Support

Pilcrow · answers to the things that actually go wrong

Everything below describes what the app really does. If your problem is not here, write to hello@aktasfatih.com and a person will read it. Say which iPhone you have and what you saw on the screen, and you will get a better answer faster.

Billing runs through Apple, not through us. We cannot cancel a subscription or hand back money ourselves — only Apple can do either. Jump to cancelling and refunds for exactly where to tap, and for the cases where we will back your refund request.

What a scan is, and when one is used up

One scan is one photograph. Every question visible in that photo is read and answered together, and the whole photo counts as one scan — so a page with six questions on it costs the same as a page with one.

The scan is taken when the photograph is read, and that is the line that decides whether you are charged:

Before the photo is read, nothing is charged. If the upload fails, or the server cannot read the picture at all, the scan goes straight back and you can try again for free.
Once the photo has been read, the scan is spent — including when the answer is unhelpful, when it could not be grounded in your course material (see below), when the photo turned out to have no questions on it, and in the rarer case where the answering step itself fails after a successful read. Retaking that photograph costs another scan.
In short: a retry is free only while the photograph has not been read yet. If you lose a scan to something going wrong on our side, tell us at hello@aktasfatih.com — that is a bug, and we would rather hear about it than not.

There is also a ceiling of 60 scans a day per account, independent of your plan. It exists to stop a stolen account running up a bill. It resets on a rolling 24-hour basis and it does not touch your monthly allowance.

A message headed "One scan at a time" is a pacing limit, not a fault: you tapped again within a second of the last scan, or the account already has four scans running at once, counted across every device signed into it. Wait a moment and take the photograph again.

"Nothing in your course matched", and the other two

Under every answer there is a line saying where it came from. When it names a lecture and a timestamp, the answer was built from your own material and you can go and check it. When there is no citation, the line says which of three quite different things happened — and they need different fixes.

The line under the answer	What it means
From general knowledge — nothing in your course matched.	Your library was searched correctly and had nothing relevant. That is a real fact about your course material, not a fault. Usually it means the topic is not in what you loaded, or the question belongs to a different course from the one you have selected. Check which course is selected in Courses, or add the missing lecture.
From general knowledge — no course selected.	No course was chosen, so nothing was searched. Open Courses and tap the one you are working on.
From general knowledge — your course library could not be searched.	The app failed at the thing you are paying it for. This one also raises a banner above the answers. Go to the search index.

In all three cases you still get an answer, and the scan is still charged. An ungrounded answer is exactly what you should trust least: nothing was checked against your lectures.

The search index, and rebuilding it

Your material is searched on the phone, by an index the app builds when you add a course. Settings shows the status of that index, in plain words:

Search index: ready (SQLite FTS5). Nothing to do.
Search index: damaged — answers cannot be grounded until it is rebuilt. Tap Rebuild search index, in Settings, right under that line. It reads your course material back through the indexer; on a large library it takes a few seconds, so keep the app open. Your material itself is untouched either way — a rebuild cannot lose a lecture. The same button appears on the camera screen as Rebuild index when the app notices the problem before you take the photo.
Search index: unavailable — answers cannot be grounded. Something further down failed: a search that errored, a database that would not open, or a device whose SQLite has no full-text search at all. The Rebuild search index button appears here whenever a rebuild could fix it, and is absent when it could not. If there is no button, restarting the phone is worth one try; after that, write to hello@aktasfatih.com.

If a rebuild finishes and the problem comes back, that is worth an email. It is not normal.

A new phone: your subscription comes back, your library does not

This is the one that surprises people, so it is worth being blunt about.

Your course material is stored only on your phone. We never receive it, which means we cannot send it to your next phone. Signing in on a new device brings back your subscription, your remaining scans and your email address — and none of your courses.

The way to move a course is an export. On the course's own screen, export it: you get a .pilcrow.zip file you can put in Files, iCloud Drive, or anywhere else you keep things. On the other phone, open Courses and tap Restore a course from an export.

Three things to know about an export before you rely on it:

It covers one course, not your whole library. Several courses means several exports.
It contains the extracted text of your material and where each passage came from — not the original PDFs, documents or caption files. Keep those wherever you got them.
Restoring always creates a new course. It does not merge into an existing one, so restoring the same file twice gives you the course twice.

An export does not need an account. You can restore one on a phone that is not signed in at all.

Using more than one device

Scans are shared across every device signed into one account. There is one allowance and one counter, wherever you spend it. Course material is not shared — it stays on the phone you added it to, and travels only by export.

There is no password, and two ways in.

Sign in with Apple is one tap, on the iPhone app. Nothing to type and nothing to come back from. We receive whatever address Apple chooses to share — your own, or one of its @privaterelay.appleid.com forwarders if you pick "Hide My Email", which works perfectly well for us either way.

An emailed sign-in is the other, and the only one on a device that is not an iPhone. You give an address and we send a mail to it. That mail holds two ways in, and either one finishes the job:

The link. Tap it on the phone Pilcrow is installed on and it opens the app and signs you in.
The 8-digit code, when the mail shows one. Open Pilcrow on your phone and type it in. This is the one to use when you opened the mail on a laptop, when the link arrived cut short, or when tapping the link landed you on a web page instead of in the app.

That web page is not a failure and it holds nothing you need: it only tells you what just happened. It appears when the browser could not find Pilcrow — almost always because you are on a computer rather than on the phone it is installed on.

