Terms of service
Plain terms for using this website, trying the software and buying a licence key.
1. Who we are and what this covers
The website www.hammsoft.com and the Hamm Software range of Windows language-learning apps are operated by Zhongcheng Huang, an individual (sole proprietor) trading as "Hamm Software" ("we", "us", "our"). We are a one-person business rather than a company, and "Hamm Software" is a trading name, not a separate legal entity. Our contact address for everything - orders, licence keys, support, refunds, billing questions and privacy requests - is myhama@hotmail.com, which a person reads and answers.
These terms cover your use of the website, the free trials offered here, the way orders are placed, and how licence keys are delivered and supported. Three companion documents complete them: the licence agreement governs your use of the software itself, the refund policy states when a purchase can be refunded, and the privacy policy explains what personal data we hold and why. Where they overlap, they are meant to be read together.
By using this website, ordering a licence or activating a licence key you confirm that you are at least 18 years old, that you have read and accept these terms, and that you accept the privacy policy. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site and do not order a licence. Nothing here takes away rights that the mandatory consumer law of your own country gives you.
2. Using the website
You may browse and download from this site for your own personal use. Please do not attempt to overload, probe or interfere with the site, scrape it automatically, or use our product names and recordings in a way that suggests we endorse your own product or service.
3. Trials and downloads
Every product can be tried free of charge for seven days from the first launch, counting from the day you first run it. The trial is recorded per Windows user account, so re-installing does not restart it. Download files are provided as they are; please check the checksums published on the download page.
4. Orders and payment
Orders are placed through the payment page linked from buy.html, or by e-mail if you prefer a person to handle it; an e-mail order is confirmed by us in writing before anything is charged. Prices are quoted in US dollars; the price shown is the total price for one language and includes both the Dialogs and the Vocabulary edition. A licence key is issued once the payment has been received and matched to your order. If you are charged in a currency other than US dollars, your bank or card issuer applies its own conversion rate.
Payments are processed by Waffo Pancake, our payment service provider. It is PCI-DSS compliant and handles the card data; your full card number never reaches our servers, and we cannot see or store it. We receive only what is needed to match a payment to an order: the amount and currency, the payment status, a payment reference, and the e-mail address and country you supply. A charge appears on your card statement under a descriptor that identifies this purchase; if you do not recognise a charge, please write to us before asking your bank to reverse it - see section 10.
A purchase here is a one-time payment, not a subscription. Nothing renews, nothing is charged again automatically, there is no recurring billing to switch off, and we never hold your card details for a later charge. Each language is a separate purchase, and a purchase is complete once the licence key has been delivered. The price and what is included are also shown on pricing.html and on the checkout page itself.
5. Refunds and your right to cancel
Because there is no subscription, there is nothing to cancel and no renewal to stop. What you can ask for is a refund, and the full conditions are in the refund policy, which is also displayed at checkout. In short:
- The software does not work on your PC and our support cannot solve it - even after you have installed the free .NET Desktop Runtime described on the site. Tell us within 30 days of the purchase and we refund the full amount.
- You bought the wrong language and have not activated the key yet: we swap it or refund it, whichever you prefer.
- You were charged twice, or charged for an order you did not place: the duplicate is refunded.
- The key never worked and we cannot issue a key that does: the purchase is refunded.
- What we cannot refund: a request made more than 30 days after the purchase; a key that has been shared, published or resold, which also ends the licence; or a change of mind after the key has been used, because the product is digital and delivered immediately - this is exactly what the free seven-day trial is for.
To ask, write to myhama@hotmail.com from the address you ordered with and include the product name, the approximate date of purchase and the payment reference. We reply to refund requests within two business days and process an approved refund within five business days; the money goes back the way it came. If you are a consumer in the European Union or the United Kingdom and you ask before the software has been delivered to you, your statutory right of withdrawal applies as well; this section does not restrict it.
6. Licence keys
A key is personal to the buyer, covers one language, and must be kept confidential. Keys are not transferable except together with the licence itself. Sharing a key publicly - in a forum, a repository or a download site - ends the licence for that key.
7. Content and intellectual property
The text, layout, product names, logos and all audio recordings and lesson data on this site and inside the products belong to Zhongcheng Huang (trading as "Hamm Software") or are used with permission. You may not copy, redistribute, resell or publish them, or use the recordings inside another application, without our written permission.
