Terms
What you get, and what you don’t
Who you are buying from
Your payment is taken by Polar Software Inc. as merchant of record: Polar charges your card, issues the receipt, works out and pays any VAT or sales tax, and processes refunds. The minute, the page, the card and the certificate are made and run by Keep a Minute, which is Juan Bernado, Tarragona, Spain. Prices are in US dollars; any tax is shown at the checkout before you pay. The line on your statement will read Polar, not Keep a Minute.
You must be 18 or over to buy, or have a parent or guardian buy for you.
What you are buying
One entry in this website’s record, naming a single minute of 2027, the first name you give us, and the dedication you write. Some of what that buys you is yours outright. Some of it depends on us still being here. We would rather tell you which is which than let you find out later.
Yours to keep, whatever happens to us — once you save it
Ready the moment you pay — but you have to save them. Until you download the card, and print or save the certificate, they exist only on our servers, exactly like everything in the next section. Do it the day you buy:
- the card — an image with your minute, the name and the dedication on it, which you download and own like any other file;
- the certificate, on the the gift edition ($9.99) and on special minutes — a page laid out for one sheet, which you print or save as a PDF from your own browser.
Once saved, these are files on your machine, and they are the unconditional half of what you bought: if this site disappeared tomorrow you would still have them, and nothing we do or fail to do can take them back. Until you save them they only exist here, and “whatever happens to us” does not apply yet.
Both are on the page you land on after paying, and the card again from your minute’s own page. We do not email them to you. The only email you will get is the receipt from Polar, our payment provider — keep it, because the order number on it is how we find your purchase.
Yours while Keep a Minute is running
- the public page for your minute, at its own link;
- our commitment that no second dedication is sold for that same minute;
- the yearly turn on the front page, when your minute comes round on the clock;
- a place on the front page’s programme for the whole of your minute’s hour, each time that hour comes round — the list of the hour’s kept minutes, under the sign. When an hour is busy the sign shows the earliest few and folds the rest into one ticket that opens the whole hour; yours is on that list either way.
We intend all four to last, and we will not resell a minute that has an owner. But they are things this site does, so they last as long as this site does — we are one person and a weekend project, and we are not going to promise you a hundred years of hosting we cannot underwrite. That is the ordinary shape of a symbolic dedication, and we would rather say it plainly than bury it.
About the yearly turn, precisely: the front page shows whichever minute of 2027 matches the reader’s own clock, so your minute comes up once a year in every part of the world as that part of the world reaches it. It lasts the sixty seconds it lasts, and a dedication we have taken down for breaking the rules below does not get one.
Hours, days and sets
An hour and a day are separate things from the minutes inside them. Their prices are arithmetic: an hour costs what its sixty minutes would cost one by one at the current standard price of $2.99, less ten per cent ($161.46); a day costs what its 1,440 minutes would, less twenty per cent ($3,444.48). Minutes that carry a higher price on their own day keep it; the sum is done at the standard price, and each page shows the current figure. Keeping an hour does not give you its sixty minutes: each of those is still sold on its own, to whoever wants it, and whoever keeps one of them keeps it. What you are buying is the hour as a whole — its own page, with your name and words at the top, above the list of whoever keeps its minutes; a card; a certificate; your link shown in full on that page; and, while we run, a line on the front page for the whole of that hour every year, when it comes round on each visitor’s own clock. A day is the same thing for the whole of a day; its line sits above all twenty-four hours.
A set is two to five minutes kept at once, under one name and the same words. The price is the gift-edition price of each minute added together; a premium minute counts at its premium price. Each minute in a set is kept exactly as a minute bought on its own in the gift edition — its own page, card and certificate — but the set is paid for as one order. Cancelling, and the refund we give anyway, apply to that order as a whole: they release every minute in the set, and opening any one of its certificates counts as opening them all. There is one exception. If somebody gets to one of those minutes before your payment lands, that minute is not yours; we refund its price ourselves, by hand, outside the cancellation above, and the rest of the set stands.
Twelve days and twelve hours are held back and not sold here. Their pages say which, and their minutes are still for sale one by one.
Everything else on this page applies to hours, days and sets exactly as it applies to minutes: the same box you tick, the same refund and the same conditions on it — taken over the whole order, with the one exception for a set described above — the same rules about words and links, the same end if we ever shut down.
What you are not buying
You are not buying the minute. Nobody can sell you a minute of time, and we are not pretending otherwise. You get no legal right, title, property interest, trademark or licence over that minute, over the words describing it, or over anything anybody else does during it. The rest of the world will use 2027 exactly as it would have anyway.
This is a keepsake and a gift. Its value is that it is yours, it is public, and it is the only one. That is the whole of it.
Other years
A minute is sold by its year. What you are buying names a minute of 2027, the card and the certificate say so, and that is the set it belongs to. If we ever open another year, its minutes are a separate set with their own owners — a vintage, the way a wine has one. Somebody keeping the same day and time of a later year does not touch your page, its link, or our commitment that no second dedication is sold for your minute of 2027. What the two would have to share is the front page when that day and time comes round, and the sign does not do that yet. Before we open another year we will say here, first, how those sixty seconds are shared — and whatever the rule, a later vintage never takes you off the stage. We will not open another year without saying so here first.
If we ever shut down
If we can, we give you notice first. We would like to publish the record of kept minutes before we go, so it outlives us, but that is an intention and not a promise. The only things certain to survive us are the card and the certificate you saved — which is why we keep telling you to. A card nobody downloaded goes down with the site.
