About these terms
These terms cover your use of tea.gratis, including browsing the site, creating an account, and ordering free sample boxes or farm drops where you pay only the shipping. tea.gratis is operated by Teamotea as part of the THETEA constellation of tea sites. Sister sites like shop.thetea.app, shop.puerh.app, and tea.school have their own terms, which apply when you visit them. By placing an order or creating an account here, you agree to what follows. If something is unclear or you disagree with a clause, write to us at hello@tea.gratis before ordering and we will explain or, where reasonable, decline the order so neither of us is bound to a misunderstanding. We try to keep these terms short. We update them when our practices change, and we keep the previous versions available on request. Nothing in this document removes consumer protection rights you have under the law of your country of residence — those rights always sit on top of what is written here.
Who can use the site
tea.gratis is available to anyone 18 or older with a valid shipping address in a region we serve (see the shipping page for the current list). If you are under 18, please ask a parent or guardian to place the order on your behalf. You may create one account per person. Multiple accounts created to bypass the one-sample-box-per-quarter limit will be merged or closed. We do not sell tea to retailers through this channel — wholesale, hospitality, and farm partnerships are handled through teamotea.com. We may decline or cancel an order without giving detailed reasons, for example if a shipping address looks fraudulent, if the same household has already received the quarter’s box, or if a farm drop is reserved for a specific audience disclosed on its page. In those cases we refund any shipping payment in full within seven business days.
Your account
An account lets you track your sample queue, view past orders, and manage your shipping address and preferences. You are responsible for keeping your login credentials private and for activity that happens under your account. Please use a unique password — a password manager is a good idea. Tell us at hello@tea.gratis if you think someone else has accessed your account, and we will lock it while we investigate. You can close your account at any time from the account page or by writing to us. When you close it, we keep order records for the period required by tax and consumer-protection law (typically six years) and delete or anonymise the rest. Closing an account does not cancel a sample box already in transit. If you go a long time without activity, we may archive the account and ask you to re-verify your shipping address before the next order — sample boxes are too easy to misroute otherwise.
Sample boxes and farm drops
Quarterly sample boxes contain 3 to 6 portioned teas of 3–5 grams each, plus a brew guide. They are tasting samples, not a daily supply, and they are limited to one box per account per quarter. Farm drops are limited-edition awareness or charity releases tied to a specific producer, and the box page discloses any charitable allocation and where contributions go. The contents of a box can change without notice — harvests vary, a lot may sell out, a substitution may be needed. We will not silently replace a flagship tea with a lower-grade one; if a meaningful change happens after you order, we contact you first and offer either the substitute or a full refund of shipping. Photography on the site shows representative samples, not the exact pouches you receive. Brewing parameters in the guide are suggestions, not promises — water, vessel, and palate vary.
Pricing, shipping, and payment
The tea inside the sample box is free. Shipping is paid by you, and the cost is shown clearly before checkout, calculated by destination and weight. We do not add handling fees, hidden surcharges, or post-checkout adjustments. Taxes and import duties, where applicable, are listed alongside shipping or, for some destinations, collected by the carrier on delivery — the shipping page explains which regions work which way. Payment is processed by a third-party provider; we do not store full card details on our servers. If a payment fails, your order is held for 48 hours so you can retry with a different method, then released. Prices for shipping can change between quarters as carrier rates move, but the price you see at checkout is the price you pay for that order. If we ever misprice a shipping rate by an obvious technical error, we will contact you before dispatch and either honour the rate or cancel and refund.
Cancellations, refunds, and returns
You can cancel a sample-box order any time before it ships — log in, open the order, and choose cancel, and the shipping payment is refunded in full within seven business days. Once the box has been handed to the carrier we cannot cancel it, because the shipping cost has already been incurred. Because the tea inside is a free perishable food item, we do not accept returns for change of mind. If a box arrives damaged, opened, or visibly off (mould, crushed leaf, broken seal), photograph the package and contents and write to hello@tea.gratis within 14 days of delivery; we will refund shipping, send a replacement where stock allows, or both. If a box never arrives within 30 days of dispatch (60 days for international), we treat it as lost and refund shipping. Charity farm drops follow the same rules, except that the charitable contribution, once paid out to the recipient organisation, cannot be reversed — only the shipping portion can be refunded.
