These are the terms on which The Rotation is offered. They are written to be read, and the short version is the honest one: the register is yours, reading and exporting it is free forever, membership pays for the services that cost us something to run, and either of us can end the arrangement without ceremony. The detail follows.
The Rotation is a private register for watch collectors: a place to keep what you own, what you wear, and what you want, with the serial filed, the wear tracked, and the rate checked through your phone. It is software, and only software.
It is not a marketplace. Nothing is listed, nothing is brokered, no commission exists, and we earn nothing when you buy or sell a watch. It is not an authentication service — identification proposes a reference and says how sure it is; it never certifies that a watch is genuine. It is not a valuation service — a value in your register is an estimate. You may set it yourself, or accept one the Registrar proposes from the public asking and auction prices it finds for the reference; either way it is indicative, it is not a figure for your particular watch in its particular condition, and nothing here is an appraisal, an insurance or probate valuation, or financial advice. For insurance, tax, probate or a sale, obtain a valuation from a qualified valuer.
The Registrar is a machine. The Registrar, the Eye, the importer and the month’s letter are produced by an artificial-intelligence model — Claude, made by Anthropic — working from the material the request needs. Before anything of yours is first sent to Anthropic, the register asks for your permission, and you can withdraw it from your account at any time; the rest of the register works without it. The website asks, and the iPhone app asks from version 1.1.0, in the same words; an earlier version of the app does not ask, as the privacy notice explains. Anthropic processes each request for us under contract, does not use it to train its models, and deletes it within 30 days, or keeps it for up to two years only if its safety systems flag it. No person at The Rotation reads your question or writes the answer. The model can be wrong — about a reference, a specification, a date or a price — and what it proposes becomes part of your register only when you confirm it. Check anything that matters before you rely on it.
You must be 18 or over to open an account or buy a membership; we will close an account we learn belongs to someone under 18, and ask Apple to refund any unused part of a membership they have paid for. An account is for one person, opened with accurate details and kept behind credentials only you hold. You are responsible for what is done with your credentials; tell us promptly if you believe they are compromised. We may suspend an account used in breach of these terms — suspension locks every entrance at once — and we may end it for serious or repeated breach. You may leave at any time, and you may ask us to erase your account entirely; the privacy notice describes what erasure covers and how to ask. Leaving does not end a membership: it is bought through the App Store, the subscription is held by Apple rather than by us, and it goes on being charged after the account is gone. Only you can stop it, in Settings → your name → Subscriptions, and it is worth doing that before you ask for erasure. The same is true of suspension: it locks every entrance we control, and an App Store subscription is not one of them.
Reading and exporting your register is free, forever — member or not, lapsed or not. A collection belongs to whoever kept it, and holding it hostage would be a poor answer to that.
A register of three watches is free in the iPhone app from version 1.1.2. Without a membership you may file up to three watches with their photographs, have the Eye identify them within a daily allowance, keep their wear log, read them at the bench and check them with the compass, and the server keeps the register’s copy and its photographs under your account, as it does a member’s.
Membership buys the services that cost the house something to run: a register past three watches, and its cloud copy; photographs and identification by the Eye past the free three and on the wishlist, and identification past the free daily allowance; the bench’s recordings kept with a reading; filing with the Registrar, and the importer; and the Registrar’s monthly letter (paused for now, until it asks for its own permission). Model-assisted services carry a fair-use ceiling (currently sixty calls per account per day, and six in any one minute; a long import counts as several; and ten calls a day for the Eye without a membership, while the house’s free allowance for the day lasts) so that the service stays sound for everyone, and a house-wide daily ceiling may pause them for every member until the next day. The ceilings may change, and the register tells you when you reach one.
Everything you put into your register — records, photographs, notes, estimates — remains yours. You give us only the licence needed to store and process it in order to run the service for you, and that licence ends when the data does. The register is local-first: your device keeps its own copy, your export is a single file, and both remain yours in every case — while you are a member, after you lapse, and after you leave.
What you put in. You confirm that what you add to your register is yours to add, and that it is lawful: photographs you have the right to use, and notes that do not infringe anyone’s rights. We do not review your register, but we may remove anything we learn is unlawful. A card you draw is yours to share or withdraw; what you choose to show on it, and to whom, is your responsibility.
Keeping your own copy. Your device keeps your register, the server keeps a copy of every register of three watches or fewer and of every member’s, and each version it replaces is kept for thirty days, with daily backups that expire within the same period. Faults happen even with care, so we recommend you keep an export of your register from time to time; it is one file, free, and yours. After you ask us to erase your account, we cannot restore it.
