Terms of Use

Last updated 27 July 2026

These terms are an agreement between you and Parallel Bars (“Parallel Bars”, “we”, “us”) covering the Parallel Bars mobile app and this website (the “Service”). By using the Service you accept them. If you don’t, please don’t use it.

1. You must be 21 or over

The Service is about bars and alcohol, and is available only to people who are 21 years of age or older. The app asks you to confirm this the first time you open it. You must also be of legal drinking age wherever you are using it. If you are under 21, you may not use the Service, and we will delete any account we learn belongs to a minor.

Nothing in the Service encourages excessive drinking. You are solely responsible for your own consumption, your conduct, and how you get home. Never drink and drive.

2. What the Service is — and isn’t

Parallel Bars helps you find bars whose vibe resembles a bar you already like. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any bar listed in the app. We do not sell alcohol, take reservations, sell tickets, or act as an agent for any venue. A bar appearing in the app is not a recommendation by us, and a high match percentage is a community-driven opinion, not a promise about your evening.

3. Your account

You can browse without an account. To contribute — tagging, voting, saving home bars — you need to sign in. You are responsible for keeping access to your account secure, and for activity that happens under it. Use one account per person. You may delete your account at any time from inside the app.

4. Your contributions and the licence you grant us

“Contributions” means the tags you apply to bars and the votes you cast on tags.

You keep ownership of your Contributions. By submitting them, you grant Parallel Bars a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable licence to host, store, reproduce, modify, adapt, aggregate, publish, publicly display and otherwise use your Contributions in order to operate, improve, and promote the Service. That expressly includes combining them with other users’ Contributions and deriving aggregate values from them — such as the confidence scores and match percentages the app is built on.

This licence is perpetual and survives the deletion of your account, for a practical reason: once other people have voted on a tag you added, that tag has become shared community data, and removing it would strip information from bars unconnected to you. When you delete your account we sever the link between you and your Contributions, as described in our Privacy Policy. Your votes are deleted outright.

You confirm that you have the right to submit each Contribution, that it is your genuine opinion of the bar, and that submitting it breaks no law and infringes nobody’s rights.

5. Acceptable use — no scraping or bulk extraction

You agree not to:

• Scrape, crawl, harvest, bulk-download or otherwise systematically extract bar listings, tags, votes, confidence scores or match results from the Service, by any means including automated scripts, headless browsers, or direct calls to our API;
• Redistribute, republish, resell or sublicense our data, or use it to build, train, or seed a competing product or dataset;
• Manipulate the ratings — no bots, no multiple accounts, no coordinated voting, no voting on bars you have never been to, and no accepting payment from a venue to tag or vote a particular way;
• Attempt to bypass our access controls, rate limits or authentication, probe the Service for vulnerabilities, or access data belonging to other users;
• Reverse engineer or decompile the app except where law expressly permits it;
• Use the Service unlawfully, or to harass, defame or endanger anyone.

Ordinary personal use of the app is of course fine. This section is aimed at automated and commercial extraction, not at you looking up a lot of bars. If you want to use our data for research, ask us at hello@parallelbars.app.

6. Moderation

We may remove, hide, reweight or refuse any Contribution at our discretion and without notice, including where we think it is inaccurate, manipulated, or in breach of these terms. The app also hides low-confidence tags automatically once the votes stop supporting them, which is a normal part of how scoring works rather than a penalty.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you breach these terms. We are not obliged to monitor Contributions, and we do not undertake to review them before they appear.

7. Bar information may be inaccurate

This matters enough to say plainly: the information in the app can be wrong. Bar listings come from open datasets that may be out of date, some starter tags were generated by AI, and the rest is crowdsourced opinion. Names, addresses and locations may be incorrect. A bar may have changed hands, changed character, or closed permanently. Tags may not reflect what the place is like tonight.

Check before you travel — call ahead or confirm with the venue. Do not rely on the Service to tell you whether a bar is open, accessible, or suitable for you. Match percentages are a similarity measurement over community tags, not a guarantee of anything.

8. Tips

The app may show a “Buy the team a beer” link. Tips are entirely voluntary, are processed on Buy Me a Coffee’s website under their terms, are non-refundable, and unlock nothing — no features, no perks, no priority. They are a thank-you, not a purchase.

9. Our intellectual property

The Parallel Bars name, logo, design and the software itself belong to us. These terms give you a personal, revocable, non-transferable licence to use the app for your own non-commercial use, and nothing more. Underlying place data remains subject to the licences of Overture Maps and Foursquare Open Source Places.

10. No warranty

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that any information in it is accurate or current. You use it at your own risk.

11. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Parallel Bars will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, profits, goodwill, or for any injury, loss or expense arising from your use of the Service — including anything that happens at or on the way to a bar you found through it. Our total aggregate liability to you is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid us (which, tips aside, is nothing) or US$50.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or liabilities, so parts of sections 10 and 11 may not apply to you. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

12. Third-party services

The Service relies on third parties — Apple Maps and Google Maps for mapping, Apple and Google for sign-in, and Buy Me a Coffee for tips. Their own terms govern your use of them, and we are not responsible for their content or availability.

13. Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time and delete your account from within the app. We may suspend or end your access if you breach these terms or if we discontinue the Service. Sections 4, 5, 10 and 11 survive termination.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will change the date at the top and, for significant changes, flag them in the app. Continuing to use the Service after a change means you accept it.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Minnesota, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and you and we agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located there.

16. Contact

hello@parallelbars.app