Terms
The rules of the place, in English. By using Dear Alfred you are agreeing to them.
Who you are agreeing with
Dear Alfred is run by William Street Designs LLC. “We” and “us” mean that company. Write to us at support@dearalfred.ink.
Who may use it
You must be at least 13 years old, and old enough where you live to agree to this. If you are buying something you must be 18.
What this is, and what it is not
Alfred is a character. He is written using a language model, he is not a person, and he is not a therapist, a doctor, a lawyer or an adviser of any kind. Nothing he writes is professional advice and nothing on this site should be used in place of it.
If you are in danger, this is the wrong place. In the United States, call 911 for all emergencies, or call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, at any hour. Outside the US, call your local emergency number.
Alfred is a fictional character created by John Sarris, and every saying he offers is John’s own writing. Which sayings he chooses, and the few words he puts around them, are generated using Claude, an AI assistant made by Anthropic. Alfred does not invent sayings, and what he chooses may be wrong for you. A page is a page, not a judgment about your life.
Your journal, and what you write
Whatever you write in your journal is yours. We claim no ownership of it and we do not read it, publish it, or use it to train anything.
You give us permission to store it and show it back to you, which is the only thing we do with it. You can delete all of it at any time from the bottom of your journal page, and that ends the permission.
Your journal is identified by a cookie. Clear it, and we have no way to find the journal again — there is no account to recover and nothing we can do about it from our end.
Alfred’s sayings
The sayings are original work, written by John Sarris, and the copyright in them belongs to him and to William Street Designs LLC. The same goes for Alfred, Switch, the drawings, and the site itself.
The page Alfred writes you, and the squares you keep from it, are yours to keep, print, and post anywhere you like, including on social media, with the name of the site left on them. What you may not do is sell them, put them on things you sell, feed them to a model, or publish the sayings as a collection. If you want to do something of that kind, write to us — the answer is often yes.
Using the site properly
Do not break into it, scrape it, hammer it with automated requests, work around the limits in it, or use it to harass anybody. Do not pretend to be somebody else. Do not use it for anything illegal. We can stop serving anyone who does, without notice.
Buying things
Where something is for sale:
- Everything is printed when it is ordered. Prices are in US dollars and may change; the price you see at checkout is the price.
- Shipping and any tax are shown before you pay. Payment is handled by Stripe; we never see your card.
- An order is accepted when we send you confirmation, not when you press the button. If we cannot make it, we will say so and refund you in full.
- Because each item is printed for you, we cannot take returns for a change of mind. If it arrives damaged, wrong, or badly printed, tell us within 30 days and we will reprint it or refund it.
- Colors on a screen are not colors on cloth, and printed placement varies a little. That is normal and not a fault.
Other people’s services
The site is built on services run by others — Anthropic, Fly.io, Supabase, Stripe, Printify. When one of them is down, so are we, and we are not liable for what they do or fail to do.
No promises about uptime
The site is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be available, uninterrupted, or free of mistakes, and we may change or stop any part of it. We will not delete your journal without telling you.
Limits on what we owe you
To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost data, or for anything arising from decisions you make after reading something Alfred wrote. Where we are liable, what we owe is limited to what you paid us in the previous twelve months, or one hundred US dollars if you paid us nothing.
Some places do not allow limits like these. Where that is so, they do not apply to you.
If you cause us a problem
If somebody brings a claim against us because of what you did here — what you wrote, what you posted, or breaking these terms — you agree to cover what it costs us.
Ending it
You can stop using the site whenever you like and delete your journal with it. We can suspend or end access for anyone breaking these terms. The sections about the sayings, about limits, and about the law survive either of those.
The law, and arguments
These terms are governed by the laws of the state in which William Street Designs LLC is organized, and any dispute belongs in the courts of that state, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. If you are a consumer somewhere that gives you the right to your own courts and your own law, you keep it.
Before anything formal, write to us. Nearly everything is a misunderstanding that an email fixes.
Changes
If these terms change in a way that matters, the date below changes and we will say so on the site. Carrying on using it after that means you accept the new version.
Last updated 4 October 2026.