Fairness, not as a slogan.

01The geometry math is free, forever.

If you need cinemap's math to know whether your cinema works (whether the projector hits the screen, whether your viewing angle is sane, whether the speakers fit Dolby spec), you will never pay us a euro to find out. The free tier solves the problem for the room you're designing tonight.

Pro is for integrators who get paid to design cinemas for other people. The line is "are you doing this for a living, with a logo on a deliverable?" It is not "do you deserve answers about your own room?"

02Gear rankings are never sold.

Picker results are ranked by geometry fit + persona match + spec quality + price-for-performance. They are not ranked by which retailer pays the highest commission, by which manufacturer paid for placement, or by what we think will convert best.

• No manufacturer can pay for a higher ranking. Ever.
• No retailer can pay for a higher ranking.
• No "Sponsored" gear in the picker. No "Featured." No native ads dressed as recommendations.
• Affiliate revenue is downstream of rank, not upstream. The same product ranks identically whether you click an affiliate link or buy direct.

03Your saved configurations are yours.

Saved scenarios live in your browser's localStorage. We don't see them. We don't analyze them. We don't aggregate them. When cloud sync launches via Supabase, we store what you ask us to store and nothing else. The entire schema is in our Supabase migrations, public for review.

• No sale of user configurations to manufacturers, retailers, or anyone else.
• No "anonymized aggregate" sale either. That's the same thing wearing a fig leaf.
• You can export everything you've created as a JSON file at any time.
• Account deletion wipes your data within 30 days, no questions, no retention.

04No dark patterns. never

• No fake countdown timers. The "first 500 lifetime buyers" counter is the real Stripe purchase count. When it hits 500, the offer is retired, and it does not reset.
• No fake testimonials. Every quote on cinemap has an attributed name, role, and (when allowed) a link to verify.
• No fake scarcity. We will never say "only 3 left" or "X people viewing this" unless that's a real number you can verify.
• No pre-checked opt-ins. No "by continuing, you agree..." manipulation. No nag screens.
• No 7-step cancel flows. One click cancels. Access continues until the end of the period you paid for.
• No surprise renewals. Annual plans get a 7-day-prior reminder email with a one-click cancel link, every year.
• No "downgrade to free is permanent" trickery. Reactivate any time.

05Privacy is a structure, not a promise.

• No tracking cookies. No retargeting pixels. No third-party analytics. Ours is self-hosted: anonymous aggregate event counts in our own database, cookieless, no fingerprinting, no cross-site profiling.
• No selling, sharing, or licensing of personal data to third parties.
• No reading or analyzing the content of your saved scenarios.
• No microphone, camera, location, or contact-list access.
• Affiliate clicks are tracked by the retailer (Amazon, B&H, Crutchfield) once you leave cinemap. Their privacy practices apply at that point, not ours. We disclose this on every affiliate link.

Full privacy policy.

06Pricing is plain.

• No "was €299, now €99" anchoring. The real price, plainly stated.
• No surcharges revealed at checkout. The price you see is the price you pay (taxes shown explicitly when applicable).
• 30-day money-back on all paid plans. No questions, no "let's chat first," no retention dance.
• Prorated refunds on annual plans any time, not just within the first 14 days.
• Cancel any time → access until the end of the period you paid for.
• Trials don't require a credit card. You upgrade by entering payment details, not by un-entering them.

07The free tier is built to be useful.

Free isn't a trial. The geometry engine, all 200+ gear items, unlimited saved scenarios, share URLs, the persona quiz, the 6-page print sheet, multi-currency, country-aware pricing, Atmos layouts up to 7.2.4: all of it, free, forever, no account required.

Pro adds professional deliverables (branded PDF, DWG export, 9.2.6 / 11.2.8 / 13.2.10), the multi-axis solver, multi-row theater analysis, theater seating, and (when launched) cloud sync + version history. Pro is what an integrator pays €99/yr for instead of €900+/yr to D-Tools.

08Affiliate competition, not affiliate funneling.