Acceptable use
Please use tea.gratis in good faith. Don’t try to break the one-box-per-quarter limit using multiple identities, disposable addresses, or automated tooling. Don’t scrape the catalog at high volume — if you want our data for a legitimate purpose (research, press, an integration), write to hello@tea.gratis and we will likely just give it to you. Don’t attempt to probe, fuzz, or attack the site’s infrastructure; if you find a security issue, please report it responsibly to the same address and we will credit you in our changelog. Reselling free sample boxes is against the spirit of the program and, if we notice it, we close the account. Influencers and reviewers are welcome — there is a dedicated press intake on tea.community where we send curated drops without you needing to scrape or stockpile.
Intellectual property
The tea.gratis brand, site design, photography, brew guides, copy, and code are owned by Teamotea or licensed to us. You may quote short excerpts of our writing for reviews, journalism, or teaching, with attribution and a link back. You may share photos of your sample box on social media — that is the whole point — and we appreciate a tag. You may not reproduce our brew guides in full on commercial sites, repackage our photography as your own, or use our marks to imply endorsement of a third-party product. Names of farms, regions, and cultivars are not ours — they belong to the producers and growing regions they describe — and pinyin tea names like Mí Lán Xiāng (蜜兰香) are part of shared cultural vocabulary. Anything you submit to us (reviews, photos, feedback) you grant us a non-exclusive licence to use across the THETEA constellation, with attribution where you have asked for it. You keep ownership of what you submit and can ask us to remove it at any time.
Third-party links and sister sites
We link to other sites in the THETEA constellation — thetea.app for encyclopedia entries, shop.thetea.app and shop.puerh.app for full purchases, tea.school for courses, tea.travel for origin context, tea.doctor for health framings, tea.community for the social side. These sites are operated under the same group but have their own terms and privacy policies, which apply when you visit them. We also link to producer pages, charity partners, and third-party shipping carriers. We pick those links carefully but we do not control external sites and cannot be responsible for changes they make after we link. If a link breaks or points somewhere unexpected, please tell us.
Disclaimers about tea and health
Tea is a food, not a medicine. The brew guides, tasting notes, and origin stories on tea.gratis are written for enjoyment and education, not as medical advice. If you have allergies, are pregnant, take medication that interacts with caffeine, or follow a restricted diet, please read the ingredients on each pouch and consult your healthcare provider before drinking unfamiliar teas. Health-oriented writing on tea.doctor is similarly informational. Samples are packed in a facility that handles a wide range of teas and botanicals — we cannot guarantee absence of cross-contact for severe allergens, so please err on the side of caution. We describe origin and processing as honestly as we can based on what producers tell us, but we are not a certification body.
Liability
We do our best to make tea.gratis accurate, available, and pleasant to use, but we offer it on an as-is basis. To the extent allowed by law, our liability for any claim relating to a sample box or use of the site is limited to the shipping amount you paid for the order in question. We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses — for example, a missed gift occasion because a carrier was slow. Nothing in these terms limits liability for things that cannot lawfully be limited, such as death or personal injury caused by our negligence, fraud, or your statutory consumer rights. If a court decides one clause is unenforceable, the rest of the terms still apply.
Dispute resolution
If something goes wrong, the fastest path is to email hello@tea.gratis and tell us what happened. We aim to acknowledge within two business days and resolve most issues within ten. If we cannot agree, you and we will try mediation through a mutually acceptable mediator before going to court — mediation is cheaper and usually faster than litigation, and we are happy to share costs. Consumers in the EU may also use the European Commission’s online dispute resolution platform. Nothing in this section stops you from going directly to a court that has jurisdiction over you as a consumer, or from contacting a consumer-protection authority in your country.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction where Teamotea is established, currently Germany, without limiting the mandatory consumer-protection rights of the country where you live as a consumer. That last part matters: if German law gives you fewer rights than your home law does as a consumer, your home law applies for those rights. Courts in Berlin have non-exclusive jurisdiction over disputes that are not consumer disputes, meaning we can also bring or accept proceedings in the country where you live if that makes more sense for the situation.
Changes to these terms
We update these terms when our practices, products, or the law change. Small clarifications — typos, clearer wording — happen quietly and the last-updated date moves. Material changes (anything affecting your rights, refunds, data handling, or pricing of shipping) are announced via email to account holders at least 30 days before they take effect, and we publish the previous version alongside the new one for that period. If you do not agree with a material change, you can close your account before it takes effect and any pending sample box is delivered on the old terms. Continuing to use tea.gratis after a material change takes effect means you accept the new version. For questions about any clause, past or present, write to hello@tea.gratis and a human will answer.