Terms

Last updated 21 August 2026

Using Wayside means agreeing to what is on this page. It is short because the product is simple: we tell you about places beside the road, and you drive the car.

Eyes on the road

Wayside is built to be listened to. It is not a navigation app and it will never tell you where to turn — you enter your destination into whichever navigation app you already use, and Wayside is the commentary. Do not operate it while the vehicle is moving. You are responsible for driving safely and for obeying the law where you are, including any law about handling a phone.

Places we describe may be on private land, may be closed, may be unsafe to stop at, and may not be visible from the road at all. Nothing here is an invitation to trespass or to stop somewhere you should not.

Your account

You need an account, and a confirmed email address, to plan a route. Keep your password to yourself; you are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us at support@opencircle.ai if you think somebody else has got into it. One account is for one person.

The plans

There is a free plan and a paid one, and the current difference between them is set out on the plans table rather than repeated here, so the two cannot disagree. In outline: planning a route and hearing the opening of every place is free; the whole of each piece, drive mode, comparing roads, deep dives and saving a trip for out of signal are paid.

New accounts get a trial: everything for two days, starting when you confirm your email address, then the free plan for the rest of the fortnight. No card is asked for.

Paying

The paid plan is a subscription, monthly or annual, taken through Stripe. It renews automatically at the price shown when you bought it until you cancel. Cancel any time from your account page, which opens Stripe's own billing portal — cancelling stops the next renewal and you keep the plan until the end of the period you have paid for.

If a payment fails, Stripe retries and you keep the plan while it does. We only end a subscription when Stripe tells us it has given up.

We do not offer refunds for part of a period, except where the law where you live says otherwise, in which case it does.

Prices can change. If the price of your subscription changes we will tell you before it takes effect, and you can cancel.

What the writing is

Each piece is written by a language model that has read a public source — a Wikipedia article, or the words on a roadside marker — and every piece carries a span copied word for word from that source, checked automatically before you hear it. That check is why we can say the pieces are grounded. It is not the same as saying they are correct: sources are wrong sometimes, and a model can read one correctly and still mislead. Treat Wayside as an interesting account rather than a citable one, and tell us when something is wrong — there is a report control under the timeline.

Nothing in Wayside is advice of any kind.

What you may do with it

Listen to it, on your own drives, as much as you like. What you may not do is scrape, bulk-download, resell or redistribute the writing or the audio, use it to train a model, or run automated requests against the service. The pieces cost real money to produce and are what the paid plan pays for.

Source material keeps its own licence. Pieces written from Wikipedia are derived from text under CC BY-SA, and each page says so and links to the article it came from.

Things you tell us

If you rate a piece or report a problem, we can use what you send to improve the product, including by rewriting the piece. Do not send us anything confidential or anything you do not have the right to send.

Availability

We will try to keep Wayside running and we do not promise that it always will be. It depends on services we do not control, and parts of it need a data signal that a road trip does not always have. Save a trip for offline use before you set off if the route goes somewhere quiet.

We can change or withdraw features. If we withdraw something a paid plan included, you can cancel and we will refund the unused part of the period.

Ending it

You can close your account at any time by writing to support@opencircle.ai. We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and we will say why.

Liability

To the extent the law allows, Wayside is provided as it is, and OpenCircle.ai is not liable for indirect or consequential loss. Where we are liable, our liability is limited to what you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law — and if you live somewhere that gives you consumer rights, this paragraph does not take them away.

The rest

These terms are governed by the law of the State of Delaware, United States. If we change them we will post the new version here with a new date, and tell anyone with an account by email if the change matters. Carrying on using Wayside after that is agreement to the new version.

Questions: support@opencircle.ai.