Terms of Use

1. This agreement

These Terms of Use are a binding agreement between you and Hume. They apply whenever you use withhume.web.app, the Hume app, or anything else we operate — including simply browsing, joining the waitlist, applying as an Experience Creator, or booking.

Four other pages form part of this agreement, and you should read them: the Community Guidelines, the Safety page, the Cancellations & Refunds policy and the Privacy Policy. If you don't accept all of it, don't use Hume.

2. The words we use

• Hume The marketplace described in these Terms, currently operated by Vsevolod Losev, carrying on business as Hume, in Toronto, Ontario. "We," "us" and "our" mean Hume.
• Experience A bookable in-person offering created and run by an Experience Creator.
• Experience Creator A person who creates and runs an Experience on Hume.
• Explorer A person who discovers, books and participates in an Experience.
• Experience Agreement The contract formed directly between an Explorer and an Experience Creator when a booking is confirmed.

3. What Hume is — and isn't

Hume is a marketplace. We introduce Explorers to Experience Creators and provide the tools to discover, book and run an Experience. That's the whole of what we do.

It follows that:

• Experience Creators are independent. They are not employees, agents, partners or joint venturers of Hume. They set their own Experiences, prices, schedules and methods, and they carry their own responsibility for how those Experiences are run.
• Hume is not a travel agency, tour operator, event organiser, employment agency, insurer or security service, and doesn't hold itself out as any of them.
• We review, we don't guarantee. We speak to every Experience Creator, check government-issued photo ID, and review every Experience before it goes live. We describe exactly what that involves — and what it doesn't — on the Safety page. We do not run criminal record checks or police background checks. Our review is not a warranty about anyone's character, honesty, skill or conduct.
• We don't control venues. Third-party bars, cafés, studios, parks and transport are run by other people, under their own terms.

4. Hume is in a pilot

We'd rather tell you this than have you assume otherwise. Hume is early. That means:

• The number of Experiences is small and the product is still changing. Features may appear, change or disappear.
• Creator Profiles and Experience Pages are currently built as web pages and shared as links, rather than living in an app.
• Hume is not yet incorporated. These Terms are given by Vsevolod Losev carrying on business as Hume, and section 22 explains what happens to them when Hume incorporates.

5. Who can use Hume

• You must be 18 or older and able to enter a binding contract.
• Experiences that involve alcohol are 19+ — the legal drinking age in Ontario — and an Experience Creator or venue may ask for ID.
• Hume currently operates in and around Toronto, Ontario.
• You may not use Hume if we've previously removed you.
• Hume is for personal, non-commercial use, except that Experience Creators use it to offer Experiences under these Terms.

6. Your account

• Give accurate information and keep it current. One account per person.
• Keep your login secure. You're responsible for what happens under your account.
• Tell us straight away if you think someone else has access to it.
• Don't impersonate anyone, misstate your affiliation with anyone, or use someone else's identity or photos.

7. Booking an Experience

• An Experience Agreement is formed between the Explorer and the Experience Creator when we confirm the booking. Hume is not part of it.
• The Experience page, and anything the Experience Creator tells you before you book, set the terms of that agreement — what's included, where it starts, how long it runs, group size, and what you need to bring or be able to do.
• Book a spot for every person attending. Unannounced additional guests may be refused.
• An Experience Creator may change or cancel an Experience for genuine reasons. If that happens before it starts, you're entitled to a full refund of what you paid for it.
• An Experience Creator may refuse entry to, or remove, anyone who is impaired, unsafe, or breaching the Community Guidelines — with no refund in those circumstances. Refusal on a ground protected by the Ontario Human Rights Code is never permitted.

8. Payments and fees

Every booking is paid through Hume. That is how a cancellation policy, a refund, a record and a route to report a problem all become possible — none of them work if money changes hands privately.

