Terms of Service

SoChefs.com ("we," "us," "our")

Effective date: 8/13/2026

Last updated: 8/13/2026

These Terms are written in plain language on purpose. They are still an agreement, and by using SoChefs.com you accept them.

0. The short version

This summary is here to help. It is not a substitute for the full Terms, and if the two ever conflict, the full Terms control.

• You must be at least 14 to use SoChefs.com.
• Post recipes for food — real food, meant to be eaten by people, safe to eat when made as written.
• Nothing toxic, poisonous, inedible, or dangerous. No pranks, no dares, no "challenges."
• Keep it clean. No vulgar or offensive language or images.
• Be awesome to each other. People come here to feed the people they love. Act accordingly.
• If you publish a recipe publicly, you are giving away the words. The Recipe Text enters the public domain — permanently, worldwide, for anyone to use. You cannot take it back.
• Your photos are different. You keep them. They do not enter the public domain. You give us a license to show them on the site and to promote the site, and nothing more.
• If you don't publish it, it stays entirely yours — words and photos both — and we won't use it for anything but showing it to you and the people you share it with.
• We moderate with software plus human review. Software makes mistakes. You can appeal.
• We do not test recipes. Cook at your own risk and check your own allergens. See Section 10.

1. Agreement to these Terms

1.1 These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you and SoChefs.com and govern your use of SoChefs.com and related services (together, the "Service").

1.2 By creating an account, or by accessing or using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

1.3 Our Privacy Policy is part of these Terms.

2. Who may use SoChefs.com

2.1 Minimum age: 14. No exceptions.

You must be at least 14 years old to create an account or use the Service. There is no exception to this rule. You confirm that you are 14 or older when you create an account. We do not knowingly permit anyone under 14 to use the Service, and we will terminate any account we reasonably believe belongs to someone under 14.

2.2 Honesty about age

Lying about your age — or helping someone else lie about theirs — is a material breach of these Terms and grounds for immediate termination.

2.3 Other eligibility requirements

You must not be barred from using the Service under the laws that apply to you, and you must not be using it to evade a previous suspension or ban.

3. Your account

3.1 Accurate information. Give us accurate registration information and keep it current.

3.2 One human, one account. Accounts are for individual people. Don't share your login, don't sell or transfer your account, and don't run automated accounts without our written permission.

3.3 Security. You are responsible for keeping your password secure and for everything that happens under your account. Tell us promptly at support@sochefs.com if you suspect unauthorized access.

3.4 Closing your account. Email us at support@sochefs.com and we will close your account. Note that closing your account does not reverse the public domain dedication in Section 7.3 for Recipe Text you already published publicly.

4. Be awesome to each other

This is the heart of SoChefs.com, and it is a rule, not a slogan.

Be awesome to each other.

Cooking is generosity. Somebody's grandmother wrote down the thing she made every Sunday for forty years, and now it's here, and someone across the world is going to make it for their kids tonight. Treat that with the respect it deserves, and treat each other the same way.

Being awesome looks like: Sharing what you know. Assuming good faith. Giving useful, kind feedback. Crediting the cook, the country, or the tradition a dish came from. Being patient with beginners — everyone burned the first thing they ever made. Saying "here's what worked for me" instead of "you're doing it wrong." Reporting genuinely unsafe recipes instead of just mocking them.

Being awesome does not look like: Cruelty dressed up as honesty. Pile-ons. Sneering at someone's food, culture, budget, diet, body, or skill level. Making the comments section about you. Ruining someone's day for sport.

We will enforce this clause using the specific rules in Sections 5 and 6, and we reserve the right to act on conduct that violates the spirit of this section even where it doesn't neatly fit a listed rule. If you're not sure whether something is awesome, it probably isn't. Don't post it.

5. Recipe content rules

5.1 Food only

Every recipe you post must be for food or drink intended to be consumed by humans.

This means no recipes for: soap, bath bombs, candles, slime, play dough, cosmetics or skincare, cleaning products, pest control, fertilizer, craft projects, pet or livestock food, or anything else that is not human food — even if it is made entirely from food ingredients. A sugar scrub is not a recipe. A dog biscuit is not a recipe. This is a recipe site for people food.

Decorations, garnishes, and anything else presented as part of a finished dish must also be food-safe and edible, or clearly and prominently marked as "remove before eating."