When you have multiple affiliate retailers in your country, cinemap shows you all of them side-by-side with their prices, so they compete for your purchase. We don't push you toward whichever pays us most.

Affiliate revenue funds the tool. We're explicit about it, and we disclose it on every gear card. You can also just take the product name we recommend and search for it yourself, no affiliate link. The price is identical, and we don't penalize you for it.

Full affiliate disclosure.

09Public roadmap, public release log, public scoreboard.

• Changelog: every release, dated, with what shipped.
• Backlog: what's planned, with priority and rough sizing.
• Gap analysis: what's missing from being a real business, written for ourselves first.
• Status page (coming): uptime, incidents, recovery times.

10If we break a principle, we say so.

If we ever cross a line on this page, whether by mistake, by drift, or by a bad call under pressure, we publish what happened, what changed, and what we'll do differently. Public, dated, signed by a human name. No silent corrections, no quiet wording changes, no PR-laundered apologies.

11A new pillar, not a replacement.

The home-cinema community didn't ask for cinemap. It already has ProjectorCentral, Rtings, Audio Science Review, AVS Forum, r/hometheater, CEDIA, Crutchfield's Advisor program, and decades of accumulated expertise from people who built the canon long before we showed up.

cinemap exists to add one missing tool to that canon, fit-tested room geometry. Not to displace anyone. Specifically:

• We don't scrape databases that beloved community institutions built. ProjectorCentral's spec database is the gold standard; we ask for permission, license what we use, and cross-link to their reviews. Same for Rtings, Audio Science Review, Spinorama, and others doing the slow careful work.
• We cite our sources on every gear card. If you find a great projector through cinemap, you should know whose review or measurement vouched for it.
• We don't position ourselves as an oracle. The community is the oracle. cinemap is a slide rule.
• We send traffic out to the community more than we keep it. Our affiliate links are to the retailers who fund the people who write the reviews. Our gear cards link to the reviewers, not over them.
• If a community member asks us to take down content or change a behavior in good faith, we listen first and talk second.

12If we ever shut down, your work doesn't.

cinemap is one person working alone. The realistic path is sustainable solo growth, not high-velocity success. We're optimizing for cinemap still being here in five years. But if it isn't, we owe the people who paid for it a lot more than a server-shutdown email.

• The .cinemap format is MIT-licensed forever. Your scenarios stay yours, openable by any future tool that implements the spec.
• If the hosted service shuts down, we publish a self-hostable static build of the app on day one of the wind-down. Clone it, drop it on any static host, and your designs keep opening. The geometry engine doesn't need our servers to run.
• Lifetime buyers get a 24-month sunset of any paid features at no charge if we ever stop operating commercially. The "first 500 buyers · honest count" page tracks the real Stripe purchase count and never resets.
• The source repository at github.com/jaredhuke/cinemap stays public. Even if the hosted brand ends, the code stays archived and forkable.
• If we get acquired, the new owner inherits this commitment in writing. We won't spirit-of-the-law our way out of it.

13We love music and movies, and we try to have fun.

This tool exists because the founder spent too many weekends with pen, paper, and clunky 3D programs trying to fit one stubborn center channel under a UST. That's not a tragedy. It's a hobby. cinemap is built by someone who likes this stuff, for people who like this stuff, and the writing in the app reflects that.

• Persona names, gear blurbs, error messages, the persona quiz, the "take me there" cinematic: all written to be useful first and a little playful second.
• Audiophiles, cinephiles, vinyl-only stereo nerds, pure-2.0 listeners, theatre-room maximalists, all welcome. The geometry engine cares about geometry. If your build is a turntable and two speakers in a 12 m² room, that's a perfectly valid build to design here.
• If a joke isn't funny to you, feel free to not laugh. Humour is taste-dependent and we're not going to pretend ours is universal.
• If anything in the app reads as snide, condescending, or like it's punching down at a brand, persona, format, or budget, that's a bug. Tell us, and we'll rewrite it.