Terms of Service

Last updated: 17 July 2026

These terms are the agreement between you and Zero Debate. They cover who may use the app, what you may argue about and how, who owns what you write, and what happens when someone breaks the rules. Please read them — using the app means you accept them.

1. Agreement

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you and Abhishek Awasthi, a sole proprietor based in India trading as Zero Debate ("Zero Debate", "we", "us"), covering your use of the Zero Debate mobile app, website and related services (the "Service").

By creating an account or using the Service, you accept these Terms and our Privacy Policy. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

2. Who may use it

You must be at least 18 years old. By using the Service you confirm that you are 18 or over, that you can form a binding contract, and that you are not barred from using the Service under the laws that apply to you.

You may not use the Service if we have previously banned you, or if you are subject to sanctions that would make providing it to you unlawful.

3. Your account

• You sign in with a phone number or a Google account. Keep control of whichever you use — anyone with access to it can get into your account.
• One account per person. Do not create additional accounts to evade a ban, manipulate voting, or inflate your record.
• Give accurate information about yourself, and do not impersonate anyone else or claim credentials you do not have.
• Your username is visible to everyone. Do not choose one that impersonates another person, or that would itself break the rules in section 5.
• You are responsible for everything that happens under your account. Tell us promptly at contact@zerodebate.com if you think it has been compromised.

4. What Zero Debate is

Zero Debate is a text-only debate platform. You take a side on a topic, you are matched with someone arguing the other side, and you exchange typed arguments in turns. An audience can watch, react, chat and vote on who argued better. When a debate ends we may produce an automated scorecard and summary.

There is no voice or video anywhere in the Service. Debates are visible to other signed-in users by default, and remain viewable as replays after they finish.

The Service is provided free of charge. We may add paid features in future, in which case we will set out the terms before you buy anything.

5. Rules of the arena

Zero Debate exists for genuine disagreement. Argue hard, argue with evidence, and attack the argument rather than the person. The following are not allowed:

• Harassment and abuse — threats, intimidation, targeted insults, sexual harassment, or encouraging others to pile on someone.
• Hate speech — attacking or dehumanising people based on religion, caste, ethnicity, national origin, race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability or serious disease.
• Violence — threatening, glorifying or inciting violence, or praising those who commit it.
• Sexual content — pornographic or sexually explicit material, and anything at all that sexualises minors. Child sexual abuse material is reported to the authorities without exception. See our Child Safety Standards for what is prohibited and how to report it.
• Illegal activity — using the Service to commit, plan or facilitate a crime, or to trade in illegal goods.
• Privacy violations — posting someone's personal information (address, phone number, identity documents, private messages) without their consent.
• Impersonation and deception — pretending to be another person or organisation, or fabricating quotes, sources or evidence to win a debate.
• Spam and manipulation — bulk or repetitive posting, advertising, vote manipulation, sockpuppet accounts, or coordinated brigading.
• Intellectual property infringement — posting content you do not have the right to post.
• Attacking the Service — scraping, reverse-engineering, automated access outside a documented interface, probing or circumventing our security, or overloading our infrastructure. Good-faith security research reported privately to us is welcome and is not a breach of this rule.

Losing an argument is not a violation, and neither is holding an unpopular position. Being unpleasant to the person you are arguing with is.

6. Your content

You own what you write. Your arguments, comments and profile content remain yours, and we claim no ownership of them.

To run the Service, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, display and distribute your content within the Service, and to process it as described in our Privacy Policy — including sending debate transcripts to our AI provider for scoring and summaries. This licence exists so we can show your debate to the audience, keep it as a replay, and back it up. It ends when your content is removed, except for the shared-record limits explained below and in the Privacy Policy.

You are responsible for what you post, and you confirm you have the rights to post it. We do not endorse any opinion expressed in a debate — including ones that an AI scorecard rated highly.

7. AI scoring

When a debate ends we may generate an automated scorecard and summary using a third-party AI provider. Please treat these as an automated opinion, not a finding of fact:

• They are generated by a language model and can be wrong, inconsistent or biased.
• They are not a fact-check, and a high score does not mean a claim is true.
• They carry no professional, legal, medical or financial weight of any kind.
• The audience vote and the AI scorecard are separate and often disagree. That is the point.

We may change, re-run or withdraw AI features at any time. If you believe a scorecard is materially unfair, tell us and we will look at it.

8. Moderation and enforcement

You can report content or users from within the app, and block anyone you would rather not interact with. Some content is automatically filtered against a banned-word list.

Where we find a breach of these Terms we may, proportionately to how serious and how repeated it is: remove content, issue a warning, restrict features, suspend the account temporarily, or ban it permanently. Serious cases — credible threats, child sexual abuse material, and other serious crimes — may be reported to law enforcement.

If you think we got a decision wrong, email contact@zerodebate.com and a human will review it. Complaints go to our Grievance Officer, named in the Privacy Policy.

9. Ending your account

You can leave whenever you like. Delete your account from Settings in the app, or follow the instructions at Delete account. What is erased, what survives and the 30-day grace period are all set out in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms, if we are legally required to, or if keeping it open would put other users at risk. Except where that would be unlawful or would undermine an investigation, we will tell you why and give you a route to appeal.

Sections 6 (as to the shared-record licence), 11, 12, 13 and 14 survive the end of your account.

10. Availability

Zero Debate is a young product under active development. We may add, change or remove features, and the Service may be unavailable during maintenance or because something broke. We do not guarantee any level of uptime, and we may discontinue the Service — in which case we will give reasonable notice so you can retrieve what matters to you.

11. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement, to the fullest extent the law allows.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that defects will be fixed, or that any content on it — including AI-generated scorecards and summaries, and anything another user asserts in a debate — is accurate, complete or reliable.

12. Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Zero Debate will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, goodwill or reputation, arising from your use of or inability to use the Service — including anything arising from another user's conduct or content.

Our total aggregate liability to you for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or (b) ₹1,000.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

13. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Zero Debate from any claim, demand, loss, liability or expense (including reasonable legal fees) brought by a third party and arising out of your content, your use of the Service, or your breach of these Terms or of any law or third-party right.

14. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of India, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. You and we submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the competent courts in India for any dispute arising out of them.

If you are a consumer in a jurisdiction whose law grants you the right to bring proceedings locally or to rely on mandatory local consumer protections, this section does not take that right away.

Before starting formal proceedings, please contact us — most disputes are settled faster by email than by lawyers.

15. Changes

We may update these Terms. When we do we will change the date at the top, and for material changes we will give notice in the app before they take effect. Continuing to use the Service after that means you accept the new Terms. If you do not, delete your account.

16. Contact

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service. If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.