Paying

• Card payments are processed by Stripe under Stripe's own terms, on the website and in the app alike. Hume never sees or stores your full card number.
• Prices are set by the Experience Creator and shown in Canadian dollars. Before you pay, we show you the total: the Experience price, Hume's service fee, and any tax collected at checkout.
• Anything you pay separately on the day — your own drinks, food, admission or transit — must be stated on the Experience page in advance, with a realistic figure. An Experience Creator may not collect anything else from you at the meeting point.
• Your card is charged when the booking is confirmed, unless the Experience page says otherwise.
• Never pay an Experience Creator directly. Doing so voids every protection on the Cancellations & Refunds page, and a Creator who asks you to is breaking section 15. Tell us.

Fees

• Explorers pay a Hume service fee, shown separately in the total before you pay.
• Experience Creators pay a commission, deducted from the payout.
• Both are shown in the product before you commit, and either can change — but we'll give Experience Creators at least 30 days' notice of a change, and no change ever applies to a booking already made.

Payouts to Experience Creators

• You're paid after the Experience has taken place, into the account connected to your Stripe payout details, less Hume's commission and any refunds.
• Payouts require verified identity and payout details. Stripe may ask for information before it can pay you; we can't release a payout until it does.
• We may hold, delay or offset a payout where a booking is disputed or refunded, a chargeback is open, we're investigating a safety report, there are reasonable grounds to suspect fraud, or these Terms have been breached. We'll tell you why, and we won't hold it longer than the reason lasts.
• If a refund is owed after you've been paid, we may recover it from your next payout or ask you for it directly.

Chargebacks

If something went wrong, email us before you contact your bank — we can usually fix it in a day, and a chargeback takes weeks and helps nobody. Raising a dispute for a booking that was delivered as described, or after you've already been refunded, may cost you access to Hume. We'll pass on the evidence a bank asks us for, from both sides.

Tax

Hume charges tax on its own fees where the law requires it. Tax on the Experience itself is the Experience Creator's responsibility, and so is reporting their income — see section 11. We'll show on your receipt what tax was collected and by whom.

9. Cancellations, no-shows and refunds

Hume Experiences are small, so one cancellation matters. Unless an Experience page clearly states something different, this is the standard policy:

• More than 48 hours before the start: full refund.
• Between 24 and 48 hours before: 50% refund.
• Less than 24 hours before, or no-show: no refund.
• If the Experience Creator cancels, at any point and for any reason: full refund.
• If the Experience is materially different from what was described — a different activity, a different length, a private residence that wasn't disclosed — tell us within 48 hours and we'll take it up with the Experience Creator and expect a refund.
• Severe weather, illness, transit failure or another genuine emergency: talk to us. We'd rather be fair than rigid, and the standard policy isn't meant to punish people for things outside their control.

Cancel through Hume so there's a record. Repeated late cancellations or no-shows may cost you access to Hume, as set out in the Community Guidelines.

Refunds are issued by Hume to the card you paid with — see section 8.

That's the summary. The full policy is the Cancellations & Refunds page, which forms part of these Terms and covers material changes, weather, and what happens when an Experience wasn't what was described. Where the two differ, that page governs. An Experience may carry different windows only where they're shown on the Experience page before you pay.

10. Risk and the waiver

Experiences happen in the real world, with real people, in places Hume doesn't control. Walking, cycling, cooking, drinking, nightlife, weather, traffic and strangers all carry risk, and some of it can't be designed away.

• You take part voluntarily and at your own risk, and you're responsible for judging whether an Experience is right for your health, fitness and ability.
• A separate waiver applies to every booking. Before an Experience is confirmed, the Explorer signs a release of liability, waiver of claims and assumption of risk agreement for that Experience. It is a distinct legal document, it expressly covers claims arising from negligence, and you should read it carefully before signing. If there is a conflict between that waiver and these Terms, the waiver governs for that Experience.
• Tell the Experience Creator what they need to know — allergies, medical conditions, mobility, anything affecting your participation. You choose what to share, and it stays with them.
• You can stop at any time. Leaving an Experience early is always your right.
• You're responsible for your own conduct, and for damage you cause to a venue, a Creator's property, or another person's property.

