The agreement between us

crit.photo is operated by Thodoris Markou, sole trader (ατομική επιχείρηση), established in Greece.

We are called "Crit", "we" and "us" below. You are "you". Write to hello@crit.photo about anything in this document.

Using the site means accepting these terms. If you do not accept them, do not upload anything and do not buy anything.

Crit does two things. It lets you upload a set of photographs and collect votes and notes on them from people you send a link to. And it lets you pay a vetted photographer, a crit master, to read the set properly.

The crowd half is free. The paid half is a marketplace: the contract for a critique is between you and the crit master who writes it. Crit provides the platform, takes the payment, keeps a commission and passes the rest on. We do not write critiques, we do not review them before they reach you, and we do not guarantee any particular opinion or outcome.

What we do guarantee is the mechanism: that a master who does not deliver does not get paid, and that where the work was not what you paid for there is somebody here to decide it. Both are in the refunds and cancellation policy.

You need an account to upload a set or to buy a critique. You do not need one to vote on somebody else's set: a link and a name is the whole of it.

Give a real email address, because that is where a password reset and every notification goes. Keep your password to yourself. Anything done from your account is treated as done by you until you tell us otherwise.

You must be at least 15 years old to have an account, which is the age Greek law sets for agreeing to this kind of service on your own. One account per person.

You can delete your account at any time from your account page. What that removes is in the privacy policy.

You keep every right you have in the photographs you upload. We claim none of them.

To run the service we need your permission to do a short list of specific things with them, and nothing else: store them, make a smaller working copy sized for a screen, show them to the people you share the set with and to a master you send it to, and generate a preview image for the link when you paste it somewhere. That permission lasts as long as the photographs are on Crit and ends when they are deleted.

We do not use your photographs to train anything, sell them, licence them to anyone, or show them to anybody you have not sent the set to. Crit stores a working copy rather than your original, and deletes it once the set is decided, on the schedule in the privacy policy.

By uploading you confirm that the work is yours or that you have the right to upload it, and that where a person can be identified in it you have whatever permission you need to show it to the people you are showing it to.

A shared link is the credential. Anyone holding it can vote unless you turn link sharing off, in which case only people you invited by email can. Send it accordingly.

If you vote on somebody's set, the name you type and every mark and note you leave are shown to the person who owns the set, under that name. Type a name you are willing for them to see. Do not put anything in a note you would not sign.

Votes are counted per person as a name plus a browser cookie, which means somebody determined can vote twice. The results page is a count of ballots rather than a count of people, and it says so.

How it runs, and these are the dates the product actually enforces:

1. You choose a master, choose which set to send, write a brief, and pay. The price is fixed at that moment from the master's own prices and the size of the set, so a master changing their prices afterwards cannot move it.
2. The master sees the set and the brief and either accepts or declines. Declining refunds you in full, automatically. Until somebody accepts, you can withdraw and be refunded in full.
3. Accepting starts a 7 days clock. A master may take one extra week, once, and you are told when they do and may pull out and be refunded instead of waiting.
4. The read goes straight from the master to you. Nobody edits it and nobody approves it.
5. If the master delivers nothing by the deadline, you are refunded automatically. Nobody has to ask.
6. You have 14 days from delivery to say the work was not what you paid for. That is the one thing a person here decides, and the money stays with us until they do.

The whole of the money side, including your right to change your mind, is in the refunds and cancellation policy, which is part of these terms.

It is one professional's opinion about your work, written by a named person who stands behind it. It is not a valuation, not a qualification, not an introduction to a gallery, and not a promise that anything will follow from it.

A master telling you something you did not want to hear is the product working. Disagreeing with a read is not a reason for a refund; getting something other than a read is.

Prices are in euro and are shown before you pay. Payment is handled by Stripe; we never see or store your card details.

Crit keeps 20% of each critique. The rest goes to the master. Stripe moves their share to their own account directly, so we never hold anybody else's money.

Prices shown to you are the total you pay. Any tax treatment of the master's share is between the master and their own tax authority.

This section is in addition to everything above, and it applies to you as a business rather than as a consumer.

You become a master by applying and being approved. Approval is ours to give and we do not have to explain a refusal beyond telling you it was refused. You set your own three prices and you can unlist yourself at any time, which stops new requests without touching the ones you have already accepted.

You are independent. Nothing here is employment, agency or partnership. You decide whether to take a request, when you work and what you write. You are responsible for your own tax, your own insurance and your own compliance.

Payouts run through Stripe Connect, and you have to finish Stripe's onboarding before you can be listed. Stripe's own terms apply to that account and are between you and Stripe.

Accepting a request commits you to delivering inside the week, or to taking your one extension before the date rather than after it. Work that does not land is refunded to the photographer and you are paid nothing for it.

The roster order is not sold. Masters are listed by the same rules for everybody and no position on it can be bought.

We can suspend or remove a master's listing where these terms are broken, where work repeatedly fails to arrive, or where we are required to. We will tell you why, in writing, and you can reply to hello@crit.photo. Where we change these terms in a way that affects you as a master, you get at least 15 days' notice before the change takes effect, and you can close your account inside that time instead.

Do not upload or write:

• anything unlawful, and in particular anything sexual involving a child
• work that is not yours to upload
• images of a person who has not agreed to be shown to whoever you are showing them to, where their agreement is needed
• abuse, threats, or anything aimed at a person rather than at the work
• anything designed to break, overload or work around the site

A public review of a master is checked against a word list before it is published, and it has to be about the work you received rather than about the person who wrote it.

We can remove content and close accounts for any of the above. Where we do, we tell the person why unless the law says otherwise.

If something on Crit is unlawful, is your work being used without permission, or is a photograph of you that should not be here, write to hello@crit.photo with a link and enough detail to find it.

We read every one of those, act on the ones that need acting on, and tell you what we did. Most of what is uploaded here is only ever visible to the handful of people the photographer sent a link to, so in practice this is a small door, but it is open.

Crit is a small service and it is offered as it is. We do not promise it will never be down, and we do not promise a particular speed.

Working copies of photographs are deleted on a published schedule, so Crit is not storage. Keep your originals.

We may change what the product does. Where a change removes something you have paid for and not yet received, you are refunded.

We are responsible for running the service with reasonable care, and for the money: for taking the right amount, passing on the right share, and refunding what the policy says is refundable.

We are not responsible for what a master writes, for what a voter says about your photographs, or for a decision you make about your own work after reading either.

Where we are liable for something that goes wrong with a paid critique, our liability is limited to what you paid for it, unless the law does not allow that limit. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law, and nothing here affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

You can delete your account whenever you like. If you have paid for a critique that has not been delivered, deleting refunds it first, so that leaving never costs you money you are owed.

We can close an account that breaks section 10, or where we have to. A critique already paid for and not delivered is refunded.

The date at the top says when this last changed. A change that affects you materially is announced by email before it takes effect, and for crit masters that notice is at least 15 days.

A change never applies backwards to a critique already requested: the terms that count are the ones in force when you paid.

Greek law applies, and the Greek courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protection of the law of the country you live in, and you can always bring a case in the courts where you live.

Before that, write to hello@crit.photo. Most things are a misunderstanding and are settled in a day.

If we cannot settle it, a consumer in Greece can go to the Consumer Ombudsman (Συνήγορος του Καταναλωτή, synigoroskatanaloti.gr), which is free. Elsewhere in the EU, the Commission keeps a list of approved dispute resolution bodies by country. The EU's own online dispute resolution platform was shut down on 20 July 2025 and no longer exists, which is why there is no link to it here.