Showing your watch in public. We never publish anything from your register unless you ask us to. If, for a particular watch, you choose to let the house show it — in a post, a film or on the site — you grant Atelier Benedict Limited a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to reproduce the record you selected (the watch, the reading, the photograph you chose) for that purpose, with your name shown only if you say so. The licence lasts until you withdraw it, which you may do at any time by writing to us; we will take the item down within fourteen days, though copies already printed or shared by others may persist. You confirm that the photograph is yours to license. What you paid, your serial number and your wear log are never shown.
The app, the website, the reference catalogue as compiled, the house’s text, design, films and photographs, and the name and marks of The Rotation belong to Atelier Benedict Limited or to those who license them to us. Your account gives you the right to use them for your own collection, and no other. You may not copy, resell or republish them; decompile or reverse-engineer the app except where the law allows it; or use the catalogue, the register’s outputs or the AI desks’ answers to build or train another service or AI system.
To help you identify and file a watch, the register draws on a shared catalogue of makers, models, references and specifications, and, where it has one, a picture of the reference. Makers’ names, model names, marks and pictures belong to their owners and are used only to identify the watch described; The Rotation is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any of them. If you hold rights in anything in the catalogue and object to its use, write to hello@therotation.ai naming the item and the right you hold. We will review it promptly and, where the objection is well founded, remove it, usually within five working days.
Use the register lawfully and as a person, not as a harvest. Do not probe, overload, or attempt to break the service; do not scrape or resell the reference catalogue; do not automate bulk use of the model desks; do not use a card — the single-watch address the register can issue — to mislead anyone about what it shows. We would rather never enforce any of this.
We provide The Rotation with reasonable skill and care, and we say plainly what its instruments can and cannot do. We do not promise uninterrupted availability; maintenance and faults happen, and the local-first design exists so that your register survives them. Features may evolve; anything material is announced. Readings, identifications and figures produced by the register's instruments are honest aids with stated limits — they are not professional advice, and decisions made on them are your own.
Not an emergency service. The Rotation is a register for watches. It is not a place to seek help in a crisis, and the AI desks are not a substitute for a person who can help. If you or someone else is in danger, call the emergency services (999 in the UK, 112 in the EU). In the UK, Samaritans will listen at any hour, free, on 116 123.
The register’s two instruments measure a watch with the phone you hold. The bench listens through the microphone and reports a rate in seconds a day and a beat error; it does not measure amplitude. The compass reads the phone’s magnetometer and reports whether a watch appears to carry a magnetic field.
Both are provided for information only. Neither is a professional, certified or calibrated instrument, and a phone’s microphone and magnetometer were not made or calibrated for this work. We build the tools with care and say what they can and cannot do, but we make no commitment that a reading is accurate for any particular watch, phone or occasion. A reading can change with the watch’s position, how fully it is wound, the temperature, background noise, the case and strap, magnets and metal nearby, and the phone itself, and a timegrapher or demagnetiser in a watchmaker’s workshop may give a different result.
A reading is not a certificate of accuracy or chronometer performance, not a diagnosis of the movement, not a recommendation to service, regulate or demagnetise a watch, and not evidence of a watch’s condition or value for a sale, an insurance claim or a warranty. Before you act on a reading, or make any decision that matters, have the watch examined by a qualified watchmaker. Any decision you make on a reading is your own.
The register runs on services provided by others: Apple for the app and its payments, Anthropic for the AI desks, and our hosting and database providers. We choose them with care and hold each to a written agreement, but we do not control them. If one of them fails, the parts of the register that depend on it may pause until it returns, and the AI desks in particular may be unavailable when their provider is. We are responsible for choosing and using these services with reasonable care, and not for failures of theirs that we could not reasonably have prevented.
Events outside our control. We are not responsible for a delay or failure caused by an event outside our reasonable control, such as a failure of the internet, power or a provider, a cyber-attack we could not reasonably have prevented, fire, flood, or an act of government. If one happens we will tell you as soon as we reasonably can and do what we reasonably can to limit its effect. If it lasts more than thirty days you may end your membership, and any refund due will be asked of Apple on your behalf.
Nothing in these terms limits liability that the law does not allow to be limited — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or your statutory consumer rights. Beyond that, we are not liable for loss that was not reasonably foreseeable when you joined, nor for business loss. Our total liability to you under these terms is limited to the greater of the membership fees you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim and £100. Nothing here limits your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 — including, if digital content we supply damages your device or other digital content, our duty to repair the damage or compensate you.