5.2 Edible and safe as written

Every recipe must, when followed as written by an ordinary home cook, produce something that is safe for a healthy adult to eat.

A recipe must not:

(a) call for any ingredient that is poisonous or toxic to humans, or any substance not intended for human consumption;

(b) call for a plant, fungus, or animal that is toxic unless expertly identified or prepared, or that requires a specialist license to prepare (for example, pufferfish);

(c) omit a preparation step that is necessary to make an ingredient safe — for example, thoroughly cooking dried kidney beans, properly processing cassava, cooking elderberries, or removing rhubarb leaves;

(d) contain any instruction that a reasonable person would recognize as likely to cause poisoning, foodborne illness, burns, or other injury; or

(e) be designed as a prank, dare, trap, or "challenge" — including recipes intended to be inedible, revolting, painful, or harmful, and including recipes intended to deceive someone about what they are eating.

5.3 High-risk recipes

Some real cooking carries real risk. The following are allowed only if your recipe includes clear, accurate safety instructions, and we may remove them if it does not:

• Home canning, preserving, and pickling (low-acid foods must follow a tested, published process — botulism is fatal)
• Fermentation and curing
• Raw or undercooked meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, or flour
• Raw milk and raw-milk dairy
• Sprouts, and other high-risk produce
• Deep frying, sugar work, pressure cooking, blowtorches, and other high-heat techniques
• Recipes containing common allergens (see 5.4)

The following are not allowed at all:

• Recipes calling for wild-foraged mushrooms or wild plants that require expert identification to distinguish from toxic look-alikes
• Distilling alcohol (illegal for home cooks in the United States)
• Recipes containing any controlled substance or prescription drug
• Solvent extraction of any kind — producing concentrates or oils using butane, propane, or other flammable solvents. Home extraction of this type causes explosions, severe burns, and house fires.
• Recipes whose purpose is to conceal, adulterate, or misrepresent an ingredient

5.4 Allergens

If your recipe contains a common allergen — milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soy, or sesame — say so plainly in the recipe and its tags. Do the same for anything else a reasonable person would want warning about.

Allergen information is provided by users, not by us. We do not verify it. See Section 10.

5.5 Alcohol

Recipes containing alcohol are permitted, but they must say they contain alcohol, they must not encourage excessive, rapid, or underage drinking, and if you are under 18, don't post them.

5.6 Recipes must be yours to post

See Section 7.1. Don't copy someone else's recipe blog, cookbook, or photographs and post them as your own.

5.7 Photographs

Recipe photographs should be your own photographs of food you actually made. Don't post stock images, images pulled from the web, or someone else's food photography.

An AI-generated image may not be presented as a photograph of a finished dish. A picture of a dish nobody has actually cooked is not useful to anyone deciding whether to cook it. Beyond that, AI-generated images are welcome — as avatars, cover photos, in Community Kitchen posts, anywhere they aren't standing in for a finished dish or trying to deceive anyone.

6. Prohibited content and conduct

Beyond the recipe rules above, you may not post, upload, or share content — or behave in a way — that is:

Vulgar or offensive. No profanity, crude language, sexual innuendo, or vulgar imagery, in recipe titles, descriptions, comments, usernames, or photos. Keep language and images suitable for a general audience that includes 14-year-olds.

Sexual. No sexual or sexually suggestive content of any kind. Any sexual content involving a minor will be removed, the account terminated, and the matter reported to law enforcement and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Hateful or harassing. No attacks on people based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, or serious disease. No harassment, bullying, threats, stalking, or coordinated pile-ons.

Violent or graphic. No threats, no incitement, no gratuitous gore.

Harmful to others. No content promoting self-harm, disordered eating, or dangerous restriction. No doxxing or publishing private information. No content that exploits or endangers a minor.

Illegal or infringing. No content that breaks the law or infringes anyone's intellectual property, privacy, or publicity rights.

Deceptive. No impersonation, no fake accounts, no misrepresenting your affiliation with a person or organization.

Spam or commercial abuse. No spam, no engagement farming, no bulk or repetitive posting, no undisclosed paid or affiliate content, no advertising without our written permission, no multi-level-marketing recruitment.

Technically abusive. No malware, no phishing, no scraping or bulk-harvesting user data, no attempts to breach, overload, or reverse-engineer the Service, no bots or automated access without permission, and no circumventing our moderation systems, rate limits, or bans.

