Terms of Service

This is a convenience translation. In case of discrepancies, the German version of these Terms prevails.

1. Scope and Provider

These Terms of Service govern your use of the Gartenkern platform (gartenkern.de and its subdomains, the "Platform").

Provider (data controller under GDPR):

Robert Gürgens
Software- und IT-Dienstleistungen (software and IT services)
Suhler Straße 17
12629 Berlin
Germany

Email: support@gartenkern.de

Small-business operator under § 19 of the German VAT Act (UStG); VAT is not shown on invoices.

By creating an account, you agree to these Terms and to the Privacy Policy.

2. Service Description

The Platform provides tools for managing private garden data: garden layout, planting journal, plant knowledge base, task calendar, photo management, and optional sharing through unlisted links.

We also operate the Gartenbörse, a public listing area for garden plots and garden properties. You can place paid offers and wanted ads there. A listing goes live only after editorial approval. Once live, it is publicly accessible and indexable by search engines. We show contact details to signed-in users only.

Some features require paid plans. Which ones is shown on the pricing page and in your account area.

3. Minimum Age

Use is permitted from age 16 (GDPR Art. 8 (1)). By registering you confirm you are at least 16 years old.

4. Contract Formation, Plans, and Payment

The free plan is called Gartenkern Free. A contract for a paid plan is formed when you click the button confirming the obligation to pay during checkout and we confirm your order by email.

• Prices: the prices shown on the pricing page at the time of your order apply. They contain no VAT due to § 19 UStG.
• Billing period: monthly or yearly, depending on the plan you choose.
• Payment: via Stripe or PayPal. Charges are made in advance for each billing period.
• Renewal: the subscription renews automatically for the same period unless you cancel before it ends.
• Trial: where we offer a free trial for a plan, we disclose its duration and the follow-on cost before you order.

Listing fees (Gartenbörse)

A listing in the Gartenbörse is paid for with a one-off fee per listing, not a subscription. The contract is formed when you click the button confirming the obligation to pay during checkout and we confirm your order by email.

• Price: €4.90 for a runtime of 60 days. Renewing for another 60 days costs €2.90. No VAT is charged under § 19 UStG (German small-business rule). No further costs.
• No automatic renewal: unlike a subscription, a listing does not renew by itself. When the runtime ends, publication ends until you renew it yourself.
• Approval reserved: your payment buys the review of your listing and, if the review succeeds, its publication. You acquire no right to publication.
• Changes requested: if we ask you to change something, the fee for that listing remains valid. You do not pay again.
• Rejection: if we ultimately reject the listing, we refund the fee under Section 5. Where abuse is documented, such as an attempted fraud or prohibited content, there is no refund.
• Credit: if you take out a paid plan within 12 months of your payment, we credit the fee in full. The credit is personal and can be redeemed once.

5. Right of Withdrawal for Consumers

If you are a consumer within the meaning of § 13 of the German Civil Code (BGB), the following right of withdrawal applies to paid plans and to listing bookings.

Withdrawal policy

Right of withdrawal

You have the right to withdraw from this contract within fourteen days without giving any reason. The withdrawal period is fourteen days from the day the contract was concluded.

To exercise your right of withdrawal, you must inform us

Robert Gürgens, Software- und IT-Dienstleistungen, Suhler Straße 17, 12629 Berlin, Germany, email: support@gartenkern.de

of your decision to withdraw from this contract by an unequivocal statement (for example a letter sent by post or an email). You may use the model withdrawal form below, but it is not obligatory.

To meet the withdrawal deadline, it is sufficient for you to send your communication concerning your exercise of the right of withdrawal before the withdrawal period has expired.

Effects of withdrawal

If you withdraw from this contract, we shall reimburse to you all payments received from you without undue delay and in any event not later than fourteen days from the day on which we are informed about your decision to withdraw. We will carry out such reimbursement using the same means of payment as you used for the initial transaction, unless you have expressly agreed otherwise; in any event, you will not incur any fees as a result of such reimbursement.

If you requested the service to begin during the withdrawal period, you shall pay us an amount which is in proportion to what has been provided until you have communicated to us your withdrawal from this contract, in comparison with the full coverage of the contract.

End of the withdrawal policy

In addition to letter and email, you can declare your withdrawal using the "Cancel contract" function in your account (/konto/widerruf, § 356a BGB). We confirm receipt without undue delay.

