Terms of service

Cashew connects you with independent, verified therapists and hosts your sessions. We are a platform. Your therapist is responsible for your care; we are responsible for checking that they are qualified, presenting them honestly, and running the service around them properly.

What we are not

• Not an emergency or crisis service. See section 3.
• Not a hospital or a clinic. We do not employ your therapist and we do not direct their clinical judgment.
• Not psychiatry. Nobody on Cashew diagnoses you, prescribes medication, or provides medical treatment. If that is what you need, we will tell you so rather than take your money.
• Not a substitute for in-person care where in-person care is what the situation calls for.

Therapy has no guaranteed outcome, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. We can promise you a qualified person, an honest match and a service that works. We cannot promise you will feel better, and we do not.

If you are in immediate danger, do not use Cashew to get help. Call KIRAN on 1800-599-0019 — free, 24×7 — or your local emergency number. The crisis line is shown on every screen for exactly this reason.

Cashew is not monitored around the clock, and nobody is watching your account for signs that something is wrong. We check the free-text answer you write at intake for crisis language and raise it with a person on our team, and that is the extent of it — we do not monitor your journal, your messages during a session, or the session itself. The privacy policy explains this precisely, because a vague promise about safety is worse than none.

• You must be 18 or older. You confirm this when you create an account. We are not currently able to obtain and verify parental consent, so we cannot offer this service to anyone under 18.
• You must be in India. The service, its therapists, its pricing and its crisis resources are all built for India, and our therapists are registered to practise here.
• One account per person. Your journal, your notes and your session history live behind it, and sharing it means sharing those.
• You must be able to accept a legally binding agreement.

• Give us something true to call you. A first name or a nickname is fine — we do not want your legal identity — but it should be something you will answer to, because your therapist will use it.
• Your email address must be real and yours, and you will be asked to confirm it before you can go further. Addresses at disposable-mail services are refused.
• Keep your password to yourself. If you think someone else has it, change it in your settings and tell us.
• Your intake answers matter. They are what a person uses to choose your therapist. There is no wrong answer, but an inaccurate one produces a worse match, and the only person that costs is you.
• You can close your account at any time from your settings, and ask us to delete your data with it. See the privacy policy.

There are two routes, and they work differently.

• Matched by us. Our system ranks verified therapists against your answers, and then a person on our team reads the shortlist and chooses one, writing you a short note explaining why they picked them. This takes up to a day. No algorithm makes this choice by itself.
• A therapist’s reference number. If a therapist gives you their number, entering it matches you to them immediately — no shortlist, no review, no wait, because you have already chosen. Answering the intake questions afterwards is optional, and we will invite you once and then leave it alone.

If the match is not right, we will re-match you — free, no questions, and nobody will make you justify it. You can ask from your account or by writing to us. This is a promise we intend to keep rather than a marketing line, and it applies whether you have had one session or five.

We cannot guarantee a match in any particular timeframe, or that a therapist matching every preference you stated is available. Where we cannot find someone right for you, we will say so rather than send you the nearest available person.

• Sessions are 50 minutes and run as a video call in your browser. You will need a device with a working camera and microphone and a reasonable internet connection; there is a device check before you join, and we recommend using it.
• You can join from shortly before the start time. Please join on time — a session that starts late usually ends on time.
• If your therapist does not appear, tell us and we will make it right. You will not be charged for a session your therapist missed.
• If you do not appear, the session is treated as taken. Your therapist has held the hour.
• A session can be extended mid-way if you both want it and the time is free.
• Sessions take place at the time shown, in Indian Standard Time.

Recording is your decision, every time

• A session is only recorded if you are asked during it and you agree. There is no other way to start one.
• Agreeing covers three things and the request says all three: the session is recorded, the recording is transcribed, and an AI writes your therapist a draft note from the transcript.
• Declining does not affect your care, and your therapist sees only that you declined, never a reason.
• You can switch the request off permanently in your settings.
• You can watch a recording of your own session whenever you want, and you can ask us to delete it without closing your account.
• You may not record a session yourself by any other means without the other person’s agreement. That applies to your therapist too.

