What you agree to when you write here.

You have to be 18 or older to use Breakwater.

This is written for adults. The words people float here come out of adult distress, the strangers who answer are volunteers rather than trained professionals, and nothing about the way this works is built to look after a child. Making an account asks you to confirm you are 18 or older, and confirming that when it is not true breaks these terms. If we find that an account belongs to someone under 18, we close it.

If you are under 18 and tonight is bad, the crisis lines on Help Now are for you too, and they always will be.

Somewhere to put the words, and, if you ask for it, a stranger who reads them.

You write into a jar. What you write there is held in this device's own storage and does not reach Breakwater at all. You can smash it in the rage room, keep it, or float it out as a message in a bottle. Only that last one leaves your phone.

A floated bottle is peer support. The people who might answer are strangers with room for someone else's bad night. They are not clinicians, we do not check qualifications, and none are claimed. What they can offer is kindness, screened before it reaches you. The whole loop is walked through on how it works.

Not therapy, not medical care, and not an emergency service.

Nobody here diagnoses, treats, or prescribes. Nothing on Breakwater is medical advice, and nothing a stranger writes to you is a professional opinion about you. If you have a doctor, a therapist, or a plan you made with someone, keep them. This sits alongside care, never in place of it.

Nobody is watching your jar. There is no monitoring, no alert, and no one waiting on the other side of the screen for a sign. If you are in danger tonight, Breakwater is not the thing that helps: the crisis lines for your country are one tap away, and they work even when our servers do not.

One email address, used to send you a sign-in code.

Most of Breakwater has no account at all. An account exists for one reason: a bottle you float needs a shore to come back to. The signup ask appears at that moment and not before.

Signing in needs an email address, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is used to send you a code. It is never shown to anyone and never attached to anything you write. The only messages sign-in ever sends you are that code, and a password reset if you ask for one. The longer version is on anonymity and in the privacy policy.

Keep the account to yourself. Anything written from it is treated as written by you.

Written out as rules, so none of it is a surprise.

Every word that would pass between two people here is read by an automated guardian first, in both directions. Most of this list is what it catches: some of it stops a message outright, and detail that could identify you is generalised rather than blocked. The last one is ours to enforce rather than anything a screening model can see. Agreeing to these terms means agreeing not to write any of it.

Some of that will read as strict for words written at 3 in the morning. The strictness is aimed at the person on the other end, who is having their own version of that night.

Before anything floats, you see exactly what a stranger would see.

When you float a bottle the text goes straight into screening. It comes back with anything that could identify you already generalised, and you see your original beside the version strangers would read. Nothing floats until you say so.

A floated bottle carries no name. You can pull it back, which closes it and stops new replies. What that cannot do is unsend: if someone has already read it, they have read it.

Do not float anything you would not want a stranger to read. The sanitising is careful and it is not a guarantee, which is why the rule above it is that you keep identifying detail out in the first place.

Floating a bottle gives Breakwater permission to store it, screen it, show the sanitised version anonymously to responders, and keep the moderation record that goes with it. Nothing else. What you wrote stays yours, and what is kept, for how long, is set out in the privacy policy.

If you answer, the rules get stricter, not looser.

Responding is not open by default. It starts when you take the pledge, inside the app, in your settings, and nothing out here can make you a responder. Moderators can pause it or take it away. If it has been revoked it stays revoked until a moderator says otherwise, and there is no way to turn it back on from your own account.

You will read hard things. Your job is never to fix, diagnose, or rescue. It is to be kind to a stranger you will never identify, who will never identify you.

Nothing is assigned to you: you open the bottles you open, and you can pause responding from your settings whenever you want. You see sanitised words only. Every word you write is screened before it reaches anybody, and a reply that was well meant but lands badly comes back to you as coaching rather than as a punishment. Section 5 applies to you twice over. The rest of the weight is described on the boat.

A person can look at anything the screening was not sure about, and moderators can take things down.

Screening runs in both directions. If it errors, times out, or comes back malformed, the words are blocked and held for a human. A broken safety check blocks here. It never waves anything through.

When a moderator reviews something they read a snapshot of the exact text that was screened, taken at that moment, never a version its author could still be editing. For a reply, that snapshot is word for word what gets delivered. For a bottle that was blocked or held, it is what you actually wrote, before any of it was generalised. What an administrator can see, and when, is set out in the privacy policy.

The outcomes are: delivered, returned to the writer with coaching, blocked, or held for review. Repeat breaches end responder access and can end an account. We do not explain every decision line by line.

When Breakwater itself writes back to a bottle it says so, and that draft goes through the same guardian a stranger's reply does. How the pipeline works is on safety, and every place AI touches the product is listed on how we use AI.

Nobody is on duty, and a bottle can float without ever being answered.

There is no queue position, no response time, and no promise that a human replies at all. The people who answer are volunteers, and volunteers have their own nights.

Nothing here pings you. Breakwater cannot send push notifications, so a reply waits on your shore until you come back and look. The app can also be down, can change, and can lose features. It is free, it sells nothing, there is nothing in it to buy, and no part of it is advertising.

How far responsibility runs when something goes wrong depends on the law that ends up governing these terms, so that wording sits with section 12 and is reviewed with it.

You can delete everything from the Me screen, any night, without asking anyone.

This is what that does, in this order:

1. Anything of yours still floating is pulled back out of the water.
2. Your bottles, your reasons, your drafts and your safety plan are deleted from Breakwater.
3. The jar on this device is wiped, drafts included.
4. You are signed out.

What it cannot do: words already delivered to someone's screen cannot be unread. There is no undo, no export, and no copy kept anywhere for you.

The sign-in record itself sits with the platform that provides Breakwater's authentication. If you want that gone as well, write to us and say so.

From our side: we can close an account that breaks these terms, and we can end responder access without closing an account. Neither of those touches the parts that never needed an account, and Help Now is not taken away from anybody, for any reason.

If these terms change, the version and the date at the top change with them.

Small corrections happen quietly. Anything that changes what you agreed to gets a new version number and a note of what moved. Carrying on using Breakwater after that is how you accept it, and if you would rather not, section 10 is how you leave.

Questions about this document, or anything in the app that worries you, go to contact. A human reads it. It is not a crisis line, and if tonight is the emergency, Help Now is the right door.