Terms of Service

These terms are an agreement between you and the operator of BlackHole, the service at blhole.com. In these terms, “we” and “us” means the operator of BlackHole, and “you” means the person using the service.

You can reach us at support@blhole.com. Email is the fastest route and is monitored.

Using blhole.com, the BlackHole desktop application, or the API means you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

BlackHole retrieves publicly accessible media from third-party platforms at your direction and delivers it to you. You supply a link; we fetch what that link points to and hand it back in the format you choose. We also offer related tools — transcripts, subtitles, thumbnails, clipping and others listed on the tools page.

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, X, Facebook, Pinterest, Bluesky, Vimeo, SoundCloud, or any other platform we can retrieve from. Those platforms have their own terms, which apply to you independently of these.

You need a free account to download. You must give an accurate email address, keep your credentials secure, and you are responsible for activity under your account. Authentication is handled by Clerk — see the Privacy Policy for what that involves.

You must be old enough to form a binding contract where you live, and at least 16. If you are under 16, do not create an account.

The free tier allows 3 downloads per day, at up to 480p, for videos up to 20 minutes, across the supported platforms other than YouTube.

Pro is $3.99 per month, $19.99 per year, or $49 once for lifetime access. Pro removes the daily limit, unlocks YouTube and quality up to 4K, lifts the length cap, raises batch limits, and includes the desktop application. Current prices and inclusions are always on the pricing page, which governs if it differs from this summary.

Payments are processed by Mollie B.V. We never see or store your full card details. Monthly and yearly plans renew automatically at the then-current price for your plan until you cancel. Prices are shown in US dollars; your bank may apply conversion or foreign-transaction fees we do not control.

Some regions are offered a reduced price. Where that applies it lasts for the life of the subscription, not as an introductory rate.

If a renewal charge fails, we retry it over the following days and your access continues during that window. If every attempt fails, Pro access ends when the paid period expires.

“Lifetime” means a single payment with no recurring charge, for as long as we operate the service. It is not a guarantee that the service will exist indefinitely — see clause 8.

You can cancel a recurring subscription at any time from your dashboard. Cancelling stops future charges. It does not end your current period: you keep Pro until the paid period expires, and we do not pro-rate or refund the remainder. Lifetime purchases have no recurring billing, so there is nothing to cancel.

Deleting your BlackHole account does not by itself cancel billing. Cancel first, then delete.

30-day money-back guarantee. We advertise this on our pricing page and we honour it. If you are unhappy with Pro for any reason, email support@blhole.com within 30 days of the charge and we will refund it in full. You do not have to give a reason. This applies to monthly, yearly and lifetime purchases alike, and it is in addition to the statutory rights below, not a replacement for them.

Refunds are issued to the original payment method through Mollie and typically take a few working days to appear. Pro access ends when the refund is issued.

Statutory withdrawal. If you are a consumer in the EU or UK you normally have 14 days to withdraw from a distance contract. Because BlackHole gives you immediate access to a digital service, by subscribing you ask us to begin performance straight away and acknowledge that the statutory right lapses once we have done so. Our 30-day guarantee is deliberately more generous than this, so in practice it is the one you will use. Neither affects your rights where the service is faulty or not as described.

Beyond the 30 days, refunds are at our discretion, and we would still rather fix a genuine problem than argue about it — a double charge, a failed service, or billing after a cancellation will always be put right.

If you raise a chargeback, we may immediately end access to paid features.

You are responsible for what you download and what you do with it. Copyright law applies to you, not to us, and it varies by country. Downloading material you have no right to copy may be unlawful where you live even if this service made it technically possible.

Specifically, you agree not to:

• download or distribute material you do not own, have a licence for, or have another lawful basis to copy;
• use the service to infringe copyright, trade marks, privacy, or any other right;
• download content depicting the sexual abuse of minors, or anything else whose mere possession is unlawful;
• resell, sublicense, or present the service as your own, including wrapping the API in a competing product;
• circumvent rate limits, tier restrictions, or authentication; share, resell, or publish API keys or desktop licence keys;
• attack, overload, scrape at scale, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to the service or the machines it runs on;
• use the service where doing so would break the law that applies to you.

A desktop licence key is for one device at a time. You can move it between your own devices from the dashboard; you may not share it.

The service is provided as-is. We do not promise uptime, and we do not promise that any particular platform will keep working. Platforms change how they serve media, and sometimes deliberately prevent tools like this from functioning; when that happens a platform may stop working with little or no notice. That is a normal and expected part of this service, not a defect.

We may change, suspend, or discontinue features, and we may change prices for future billing periods. Where a change materially reduces what you have paid for, we will give reasonable notice by email to the address on your account.

Downloaded files are held only briefly on our servers so you can retrieve them, and are then deleted automatically. We are not a storage service and keep no copy of your downloads — do not rely on us to retain anything.

We do not host, index, or curate a library of third-party media. We retrieve files at a user’s direction and delete them shortly afterwards, so there is generally nothing for us to take down. If you are a rights holder and believe the service is being used to infringe your rights, email support@blhole.com with enough detail to identify the work and the alleged use, and we will respond. We will terminate the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe.

Nothing here excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded — including your non-waivable rights as a consumer.

Subject to that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profits, data, or goodwill, or for any loss arising from a platform changing or blocking access. Our total liability to you in any twelve-month period is limited to the amount you paid us in that period.

You may stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or terminate your account if you breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we discontinue the service. If we terminate you without cause while you have paid time remaining, we will refund the unused portion.

These terms are governed by the law of the country in which we are established. If you are a consumer, nothing here removes the protection of the mandatory consumer rules of the country where you live, and you may bring proceedings in your local courts.

We may update these terms. The date at the top shows the last substantive revision. For changes that materially affect your rights we will give notice by email before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the new terms.

Questions about these terms: support@blhole.com. For what we do with your data, see the Privacy Policy.