Mela
Effective August 7, 2026 · An agreement between you and Cornerstone Venture Holdings LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company ("Cornerstone," "we," "us"). Mela is our product. These Terms also serve as the end-user license agreement for the Mela iOS app.
Mela helps people host gatherings and helps communities — neighborhoods, congregations, and other groups — organize themselves. These Terms explain what you can expect from us and what we expect from you.
We've written them to be read. Where the law requires precision, we're precise; everywhere else, we're plain. If you create an account or use Mela signed in, all of these Terms apply to you. If you only open an invitation link someone sent you, section 6 describes the smaller set that applies to you.
How you accept. You accept these Terms by affirmatively indicating agreement when you create your account. We keep a record of the version of the Terms and Privacy Policy you accepted, when you accepted them, and the method of acceptance. The Privacy Policy explains how information is handled and is part of this agreement.
You must be at least 13 years old to create an account, and old enough to form a binding contract where you live (or have a parent or guardian's permission). You may not use Mela if you are barred from doing so under U.S. law (§39).
Your account is yours: keep the email address behind it secure, tell us at security@joinmela.co if you believe someone else has accessed it, and don't share, sell, or transfer it. You're responsible for activity that happens through your account. One person, one account.
Mela has no passwords. You sign in with Apple, or with a one-time code (app) or sign-in link (web) sent to your email. Your email account is your key to Mela — anyone who controls your email can control your Mela account, so protect it accordingly.
We grant you a personal, limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the Mela apps and services for their intended purpose: organizing your events, people, and communities. This license doesn't include the right to resell Mela, to access it by automated means except public pages a browser would fetch, or to copy its software, designs, or templates for use outside Mela.
Guests can RSVP, claim a potluck dish, and vote in date polls from an invitation link without ever creating an account. That's by design.
If you use Mela this way, only the following parts of these Terms apply to you:
Nothing else in these Terms binds you merely because you opened or used an invitation link. If you later create an account, the full Terms apply from that point.
An event on Mela is its host's space. Hosts (and co-hosts they appoint) decide who is invited, may add or remove guests, may require RSVP approval, may assign or remove potluck items, and may close the event.
If you host, three responsibilities come with the powers: you're responsible for the accuracy of what your invitation says, for having the right to share the details and photos you put on it, and for your decisions about your guests. A guest you remove has their remedy with you, not with us — though we may step in under §19 if conduct violates these Terms or the law.
RSVP details — party size, children count, dietary notes — exist so hosts can plan. Enter them honestly and only for people you're actually bringing. What a host shows you (guest lists, potluck lists) is for the event, not for collection or reuse elsewhere.
Mela is built around inviting and remembering people, so much of what you enter is about someone else. When you add another person's information — a guest's phone number, a friend's birthday, an emergency contact — you promise us that:
People who never created an account can ask us to see, correct, or remove information about them (Privacy Policy §12). If we act on such a request, we may briefly tell the organizer that a removal occurred.
A community on Mela is a shared space — for an HOA, a congregation, a neighborhood, a school group — with members, administrators, events, announcements, documents, and programs. Communities govern themselves; §11 explains exactly what that means.
This section is deliberately specific, because it answers the questions that matter when a group of people share a space for years. Three ideas run through it, and they are different things: ownership (who holds rights in content), authorization (who may act on a community's behalf), and administration (who runs the shared space). Mela never confuses the three, and neither should these Terms.
a. Ownership of a community's content.
b. Authorization and administration. Creating a community grants stewardship, not ownership: the creator becomes its first owner-role holder, with administrative authority over the shared space. Administering a community is running it — it is not owning its content. For routine matters, the current owner-role holder speaks for the community, and whoever uploads on a community's behalf warrants they are authorized to do so. Where authority is disputed — a board election, a schism, a removed officer — we may ask for reasonable documentation, temporarily freeze ownership transfers and administrative changes while we review it, and we will give controlling weight to the lawful authority of the entity the community represents.
