Terms of Use

Effective: 25 September 2026 · Last updated: 29 October 2026

Who you are dealing with

These terms are the agreement between you and FOP Cat LLC, a North Carolina (USA) limited liability company (“zombie.cat”, “we”, “us”), for using zombie.cat. By using it you agree to them. Read them alongside our Privacy Policy, which explains what we do with your data, and our Refund Policy.

What zombie.cat is

A flashcard course that takes you from no Japanese to reading it. Once you have signed in it works offline, apart from recordings, which stream; and it schedules your reviews for you.

Free and paid

• Free: all of kana, plus the first kanji lesson. No account needed, no card, nothing to cancel.
• Paid: N5 through N1, for one payment of $99. Not a subscription. It does not renew and it does not expire. If you buy it and come back in three years, it opens.

The N5 Rookie gift

The first 50 learners who pass the N5 test in the app get a free, exclusive N5 Rookie item from our merch store, while gift codes last.

• To claim it, you need to have bought the course and passed the N5 test, which our server grades.
• One gift per person and per account. You get a single-use gift link; it opens our merch store, where you enter your shipping address.
• The gift ships only where our merch store delivers, and it is not available for delivery to Japan. It has no cash value, and you can’t exchange it for money or for another item.
• Where local law limits gifts like this one, we may offer a different item, or none.
• We may end the offer at any time. A code you have already claimed stays valid.

Referring friends

Every learner has a referral code in the app. A friend who enters it at checkout gets 15% off the full course. When three of those purchases have stayed final for 14 days, you get one reward: the full app if you do not already own it, or a sticker bundle from our merch store if you do.

• A purchase counts once it has stayed final for 14 days. A refund or a payment dispute inside those 14 days means it does not count, and buying with your own code never counts.
• One reward per person, however many friends buy.
• A reward you have been granted stays granted. A friend refunding after that changes the count, not the reward.
• Attribution is the code alone: no referral cookie, no click tracking, no device fingerprint, no IP matching. The privacy policy lists the little we store.
• Sticker bundles are while stock lasts. If the bundle runs out before yours is sent, the reward waits for the next restock instead of being lost.

Your account

You are responsible for keeping your password to yourself and for what happens under your account. Your purchase is attached to your account, so it is worth not sharing it. One account is for one person.

Your age

You must be at least 13 to use zombie.cat. If you are under 18, please make sure whoever looks after you is happy for you to buy anything.

What you may and may not do

Use zombie.cat to learn Japanese, on as many of your own devices as you like. Please do not resell it, redistribute the course content, scrape it, or pass your account to other people. Please do not attack the service or try to get at other people’s data.

If somebody does those things we may suspend their account. If we suspend an account that has paid, and it was not for something serious, we will refund it.

When something breaks

The app sends us a report when it hits an error, with a masked replay of the moments before it, so we can fix it. It is used for troubleshooting only, never for marketing. What it carries, who processes it and how long it is kept are in the privacy policy.

The content, and where it comes from

Parts of the course are built on openly licensed dictionaries and corpora, and their licences require us to say so and to share derived data on the same terms. The full list is below. Every mnemonic in zombie.cat is our own writing — none of it is taken or adapted from any other course.

If we stop running it

If we ever shut zombie.cat down: whatever is already on your device keeps working — your cards are stored on the device and downloaded content does not need us to be there; recordings stream from our servers, so audio would fall back to your device's own voice — and we will give you a final chance to export your progress before the service goes.

We are saying only what we can keep. We are not promising a notice period we might not be able to honour, and we are not promising a refund years after a one-off purchase. What we are promising is that you will not simply lose what you paid for overnight.

Changes to these terms

If we change these terms we will change the date at the top, and if the change matters we will tell you before it takes effect. We are not reserving the right to change your deal silently. If you do not accept a change that affects a purchase you have already made, tell us and we will sort it out.

The boring but necessary part

• No warranty beyond the obvious. zombie.cat is provided as it is. We work hard to keep it correct and available, but we cannot promise it will never be wrong or never be down. Nothing here takes away rights your local consumer law gives you.
• Governing law. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, USA, without affecting any mandatory consumer-protection rights you have where you live.
• If we disagree. Please write to us first. Most problems are a misunderstanding, and we would rather fix one than argue about it — give us 30 days to put it right before taking any formal step. Nothing here stops you complaining to a regulator or a consumer body where you live.

Contact

thegoodpeople@zombie.cat