Algemene Voorwaarden

Effective September 7, 2026 · Last updated September 7, 2026

Deze voorwaarden zijn opgesteld in het Engels. Vragen? Mail support@mss.gs, in het Nederlands mag ook.

The short version. mssgs is made by Deverence Group B.V. in the Netherlands. You need to be 13 or older, and until you are 16 a parent or guardian is involved. What you post stays yours: we only get the technical permission we need to store it, encrypt it and deliver it to the people you send it to. Every image and file you send is encrypted. Be decent to other people, do not break the law, and we will keep the service running for you. Moderation decisions are made by people, never by an algorithm on its own. The full terms below explain each of these points.

1. Who We Are and What These Terms Cover

mssgs is operated by Deverence Group B.V. ("Deverence", "mssgs", "we", "us"), a Dutch company with its postal address at Postbus 50, 6970 AB Brummen, the Netherlands. These terms are an agreement between you and Deverence.

They cover everything we offer under the mssgs name: the desktop applications for macOS, Windows and Linux, the mobile applications for iOS and Android, the web application at mss.gs/app, the website mss.gs, and all features, games, bots, developer tools, credits and paid upgrades available through them (together, the "Service"). Some parts of the Service have additional terms, which we link to where they apply; the Bot Development Rules are an example.

By creating an account, installing an application or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

If you use mssgs on behalf of a company, school, club or other organisation, you confirm that you are allowed to accept these terms for that organisation, and "you" then means the organisation as well as you personally.

2. Who May Use mssgs

You must be at least 13 years old to create an account or use the Service. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13, we will close it.

13 to 15. If you are 13, 14 or 15, you need the consent of a parent or guardian to use mssgs, and your account starts with protective defaults: starting new conversations, joining communities, posting publicly and sharing your location stay switched off until a parent or guardian has linked to your account through the Parent Center. The Parent Center shows a parent limited safety and activity information, such as who you are friends with and how long you were connected; it never gives them access to your messages.

16 and 17. If you are 16 or 17, you may use mssgs on your own, but you need the permission of a parent or guardian to make any purchase (see section 9). A parent or guardian can still link to your account if you both want that.

How we know your age. We use the age band provided by your device or platform (for example Apple's declared age range) or the age you give us, and we store only the band, never a date of birth. An account whose age band is unknown receives the most protective defaults until the band is known. Lying about your age to get around these protections breaks these terms.

You must also not be someone who is prohibited from using the Service under the laws of the Netherlands or of the country you are in, and you must not use the Service if we have previously closed your account for breaking these terms.

3. Your Account

You are responsible for what happens on your account. Keep your password and sign-in codes to yourself and turn on two-factor authentication if you want extra protection. Tell us at support@mss.gs right away if you think someone else has access to your account.
Give us accurate information when you sign up and keep it up to date, in particular the email address we use to reach you.
One person, one account, unless we have explicitly allowed you more (bot accounts created through the developer portal are separate and have their own rules).
Do not pick a username, display name or profile that impersonates another person or organisation, that infringes someone's trademark, or that is offensive. We may reclaim usernames that are inactive, misleading or that we need for the Service to work.
You may not sell, rent or transfer your account.

4. Your Licence to Use mssgs

We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use the mssgs applications on devices you own or control, and to use the Service, for as long as these terms are in force. The software is licensed, not sold: you get the right to use it, not ownership of it.

You may not, and may not help anyone else to:

copy, modify, sell, rent, sublicense or redistribute the applications or any part of the Service, except where we have given written permission or where the law lets you do so regardless of these terms (for example, interoperability under EU software law);
decompile, disassemble or reverse engineer the applications beyond what the law allows;
circumvent, disable or interfere with security, rate limits, encryption, age or parental protections, or any other safeguard in the Service;
access the Service through unofficial clients or automated means, other than through the public APIs and the developer tools we document at mss.gs/docs and within their rules;
scrape, harvest or bulk-download content, profiles or contact information from the Service;
remove or alter our trademarks, logos or legal notices.

5. Your Content, and What We May Do With It

"Your content" means everything you post, send, upload or create on mssgs: messages, photos, images, videos, voice messages, files, links, profile information, community descriptions, feed posts, game results and anything else that comes from you.

Your content stays yours. We do not claim ownership of it, and nothing in these terms transfers any of your rights to us.