11. If you run Experiences

Becoming an Experience Creator means taking on the responsibilities of running your own small business. These are yours, not Hume's.

Deliver what you listed

• Your profile and Experience page must be accurate and yours — your own words, photos, video, skills and history.
• Run the Experience as described: same idea, same rough duration and group size, same city. Material changes must be communicated before anyone arrives, with a full refund for anyone who'd rather not come.
• Disclose anything an Explorer would want to know before paying: physical demands, terrain, stairs, weather exposure, animals, food, loud environments, alcohol, and any part that takes place in a private residence.
• Describe accessibility honestly — see the Accessibility page. Never describe an Experience as accessible without a reasonable basis for it.
• Label the filming. Every Experience must carry one of three labels before anyone can book: Filming required, Filming optional, or No participant filming. Where filming is required or optional, the page must also say what will be captured, where it may appear, and whether it may be used commercially. See section 14.
• Every attendee must be booked. Don't accept unregistered guests at the meeting point. Capacity, waivers and your own insurance all depend on knowing exactly who is there.

Permissions, licences and insurance

• Get permission from every venue, property owner or landowner you bring a group to.
• Hold any licence or permit your Experience actually requires, and comply with all applicable laws and municipal by-laws.
• Do not serve, supply, sell or resell alcohol. In Ontario that requires a licence or permit under the Liquor Licence and Control Act, 2019, and Hume Experiences operate without one. Alcohol at an Experience is served by a licensed venue only, and the Experience must be listed as 19+.
• Don't claim credentials you don't hold, promise health outcomes, or offer anything that needs an Ontario licence — therapy, medical or psychological advice, physiotherapy, legal or financial advice. See the Community Guidelines.
• Do not prepare and sell food from a home or unlicensed kitchen. Follow Toronto Public Health requirements wherever food is involved, and always ask the group about allergies.
• Carry your own liability insurance, adequate for what you run, before your first Experience — and keep it current. Hume does not insure you, your Explorers, or your Experience, and provides no cover of any kind. Show us your certificate if we ask.
• Tell us before listing anything with significant physical risk — cycling, water, heights, anything strenuous. Some Experiences need more than a standard policy, and we may decline to list them.

Money and tax

• You are an independent contractor, not an employee of Hume. There is no employment, agency, partnership or joint venture between us, and Hume does not withhold tax, make source deductions, or provide employment benefits, vacation pay, or workers' compensation coverage.
• You are responsible for your own taxes, including reporting your Hume income to the Canada Revenue Agency and registering for and remitting GST/HST once your revenues require it. Hume does not withhold tax from your payout.
• We report your earnings to the CRA. Because Hume collects payment for your Experiences, we expect to be a reporting platform operator under the Canada Revenue Agency's digital platform rules. That means we collect identifying and income information about Experience Creators and file it with the CRA annually, and give you a copy of what we filed. You agree to give us the information we need for that; we can't pay out without it.
• Keep your own records. Your Hume payout statements are a starting point, not a substitute for your own bookkeeping.

Running the group

• You're responsible for the safety and tone of your Experience. You may remove anyone who is unsafe, impaired, or breaching the Community Guidelines, and you may end an Experience early to keep people safe. Hume will not penalise you for that, and you keep your payment for that booking.
• You may not discriminate against an Explorer on any ground protected by the Ontario Human Rights Code.
• Report incidents to us afterwards, as set out on the Safety page.

12. If you book Experiences

• Read the Experience page and make sure it's right for you before you pay.
• Turn up on time, or cancel through Hume as early as you can.
• Follow the Experience Creator's reasonable instructions on safety, and the rules of any venue you visit.
• Be responsible for anyone you booked a spot for.
• Don't take part while impaired to the point of being a risk to yourself or the group.
• You're responsible for any damage you cause. The Experience Creator or the venue may seek that cost from you directly.