Messages during a session are not saved

The in-session chat is not stored by us or by our video provider. When the session ends, it is gone. Do not use it for anything you will need afterwards.

Notes

• Your therapist’s session notes are their clinical record, and are private to them by default. They can choose to share a particular note with you, and can stop sharing it.
• Once written, a note cannot be silently rewritten — corrections are added as a marked addendum, so the record stays honest.
• Any AI-written draft is your therapist’s working material, never the record. Nothing enters your notes unless your therapist reads it, edits it and saves it themselves.

Cashew is not charging anyone right now. There is no payment step in the product, and there is no way for us to take your money even if you wanted us to. Sessions are added to your balance by our team — see below. When we do start charging, we will tell you before it affects you, and it will never apply to something you already hold.

The rest of this section describes how payment will work, and is here so you can see the terms before they apply to you rather than after.

• The price shown on your therapist’s profile is the price you pay. It is set before you book, never at checkout, and we do not add fees at the end.
• Payments run through Razorpay’s secure hosted checkout. We never see or store your card details.
• If a payment fails, nothing is charged. Your slot is held briefly so you can try again.
• Packages are a number of sessions bought together at a lower price per session. Sessions are drawn from the package as you book, and returned to it if a session is cancelled in time.
• Reduced-price sessions are available to some clients through our subsidy programme. Eligibility is decided by our team, is limited in number, and can change.
• Sessions added by our team. This is how everyone gets sessions today, and during early access it is the only way. They have no cash value and are not refundable in money. They work exactly like bought sessions in every other way, and where a session was added rather than bought, your account says so.
• Prices may change, but never for something you have already bought.
• All prices are in Indian rupees and include applicable taxes unless stated otherwise.

You can cancel or reschedule free, any time up to 12 hours before your session. No reason required, and nobody will guilt you for it.

• Inside 12 hours, cancelling and rescheduling are not available in the app. Write to us and a person will sort it out with you.
• Cancelling in time returns the session to your balance immediately — a package session goes back to the package, a subsidised session frees your allowance.
• Refunds of money already paid are processed by hand today. Write to us and we will do it; the automatic version is being built.
• If your therapist cancels, it costs you nothing. You keep your credit or we rebook you, and if it keeps happening we will re-match you.
• Not the right fit is different from a scheduling problem. That is a re-match, and it is free — see section 6.

The cancellation policy has the full detail and is part of this agreement.

Short, and all of it is about not harming someone:

• Do not abuse, harass, threaten or discriminate against anyone on the platform — your therapist, our team, or anyone else.
• Do not record, photograph, screenshot or transcribe a session without the other person’s agreement, or share any part of one.
• Do not impersonate anyone, or claim professional credentials you do not hold.
• Do not use Cashew for anything unlawful, and do not try to break, probe, scrape or overload it. If you find a security problem, please tell us — we will thank you rather than threaten you.
• Do not share your account with another person.

If you break these rules we may suspend or close your account — see section 15. Where somebody is at risk, we will act first and discuss it afterwards.

What you write stays yours. Your journal, your intake answers, your messages and your feedback belong to you. We do not claim ownership of any of it, and we do not train AI models on it. What we cannot yet promise on our AI provider’s behalf is set out honestly in the privacy policy — please read that section rather than take this sentence as covering it.

You give us only the permission we need to run the service for you: to store what you write, to show it to the people the privacy policy says can see it, and to process it for the purposes listed there. Nothing else.

Feedback is the one thing we may act on more broadly. If you tell us something is broken or confusing, we may use that to fix the product and may quote it internally — never with your name, your email address or anything identifying attached.

This section applies to therapists. A fuller practitioner agreement covering commission, payment terms, insurance and records will be provided to you, and will take precedence over this section where the two differ. Until then, these are the terms you practise under.

