Version 2.0 · Effective 6 September 2026 · Previous versions: sonniss.com/terms-of-service/previous-versions/
These terms cover your use of sonniss.com and anything you buy from us. What changed: a complete rewrite. We are the seller on every order, which is how it has always worked in practice, and these terms now say so plainly. Our old Legal Disclaimers page has been retired and anything that mattered on it lives here.
Who we are
Sonniss is a sound effects marketplace. Independent publishers make the libraries. We sell the licences.
The company behind it is Sonniss Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 09377364. Registered office: Colony, 5 Piccadilly Place, Manchester, M1 3BR, United Kingdom. VAT number GB 205 1073 61. You can reach us about anything on this page at [email protected].
“Sonniss”, “we” and “us” means Sonniss Ltd: the company you buy from, the company named on your invoice, and the company that grants you your licence.
We did not record these libraries. Independent publishers did, and they still own them. We sell and license their work in our own name, on commission, with their permission. Selling a library does not make us its owner, and buying one does not make you its owner either. Your licence sets out exactly what you may do with the files.
Both of those things are true at the same time, and there is nothing unusual about it. A shop can sell you a kettle it did not manufacture. You buy from the shop, the shop is who you deal with, and somebody else built the kettle.
What these terms cover, and which document wins
These terms are one of several documents. Each does a different job, and none of them replaces another.
| Question | Which document answers it |
|---|---|
| What you may do with the files you bought | Your licence: sonniss.com/license/ |
| What you may do with the free GDC Game Audio Bundle | The bundle licence: sonniss.com/gdc-bundle-license/ |
| Refunds, cancellation and faulty files | Our refunds policy: sonniss.com/refunds/ |
| What we do with your personal information | Our privacy policy: sonniss.com/our-privacy-policy/ |
| Reporting an intellectual property complaint | sonniss.com/dmca/ |
| Everything else, and anything not covered above | These terms |
If one of those documents and these terms ever say different things about the same subject, the document named in the table wins on its subject. The two licences are separate instruments covering different things, and neither replaces the other.
And because it would be easy to miss: your licence gives you more than this page does. It carries a warranty from us, in our own name, about the libraries we license to you. If you only read one of our documents, make it that one: sonniss.com/license/.
Buying from us
When the contract is made. Your order is an offer to buy. The contract is made when we confirm your order by email. That email is your record of it, and your invoice comes with it.
What you agree to at checkout. Before you can place an order you have to tick a box. It is not ticked for you, and the order will not go through without it, so if you have an order, you ticked it. By ticking it you agree to your licence, to these terms and to our refunds policy. You also consent to your download starting straight away, and acknowledge that your right to cancel ends once it does. Your order confirmation email restates the consent and the acknowledgement, so you have those two in writing.
How the licence gets to you. The publisher owns the library and permits us to sell licences to it. When you buy, we grant you the licence. Both permissions take effect at the same moment, when we send your order confirmation, and neither happens without the other.
Separately from any sale, publishers allow us to host their libraries here, to stream previews, and to use their artwork and descriptions to promote them. That permission is not part of your purchase and does not depend on it.
“Sold by”. Your order shows the publisher’s name against each library, so you know who made it. Your contract is with us.
Prices, currency and tax. Prices are shown in US dollars. UK sales have UK VAT added. Consumers in the EU are charged VAT at their own country’s rate, which we account for under the One Stop Shop scheme. Businesses in the EU with a valid VAT number are zero rated under the reverse charge. If you give us a VAT number that turns out not to be valid, we treat the sale as a consumer sale and charge accordingly.
How you can pay. Card, through Stripe, or PayPal. That is the list.
Studios, and buyers working to a purchase order, can be invoiced instead. Tell us what you need and we will raise the order and send you the invoice. You pay it by card or PayPal, from the invoice itself. It is a different place to pay, not a different way to pay.
That route does not pass through our checkout, so we take the same confirmations by email before your files go out. We will ask you to confirm that you accept your licence and these terms, that you want your download available as soon as your payment clears, and that you understand your right to cancel ends when the download starts. Nothing is released until you confirm. If you would rather keep the full fourteen days, say so and we will hold your files until they have run.