Model withdrawal form

If you wish to withdraw from the contract, please complete and return this form.

To: Robert Gürgens, Software- und IT-Dienstleistungen, Suhler Straße 17, 12629 Berlin, Germany, email: support@gartenkern.de

I/We (*) hereby give notice that I/We (*) withdraw from my/our (*) contract of sale of the following goods (*) / for the provision of the following service (*)

Ordered on (*) / received on (*)

Name of consumer(s)

Address of consumer(s)

Signature of consumer(s) (only if this form is notified on paper)

Date

(*) Delete as appropriate.

Specifics for listing bookings

Running a listing is a service. The following applies in addition:

• Start before the period ends: during checkout you expressly request that we begin publishing before the withdrawal period expires, and you confirm that you are aware your right of withdrawal will expire. Without that consent we cannot run the listing.
• Expiry: your right of withdrawal ends at the latest when the fourteen-day withdrawal period expires, and otherwise upon full performance of the service, that is when the booked runtime ends (§ 356 (5) no. 2 BGB, in the version in force since 19 June 2026). Whichever comes first applies. A withdrawal is therefore only possible within the fourteen-day period, not across the whole runtime of the listing.
• Withdrawal within the period: if you withdraw within that period after publication, you owe us a proportionate amount. We calculate it from the runtime of your order: price × days already published ÷ runtime days. What you get back is the remainder, price × remaining days ÷ runtime days (§ 357a (2) no. 1 BGB, CJEU C-641/19). We charge no flat processing fee.
• Withdrawal before publication: if your listing has not been published yet, we refund the fee in full.

The consent text in checkout reads:

I expressly request that Gartenkern begins publishing my listing before the withdrawal period expires. I am aware that my right of withdrawal expires upon full performance of the service, and that if I withdraw during the runtime I owe a proportionate amount corresponding to the time already published.

6. User Obligations

You commit to

• providing truthful information about yourself and keeping your account credentials confidential,
• not abusing the Platform, in particular uploading no unlawful content, circumventing no security mechanisms, and performing no automated bulk access without our consent,
• respecting third-party rights, so no copyrighted images without licence and no personal data of others without consent,
• complying with child protection and criminal law.

Listing terms (Gartenbörse)

The following clauses apply in addition to listings in the Gartenbörse. They carry fixed numbers so that every statement of reasons can name the clause it relies on.

A-1 No duplicate listings for the same property. This applies even if you delete a listing and post the same one again.

A-2 No keyword stacking. Do not string together search terms unrelated to the property.

A-3 No third-party photos without the right to use them.

A-4 The listing sits at the actual location of the property.

A-5 Amounts are truthful. This covers lease, service charges, valuation, and purchase price.

A-6 Commercial providers, associations, and federations identify themselves as such.

A-7 No circumvention of the contact gate. The free-text fields carry no contact details and no links.

A-8 No contact details of third parties without their consent.

A-9 No prohibited, misleading, or discriminatory content.

If a listing breaches one of these clauses, we withhold approval, ask you to make changes, or remove it. Our statement of reasons names the clause concerned (Art. 17 DSA).

7. Content and Licence

Your content (journal entries, photos, plantings, garden layouts) remains your intellectual property. You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, non-transferable licence to store, process, and display it within your account and to recipients you choose (shared workspaces, unlisted share links), solely for operating the Platform.

Visibility levels

For content you deliberately share beyond your own account there are four levels. You choose the level per item, and you can lower it again at any time.

At the Community and Public levels we display your contribution without your name. The licence covers display on gartenkern.de only. We do not sell your content, do not pass it to third parties, and do not train AI models on it.

If you lower the level or delete the content, the extended licence ends. We cannot recall copies already served into caches or search engine indexes, but we request their update as far as we are able.

The Public (listing) level exists only in the Gartenbörse, and it applies only for the runtime of your listing. The content of an approved listing is publicly accessible and indexable by search engines. Your contact details and the exact location of the property are shown to signed-in users only, and only on request. In public we show the location roughly, rounded to a point.

For listings from private providers, consumer protection rules do not apply to a contract between you and the provider. We provide the area and do not become a party to that contract (Art. 246d § 1 no. 5 EGBGB).