c. Succession. Administrative control of a community passes as the product provides: by voluntary transfer; if an owner departs, to the longest-standing administrator; otherwise to the longest-standing member. A community with no other members may be deleted together with its sole owner's account. If an owner dies and their account remains, a verified request from someone with legal authority (an executor, the represented entity) can be handled through support. Succession moves administration; it does not move ownership of anyone's content.
d. What administrators can do — and what comes with it. Administrators manage membership, post announcements, upload and remove documents, manage vendors and programs, record expenses, and moderate their community's content. In exchange, administrators are responsible for: acting with their community's authority, the accuracy of what they publish (emergency contacts above all — §13), having rights to what they upload, and their moderation decisions.
e. Community moderation and our role. Community administrators ordinarily control membership and community-level moderation. We don't decide internal governance disputes — a member removed by their admins has their remedy within their community. But we may intervene where conduct violates these Terms, applicable law, safety requirements, or platform integrity — including discrimination, harassment, or retaliation dressed up as moderation.
f. Inactive communities. After prolonged inactivity, we may archive or delete a community after giving reasonable notice to reachable administrators, unless immediate action is necessary for legal, security, or operational reasons.
g. Removing a community. We may remove a community that violates these Terms, hosts illegal content, or has been abandoned (f), or where the law requires it. Where lawful and practical, we'll give administrators an opportunity to retrieve their community's content first.
Ownership of documents a community uploads — bylaws, minutes, budgets, notices — follows §11.a; uploading a document to Mela does not change who owns it. Three things to understand about how Mela handles them:
Emergency contact lists, vendor recommendations, FAQ answers, schedules, phone numbers — everything in a community was typed in by its members and administrators. We don't verify any of it. Verify anything you intend to rely on, and never depend on Mela for emergency information — in an emergency, call emergency services.
The same is true of delivery: notifications and email are best-effort (§25). Don't rely on Mela alone for anything time-critical or safety-critical.
Communities can keep a directory of vendors — submitted by vendors themselves, recommended by members, rated by members. We don't vet, endorse, or guarantee any vendor. We're not a party to any engagement between you and a vendor; a rating is its author's opinion. Vendors who believe a listing about them is wrong can write to support@joinmela.co.
Gift search sends your search text to a product-search service and shows results that link to external retailers. Prices, availability, and everything after you leave Mela belong to the retailer. Mela has no affiliate relationships and earns nothing from these links.
"User Content" is everything you create or upload in Mela: events, invitations, RSVPs, announcements, documents, photos, potluck items, ratings, questions — yours or your community's.
You own your User Content. So we can operate Mela, you grant Cornerstone a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, display, and transmit your User Content — solely to operate, secure, and improve the service. This license ends when your content is deleted, except for: residual backup copies until they cycle out, content shared into community spaces (which stays with the community, no longer attributed to you), and what we must retain for legal reasons. We don't use your content for advertising and don't train AI models on it.
You promise your User Content doesn't infringe anyone's rights — including copyright in photos and the rights of the people depicted in them — and doesn't violate §18.
Ask Mela answers questions from your community's uploaded documents. Photo transcription turns a photo of a list into a checklist. Here is the honest deal on both:
What they do. Ask Mela reads only what your community uploaded — nothing else — and cites the document and page each answer rests on. Mela checks that the quoted passage genuinely appears in the cited document before showing you an answer. Photo transcription reads your photo and keeps the list, not the photo.
What they don't do. Ask Mela doesn't know whether your documents are current, complete, or correct. It doesn't know the law, your insurance policy, or your finances. It answers from paper, and paper can be outdated.
AI can be wrong. Even when it quotes real text, an answer can mislead through missing context. Treat every answer as directional — a pointer into your documents, not a conclusion.
It is not professional advice. Answers are not legal, financial, insurance, tax, or any other professional advice, and no professional relationship is created. Before acting on anything involving money, liability, safety, or rights — verify the answer against the documents themselves and consult the appropriate professional. Boards: verify before you rely; your community is trusting you, not the software.
Answers belong with your community. We claim no ownership of Ask Mela answers; they're provided as-is as part of your community's records, and the question log is visible to your community.