• You are an independent professional, not our employee. We do not direct your clinical judgment, set your treatment approach, or take responsibility for the care you provide. You set your own fee and your own hours.
• Your credentials must be true. You confirm that your registration is current, that the documents you give us are genuine, and that you are entitled to practise. Tell us promptly if any of that changes.
• “Verified” means we checked what we could check — we review the documents and registration details you give us, and our team speaks with you before verifying you. It is not a warranty of your competence to a client, and you remain responsible for practising within your training.
• You are responsible for your clients’ care, including recognising when someone needs more than you can offer, and managing risk according to your professional obligations.
• Your session notes are clinical records. Write them as such. Once saved they cannot be silently altered; corrections go in as addenda.
• Our operations team can see your clients’ session notes, documents and session recordings on our platform, in order to run the service, investigate complaints and respond to risk. Every time one of them opens a recording, it is logged. You should assume your notes are readable by us and write them accordingly.
• Recording requires your client’s agreement, taken in the session. You may not record any other way. You will see only that a client declined, never a reason.
• Any AI-drafted note is your draft, not your note. You are responsible for everything you save under your name.
• Honour the times you publish. Availability you open is a commitment a client books against; repeated cancellations affect real people mid-treatment and may affect your standing with us.
• Reference numbers are for people you already know or have been approached by. Do not use them to route clients around a match that is already in progress.
• Confidentiality continues after you leave, both about your clients and about our internal material, including our procedures and the SOP library.
• We may withdraw verification where credentials lapse, where a serious complaint is upheld, or where a client is at risk. We will tell you why, and you can respond.
• Commission and payment terms are set out in the practitioner agreement. We do not currently pay out automatically; earnings shown in your account are a record, not a transfer.

Cashew is early. We add things, remove things that are not working, and occasionally take the service down for maintenance. We do not promise the service will be available uninterrupted, and some of what makes it work — video, email, SMS, payments — is provided by other companies whose failures we cannot prevent.

What we will not do is remove something you are relying on without telling you. If we withdraw a feature that holds your data, you will have notice and a way to take your data with you.

You can close yours whenever you like, from your settings, and ask us to delete your data at the same time. You do not have to give a reason.

We may suspend or close an account if these terms are broken, if there is a risk to somebody’s safety, if we are required to by law, or if we stop offering the service. Except where somebody is at immediate risk or the law prevents it, we will tell you first and give you a chance to respond.

If your account closes with sessions still on your balance, tell us — where those sessions were paid for, we will refund what is unused. Sessions added by our team have no cash value and are not refunded.

The privacy policy explains what is deleted, what is kept, and why.

We are responsible for running this platform properly — for verifying the therapists we present, for keeping your data as the privacy policy describes, and for the service working as we say it does. If we fail at those, we are answerable for it.

Your therapist is responsible for your clinical care. They exercise their own professional judgment, and we do not accept liability for it, for the outcome of your therapy, or for a decision you take as a result of a session.

We are not liable for losses we could not reasonably have foreseen, or for failures of things outside our control — your internet connection, your device, or an outage at a provider we rely on. Where we are liable for something, our liability is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before it happened.

Nothing in these terms limits any liability that the law does not allow us to limit, including liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or under consumer law that applies to you regardless of what a contract says.

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts of India have jurisdiction over any dispute. Once Cashew is incorporated we will name a specific city here, and we will not do it in a way that makes it harder for you to bring a complaint than it is today.

Please talk to us first. Write to support@cashew.care and a person will answer. Most things that look like a dispute are a mistake somebody wants to fix.

You also retain every right you have under Indian consumer protection law, and nothing here asks you to give any of it up.

We will update this page as the product changes, and the version and date at the top will change with it. If a change materially affects your rights, we will tell you directly rather than editing the page and hoping you notice. If you do not accept a change, you can close your account.

Anything at all: support@cashew.care — a person will answer.

Grievance Officer: support@cashew.care — a member of the founding team reads this mailbox and answers it personally. We will name them here once Cashew is incorporated.

We have no registered office to print here yet, because there is not yet a company. That will change, and this page will change with it.