What you check before sharing

For content you set to Community or Public you are responsible for having the right to do so. Specifically:

• People shown in photos must consent.
• Third-party images (from the web, from books, taken by others) may only be shared if you hold the rights.
• No content that infringes third-party rights, youth protection law, or criminal law.

If we notice an infringement or are notified of one, we remove the content under Section 9.

8. Platform Safety and Automated Checks

To protect the Platform we check uploaded files automatically for technical integrity, limit the request rate to prevent automated abuse, and log upload attempts. For security reasons we do not name the individual mechanisms we use.

For every uploaded image we compute a technical checksum that describes the image as a sequence of numbers. We compare that checksum against the checksums of content we previously removed after a report, and against the checksums of the images in active listings. If it matches removed content, we reject the upload. This prevents already removed content from being uploaded again. If it matches an image in an active listing, the upload is flagged for review rather than rejected: the same photo may belong to a further, permitted listing by the same person. Only the checksum is stored, never the image itself. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in an abuse-free platform (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

We do not match image uploads against third-party hash databases of known abuse material, and we do not scan image content using machine learning. Should we introduce such a process, we will change these Terms and tell you beforehand.

We classify the texts of listings automatically to pre-sort possible breaches of the listing terms. A human always decides whether a listing is approved; the automation never rejects anything on its own (Art. 14 (1) DSA). For security reasons we do not disclose the thresholds we use.

If we become aware of child sexual abuse material, we delete the content, suspend the account immediately, and report it to the competent authorities.

9. Notice-and-Action, Statements of Reasons, Complaints (DSA Art. 16, 17)

You can report content via the "Report content" button in the footer of every public page or by email to abuse@gartenkern.de, also anonymously (DSA Art. 16).

If we take action against your content (suspension, removal, visibility restriction), you receive a Statement of Reasons (DSA Art. 17) by email.

You may appeal any of our decisions within 6 months, free of charge, via the address stated in the Statement of Reasons. We re-examine every appeal and inform you of the outcome.

As a micro-enterprise within the meaning of DSA Art. 19, we are exempt from the obligations of Section 3 of Chapter III of the DSA, in particular from operating a formal internal complaint-handling system. We offer the appeal described above voluntarily.

Your right to turn to an out-of-court dispute settlement body under DSA Art. 21, or to seek redress before state courts, remains unaffected.

10. Availability, Maintenance, Data Safety

We aim for high availability but provide no guarantee. Maintenance windows are announced in advance where planning permits.

We operate daily encrypted off-site backups. We still recommend that you back up important content yourself.

11. Liability

We are liable without limitation for intent and gross negligence and for damages from injury to life, body, or health. Otherwise, liability is limited to typically foreseeable damage at contract conclusion.

Plant-related content (care tips, herbal information, companion-planting recommendations, recognition results) is not medical or horticultural advice. The disclaimer on each plant page applies.

12. Term, Cancellation, and Data Deletion

You may cancel a paid subscription at any time with effect from the end of the current billing period. There are three ways to do so:

• the "Cancel contracts here" button in the footer of every page, which takes you to the cancellation page without signing in (§ 312k BGB),
• the "Cancel subscription" button in your account settings under "Billing",
• informally by email to support@gartenkern.de.

For the first route you need your contract number (format GK-YYYY-NNNNNN). You will find it in your order confirmation and in your account settings under "Billing". We confirm receipt of your cancellation without undue delay by email, stating its content, the time of receipt, and the date the contract ends.

You may have your account deleted entirely at any time on request at dpo@gartenkern.de. A 30-day grace window applies during which you can revoke deletion. After that, your data is irrevocably deleted per GDPR Art. 17 (see Privacy Policy).

We may terminate your account for cause if you seriously or repeatedly violate these Terms, in particular for abuse under Section 6 or unlawful content under Section 8.

13. Governing Law and Jurisdiction

German law applies, excluding the UN Sales Convention. If you are a consumer with habitual residence in the EU, the mandatory consumer protection provisions of your state of residence remain unaffected. Place of jurisdiction for merchants is Berlin, Germany.

14. Severability and Changes

Should any provision of these Terms be invalid, the remaining provisions remain in effect.

We will notify you of changes to these Terms by email to your registered address at least 30 days before they take effect. If you do not object within that period, the amended Terms are deemed accepted. We will point out this deemed acceptance and your right to object separately in the notification.