AI features are optional and will change. Documents work fully without Ask Mela. We may change AI providers, models, and features, add new AI features, or discontinue them, at any time.
Don't use Mela to: break the law; harass, threaten, or defame anyone; post content that is hateful, pornographic, exploitative of minors, or gratuitously violent; impersonate others; enter information about people you have no genuine connection to; collect other users' information; send spam; interfere with the service, probe its security, or access others' data; or misrepresent your authority over a community. We keep this list short because it's a floor, not a ceiling: Mela is for organizing real communities and real gatherings, and uses hostile to that purpose aren't allowed.
Mela has no tolerance for objectionable content or abusive behavior.
We may review a moderation or enforcement decision after receiving additional information, but we don't guarantee an internal appeal process or any particular outcome.
Content reports: in-app (§19) or support@joinmela.co. Abuse of the platform itself: abuse@joinmela.co. Security vulnerabilities: security@joinmela.co. Copyright: §22.
Five kinds of things exist in Mela, with five different owners:
| What | Who owns it |
|---|---|
| The platform — software, designs, invitation templates, the Mela name and brand | Cornerstone |
| Your User Content | You (§16) |
| Community content — what's created or uploaded for a community | Per §11.a: the represented entity where one exists and the upload was authorized on its behalf; otherwise the individual creator |
| Ask Mela answers | We claim no ownership; they sit with your community's records (§17) |
| Feedback you send us | You — with a license to us (§23) |
Nothing in these Terms transfers ownership of anything in this table.
We respect copyright and expect the same from you. If you believe content on Mela infringes your copyright, send a notice to our Copyright Agent:
Copyright Agent, Cornerstone Venture Holdings LLC
30 N Gould St #37410, Sheridan, WY 82801, United States
legal@joinmela.co
Your notice must include: your signature; identification of the copyrighted work and of the infringing material with enough detail to locate it; your contact information; a statement of good-faith belief that the use is unauthorized; and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the notice is accurate and you're authorized to act. We'll remove or disable access to material identified in valid notices, notify the user who posted it, accept counter-notices as 17 U.S.C. §512 provides, and terminate repeat infringers' accounts.
If you send us ideas or suggestions, you keep whatever rights you have in them, and you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license to use them without restriction or obligation to you. Tester feedback shapes Mela; this clause is what lets it.
Mela links out — to Apple Maps results, to retailers from gift search, to album links admins post, to vendors' contact details. Third-party services have their own terms and privacy practices; we're not responsible for them. The service providers that operate parts of Mela are listed in the Privacy Policy §11.
Mela is provided as it is on any given day. We work hard on reliability — including continuous monitoring — but we don't promise uninterrupted availability, and outages, maintenance, and changes happen. We may add, change, or remove features. Mela is not a backup service: keep your community's critical documents and records in your own storage too.
Mela is young and moves quickly: features change, some things break, and feedback matters more than polish. Everything in §25 applies with extra force.
Mela is free today. We may introduce paid features or plans in the future. If we do: changes are prospective with reasonable advance notice; you'll always see a price before you're charged; nothing you already did becomes retroactively chargeable; and your data is never held hostage for payment — you can delete your account at any time, and request your information as applicable law provides. Purchases made through an app store follow that store's billing and refund rules.
Mela will grow — possibly into subscriptions, paid communities, enterprise organization agreements, APIs, and apps on more platforms. These Terms are written to carry that growth: new services are covered by these Terms unless we say otherwise, and where an organization signs a separate agreement with Cornerstone, that agreement governs for that organization and its spaces, with these Terms filling any gaps. Separate enterprise agreements may include different terms — including different dispute-resolution, audit, and data provisions.
You can stop using Mela at any time, and delete your account at any time (§30).
We may suspend or terminate accounts, restrict features, or remove communities for violations of these Terms, illegal content or conduct, risk to other users or the service, or legal compulsion — with notice where practical, immediately where necessary. Sections that by their nature survive termination (ownership, licenses already granted for shared content, disclaimers, liability limits, dispute resolution) survive.
