Do I need terms and conditions on my website or app?

Check your actual features rather than assuming every website needs the same agreement. Payments, recurring charges, accounts, uploads, and app distribution each introduce rules users need to understand. A static page with none of those features presents a different question. Answer the following, then use the explanations below to identify the relevant obligations:

1. Do you sell goods, services, or digital content online?
2. Do you charge recurring fees or offer free trials that convert to paid plans?
3. Can users create accounts?
4. Can users post, upload, or share content others can see?
5. Do you distribute an app through Apple or Google Play?
6. Do you accept card payments through a provider such as Stripe?
7. Do you offer an API, marketplace, or business service?
8. Do you serve consumers in the EU, UK, Australia, Brazil, Canada, or New Zealand?

If you answered yes to any of questions 1 to 7, publishing terms is strongly advisable and sometimes legally necessary. If you also answered yes to question 8, your terms need to respect regional consumer rights rather than override them.

The Terms of Service generator asks similar questions and activates only the clauses your answers support. The questionnaire, full preview, and simple HTML and PDF download are free with no account; advanced regional or optional modules cost $5. Generated terms are not legal advice.

Not in the blanket way privacy notices often are. Privacy laws such as the GDPR attach a notice duty to collecting personal data. There is no equivalent rule saying every website must have a contract with its visitors.

Instead, the duty to publish terms-style information is triggered by what you do:

• selling goods, services, or digital content to consumers online
• charging recurring fees or offering free trials that convert into paid plans
• hosting, storing, or transmitting content provided by users
• distributing through app stores or accepting card payments through a provider

If your site is a static portfolio with no forms, accounts, sales, or user content, you may not need terms at all, although you may still need a privacy policy if you run analytics or collect email addresses. See do I need a privacy policy for that separate question, and privacy policy vs terms and conditions for how the two documents differ.

The sections below walk through each trigger, so you can see which ones apply to your project today and which will apply as it grows.

If you sell to consumers in the EU or UK, several laws require information that most businesses deliver through their terms and checkout pages.

• Provider details: Article 5 of the EU e-Commerce Directive requires your name, geographic address, email address, and, where applicable, trade register and VAT numbers to be easily and permanently accessible.
• Ordering information: Article 10 requires you to explain the technical steps to conclude the contract, how to correct input errors, and the languages offered, and to make contract terms and general conditions available in a way that lets users store and reproduce them.
• Pre-contract information: the Consumer Rights Directive requires clear information before a distance contract, including the total price, payment and delivery arrangements, the right of withdrawal, contract duration, and termination conditions.
• Order button: the final button must make clear that ordering involves an obligation to pay, for example “order with obligation to pay”.

The UK keeps equivalent rules in the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 and the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. In practice, a well-structured terms page plus a clear checkout is how sellers deliver all of this. The ecommerce terms and conditions generator is built around that flow.

Recurring billing is where US law gets most specific. The Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act (15 U.S.C. § 8403) covers negative option features sold online, such as subscriptions that renew until cancelled or trials that convert into paid plans. It requires you to:

1. clearly and conspicuously disclose all material terms before collecting billing information
2. obtain the consumer's express informed consent before charging
3. provide a simple mechanism to stop recurring charges

California's automatic renewal law (Business and Professions Code § 17600 and following) adds detailed duties: clear and conspicuous presentation of the renewal terms, affirmative consent, an acknowledgement that explains how to cancel, and online cancellation for subscriptions bought online. Amendments applying from July 1, 2025 added further requirements, including annual reminders and notice before certain price changes.

A separate FTC click-to-cancel rule was vacated by a federal appeals court in July 2025, but ROSCA and state laws still apply. For subscription businesses, clear terms plus a checkout that matches them are hard to avoid, which is why the SaaS terms of service generator treats renewal and cancellation as core sections.

If users can post, upload, comment, review, or message on your service, two regimes often apply.

EU Digital Services Act. Article 14 of the Digital Services Act requires providers of intermediary services offered in the EU to include in their terms and conditions information on any restrictions they impose on user content. That covers content moderation policies, procedures, measures, and tools, including algorithmic decision-making and human review, and the rules of any internal complaint-handling system. Unlike some later DSA duties, this one has no small-company exemption. For many forums, community sites, and SaaS tools with user uploads, it is a genuine legal reason to publish terms.

US DMCA. The safe harbour in 17 U.S.C. § 512 can shield service providers from some copyright liability for user content, but only if conditions are met. Two connect directly to your terms: you must designate an agent to receive infringement notices and register that agent with the US Copyright Office, and you must adopt, reasonably implement, and inform users of a policy for terminating repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances.

Depending on your answers, Legal Policy Generator's Terms of Service can include Digital Services Act and DMCA notice sections.

Platform rules are not laws, but they decide whether you can launch and get paid.

• Apple App Store: Apple applies its Standard EULA to apps unless you provide a custom EULA. For auto-renewable subscriptions, Apple's developer agreement requires links to your privacy policy and terms of use to be accessible within the app, and App Review commonly checks for a terms link in the listing too. Apps with user-generated content must offer filtering, reporting, blocking, and published contact information.
• Google Play: the Developer Distribution Agreement lets you attach your own EULA and makes you responsible for supporting your products and handling user complaints.
• Stripe: Stripe's activation guidance asks businesses to show customer service contact details, a refund and dispute policy, a cancellation policy where applicable, and a return policy for physical goods by the time they start selling. Stripe Checkout can also require customers to accept your terms before paying.

So even when no statute demands terms, the platforms you depend on often expect published rules on refunds, cancellation, and conduct. For app-specific setup, read terms and conditions for apps.

Where terms are optional, they are still the main contract tool you have. Here is what they do that nothing else on your site does:

• Set the rules of use. Acceptable use clauses give you a documented basis to remove content or suspend accounts for spam, abuse, or fraud.
• Protect your intellectual property. You state what you own and grant only a limited license to use it.
• Clarify user content rights. You obtain the license you need to host and display what users post, and nothing more.
• Explain money matters. Billing, renewal, cancellation, and refund terms reduce disputes and give you something to point to in a chargeback.
• Limit liability, within the law. Disclaimers and caps can reduce exposure, though consumer law limits how far they reach.
• Choose dispute routes. Within mandatory consumer protections, you can set governing law, venues, and complaint steps.
• Reserve the right to change or end the service, with appropriate notice.

Without terms, these questions are answered by default law, which may not reflect how your service works. That uncertainty is usually what costs small businesses the most when a dispute finally arrives.

Some sites genuinely gain little from terms, at least at launch:

• a personal portfolio or résumé site with no forms
• an informational page for a local business that sells nothing online
• a hobby blog without comments, accounts, or sponsored content

Even then, two cautions apply. First, a business website aimed at people in the EU is usually an information society service, so it must show operator details such as name, address, and email; German readers know this as the Impressum. Second, any contact form, newsletter, or analytics tool brings privacy obligations that terms would not solve anyway.

The moment you add accounts, payments, downloads, subscriptions, user posts, or an API, the case for terms becomes strong. It is far easier to publish them before your first customer than to introduce them later and ask every existing user to agree.

A useful habit: revisit this question whenever you ship a feature that touches money, accounts, or user content. Those are the changes that turn a site that could skip terms into one that clearly needs them.