The permission we need, and why. To run a messaging service we have to handle your content in technical ways: store it, encrypt it, transmit it, make thumbnails and previews of it, cache it, back it up, and show it to the people and communities you have chosen to share it with. Copyright law requires that you give us permission to do these things. So, by posting content on mssgs, you give Deverence a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt (for example by resizing an image or transcoding a video), transmit and display your content solely for the purpose of operating, securing, backing up and improving the Service and delivering your content to the recipients you choose. This licence is a technical permission, not a marketing licence: it covers what is needed to get your photo from your phone to your friend's screen, and nothing more.

What we will not do with your content. We will not:

use your content in advertising, marketing or promotion of mssgs without asking you first and receiving your explicit permission;
sell your content, or license it to third parties for their own purposes;
use your content to train artificial intelligence or machine-learning models;
publish content that you shared privately, or share it with anyone you did not choose, except where the law requires us to or as described in our privacy policy.

People you share with. When you post something in a conversation, community or feed, you also give the people who can see it permission to view it in mssgs and to use it in the ways the Service is designed for, such as replying to it, quoting it or forwarding it where the feature allows. Once you have shared something with someone, you cannot un-share what they have already seen.

How long the licence lasts. Our licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except that (a) content you have shared may remain visible in copies made by the people you shared it with, (b) it may stay in our encrypted backups for up to 30 days before it is overwritten, and (c) we may keep content that we need to retain for a legal obligation, a safety investigation or an active dispute, as explained in our privacy policy and Child Safety Standards.

You are responsible for your content. Only post content that you have the right to share. You confirm that your content does not infringe anyone's copyright, trademark, privacy or other rights, and that it does not break the law or these terms. We do not read your content, but automated safety checks (see section 7) may flag content for a person to review, and we may remove content that violates these terms and act on reports (see section 7 and section 14).

6. Encryption and How We Handle Your Files

Every image, video and file you send through mssgs is encrypted. Files are encrypted in transit between your device and our servers, and they are stored on our servers in encrypted form. We do not browse your photos or files, and we never use them to build a profile of you or to train AI models. The only automated processing is the safety flagging described in section 7, which runs on our own servers.

Private one-to-one conversations are end-to-end encrypted, which means the content is encrypted on your device and can only be decrypted by the recipient's device. We cannot read those messages, and we cannot recover them for you if you lose access to your devices.

Messages in communities and channels are stored encrypted on our servers, but not end-to-end, because features such as search, moderation and joining a community after a conversation started require the server to be able to deliver history. Our security page describes the current state of encryption, hosting and backups in more detail and is updated when the technology changes.

Encryption protects your content from outsiders. It does not stop the people you send something to from saving, screenshotting or forwarding it, and it does not remove your responsibility to follow the rules in these terms.

7. Rules of Conduct

mssgs is a place for people to talk, play and build communities. To keep it that way, you may not use the Service to:

harass, threaten, bully, intimidate or abuse anyone, or encourage others to do so;
post or share child sexual abuse material or any content that sexualises or exploits minors. We have zero tolerance for this and report it to the authorities, as described in our Child Safety Standards;
share intimate images of a person without their consent, or threaten to;
post content that incites violence or hatred against people because of who they are, or that glorifies terrorism or violent extremism;
share content that is illegal where you are or where it is received, or that infringes someone else's rights;
share sexually explicit or otherwise adult content outside spaces that are clearly marked for it and restricted to adults, or expose minors to such content;
send spam, unsolicited bulk messages or unwanted advertising, or run schemes designed to deceive people;
impersonate a person or organisation, or claim an affiliation you do not have;
distribute malware, phish for credentials, or try to gain unauthorised access to accounts, data or systems, including ours;
collect other people's personal data without their permission;
interfere with the Service, overload it, or use it in a way that harms other users or us;
evade a ban, suspension or block by creating a new account or using someone else's.

If you see something that breaks these rules, use the Report action on the message, profile or community, or email support@mss.gs. Reports are reviewed by people, and the reported content is retained as it appeared so it can still be reviewed if it is later deleted.

Automated flagging, human decisions. To find abuse early, we use AI models that run on our own servers to pre-screen content the server can read, such as community and channel messages, public profiles, feed posts and reported content, and to add suspected violations to a moderation queue. A flag is never a decision: no content is removed, no account is restricted and no report is made to the authorities based on an automated flag alone. A person reviews every flag and decides what, if anything, happens. Private end-to-end encrypted conversations cannot be scanned by us, and our automated checks never send your content to a third party.