Cancelling, and the box you tick
Your card and certificate are ready the second you pay, which is the point of them. Under EU and UK consumer law that immediate delivery is a case where the fourteen-day right to change your mind does not apply — but only if you asked for it and were told what you were giving up. So at the checkout you tick this, in these words:
“I want my card (and, where my tier includes one, the certificate) delivered immediately, and I accept that once delivery begins I lose the statutory right to withdraw from the purchase of digital content.”
We record the moment you tick it and the address you tick it from. The words you ticked, and when, are printed on your certificate and shown on the page after payment; that is your copy of the consent. If you would rather keep the statutory right, do not tick the box — but then we cannot sell you the minute, because there is no version of this where delivery waits fourteen days.
The refund we give anyway
Losing the statutory right does not leave you with nothing. For fourteen days we will refund you as a matter of courtesy, no reason needed: email keepaminute@gmail.com, and we return the full amount and put the minute straight back on the shelf.
This is ours to give, and there are four things that end it:
- Your minute has aired. Once your dedication has taken the stage on its minute, the thing you bought has happened and cannot be taken back.
- You have opened the certificate. On the tiers that include one, opening the certificate page counts as taking it, whether or not you then print or save it. We keep our own record of the page being opened and of its print button being used, and we go by that record. If you think it is wrong, tell us and we will listen.
- We removed the dedication for breaking the content rules below. That is a removal, not a purchase you are unhappy with, and it is not refunded.
- A pattern of abuse — buying and refunding repeatedly, or holding minutes to stop other people having them.
Outside those four we will still listen. If something is wrong with your card, tell us and we will fix it.
What “aired” means, exactly: your dedication occupies the stage on the front page when your minute comes round. That is the whole of it. We do not promise anybody is looking, we do not count views for you, and no number of visitors is part of what you bought.
If a purchase is undone
Any refund, full or partial, releases the whole order — the minute, every minute in a set, or the whole hour or day — the moment our payment provider confirms it to us, automatically. A chargeback through your bank releases it too, but that news reaches us by hand rather than by wire, so it can take days.
Either way the minute’s page says it was kept and then let go, the minute goes back on the shelf for anyone else, and its certificate address reads revoked — until somebody new keeps that minute, when the same address starts recording their dedication instead. A certificate printed before the release stops recording anything either way.
A dedication we remove for breaking the content rules is released the same way: the page says so, the certificate address reads revoked, and the minute goes back on the shelf. The fee is not refunded.
If two people somehow pay for the same minute, the first payment we record keeps it. We detect that automatically; the refund of the second payment is done by hand, usually within a couple of days. The minutes either side may well still be free.
There is a ceiling of ten checkouts opened from one network address in any twenty-four hours, whether or not they are paid for. It is there so nobody can sit on a stretch of the year to keep it away from other people. If you honestly want more than ten, write to us.
What can go on a page
A first name, up to 24 characters; a title, up to 40; and a message, up to 240. No surnames, no addresses, no phone numbers, no handles, no advertising. Nothing hateful, and nothing about somebody else that they would not want made permanent and public.
One link, and only in the link field: https, no shorteners, no bare IP addresses, and shown on your page as the bare domain rather than as words you chose, so it cannot claim to be somewhere it is not. It is marked nofollow, so it passes no search standing to anybody, and it never appears on the card. Links written into the title or the message are refused at the till.
Every page has a report link. We remove anything that breaks these rules; a removal is not a refund, and “The refund we give anyway” above says why. Please do not write anything here that identifies a person who has not agreed to it — including a child’s full name.
A dedication cannot be edited once it is paid for. Read the preview before you buy. Inside fourteen days, a refund puts the minute back and you can claim it again with the wording you meant. If you want your own dedication taken down later than that, email keepaminute@gmail.com — we will unpublish it, though the fee is only refundable in the first fourteen days.
By submitting a name and a dedication you give us permission to show them on this site, on the card and certificate, and in previews of those pages elsewhere, for as long as the site runs. You confirm you have the right to write what you wrote, and that anyone you name would be content to see it here.
What we keep
The name and dedication you submit, which are public by design. The email address our payment provider passes us with the order, so we can find your purchase when you write to us. The moment you ticked the consent box, and the network address and browser you ticked it from — a copy of which travels with the order to our payment provider, along with the name and the dedication.
We also record the same address and browser when a card is downloaded, a certificate is opened or printed, or a page is shared. That record is what we answer a payment dispute with, and it is what the ceiling above counts. If a purchase is refunded we keep the record that it was made and released, so the page can go on saying what happened.
We do not ask for your postal address, and we have no use for it.
We keep the records above for as long as the site runs, and payment records for as long as tax law asks. Polar sees the order and the consent; our hosting and database providers store the data for us. You can ask us what we hold about you, and ask us to correct it or delete what is not needed to keep the record of a sale, at keepaminute@gmail.com. The name and dedication are public by design; once published they may be copied or cached by others, and we cannot recall those copies. This site sets no cookies at all, which is why there is no banner asking about them; the payment page, on polar.sh, has its own.
The rest of the small print
We run this site with care but without guarantees of uptime. If we fail you, the most we owe you is what you paid for the order. Nothing here limits liability that the law does not let us limit.
These terms are governed by the law of Spain. If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, nothing here takes away rights your own country’s law gives you and cannot be signed away, and you may bring a claim in your own courts.
We may change this page for future purchases. What you bought stays as it was described on the day you bought it. The date at the bottom says when it last changed.
Refunds, takedowns, corrections and complaints all go to keepaminute@gmail.com; we answer within a few days.
Keep a Minute is Juan Bernado, Tarragona, Spain. Payments are taken by Polar Software Inc. as merchant of record. This page was last changed on 2 September 2026.