The apps contain no artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models of their own, and we do not use third-party AI models to provide the service: the dialogues and the word lists are written and recorded by people. The apps generate no content: every sound you hear is a recording made by a human native speaker before release, played back from the files that ship with the product, and there is no text, image, audio or video generation anywhere in the software. We do not use anything you send us, or any content of the apps, to train, fine-tune or evaluate an AI model, and section 8 lists the uses of our content that we do not allow.
8. Acceptable use of the software
You may use the software for any lawful purpose, for yourself or inside your own organisation. You agree not to:
- use the site or the apps for anything unlawful, defamatory, fraudulent or harmful, or in breach of the law of your country;
- copy, redistribute, resell, rent, sublicense or lend the software, a licence key, the audio recordings, the lesson data, the help pages or the artwork, or publish them anywhere;
- share a licence key publicly, or use a key you know was obtained that way;
- remove or alter any copyright notice, product name or version information;
- reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the software, except where the law of your country expressly allows it and only to the extent that it does;
- probe, overload or interfere with this website or its hosting, scrape it automatically, or try to obtain licence keys other than by buying them;
- put our recordings, lesson data or other content into another product or service, or use them to train, fine-tune, benchmark or evaluate a machine-learning model, including one that competes with ours.
If these rules are broken we may suspend or end the licence for that key, and the refunds described in section 5 no longer apply to it. Nothing in this section restricts uses that the law of your country does not allow us to prohibit.
9. Other stores and third parties
The same applications are also published in the Microsoft Store. Purchases made there are licensed and supported by the Store under Microsoft's own terms, and the price may differ. Links to third-party sites are provided for convenience; we are not responsible for their content.
10. Billing questions and chargebacks
If you think a charge is wrong - a duplicate, an amount you did not expect, or a charge you do not recognise at all - please write to myhama@hotmail.com before you ask your bank or card issuer to reverse it. Tell us the date, the amount and the product, and we will look the payment up with our payment provider. We reply to billing questions within two business days and resolve a confirmed billing error within five business days, by refunding the charge or correcting it. A chargeback raised without contacting us first takes much longer for everybody involved, and is easy to avoid.
11. Changes, availability and the end of a licence
We may change the website, the products and these terms at any time. Updates within the 1.x series of a product are free for licence holders. When these terms change we record a version number and an effective date at the top of this page and keep a dated log, and when a change materially affects you we tell you at least 14 days before it takes effect, by e-mail or by a dated notice on this page. Continuing to use the site or the software after that date means you accept the new version; if you do not accept it, please stop using them, and you keep the rights you already have under the earlier version.
A licence ends if you seriously break these terms, for example by publishing a key or redistributing the recordings; we may then suspend or end it, as section 8 describes. We may also stop offering a product or a part of this website - if we end a paid service for reasons that are not your fault, we refund the unused part of it. You may stop using the software at any time, and you can ask us to delete the personal data we hold about you as described in the privacy policy.
12. Liability
We work to keep the site and the downloads available and correct, but they are provided as they are, without any warranty beyond what the law requires. To the extent permitted by law we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, and our total liability for any claim connected with this website, a licence or the software is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event that gave rise to the claim. Nothing in these terms limits the rights you have as a consumer under the mandatory law of your own country, and nothing limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
13. Governing law and contact
These terms are governed by the laws of the People's Republic of China, without depriving you of the protection of the consumer law of your own country of residence. Before starting a formal proceeding about them, please write to myhama@hotmail.com and give us a chance to settle the matter informally; we reply within two business days. A disagreement that cannot be settled that way may be brought before the courts of the People's Republic of China, and if you are a consumer you may also be entitled to use the courts of your own country.
Contact us about these terms, an order, a licence key, a refund, a billing question or anything else in this document:
- E-mail, for everything: myhama@hotmail.com - orders, licence keys, support, refunds, billing and privacy requests.
- Who you are dealing with: Zhongcheng Huang, trading as "Hamm Software", an individual (sole proprietor) business. We are not a company, so there is no company registration number or registered office to publish, and we do not publish a postal address: the e-mail address above reaches the person who runs the business, normally within one business day (Hong Kong time, UTC+8).
- Response times: support and billing questions within two business days; refund decisions within two business days; privacy requests within 30 days.
By ordering a licence, or by ticking "I agree" at checkout, you confirm that you have read these terms and accept them. This is version 2.0 of the terms; it takes effect from the date shown at the top of this page, and it replaces earlier versions.
Questions about this page? Write to myhama@hotmail.com.