Critique Groups — Terms of Service
Effective date: June 15, 2026
1. Parties & scope
These Terms are a binding agreement between CritiqueMatch AB, a company registered in Stockholm, Sweden, and any person who reserves a seat in a cohort on groups.critiquematch.com ("Critique Groups", "we", "us"). By reserving a seat or otherwise using Critique Groups, you agree to these Terms.
2. Separate account
Your Critique Groups account is independent from any account you may hold on CritiqueMatch.com, even if you use the same email address. Credentials, profile data, and billing for the two services are managed separately.
3. What a cohort is
A cohort consists of 3–5 writers grouped by genre and experience band. Each cohort runs on a fixed 8-, 12-, or 18-week cycle with fixed submission and critique deadlines on an auto-rotated schedule published in-app at the start of the cycle.
4. Seat reservation and payment
You reserve a seat by paying a one-time fee per cycle (starting at $49) through our payment processor (Stripe). You are only charged once the group reaches its minimum of 3 writers. If the group fails to fill, you are not charged.
5. Refunds and cancellation
You receive a full refund if you cancel at least 14 days before the cycle start date. You also receive a full refund if we cancel a cycle due to under-enrollment. No partial refunds are issued after the cycle starts.
6. EU consumer right of withdrawal
By reserving a seat and requesting that the service begin before the 14-day withdrawal window expires, you expressly consent to performance of the service and acknowledge that you lose your right of withdrawal once the cycle starts. Until the cycle starts, the refund rule in §5 applies.
7. Member obligations
You agree to meet posted submission and critique deadlines, give good-faith feedback to other cohort members, and not redistribute other members' manuscripts outside the cohort.
8. Inactivity policy
Missing two consecutive critique deadlines without prior notice locks further submissions of your own work in that cycle until you catch up on critiques you owe other members.
9. Concurrency cap
You may participate in at most two active cycles at any time.
10. Ratings
Cohort members exchange star ratings at the end of the cycle. Once submitted, ratings are final and visible to the rated member and other cohort members. We may remove ratings that are abusive or retaliatory.
11. Confidentiality of cohort content
Manuscripts, critiques, comments, and in-group chat are confidential to the cohort. Members may not republish or share this content outside the group without the author's written consent.
12. Author IP
You retain all rights in the pages you submit. You grant CritiqueMatch only the limited, non-exclusive licence required to host your pages, display them to your cohort members, back them up, and otherwise operate the service.
13. Post-cycle access
We take the group offline 60 days after the cycle end-date. After that point, members lose access to that group's manuscripts, critiques, ratings, and chat. Underlying records follow the retention rules described in our Privacy Policy.
14. Acceptable use, IP infringement, warranties, liability, indemnification, disputes & governing law
Our acceptable-use rules, IP-infringement procedures, warranty disclaimers, liability caps, indemnification, dispute resolution, and governing-law clauses (Sweden) are incorporated by reference from the master CritiqueMatch Terms at critiquematch.com/terms. In any conflict between those master Terms and these Critique Groups Terms, these Critique Groups Terms control for the Critique Groups service.
15. Changes to these Terms
We will notify registered users of material changes by email or in-app notice. Non-material changes are reflected by updating the effective date above. This mirrors the change mechanism used for the master CritiqueMatch Terms.
16. Contact
Questions? Email support@critiquematch.com.
CritiqueMatch AB, Box 761, Sankt Göransgatan 67, 112 38 Stockholm, Sweden.