We decide in good faith whether conduct breaks these rules and what to do about it. Depending on how serious it is, we may remove content, warn you, restrict features, suspend or close your account, remove a community, and where the law requires it, notify the authorities. Where reasonable, we will tell you what we did and why, and you can reply to support@mss.gs if you think we got it wrong.

8. Communities and Moderation

Communities on mssgs are created and run by their members. If you create a community, you are its first moderator: you choose its name, rules and who may join, and you are responsible for moderating it within these terms. Moderators may set additional rules for their community, remove content and remove members, as long as those rules and actions do not conflict with these terms or the law.

Community rules can be stricter than ours, never looser. We may step in independently of a community's moderators when the law, someone's safety or the integrity of the Service requires it, and we may remove communities that exist mainly to break these terms.

Joining a community means the community's other members and moderators can see what you post there. Public communities and public profiles can be seen by anyone, including people who are not signed in.

9. Credits, Premium and Payments

Credits. Credits are a virtual balance you can buy on mss.gs/credits and spend inside mssgs, for example on Premium, community memberships, support for servers and livestreamers, or to gift people who post something you like. Credits are not money: they have no cash value, cannot be exchanged for money, cannot be transferred outside mssgs, and belong to the account that holds them. Credits do not expire while your account exists. The prices of credit packs and what credits can buy are shown in the app and on the website at the time of purchase and may change; a change never affects credits you already have.

Premium. Premium is an upgrade of your own account for a fixed period, currently one month per purchase, paid with credits. It does not renew by itself. Buying Premium while a period is still running adds a further period on top. What Premium includes is described on mss.gs/premium and may develop over time; if we ever remove a Premium feature during a period you have paid for, you may ask us for a proportional refund in credits.

Payment. Card and other payments on the website are processed by Stripe; we never see your full card details. Prices are in euros and include VAT where it applies. Purchases in the mobile applications may instead be processed by Apple or Google under their own terms, and in that case their refund rules apply.

Right of withdrawal. If you are a consumer in the European Union, you normally have 14 days to withdraw from an online purchase. Credits are digital content that is delivered to your account immediately. By completing a credits purchase, you ask us to deliver the credits straight away and you acknowledge that you lose your right of withdrawal once the credits are in your account. Credits that have not yet been spent can still be refunded on request within 14 days of purchase; write to support@mss.gs from the email address on your account.

No refunds for spent credits. Once credits have been spent, given away or used for Premium, they cannot be refunded, except where a law says otherwise, where we made a mistake, or where these terms explicitly say so.

Minors. If you are under 18, you may only buy credits with the permission of a parent or guardian, and by purchasing you confirm you have it.

Closed accounts. If we close your account for a serious breach of these terms, or you delete it yourself, any remaining credits and Premium time are forfeited. If we close the Service entirely, we will refund unspent credits bought in the previous twelve months.

Chargebacks and fraud. If a payment is reversed or turns out to be fraudulent, we may remove the credits it paid for, reverse what they were spent on, and suspend the account.

10. Games

mssgs includes games you can play inside conversations and communities. They are there for fun. No game on mssgs involves betting money or credits on chance outcomes, and no game gives out money. Credits may be used in games only in the ways the game itself provides, and any credits or items you earn in a game have no value outside mssgs. Game scores, replays and results are content you share with the other players.

Cheating, using automation to play, or exploiting bugs in games to gain credits or an advantage breaks these terms.

11. Bots, AI Agents and Developer Tools

Using bots. Members can add bots and AI agents to conversations and communities, including their own bots and bots built by third parties. A bot that is added to a conversation or community can read and respond to the messages in it, the same way a human member could. Whoever adds a bot decides that its members' messages may be processed by it, so only add bots you trust and tell your community what a bot does. Bots built by third parties are the responsibility of their developers, not of Deverence.

Building bots. If you create a bot account, use the API, webhooks, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration or the game SDK, you also agree to the Bot Development Rules and to the limits and requirements in the developer documentation. You are responsible for what your bot does and for any data it collects, and you must not use developer access to bulk-collect content or contact information, to spam, or to circumvent these terms.

AI features we provide. Where mssgs itself offers an AI-assisted feature, the feature processes only the content you give it for that purpose, is described in the app where you use it, and does not use your content to train models. The safety flagging in section 7 is the only AI processing that runs without you asking for it, and it runs on our own servers.

12. Feedback

We love hearing ideas. If you send us suggestions, bug reports or other feedback about mssgs, you agree that we may use it to improve the Service without owing you anything and without any obligation to keep it confidential. You keep any rights you have in the feedback itself; you just cannot stop us from acting on it.

