Projects / HoraLuz

Terms of service

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your use of HoraLuz, an Android app published on Google Play as app.horaluz (the “App”).

The App is published by the individual developer identified on the App’s Google Play listing (“the Developer”, “we”, “us”). You can reach us at the developer contact email shown in the Developer contact section of HoraLuz’s Google Play listing.

How the App handles data is described separately in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

Section 8 limits what the App’s prices and reminders may be relied on for, and it matters. Please read it.

1. Agreement to these Terms

By downloading, installing, or using the App you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not install the App, and uninstall it if you already have.

The App is distributed through Google Play. Google Play’s own terms apply to your download and to any purchase you make, in addition to these Terms. Where Google Play’s terms give you a right that these Terms do not, you keep that right.

These Terms are between you and the Developer only. Google is not a party to them and is not responsible for the App.

2. Who may use the App

You must be old enough to hold a Google account in your country and to enter into a binding agreement. If you are a minor in your jurisdiction, you may use the App only with the consent of a parent or guardian, who accepts these Terms on your behalf.

The App is built for people on the hourly PVPC tariff (Precio Voluntario para el Pequeño Consumidor) of the Spanish peninsula. It will still install elsewhere; it will not be useful there. See section 3.

3. What the App is

HoraLuz shows the hourly PVPC electricity price for the current day as a colour chart, marks the cheapest consecutive window of that day, and — with HoraLuz Plus — can pin that chart in the notification shade, show tomorrow’s prices once Red Eléctrica has published them, and fire a reminder so you do not miss the cheap window.

The App is a glanceable timetable. It is not an electricity supplier, a comparison site, a billing service, a home-automation controller, a smart-plug app, or a financial adviser. It does not talk to your retailer, your meter, or any appliance. It will never switch anything on or off. Luz, the star mascot, is decoration and onboarding, not a claim that the App does the work for you.

The App has no user accounts, no backend server, and no cloud storage. Everything it stores stays on your device.

3.1 Where it works

Hourly PVPC prices are published by Red Eléctrica de España for the Spanish peninsula only. They are not published for the Balearic Islands, the Canary Islands, Ceuta, or Melilla. On a flat-rate or free-market contract whose price does not change by the hour, there is nothing to time, and the App will not save you money.

Look at your bill: if it says “PVPC” and you are on the peninsula, the App is for you. If it does not, it is not.

4. Licence

Subject to these Terms, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable licence to install and use one copy of the App on devices you own or control, for your own purposes, personal or professional.

This is a licence, not a sale. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

4.1 What you may not do

You may not:

  • copy, distribute, sell, rent, lease, sublicense, or otherwise make the App available to third parties, except as Google Play’s own family-sharing or device-transfer features permit;
  • modify, adapt, translate, or create derivative works of the App;
  • reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the App, or attempt to derive its source code — except to the extent that applicable law expressly permits it despite this restriction, including the decompilation rights granted to you under EU and UK software law for interoperability purposes;
  • remove, obscure, or alter any proprietary notice in the App;
  • circumvent, disable, or interfere with the in-app purchase or entitlement mechanism, or use the App with a modified or unofficial billing client;
  • use the App in a way that breaks any law that applies to you, or that infringes anyone else’s rights.

5. Purchases

The App is free to download. Today’s hourly chart and the cheapest window of the day are free to use, with no advertising, and they do not expire if you never buy Plus.

5.1 HoraLuz Plus

The App offers a single non-consumable in-app purchase (“Plus”), product horaluz_plus_v1. It is not a subscription. Nothing recurs, and no payment is ever taken again for it. At the time of writing Plus enables:

  • the permanent heatmap in the notification shade, in a compact or an expanded style;
  • tomorrow’s hourly prices, once Red Eléctrica has published them;
  • reminders for the cheap window — at the start, 5, 15 or 30 minutes before, or at a time you pick.

Plus is tied to the Google account that bought it, not to a device. Signing in with that account and using “Restore purchase” re-enables it, on that device or another one, for as long as Google Play reports the purchase.

5.2 Prices and payment

The price is shown in the App and on Google Play in your local currency before you confirm, and it includes any taxes Google is required to collect in your territory. Prices may change for future buyers; a change never affects a Plus you have already bought.

