FIRST LIGHT
TERMS, REFUNDS AND PRIVACY

The short version, because there isn't a long one

One person makes this. It is written the way it actually works, not the way a template would say it.

LAST CHANGED 2 SEPTEMBER 2026

What is free, and always will be

The conditions and every reading behind them — tide, wind, water temperature, pressure, river flow. The keep limits and the regulation they come from. The licence rules. Every safety warning. Where you are allowed to stand.

Nobody should have to pay to find out that a pass is dangerous or what the limit is. That is not a launch promise with an expiry date on it; it is the line the paid tier is drawn around, and the app is tested to keep it that way.

What First Light Plus is

A subscription that unlocks four things on firstlight.fish and in the First Light app:

$2.99 a month or $19.99 a year, and the first seven days are free. Your card is taken when you start the trial and nothing is charged for seven days; cancel inside that week and you pay nothing at all. After that it renews on its own — monthly or yearly, whichever you picked — until you cancel, which you can do at any time from the app's Plus sheet ("Manage plan"). Cancelling stops the next charge; you keep Plus to the end of the period you have already paid for.

Your email is the account. There is no password. You sign in by tapping a link sent to your email, and the same email unlocks Plus on every device you sign in on — phone, laptop, the app.

Bought a $12 code before subscriptions existed? It still works, in full, for twelve months from the day you entered it, on as many of your own devices as you like. Codes are no longer sold; nothing renews on a code and there is nothing to cancel.

How payment works

Cards are handled by Stripe, on Stripe's own page. First Light never sees your card number; it learns only that a plan is paid up, and until when. Stripe emails you a receipt for each charge and a reminder before your trial ends.

The app on Google Play will offer the same plan through Google Play billing once it is listed there; a plan bought either way unlocks the same email everywhere.

Refunds: fourteen days, no questions asked

Write to [email protected] within fourteen days of a charge and you get that charge back. You do not have to explain why. Plus switches off once the refund is made.

After fourteen days, if something is broken or not what was described, write anyway. It gets sorted.

None of this affects any statutory rights you have where you live. Payment is taken by Stripe, but you are buying directly from First Light, not from Stripe — so refund requests come here, not to them. If you bought a code on Ko-fi, the same applies: you were buying directly from First Light, not from Ko-fi.

What is kept about you

Your catch log never leaves your phone. Trips, catches, photos, positions — all of it is stored by your own browser, on your own device, and no copy is sent anywhere. There is no server for it to go to. If you clear your browser's site data it is gone, including from here, because there is no "here". Export it first if you want to keep it.

If you sign in, your email address is stored, along with what Stripe reports about it: whether a plan is active, which one, and the date it renews or ends. A sign-in cookie is set on the device you signed in on so you stay signed in; it holds your email and an expiry, nothing else. That is what an account is here, and it is the whole of it. Ask and it is deleted — and cancelling then asking is how you leave completely.

If you bought a code, the email address you paid with and which code was issued to it are kept, so you can collect your code at /code and so a duplicate order gives you back the code you already have. Ask and it is deleted.

That is the entire list. No password, no profile. No analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels, no third-party scripts. The app asks for your location only when you tap something that needs it, and that position is used on your device and stored in your own log.

Three companies see something when you use the paid side: Stripe takes payment and holds your card; Resend delivers the sign-in email to your inbox; and the sign-in, plan and code records live in Cloudflare, which also serves this site. Live readings are fetched from NOAA, the National Weather Service and the USGS, and the satellite imagery on the map comes from USGS The National Map. Those requests reach those services, as any request from a browser does. Nothing about you is attached to them. If you tap a live camera, that one plays from YouTube's no-cookie domain, and nothing loads from it until you tap.

Deleting your First Light account

To delete your First Light account and everything stored about you:

  1. If you have a Plus plan, cancel it first: open the app, tap the Plus lock, Manage plan, then cancel. (Stripe keeps its own payment records for as long as the law requires; that is Stripe's, not ours.)
  2. Email [email protected] from the address you signed in with, with the subject Delete my account. Nothing else is needed — the address is the account.
  3. Within 7 days your email address, your plan record and any code issued to that address are deleted from our systems, and you get one reply confirming it. Nothing is kept.

Your catch log is not part of this because it was never on our systems: it lives only on your device. Uninstalling the app, or clearing the site's data in your browser, removes it.

What this is not

First Light reports conditions from public feeds and tells you what the rules say. It does not predict whether you will catch anything. The 0–10 is a summary of the conditions, and the app says so on the page — it was tested against thousands of real reports and did not predict them, which is written up rather than buried.

Readings come from stations that go offline, and forecasts are forecasts. Regulations change, and the app cites the rule so you can check it yourself — always confirm current TPWD regulations before you keep a fish.

Going out on the water is your decision and your risk. Read the forecast and the warnings yourself, tell somebody where you are going, and turn back if it looks wrong. Nothing on this site is a substitute for your own judgement or for the official marine forecast.

Getting hold of a person

[email protected] — problems, refunds, deleting your details, or anything at all. It is one person, so it is not instant, but it is answered.

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