveller who pays for their own Plus keeps it.
• Location window. Home sees a location only while a timer is armed or has fired and has not yet been replaced by a new timer or a check-in. Outside that window the field is empty, whatever the plan.
• Leaving. The traveller can remove a Home contact at any time, and a Home contact can leave at any time. Removing a link ends any Plus that existed only because of that link. HelloMates does not tell the other side why a link ended.
• Misuse. Home cannot be pointed at a person who did not create the invite. Pressuring someone into sharing an invite, or using Home to monitor a partner who wants to leave, is coercive use and leads to a ban after human review.

12. Arm it

This section, together with the Arm it terms page, governs the check-in feature. Please read it before you rely on Arm it.

12.1 What Arm it is

Arm it is a check-in timer. You set a check-in hour and choose contacts. If you do not check in by that hour, and do not respond to a reminder within the grace period, HelloMates delivers to those contacts a message you prepared in advance. That message can include your last known location, the local emergency numbers for the country you are in, instructions for freezing your cards, and a link to Apple's Find My.

12.2 What Arm it is not

Arm it is not a replacement for emergency services and is not an emergency service. HelloMates does not call the police, an ambulance or any dispatcher; does not monitor you; does not freeze cards, lock a phone or locate a device; and does not send anyone to you. Card-freeze steps and the Find My link are instructions your contact opens with your bank and with Apple; they are not actions HelloMates takes. If you are in danger, contact the local emergency services directly.

12.3 No guarantee of delivery

Delivery depends on your device, your battery, your connectivity, the contact's device and carrier, and third-party SMS, email and push services that we do not control. We retry across channels, but we do not guarantee that a message is sent, delivered, read or acted on, or that it is delivered at any particular time. Do not use Arm it as your only safety measure.

12.4 Your responsibilities

• Keep your contacts accurate and current, and use a phone that works where you are.
• Tell each contact that you have added them, what the message will look like and what you would like them to do. A contact can stop these messages by replying STOP to the text, using the "stop these messages" link in the email, or writing to us. We keep that number or address on a stop list so that no HelloMates user can add it again, and we tell you that the contact cannot be reached so that you can choose someone else.
• Set honest check-in times, and check in or extend the timer when you are fine, so that your contacts are not alarmed for nothing.
• Never add a contact who has not agreed to it, and never use Arm it or Home to track another person.

12.6 Data

Your location fixes for Arm it (the low-power background updates, and the position the app had when you armed) are stored for 30 days, then deleted; turning "Share location for Arm it" off in Settings keeps only the spot where you turned it off, for the same 30 days. Your contacts and your note are stored encrypted at rest and can be deleted at any time. Nothing about Arm it is shared with other users of HelloMates. Details are in the Privacy Policy.

12.7 Misuse

Arm it contacts are people you choose: family, partners, friends. It is never pointed at nearby strangers. Using Arm it or Home to stalk, coerce or control another person is a serious violation and results in a ban after human review, and may be reported to the authorities.

13. Third-party services and links

HelloMates relies on services we do not control: Apple (sign-in, payments, push notifications, Find My), Google (sign-in, and on Android payments and push notifications), mobile carriers and email providers, a flight-data provider for landing times, and the emergency numbers and card-freeze instructions we show for a place. We check that information with care, but it can be out of date or wrong; confirm anything important with an official source. Links to other websites and apps are provided for convenience; we are not responsible for their content or their handling of your data.

14. Our rights and your licence to use HelloMates

HelloMates, its name, wordmark, icon, design, software and all content we create are owned by Yiriba or its licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark and other laws. Subject to these Terms, we grant you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use the HelloMates app on an iPhone or Android device you own or control, for your own non-commercial use. You may not copy, modify, distribute, sell or lease any part of HelloMates, or reverse engineer it except where the law expressly allows. If you send us feedback, we may use it without any obligation to you.

15. Ending your account

• By you. Delete your account at any time in the app, under Me, then Settings, then Delete account. Deletion removes your profile, presence, landings, rooms you host, Arm it timers and contacts, Home links, direct threads, Moments and device tokens. Messages you sent to shared chats keep their text but are attributed to "deleted" rather than to you. Active subscriptions must be cancelled separately with the store you bought them from, as deleting the account does not cancel them.
• By us. We may suspend or close your account for a breach of these Terms, as set out in section 5, or if we are required to by law. We may also discontinue HelloMates or any feature of it. If we discontinue HelloMates entirely we will give reasonable notice where we can, and section 9's refund path applies to unused paid periods.
• Sections that by their nature should survive (content licences for shared content, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnity, governing law) survive the end of your account.

18. Indemnity

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Yiriba and its members, officers, employees and contractors from and against any claim, loss, liability, damage, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or relating to your content, your breach of these Terms, your misuse of Arm it or Home, your violation of any law, or your violation of the rights of another person, including another user. We may take over the defence of any matter covered by this section, in which case you agree to cooperate with us.

19. Governing law and disputes

These Terms and any dispute arising out of or relating to them or to HelloMates are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and, to the extent applicable, the federal laws of the United States. Before starting a formal proceeding you agree to write to us at the address in section 21 and give us 30 days to resolve the matter with you informally. Subject to that, you and Yiriba agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in Dallas County, Texas, and waive any objection to venue there. If you are a consumer in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or another jurisdiction whose law gives you the right to bring a claim in your home courts, or under your home law, nothing in this section takes that right away. Where the law allows it, any claim arising out of HelloMates or these Terms must be brought within two years of the event giving rise to it.

20. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms as HelloMates changes or as the law requires. We will post the new version at hellomates.app/terms.html with a new "Last updated" date and, for material changes, tell you in the app or by email at least 14 days before they take effect, unless a shorter period is needed for legal or safety reasons. If you keep using HelloMates after a change takes effect you accept the new Terms; if you do not agree, delete your account before then.

21. Contact

Yiriba LLC
Pearland, TX, United States
Email: hello@hellomates.app

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