A sign-in works once, and for 10 minutes, by either route. Using one of the two uses up the other as well: they are two doors into the same sign-in, not two sign-ins.
The code allows 5 attempts. After the fifth wrong try the code stops working — but the link in the same mail still does. That is on purpose: somebody guessing at your code must not be able to lock you out of your own sign-in.
Each new mail invalidates the one before it, so if two arrived, the newest is the one that works — link and code both.
There is a limit of a few requests per address per hour. If nothing arrives, wait rather than tapping again — and check the spam folder, since this is the first mail you have ever had from us.
"That sign-in is no longer valid. Request a new one." means expired, already used, or superseded. Do what it says.
A session ends after 30 days without use, and in every case after 90 days, and then asks you to sign in again. That is normal and not a sign anything is wrong.

Treat that mail like a password. For those ten minutes it is one: anyone who can read it can sign in as you, by the link or by the code. Do not forward it, and nobody from Pilcrow will ever ask you to read the code out.

Whichever route you used is the only proof we have that an account is yours: with an emailed link, anyone who can read that inbox can sign in as you. Keep it secure, and prefer an address you will still have next year — we have no way to move an account to a different one, and inventing one on request is exactly the takeover this design is meant to prevent.

Using both routes gets you one account, not two, as long as Apple shares an address we already know and tells us it verified it. If you chose "Hide My Email", Apple gives us a forwarder instead — so signing in later with your real address would start a fresh account. Pick one route and stay with it, or share your real address with Apple, if you would rather not think about it.

Plans, scans and top-ups

Free — 10 scans a month, no payment, no card.
Pilcrow Pro — US$9.99 a month for 150 scans a month.
Scan packs — 25 scans for US$2.99, or 100 scans for US$8.99. A one-off purchase: they do not renew. The app calls them top-ups.

Prices are in US dollars; Apple shows and charges yours in local currency, including any tax. How the two kinds of scan interact:

Your monthly allowance is spent first, and pack scans only after it runs out.
Unused monthly scans do not carry over. The count resets at the start of each period, which runs from the day you subscribed, not from the first of the calendar month.
Pack scans never expire, and they survive a subscription ending. If you cancel with 40 bought scans left, they are still there.
Subscribing starts a fresh period immediately: you get the full 150, and the free scans you had already used that month do not come out of them.

Cancelling a subscription

Settings › your name at the top › Subscriptions › Pilcrow › Cancel Subscription. That is iOS Settings, not Pilcrow's settings. Do it at least 24 hours before the period ends, or Apple charges the next one.

Cancelling stops the next charge. The current period runs to its end and the scans you already paid for stay yours until then.

Deleting your Pilcrow account does not cancel the subscription, and neither does deleting the app. Apple is the only one who can stop the billing. Cancel first, then delete.

Refunds

You paid Apple, so only Apple can refund you. Request one at reportaproblem.apple.com, or in Settings › your name › Media & Purchases › View Account › Purchase History. Apple's decision is Apple's; we cannot overrule it or issue a refund on their behalf. If Apple refunds a purchase, we remove whatever of it is left — a refunded pack takes back the scans you have not spent, never more.

There are cases where we will back your request to Apple for the unused part of a term: if we close your account, if we discontinue the service, and if we change the terms in a way that leaves you materially worse off part-way through. Those promises are in the terms of service, which also covers the 14-day statutory right to cancel a digital purchase that you have in the UK and the EEA — exercised against Apple, as the seller.

Before you ask Apple: if you paid and the app did not give you anything, check Settings first. A purchase that has not landed yet shows as "A purchase is waiting to be applied", with a Try again now button, and the app retries by itself every time it opens. That fixes it in most cases, and it is much faster than a refund request. If it does not, write to hello@aktasfatih.com — we would rather fix it than have you fight Apple's form.

Restoring a purchase, and "that purchase belongs to another account"

A purchase stays with the first Pilcrow account it is applied to, permanently, and we have no way to move it to another one. So sign in before you buy.

To restore on a new phone you need both: the same Apple ID, and the same Pilcrow account. Restore purchases is on the Plans screen. If you see a message saying the purchase belongs to another account, you are signed into the wrong one of the two — sign out and back in with the address you used originally.

Deleting your account, and deleting the app

These are two different things and neither does the other's job.

Settings › Delete account, in the app, removes your account from our server: your email address, your plan, your remaining credits and your usage history. It happens immediately and cannot be undone — the privacy policy explains the one lag, which is that our nightly database backups age out a little over a fortnight later. It does not delete the course material on your phone, which we cannot reach, and it does not cancel or refund an Apple subscription.
Deleting the app erases the course material on that phone, along with the app's database. It does not delete your account, does not cancel your subscription, and does not refund anything.

To leave completely: cancel the subscription in iOS Settings, delete the account in the app, then delete the app.

Privacy and data requests

What we hold, who it goes to and how long it lives is written out in the privacy policy — including that your course material never leaves your phone and the photographs you take are never stored on our server.

To see, correct, export or erase your data, email hello@aktasfatih.com from the address on your account. It is a monitored mailbox and we answer within 30 days. You do not have to use a form, and there is no charge.

When an answer is wrong

Answers are produced by a language model and they are sometimes wrong — fluently, and in a way that reads exactly like a correct answer. The source line is there so you can check: open the lecture at the timestamp it names and see whether it says what the answer claims. A cited lecture is not proof the answer follows from it.

If an answer cites a lecture that does not support it, that is a bug worth reporting. Send the question and the citation to hello@aktasfatih.com.

Contact

hello@aktasfatih.com · pilcrow.aktasfatih.com

One person reads this mailbox, so an answer may take a day or two — but it will be an answer from someone who can look at the code, not a ticket number. The terms of service cover what we promise and what we do not.