Ban evasion. If we terminate your account, do not create a new one.

7. Your recipes, your photos, and the public domain

Two different rules apply to what you publish. The words of a public recipe go into the public domain. Your photographs stay yours, with a limited license to us. Read 7.3 and 7.4 together — they are not the same deal.

Definitions used in this section:

• "Recipe Text" means the written parts of a recipe: its title, ingredient list, instructions, description, tags, and any other text you enter into the recipe fields.
• "Visual Content" means photographs and other images you upload, whether attached to a recipe or posted elsewhere on the Service.

7.1 You must have the right to post it

You represent that everything you post is either your own original work, or something you have the legal right to post and to license as described below. You are solely responsible for your content.

7.2 Private and unpublished content stays yours

Anything you do not publish publicly remains your work. You retain all ownership and copyright in it.

You grant us only the limited license we need to actually run the Service: to store, back up, and display your private content to you and to anyone you have specifically chosen to share it with. We will not use your private content for anything else.

7.3 Public Recipe Text enters the public domain

Read this section carefully. It is permanent, and it applies to the words of your recipe only — not to your photographs.

When you choose to publish a recipe publicly on SoChefs.com, you irrevocably dedicate that Recipe Text to the public domain worldwide, to the fullest extent permitted by law, and you waive all copyright and related rights in it. We implement this dedication using the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. To whatever extent that dedication is ever found ineffective, you instead grant everyone a permanent, irrevocable, unconditional license to use that Recipe Text for any purpose, without attribution.

This section does not apply to Visual Content. See 7.4.

7.4 Your photographs: you keep them; you license them to us

You own your Visual Content. Publishing it on SoChefs.com does not place it in the public domain and does not transfer ownership to us. You keep your copyright, and you remain free to use, publish, sell, or license your own photographs anywhere else, at any time, without asking us and without paying us.

What you give us is a license: when you publish Visual Content on SoChefs.com, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, resize, and display it as part of running the Service, and to use it in promoting SoChefs.com — for example on the site itself, in emails to members, and in our own posts about the site.

We will not sell or license your Visual Content to anyone else as standalone imagery. If we ever want to use a photograph of yours beyond what this section allows, we will ask you first, individually, and you can say no.

The license runs while your Visual Content is on the Service. If you delete it or close your account, we stop displaying and using it, allowing a reasonable time for backup copies to age out.

7.5 What all of this actually means for you

Before you hit "publish," understand what you are agreeing to:

• Your recipe's words are a gift to everyone. Anyone, anywhere, can copy your public Recipe Text and use it for any purpose — including printing it in a cookbook and selling it — without paying you and without crediting you. You cannot take that back.
• Your photographs are still yours. They do not go into the public domain. Someone who copies your public recipe gets the words only. They have no right to your photos, and if they take them anyway, you are the one who can act on it.
• We only use your photos to run and promote the site. Nothing else without asking you first.
• Deleting stops future use, not past use. It won't undo the public domain dedication on your words.
• If you want to keep everything, keep it private. That option is always there.

7.6 Promises you make about your photographs

For every photograph you publish, you confirm that you made it (or have the rights to it), that anyone identifiable in it is okay with it appearing here, and that anything you present as a photograph of a finished dish is a real photograph of real food you made (see 5.7).

7.7 A note on recipes and copyright generally

In the United States, a bare list of ingredients and basic cooking directions is generally not protected by copyright at all, regardless of what any terms of service say. Copyright protects the expressive parts — your photographs, your stories, your descriptive writing. Section 7.3 dedicates whatever rights you do have in the words; it does not create rights that never existed.

7.8 Our content

The Service itself — our name, logo, design, software, and original content — belongs to us and is protected by intellectual property law. These Terms do not give you any right to use it beyond using the Service as intended.

7.9 Feedback

If you send us suggestions or feedback about the Service, we may use them freely, without compensation or obligation to you.

8. Moderation

8.1 Automated moderation

We use automated systems ("the automoderator") to screen content for violations of these Terms — before publication, after publication, or both. The automoderator may hold, hide, remove, or flag content automatically and without prior notice.

Automated systems make mistakes in both directions. They will sometimes hold content that broke no rule, and they will sometimes miss content that did.

8.2 Human review

Human review backs up the automoderator. You may appeal any automated decision (see 8.3), we will not permanently terminate an account on the basis of an automated decision alone — except in cases of severe harm, where we may act immediately — and we review flagged and reported content, prioritizing safety issues.