13. Conduct and the Community Guidelines

The Community Guidelines are part of these Terms and breaching them is breaching this agreement. In addition, you may not:

• Use Hume for anything unlawful, or to harass, threaten, stalk or defraud anyone.
• Post false, misleading, infringing, hateful or sexually explicit content.
• Offer or solicit sexual services, companionship-for-hire, or any arrangement in which intimacy is part of what's being paid for.
• Use Hume to recruit, sell unrelated products or services, run an MLM, raise investment, or harvest leads.
• Post fake reviews or bookings, or manipulate ratings.
• Ask anyone on Hume for money outside the price of an Experience — loans, emergencies, gifts, crypto, investments, or a "better rate" if you pay another way. Hume is not a place to raise money from people you've just met.
• Scrape, crawl, reverse-engineer, or extract data from Hume, or use it to build a competing service.
• Interfere with the security or operation of Hume, or try to access accounts or data that aren't yours.

14. Your content, video and likeness

You keep ownership of everything you create — your video, photos, profile text, Experience descriptions and reviews.

By posting it to Hume, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt for format and display it, for the purposes of operating and promoting Hume. That includes showing your video in the Hume feed and using your name, likeness and content in Hume's marketing.

• This licence ends for future use when you ask. Email us to withdraw it, or take your content down, and we'll stop using it going forward. We may not be able to pull it back from marketing already published or distributed, and we may keep copies where we're legally required to.
• You promise you have the rights to everything you post — including any music, footage, images or text you didn't create yourself.
• You promise everyone identifiable in it agreed to be there. Get consent before you film or photograph an Explorer, a member of the public, or anyone else, and don't post them if they said no.

Filming at an Experience

Booking an Experience is not consent to be filmed. Consent to filming is specific, it is given before payment, and it can be withdrawn.

• Every Experience carries a label — Filming required, Filming optional, or No participant filming — visible before anyone books.
• Where filming is required, the Experience page must say what will be captured, which channels it may appear on, and whether it may be used in paid advertising. An Explorer must actively agree to those terms at booking. Accepting these Terms is not that agreement.
• Where filming is optional, declining must cost an Explorer nothing — not the price, not the Experience, not how they're treated on the day.
• Consent to being filmed is not consent to every later use. Editing into something different in kind, licensing to a third party, or use in a sensitive context needs fresh permission.
• An Explorer can withdraw consent to future filming at any time, including during an Experience. Whether already-published content comes down depends on what was agreed, and the Experience page has to say so before booking.
• People who aren't part of the booking shouldn't be made identifiable without their permission.
• Safety and dignity outrank the footage. Filming stops where continuing would create a risk or cross a reasonable boundary.

Reporting content

• We can remove content that breaches these Terms, the Community Guidelines, or someone else's rights.
• Copyright, trademark and likeness complaints are handled through the process on the Support page. Repeat infringement closes an account; knowingly false complaints are themselves a violation.
• Feedback you send us about the product itself, we can use freely and without obligation.

15. Keeping bookings on Hume

Where an Explorer and an Experience Creator are introduced through Hume, bookings between them must be made and paid through Hume.

This isn't only about fees. A booking taken off-platform has no cancellation policy, no waiver, no refund, no record, and no route to report a problem — the Explorer loses every protection this agreement gives them, and the Creator loses the evidence that would defend them if something went wrong. Deliberately moving a Hume-originated booking off the platform is a serious breach and a reason we end a Creator account.

Explorers: if you're asked to pay any other way, don't, and tell us. A request to pay by e-transfer, cash or a payment link outside Hume is the clearest warning sign there is. See Money and scams.

This doesn't stop people who meet on Hume from becoming friends, or from doing something together that isn't a Hume Experience.

16. Hume's intellectual property

The Hume name, logo, site, app, design, copy and everything else we've built belong to us or our licensors. You get a personal, limited, revocable, non-transferable licence to use Hume as intended, and nothing more. Don't copy our branding or hold yourself out as Hume.

