Carrel Pro — subscription terms
Last updated: 23 August 2026
Paid plans are not available yet. This page exists so the terms are settled before the first payment is taken, not explained afterwards. When Pro goes live, this page becomes the agreement for it and sits alongside the Terms of Service.
The rule everything else follows from
Pro adds room. It never takes any away.
Whatever your free shelf holds today, it holds tomorrow. Your books stay yours, stay readable and stay editable whether you pay or not. A shelf you have published stays published. Nothing you have already added is locked, hidden behind a paywall, or deleted because you stopped paying.
What Pro adds
Carrel shows the same books two ways: the cabinet, where they stand as spines on wooden shelves, and the cover grid. Only the cabinet has a size, because it is drawn as a piece of furniture, and furniture holds what it holds. The cover grid has no size and never will.
| Free | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Books standing in the cabinet | 27 | 99 |
| Cabinets | one | several |
Pro makes the cabinet taller. It does not unlock the app. Adding books, searching the catalogue, real covers, reordering, publishing your shelf, your public page and its address all work the same whether you pay or not, and they always will. There is no feature behind the paywall that a free shelf ever had.
Books beyond what the cabinet holds are never lost, and never hidden. They live in the cover grid, they count in your totals, and you can open, edit and reorder them exactly as before. The cabinet is a display, not a container.
Several cabinets means more than one shelf of your own, to sort books between however you like. Each gets its own public address, and the one you already have keeps the address you already gave out, so a link you sent to someone never moves.
Price and billing
The price is not set yet. Pro cannot be bought today, so there is nothing to charge and nothing to quote. When it goes live, the amount, the currency and the billing period appear here first, and Google Play shows them again at checkout before you agree to anything.
There will be two ways to pay: a subscription that renews, and a single payment that does not. The single payment is called lifetime, and the section below says exactly what that word covers. What Pro adds is the same either way.
Payment goes through Google Play. Carrel never sees your card, and Google does not pass it to us. Google is the seller of record for the transaction, and the tax shown at checkout is calculated by Google for the country your Google Play account is registered in.
A subscription renews automatically at the price and period shown at checkout, and keeps renewing until you cancel it. Google charges the payment method on your Google Play account each period. You are told the price and the period before you subscribe, and Google emails you a receipt for every charge.
The lifetime purchase
Lifetime is a single payment, not a subscription. It does not renew, there is nothing to cancel, and no further charge ever comes. Google Play treats it as a one-time product rather than a subscription, so it shows up in your purchase history and not in your list of subscriptions.
"Lifetime" here means the life of Carrel, not the length of yours. For as long as Carrel runs, Pro stays on for your account at no further cost, whatever the price does afterwards. If Carrel is ever discontinued, the Terms of Service apply to you the same way they apply to everyone: notice in the app, and time to export your shelf. This is spelled out because "lifetime" is a word people reasonably read as a promise about themselves, and it is not one.
The purchase belongs to the Google account that made it, and Google Play restores it when you reinstall Carrel or move to a new phone.
How to cancel
This section is about the subscription. A lifetime purchase has nothing to cancel, because nothing renews.
Cancel in Google Play: Play Store → your profile → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions → Carrel → Cancel subscription. It takes fewer taps than subscribing did, and it never requires writing to us, calling anyone, or explaining why.
Cancellation stops the next charge. Pro stays on until the end of the period you already paid for. After that, see When Pro ends, below.
Your right to withdraw, if you are in the EEA or the UK
You have 14 days to withdraw from the purchase of a digital service, without giving a reason.
That right ends early only if you ask for the service to start immediately and acknowledge that starting it costs you the withdrawal right. Google Play shows this step at checkout, and buying through it is what makes the acknowledgement. This works the same way for a subscription and for a lifetime purchase.
If you want to withdraw and Google Play does not offer it, write to lobovlabs@proton.me within the 14 days. We refund it from our side, through Google Play, back to the payment method you used.
Refunds
Google handles refunds for purchases made through Google Play, under Google Play's refund policy, and a request there is usually the fastest route.
Write to lobovlabs@proton.me if Google turns down a request you believe is fair, if Pro did not work as described, or if you were charged after cancelling. We answer within 7 days, and where a refund is due we issue it ourselves through Google Play. If we close your account for reasons of our own, and not because you broke the rules, we refund the unused part of the period you paid for, or the whole of a lifetime purchase, which has no unused part to count.
Every refund goes back through Google Play, to the payment method you paid with. That is the only route there is, and it is the one the law asks for: the same means of payment you used. We never see your card and we never hold your money, so we cannot send it anywhere else, and we will never ask you for bank details in order to pay you back. Anyone who does is not us.
Your statutory rights come first. If you are a consumer in the EEA or the UK, Directive (EU) 2019/770 gives you the right to a paid digital service that matches its description and works properly, and to a remedy when it does not. Nothing on this page limits that, and the "as it is" wording in the Terms of Service does not apply to what you paid for.
Price changes
We may change the price of Pro. If we do, you are told before it takes effect, by email and in the app, and Google Play asks you to accept the new price. Not accepting it cancels the renewal; it never charges you the new price silently. A price change never applies to a period you have already paid for, and a change to the lifetime price never reaches a lifetime purchase already made.
When Pro ends
A lifetime purchase does not end, so none of this applies to it.
For a subscription, whether you cancel, let it lapse, or a payment fails, all of this holds:
- Every book stays. Readable, editable, exportable, in the same order.
- Nothing is deleted. Not books, not cabinets, not settings.
- Published shelves stay published. Links you have sent out keep working — breaking them would punish the people you shared with, not you.
- You keep browsing everything in the cover grid, with no limit.
Two things change, and they are worth saying plainly:
- The cabinet goes back to holding 27 books. If you had 99 standing on the shelves, the remaining 72 move into the cover grid. They are not gone, but the wooden shelf view is smaller than it was. This is the one place where "nothing is taken away" cannot be literally true, and we would rather you read it here than discover it.
- You cannot create new cabinets. The ones you have stay, with their books and their public addresses.
Subscribe again and everything comes straight back.
Changes to these terms
New versions appear here with a new date. If a change is significant, we tell you in the app before it takes effect. Changes never apply retroactively to a period you have already paid for, or to a lifetime purchase already made.
Contact
Aleksandr Lobov lobovlabs@proton.me