13. Our Intellectual Property

The mssgs applications, the website, the Service and everything we made for them, including the software, design, text, graphics, sounds, games we built, trademarks and logos, belong to Deverence or our licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark and other laws. These terms do not give you any right to use our name, logos or trademarks except to refer to the Service accurately. Guidelines and downloadable brand assets are on the press page.

14. Reporting Content That Infringes Your Rights

If you believe content on mssgs infringes your copyright, trademark or other rights, email support@mss.gs with a link to or description of the content, an explanation of the right you hold and why the content infringes it, your contact details and a statement that the information you give is accurate. We will review the report, remove or disable content where the report is justified, and inform the person who posted it. Repeated infringement leads to account closure.

15. Privacy

How we collect and use personal data is described in our privacy policy, which is part of these terms. In short: all data is hosted in the European Union, we do not sell your data, and we do not show you advertising. Questions about privacy go to privacy@mss.gs.

16. Updates to the App and to the Service

We release updates regularly and may add, change or remove features. Depending on your device settings, updates install automatically or after you are prompted. Older versions may stop working with the Service, so keep the app up to date. We are not obliged to keep any specific feature available, but if we remove something you have paid for, section 9 applies.

17. Ending the Agreement

By you. You can stop using mssgs at any time and delete your account from the app's settings or by emailing support@mss.gs. Deleting your account removes your profile and your content from the Service, subject to the retention rules in section 5 and in our privacy policy.

By us. We may suspend or close your account, with notice where reasonable, if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, if we are required to by law, if your account is used for fraud or abuse, or if it has been inactive for more than two years. We may also stop offering the Service or parts of it; if that happens, we will give you at least 30 days' notice where possible and section 9 applies to unspent credits.

Sections that by their nature should survive the end of the agreement, such as those on content licences already granted, liability and applicable law, continue to apply.

18. What We Do and Do Not Promise

We work hard to keep mssgs available, secure and reliable, and we publish our current status at status.mss.gs. Still, mssgs is provided as it is. We cannot promise it will be free of errors or interruptions, that every message will always be delivered, or that content stored on the Service will never be lost. Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose.

If you are a consumer, you have rights under the law of the country you live in that these terms cannot take away, including the right to a service that conforms to what was agreed. Nothing in this section or the next limits those rights.

19. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, for intent or gross negligence on our part, or for anything else that cannot be limited under applicable law.

Otherwise, and to the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect damage, loss of profit, loss of data that you could reasonably have backed up, or damage caused by other users, by third-party bots, or by events outside our reasonable control. For any other claim, our total liability towards you in any twelve-month period is limited to the amount you paid us for the Service in that period, or to EUR 100 if that is higher.

20. Your Responsibility for Your Own Use

If someone brings a claim against us because of content you posted, a bot you built, or another breach of these terms by you, you will compensate us for the reasonable costs and damages that result, provided we inform you promptly and let you take part in the defence. This does not apply to consumers to the extent the law does not allow it.

21. App Stores

If you download mssgs from the Apple App Store, Google Play or the Microsoft Store, the store's own terms also apply to the download. Those companies are not parties to these terms, are not responsible for the Service or for support, and have no warranty obligations towards you beyond what their own terms say. Where their terms require it, they may enforce these terms as a third-party beneficiary. For the Apple App Store in particular, you confirm that you are not in a country subject to a United States government embargo and are not on a United States government list of prohibited parties.

22. Changes to These Terms

We may change these terms when the Service, the law or our business changes. For changes that matter to you, such as new restrictions or changes to purchases, we will notify you at least 14 days before they take effect, in the app or by email, and we will explain what changed. If you do not agree with a change, you can close your account before it takes effect; continuing to use mssgs after that date means you accept the new terms. Purely editorial changes and changes required by law may take effect immediately. The current version is always at mss.gs/company/eula, and the date at the top tells you when it was last changed.

23. Applicable Law and Disputes

Dutch law applies to these terms. If you are a consumer living in another country of the European Union, you also keep the protection of the mandatory consumer rules of that country.

If you have a problem, tell us first at support@mss.gs; most issues can be solved that way. Disputes that cannot be resolved go to the competent court in the Netherlands. If you are a consumer, you may also bring the case before the court of the country where you live, and you may choose the court of your place of residence within one month after we invoke the Dutch court.

24. Contact

Questions about these terms:

Deverence Group B.V. (mssgs)
Postbus 50, 6970 AB Brummen, the Netherlands
support@mss.gs