You may cancel at any time, as above. We may end membership on reasonable notice, refunding any part of a term you have paid for and not received; the refund is Apple's to make rather than ours, and we will ask them for it on your behalf. We may end or suspend membership immediately for serious breach. We may also suspend the service, or part of it, immediately where security or the law requires it, and we will restore it as soon as we reasonably can. If we ever decide to close The Rotation altogether, we will tell you at least sixty days before, stop any renewal, ask Apple to refund any part of a term you have paid for and will not receive, and keep your register open for you to export until the day it closes. In every one of these cases the standing promise holds: your register stays yours to read and to export.
If the house changes hands. We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another organisation, for example if the business is sold or reorganised. We will tell you before it happens, your rights under these terms will not be reduced by it, and if you would rather not continue with the new operator you may end your membership and keep your register, as above.
Each version of these terms carries its date at the top, and the earlier versions are kept at therotation.ai/legal/history. If we change them in a way that matters to you, you will be told by email before the change takes effect — at least 30 days before, unless the law or a security need requires it sooner — with time to leave first and without charge. A change to the price never takes effect in the middle of a term already paid for. Corrections that describe the service more accurately, and take nothing from you, take effect when published. The terms in force when you renew are the terms that apply to that term.
Where the site, a post or a film shows how a named watch is running — a rate in seconds a day, a beat error, a magnetic reading — what is shown is one watch: a single specimen, measured on a telephone by its microphone or its compass, in an ordinary room, on the date stated. It is a record of that watch on that day. It is not a test of the reference, not a review of the model, and not a statement about any other example of it; a watch's rate and its magnetic state change with wear, position, temperature, service and time, and a bench measurement made by a watchmaker may differ. The Rotation is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any watch manufacturer. Makers' names and model names are used only to identify the watch being described, and remain the property of their owners. Nothing published here is advice about buying, selling, servicing or valuing a watch.
Where you use the iPhone app, the licence to the app is granted by Atelier Benedict Limited, not by Apple. Apple is not a party to these terms and has no obligation to furnish maintenance, support or warranty for the app; Apple's only duty is, if the app fails to conform to a warranty, to refund its price to you where one was paid. Any claim relating to the app — product liability, a legal or regulatory requirement, a consumer-protection claim, or an intellectual-property claim — is ours to answer, not Apple's. The licence is non-transferable and is for use of the app on Apple-branded devices that you own or control, as the Usage Rules in the App Store Terms of Service allow, including through Family Sharing where the app permits it. You must comply with any applicable third-party terms when using the app. You confirm that you are not located in a country subject to a United States Government embargo or designated by the United States Government as a “terrorist supporting” country, and that you are not on any United States Government list of prohibited or restricted parties. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of this section and, on your acceptance of these terms, have the right to enforce it against you. An auto-renewing subscription bought in the app is charged to your Apple ID at the price shown before purchase, renews at the end of each term unless cancelled at least twenty-four hours before it ends, and is managed and cancelled only in Settings → your name → Subscriptions. A first membership on a plan may begin with a free trial of seven days, shown at the point of sale; it becomes the paid term unless cancelled at least twenty-four hours before it ends, and any unused part of it is forfeited if a membership is purchased.
Write to us at hello@therotation.ai and tell us what went wrong. We will acknowledge you within five working days and aim to resolve it within thirty. If we cannot agree, we will say so in writing with our final position, and you remain free to go to court as Law describes. A complaint about a payment taken by Apple is Apple’s to decide, through Report a Problem, and we will help you raise it.
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes belong to its courts — except that if you are a consumer elsewhere, you keep any mandatory protections of your own country's law and the right to bring proceedings at home.
If a court decides that part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies. If we do not insist on something at once, we have not given it up. Apart from Apple, as Membership through the App Store describes, no one else has a right to enforce these terms. We will send notices to the email address on your account, and you may send yours to hello@therotation.ai. If you send us ideas or suggestions about the register, we may use them freely and owe nothing for them. These terms are in English.
The Rotation is operated at therotation.ai by Atelier Benedict Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under number 17110936, registered office at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. You can write to us about anything in these terms at hello@therotation.ai.
Complete and return this form only if you wish to cancel the contract within the fourteen days above. It tells us; to stop Apple renewing the subscription, cancel it in Settings → your name → Subscriptions as well, and a refund of anything paid is Apple’s to give.
To Atelier Benedict Limited, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, hello@therotation.ai:
I hereby give notice that I cancel my contract for the supply of the following service: membership of The Rotation.
Ordered on [*] / received on [*]: ____________
Name of consumer: ____________
Address of consumer: ____________
Signature of consumer (only if this form is notified on paper): ____________
Date: ____________
[*] Delete as appropriate.
← therotation.ai