All payments are processed by Google Play. We do not process payments and never receive your payment details. Google is the seller of record for the transaction where Google’s terms so provide, and Google’s terms govern the payment itself.

5.3 Refunds

Because Google Play processes the transaction, refund requests go to Google Play first, under Google Play’s refund policy and the refund window it offers.

Your statutory rights are not affected by that, and nothing in these Terms takes them away. In particular, if you are a consumer in the EU, the EEA, or the UK, you have a statutory right of withdrawal for digital content, normally within 14 days. That right may be lost once supply of the digital content has begun with your express prior consent and your acknowledgement that you thereby lose it — which is what you are asked to give when you confirm the purchase and Plus unlocks immediately.

If Google Play declines a refund you believe you are legally entitled to, contact us and we will look at it. Where a purchase failed, was charged twice, or did not unlock what it should have, tell us and we will help you get it put right.

5.4 Entitlement and offline use

Once Plus is granted, the App records locally that you own it so Plus features keep working without a network connection. The App re-checks the purchase with Google Play when it can. Plus does not lapse with time. If Google Play reports that the purchase has been refunded, revoked, or charged back, Plus features stop being available. Today’s chart and the cheapest window do not: they were never Plus.

Reminders you had scheduled, and the heatmap you had pinned, stop firing and stop showing if Plus is no longer owned. The underlying settings are kept, not deleted, and come back if the purchase is restored.

6. Your data

Cached prices, reminders, and settings live in the App’s private storage on your device. We claim no ownership of, and have no access to, any of it. We cannot recover it for you. Uninstalling the App deletes that storage.

How the App handles data is described in the Privacy Policy. In short: no account, no developer server, no advertising, no analytics; the only requests off the device are the public PVPC fetch and Google Play Billing.

7. Where the prices come from

Hourly prices are fetched from Red Eléctrica de España’s public data API (apidatos.ree.es), series PVPC, for the peninsula. They are the same figures REE publishes for everyone. HoraLuz is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or related to Red Eléctrica de España, the Spanish government, or any electricity retailer.

The chart shows the PVPC energy term, hour by hour, converted from €/MWh to €/kWh. Your bill also includes other concepts — tolls, charges, VAT, hire of the meter, and anything your contract adds — so the number on a bar is not the number on your invoice, and adding the bars up is not a bill estimate.

REE typically publishes the next day’s PVPC around 20:15 CET. Publication can be late, incomplete, or missing. The App will not invent a day it has not received, and it will not announce tomorrow until it has prices in hand.

8. Accuracy, and what you must not rely on the App for

This section is the important one.

Every price the App shows originates from Red Eléctrica’s public feed, as received and interpreted by the App. We do not set the PVPC, we do not correct it, and we cannot guarantee that a given hour’s figure is complete, current, or identical to the figure your retailer will use to bill you. A cached hour can be stale if the feed was later revised. A cheapest-window calculation is an interpretation of the hours the App has, not a promise about your bill.

Reminders fire in an AlarmManager window of about ten minutes, not to the second, and they fire only if the phone is on, notifications are allowed, and Plus is active. They can be late, early, or missed. They do not start a wash, a charge, or a dishwasher.

The App is provided for informational purposes only. You must not rely on it for:

  • a guarantee of savings, or of any particular amount saved;
  • the control, scheduling, or automation of any appliance, vehicle charger, heating, or other load;
  • billing, tariff advice, switching supplier, or any decision that depends on the exact composition of your electricity bill;
  • legal, regulatory, tax, or evidentiary purposes;
  • any purpose where a missed, late, stale, or wrong price or reminder could cause loss, injury, or damage — including leaving a machine running unattended on the strength of a notification.

Use your own judgement, your own contract, and your own appliances. Never treat a notification as a reason to stop paying attention to a machine that needs watching.

9. Availability and changes to the App

We may update the App, and updates may add, change, or remove features. We aim not to remove anything Plus currently pays for; if that ever becomes unavoidable, we will say so in the release notes.

