Tabelingo

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This policy and the Terms are published in English, and English is the version that governs. We do not translate them: a legal text translated without review is not the same text in another language — it is a different promise. If you need help understanding it in your language, write to privacy@tabelingo.com and a person will explain.

Terms of Service — Tabelingo

Last updated: 5 August 2026 Status: draft — not reviewed by a lawyer

⚠️ Este documento é um rascunho técnico, escrito a partir do que o app realmente faz. Ele não substitui revisão jurídica, e a seção sobre alérgenos é a que mais precisa dela: há precedente de litígio na categoria. Não publique sem que um advogado com prática em Japão, UE e EUA leia.

1. What Tabelingo does

Tabelingo reads photographs of restaurant menus, translates them, and helps you build an order that the app can display and speak in Japanese.

2. What Tabelingo is not

Tabelingo does not give dietary or medical advice.

The app flags ingredients that a dish may contain. It never tells you that a dish is safe, and the absence of a warning is not a statement that a dish is free of anything.

This is not legal hedging — it is how the app is built. There are three reasons a warning can be missing, and none of them means "safe":

  1. The menu does not say. Japanese law requires allergen labelling only for packaged food, not for restaurant meals. The information frequently does not exist at the restaurant, so it cannot exist in the app.
  2. We did not detect it. The dish is read from a photograph by a machine. Handwriting, glare and unusual dishes reduce accuracy, and the app tells you when its reading was uncertain.
  3. The kitchen varies. Two restaurants making the same dish use different recipes. Dashi (fish stock) is the clearest case: it is in most miso soups, noodle broths and sauces, and is almost never declared.

If you have a food allergy, intolerance or religious dietary restriction, confirm every dish directly with the restaurant before eating. The app provides a phrase for this in Japanese.

3. Translations and audio

Translations and the spoken order are produced by machine and may be wrong or incomplete. Check the order on screen before showing it to staff. Tabelingo is not responsible for a misunderstood order, a wrong item served, or a wrong amount charged.

4. Prices

Prices shown come from a photograph of a menu and may be misread, out of date, or displayed without tax. Currency conversion uses a rate fetched up to once a day and is an estimate.

Japanese restaurants commonly add charges that are not on the menu — otoshi (a compulsory appetiser), table charges, and service charges. Tabelingo warns about these but cannot know a specific restaurant's policy.

The bill from the restaurant is the only authoritative amount.

5. Your data

Tabelingo holds no health data, because it collects none. There is no allergy or dietary profile to fill in — not on your phone, not on our servers.

An earlier version of the app kept one on the device and highlighted dishes against it. It was removed on 5 August 2026, and the reason is the same one behind §2: deciding that a dish is a problem for you is a judgement the app cannot support. The catalogue covers about half the dishes it reads, the rest are inferred from a photograph, and neither knows what this kitchen did today.

What replaced it is smaller and truer. Every dish lists what it may contain, the same list for everyone, and the app carries ready-made questions in Japanese — 「これに〜は入っていますか？」 — so you can ask the one party that knows.

Menu photographs are processed and discarded. They are sent to our provider to be read and are not stored. We keep the resulting text (dish names, prices), not the image.

We keep: an account identifier, the menus you scanned, your favourites, and counts used to apply the free tier.

You can delete your account and everything on our servers from inside the app, under Settings.

6. Plans and purchases

Tabelingo is free to try: one complete menu per calendar month, including the spoken order, the quick phrases and currency conversion. The free allowance resets on the 1st.

Two paid options, both of which unlock the same features and differ only in how long they last:

Plan Type Duration
Monthly Auto-renewing subscription 30 days, renews until you cancel
Lifetime One-off purchase See "What lifetime means" below

The monthly plan renews automatically until you cancel it. You can cancel at any time — including during the first month — in your App Store or Google Play account settings. Cancelling stops the next charge; you keep access until the end of the period you already paid for, and we do not shorten it.

The Lifetime purchase never renews and is charged once.

Prices are shown in the App Store or Google Play, in your local currency, before you confirm. Purchases, cancellation and refunds are handled by the store under its rules, not ours.

Fair use

Paid plans have no menu allowance to ration, but they do have a ceiling that exists to stop abuse of a service that costs us money per menu read:

A full two-week trip normally uses well under twenty. If you reach a ceiling, the rest of the app keeps working — saved menus, the spoken order and the quick phrases — and only new menu reads pause.

We may change these numbers, but not downwards for a purchase you have already made.

What lifetime means

"Lifetime" means the lifetime of the Tabelingo service, not yours and not your device's. It is a one-off purchase with no recurring charge, valid on the store account you bought it with, for as long as we operate Tabelingo.

It is not a promise that the app will exist forever. If we discontinue Tabelingo, we will give at least 90 days' notice inside the app, and you will not be charged again in the meantime. Statutory refund rights in your country are unaffected by this section.

7. Acceptable use

Do not use Tabelingo to redistribute restaurant menus commercially, or to build a competing dataset from its output.

8. Availability

Tabelingo depends on third-party services and on a network connection. Menu reading does not work offline. Features may be disabled temporarily to control cost or fix problems.

9. Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Tabelingo is provided "as is". We are not liable for loss arising from reliance on translations, allergen indications, prices, or the spoken order.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Consumer protection law in your country may give you rights these terms cannot remove.

10. Governing law and contact

To be completed with the operating entity and jurisdiction.

Contact: to be completed

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