17. Suspension and removal

• We may warn, suspend, restrict or permanently remove an account that breaches these Terms or the Community Guidelines, following the process set out there.
• We may act immediately, without warning, where there's a risk to someone's safety or a serious violation.
• Conduct off Hume counts. We may suspend or remove an account for what someone does away from the platform — by text, on social media, or in person — where it involves a person they met through Hume. Meeting someone here doesn't put your behaviour toward them out of our reach afterwards.
• We may remove an Experience, hide a profile, or cancel a booking where we reasonably believe it's necessary.
• You can leave whenever you want — email us to close your account. Complete or cancel any upcoming Experience first.
• A person makes every enforcement decision. We don't suspend or remove accounts by automated system, and any decision we make can be appealed — see the Community Guidelines. How the discovery feed ranks Experiences, and what it does and doesn't use, is set out in the Privacy Policy.
• Sections 10, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22 and 23 continue to apply after your account ends.

18. Disclaimers

Hume is provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We don't warrant that Hume will be uninterrupted or error-free, that any Experience will meet your expectations, or that any Explorer or Experience Creator is who or what they claim to be beyond the review described in section 3. We are not responsible for the conduct of any user, online or in person, or for any third-party venue, service or content.

Nothing here excludes a warranty or condition that cannot be excluded by law, including under the Ontario Consumer Protection Act, 2002 (or its successor, the Consumer Protection Act, 2023).

19. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

• Hume is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, or for loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill or opportunity.
• Hume is not liable for the acts or omissions of Explorers, Experience Creators, venues or any other third party, whether online or at an Experience.
• Hume's total aggregate liability to you for all claims connected to Hume is limited to the greater of: the total fees you paid to Hume in the 12 months before the claim, or CAD $250.

20. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Hume, and the people who operate it, from any claim, loss, liability or reasonable legal cost arising from: your use of Hume; your breach of these Terms, the Community Guidelines or any law; an Experience you ran or attended; content you posted; or your conduct toward another person.

This doesn't apply to the extent a claim arises from our own negligence or wilful misconduct, and nothing in it limits your consumer rights.

21. Privacy

How we handle your information is set out in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of this agreement. By using Hume you consent to it.

22. Successor and assignment

Hume intends to incorporate. When it does:

• These Terms, and every agreement made under them — including bookings, Experience Creator arrangements and signed waivers — may be assigned to the resulting corporation, which will assume all rights and obligations under them as if it had been the original party.
• Every release, waiver, limitation of liability and indemnity given under these Terms or any Hume waiver extends to and benefits that corporation, its directors, officers, employees and agents.
• We'll tell you when it happens and update this page.

We may also assign these Terms as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of the business. You may not assign your rights under them without our consent.

23. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

Talk to us first. If something's gone wrong, email withhume@gmail.com and give us 30 days to sort it out. Most things end here.

If we can't resolve it, the courts of Ontario have jurisdiction, and you and we both submit to them.

We have deliberately not required arbitration and not waived class actions. Ontario consumer law protects your right to take a matter to court and to join a class proceeding, and treats a term that takes either away as a prohibited term — one that can put the whole agreement at risk. Plenty of platforms include those clauses anyway. We'd rather have terms that hold up.

If you're a consumer resident elsewhere, you keep the mandatory protections of the law where you live.

24. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms as Hume changes. The date at the top tells you which version you're reading. For a material change — fees, liability, how payments work — we'll give you notice by email or in the product at least 14 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use Hume after that means you accept it. A change never applies retroactively to a booking already made.

25. General

• Entire agreement: these Terms, the Community Guidelines, the Privacy Policy and any booking waiver are the whole agreement between us on this subject.
• Severability: if a provision is unenforceable, it's limited or removed to the minimum extent needed and the rest stays in force.
• No waiver: not enforcing something once doesn't mean we've given it up.
• Notices go to the email address on your account, or to us at the address below.
• Language: these Terms are drawn up in English. Les parties ont exigé que la présente convention soit rédigée en anglais.

26. Contact

Hume, Toronto, Ontario, Canada — withhume@gmail.com.

See also the Community Guidelines, the Safety page and the Privacy Policy.