The App depends on Red Eléctrica’s public API, on Google Play Billing, and on Android notification and scheduling behaviour. If the feed is down, rate-limited, or changed, today’s chart may be empty until it recovers. Missing or delayed official data is not a defect in the App. Some Plus features are simply unavailable until you grant notifications, and reminders will not fire in Do Not Disturb if you have not allowed the channel through.

We may stop distributing or supporting the App. If we do, copies already installed keep working for as long as your device, Android, the REE feed, and (for Plus) Google Play allow, and this page stays online.

10. Intellectual property

The App, its source code, its interface, its text, the “HoraLuz” name, and the Luz mascot artwork are owned by the Developer and protected by copyright and other laws. These Terms grant you no rights in them beyond the licence in section 4.

The App includes third-party components, including Android Jetpack and AndroidX libraries, Hilt, Room, DataStore, WorkManager, Ktor, Kotlinx libraries, and the Google Play Billing Library, each used under its own licence. Those licences continue to apply to those components, and where a licence grants you rights that these Terms would otherwise restrict, that licence prevails for that component. A list of components and their licence notices is available on request.

“PVPC”, “Red Eléctrica de España”, “REE”, “Android”, and “Google Play” belong to their respective owners and are used descriptively. The App is not endorsed by or affiliated with any of them.

11. Feedback

If you send us a suggestion, bug report, or idea, we may use it to improve the App without any obligation to you and without it becoming confidential. You keep any rights you already had in it; you are simply not owed payment or credit for our acting on it. Please do not send us anything you consider confidential or proprietary.

12. Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law, and subject to section 14, the App is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the App will be uninterrupted or error-free, that any defect will be corrected, that it will be compatible with any particular device or Android version, that Red Eléctrica’s feed will be available, complete, or timely, or that any price, window, chart, notification, or reminder the App produces will be accurate, complete, or fit for any purpose you have in mind — including saving money.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, and subject to section 14, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, nor for loss of profits, revenue, business, data, goodwill, or anticipated savings, arising out of or in connection with the App or these Terms, however caused — including any electricity cost you did or did not incur.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with the App or these Terms is limited to the greater of the amount you actually paid us for the App in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or ten euros (€10). If you never purchased anything, the App was supplied free of charge, and that is reflected in this limit.

14. What these Terms never exclude

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability for:

  • death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
  • fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
  • gross negligence or wilful misconduct;
  • any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

If you are a consumer, you have statutory rights — including rights concerning digital content that is faulty or not as described — that these Terms do not affect. Where any provision of these Terms conflicts with a mandatory consumer protection that applies to you, that protection wins and the rest of these Terms continues to apply.

15. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the App at any time by uninstalling it. Uninstalling deletes the App’s private storage. A Plus purchase remains on your Google account and can be restored after a reinstall with “Restore purchase”.

This licence terminates automatically if you materially breach section 4.1. On termination you must stop using the App and remove it from your devices. Sections 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, and 16 survive termination.

Termination does not, by itself, entitle us to keep money for a purchase you were entitled to have refunded under section 5.3 or under law.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of Spain, excluding its conflict-of-law rules.

If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of the country where you live. You may bring proceedings in the courts of your country of residence, and we will bring any proceedings against you there. If you are not a consumer, the courts of Spain have exclusive jurisdiction.

Before starting formal proceedings, please contact us — most problems are a misunderstanding or a bug, and both are quicker to fix by email. Depending on where you live you may also be entitled to refer a dispute to a consumer alternative-dispute-resolution or arbitration scheme; we will tell you what we know about the options available to you if you ask.

17. General

If any provision of these Terms is held invalid or unenforceable, it is severed and the remaining provisions continue in full force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us about the App, and replace any earlier understanding about it. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms; we may transfer ours if the App changes hands, provided your rights are not reduced.

These Terms are written in English. A translation, if one is ever provided, is for convenience, and the English version governs to the extent the law allows.

18. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms when the App changes or the law requires it. The effective date at the top of this page will be updated, and material changes will also be noted in the App’s Google Play release notes. Continuing to use the App after a change means you accept the updated Terms; if you do not accept them, uninstall the App. Changes never apply retroactively to a purchase you already made.

19. Contact

For anything about these Terms, a purchase, a bug, or a refund, write to the developer contact email shown in the Developer contact section of HoraLuz’s Google Play listing.