8.3 Appeals

If you believe we got it wrong, email moderation@sochefs.com. Tell us what was removed and why you think the decision was mistaken. A human will review it as quickly as we can and tell you the outcome. Our decision on appeal is final.

8.4 No obligation to monitor

We may, but are not obligated to, monitor content on the Service. We do not pre-approve, endorse, verify, or test user content, and the presence of a recipe on SoChefs.com is not our statement that it is safe, accurate, legal, or any good.

8.5 Enforcement

Depending on severity and history, we may: warn you; remove or restrict content; limit your account's features; suspend your account temporarily; or terminate your account permanently. We may also remove content or terminate accounts to comply with the law or to protect the safety of our users or the Service.

8.6 Reporting

Report content that breaks these rules using the in-product report tool, or at moderation@sochefs.com. If you believe a recipe is genuinely dangerous, report it immediately and label it as a safety issue. We prioritize those.

9. Copyright complaints

If you believe content on SoChefs.com infringes your copyright, send a notice to abuse@sochefs.com. Include: identification of your work, where the infringing material is on the Service, your contact information, a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized, and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and you are authorized to act for the copyright owner. If we remove your content in response to such a notice, you may send a counter-notice to the same address. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.

10. Food safety — please read this

WE DO NOT TEST, VERIFY, OR APPROVE RECIPES. EVERY RECIPE ON SoChefs.com WAS WRITTEN BY A MEMBER OF THE PUBLIC. YOU COOK, EAT, AND SERVE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

By using the Service, you understand and agree that:

(a) Cooking is inherently risky. It involves heat, fire, sharp tools, pressure, raw ingredients, and pathogens.

(b) Recipes may be wrong. They may contain errors, omissions, unsafe instructions, or ingredients that are unsafe for you specifically. Our moderation reduces this risk. It does not eliminate it.

(c) Allergen information is supplied by users and is not verified by us. If you have a food allergy or intolerance, do not rely on tags, comments, or recipe text. Check every ingredient yourself. A missing tag is not a statement that an allergen is absent.

(d) Nothing on the Service is medical, nutritional, or dietary advice. Nutrition information, where shown, is an estimate. Talk to a qualified professional about your health.

(e) You are responsible for safe food handling — sourcing, storage, temperature, cooking times, cross-contamination, and hygiene. Follow the guidance of the USDA and FDA.

(f) Use judgment. If a recipe looks wrong, unsafe, or too good to be true, do not make it. Report it instead.

11. Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service and all content on it are provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied — including any warranty that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, or that any content on it is accurate or safe.

12. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law: we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or loss of goodwill; we are not liable for content posted by users, for the conduct of users, or for anything you make, eat, or serve; and our total liability to you for all claims relating to the Service is limited to USD $100.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

13. Indemnification

If your content or your use of the Service causes a claim against SoChefs.com, you agree to indemnify us — to cover the losses and reasonable legal costs that claim causes us.

14. Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, how we use it, and what rights you have. By using the Service, you agree to it.

15. Termination

15.1 You may stop using the Service at any time, and close your account per Section 3.4.

15.2 We may suspend or terminate your access, with or without notice, if you breach these Terms, if we are required to by law, or if we reasonably believe it is necessary to protect our users, the public, or the Service.

15.3 We may discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, at any time.

15.4 Sections that survive termination: 7.3 (public domain dedication), 7.4 (to the extent stated there), 7.5, 10, 11, 12, and 13, along with any other provision that by its nature should survive.

16. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. If the changes are material, we will give you reasonable advance notice — by email, in-product notice, or both — before they take effect. If you keep using the Service after that, you accept the new Terms. If you don't accept them, close your account.

Changes to these Terms will not retroactively affect the public domain status of Recipe Text already published under Section 7.3, and we will not broaden the photograph license in Section 7.4 retroactively. If we ever want to use your Visual Content in a way the current version of 7.4 does not permit, we will ask you first.

17. General terms

Entire agreement. These Terms, plus the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between us about the Service.

Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest stays in effect.

No waiver. If we don't enforce a provision, that's not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.

Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

Notices. We may send notices to the email address on your account. You may send notices to support@sochefs.com.

Headings. Headings are for convenience only.

Thanks for cooking with us. Be awesome to each other.