Profile → Delete account. It's free, immediate, and self-serve. What it removes and the three exceptions (shared-space content stays without your name; communities with other members continue under a new owner; hosts keep their guest records about you) are described in Privacy Policy §12, which governs.
Mela 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 — and we don't warrant that Mela will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that content in it (including community information and AI answers) is accurate or reliable. Some jurisdictions don't allow certain warranty disclaimers, so parts of this section may not apply to you.
To the fullest extent the law allows: Cornerstone will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or lost profits, data, or goodwill; and our total liability for all claims relating to Mela is capped at the greater of $100 or the amounts you paid Cornerstone in the 12 months before the claim arose.
This section doesn't limit liability that can't lawfully be limited — including, where applicable law says so, liability for gross negligence, willful misconduct, or death or personal injury. Some jurisdictions don't allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.
If someone brings a claim against Cornerstone because of (a) content you posted or uploaded, (b) your violation of these Terms, or (c) your violation of someone else's rights — including entering another person's information without authority — you'll defend and indemnify Cornerstone against that claim, including reasonable attorneys' fees. This section is deliberately narrow: it covers what you did, not the fact that you used Mela. This obligation applies only to the extent permitted by applicable law.
We're not responsible for failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control — natural disasters, war, terrorism, labor disputes, governmental action, internet or utility failures, or failures of our service providers.
Before filing any claim, you and we agree to try to resolve it informally: send a written description of the dispute to legal@joinmela.co (we'll send ours to your account email), and both sides will confer in good faith for 30 days. Most problems are solvable this way, and neither side will start a lawsuit until this period ends. Applicable statutes of limitation are tolled during the 30 days.
Two things this section never delays: either party may bring a qualifying claim in small-claims court at any time, and either party may seek immediate injunctive or other equitable relief where waiting would cause irreparable harm.
Wyoming law governs these Terms, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. This choice doesn't take away protections you're entitled to under the mandatory consumer-protection laws of the place where you live.
Any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or Mela that isn't resolved under §35 will be decided exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Wyoming, and you and Cornerstone each consent to those courts' jurisdiction — with two exceptions:
To the extent enforceable under applicable law, you and Cornerstone each waive the right to a trial by jury in any litigation arising out of or relating to these Terms or Mela. If this waiver is unenforceable as to a claim, that claim proceeds normally and the rest of these Terms stand.
You represent that you're not located in a country subject to comprehensive U.S. embargo and not on any U.S. government restricted-party list, and you agree not to use Mela in violation of U.S. export or sanctions laws.
You can't assign these Terms or your account. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets; if we do, the Terms bind the successor and we'll tell you about any change in ownership.
These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and Cornerstone about Mela, superseding prior agreements. If any provision is found unenforceable, it's modified to the minimum extent necessary or severed, and the rest stands. Not enforcing a provision isn't a waiver of it. Provisions that by their nature should survive — §§9, 11.a, 16 (licenses granted), 21–23, 31–38, 41 — survive termination.
When we change these Terms in a way that matters, we'll tell you — by email or in-app notice — before the change takes effect, and changes apply prospectively. Continuing to use Mela after a change takes effect means the updated Terms apply. If we ever materially change how disputes are resolved under these Terms, we'll ask for your fresh, affirmative agreement rather than relying on continued use. The current version and its effective date always live at joinmela.co/terms.
These terms apply to the Mela app downloaded from Apple's App Store, and are required by Apple:
| For | Write to |
|---|---|
| Support | support@joinmela.co · hello@joinmela.co |
| Legal notices | legal@joinmela.co |
| Copyright | legal@joinmela.co (Copyright Agent, §22) |
| Security | security@joinmela.co |
| Abuse | abuse@joinmela.co |
| Privacy | privacy@joinmela.co |
Cornerstone Venture Holdings LLC · 30 N Gould St #37410, Sheridan, WY 82801, United States
Formal notices from us to you may be given by email to your account address or by in-app notice.