If a price is wrong. It happens. If we spot it before we have confirmed your order, we will tell you, and you can buy at the correct price or not buy at all. If we spot it afterwards, we will tell you, and you can choose between paying the difference and cancelling for a full refund. We will not quietly take more money, and we will not cancel a licence we have already granted you.
Where we can sell. We sell worldwide, but our payment providers restrict some countries and we have to follow UK law on sanctions. If an order cannot lawfully be completed we will not complete it, and anything you have paid comes back to you.
Your right to cancel
If you are a consumer in the UK or the EU, you have fourteen days from your purchase to cancel it and get your money back, and you do not have to give a reason.
Because everything we sell is a download, one thing ends that right early, and it is the thing you consented to when you bought: starting a download. So, plainly:
Listening to a preview does not affect your right to cancel. Starting a download does.
Preview as much as you like, on as many product pages as you like. The right survives all of it. It ends the moment a download begins on your order, and your order confirmation email says so.
If you are buying as a business the law does not give you this right. Our refunds policy sets out what we do for business buyers anyway.
Everything else about cancelling, refunds, faulty or misdescribed files, how to ask us, and the cancellation form, is on our refunds policy: sonniss.com/refunds/.
Nothing on this page affects the statutory rights you have.
Your downloads
Your download links do not expire. There is no window and no countdown. Each link carries four downloads. If you run out, or a link stops working, email us and we will reset it.
What you buy is yours to keep. A licence you have bought does not expire, and we do not take it back. It stays attached to your purchase record, under the name and email address you bought with, so it survives a library being delisted, a publisher leaving Sonniss, and you closing your account. The only thing that ends a licence is a refund, and our refunds policy explains that.
Your account
You do not need an account to buy from us. Guest checkout works, and plenty of people use it.
If you do have an account, keep your details accurate and your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens on your account. Accounts are not transferable.
You need to be eighteen or over to hold an account or to buy from us.
If you are buying for a company, a studio, or anybody other than yourself, you are telling us that you have the authority to commit them to these terms and to the licence.
We can suspend or close an account where we reasonably believe these terms have been broken. If we close an account for a reason that is not a breach, we will tell you first. Either way, if you think we have got it wrong, email us and a person will look at it again.
Closing or suspending an account does not touch a licence you have already bought. Nothing in these terms lets us take one back.
Using the site fairly
A short list, and the reasons for most of it are obvious. You must not:
- take the catalogue or its data by automated means, including scripts, crawlers and similar tools, or by an equivalent manual process
- bulk download or bulk harvest libraries, listings, previews, metadata or artwork
- get around the download limits, or use a VPN or anything else to get around these terms
- build a competing product or service out of our catalogue or our listings
- remove or alter watermarks, credits or notices, including on previews
- approach our customers or our publishers, one at a time or in bulk, to take business off the site
- misrepresent who you are, try to break into anything, or interfere with how the site runs
On that sixth one, so there is no confusion: our publishers are free to sell their libraries wherever else they like, and always have been. That bullet is about harvesting our roster and soliciting our customers. It has nothing to do with where a publisher chooses to trade.
Previews are there so you can judge a library before you buy it. Stream them here as much as you want. They are not licensed for anything else.
We keep a record of downloads on every order. If we see something that looks like link sharing, bulk harvesting or automated access, we may look into it, and suspend access while we do. If you think we have got that wrong, email us and a person will look at it again. Suspending access never takes away a licence you have bought.
Who owns what
Three layers, and they do not overlap.
The site is ours. The design, the code, the compilation of the catalogue, the look and feel, and the Sonniss name and logo.
The libraries belong to the publishers who recorded them. Buying a licence does not change that, and neither does selling one.
What you make is yours. If you use licensed sound effects in a game, a film, a trailer or anything else, that work is yours. The recordings inside it are not. You own your production. You do not own the sounds.
We reserve our rights, including the database right in our catalogue, against text and data mining, and we make that reservation expressly for the purposes of Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790 and anything equivalent to it. What you may and may not do with files you have licensed is set out in your licence, not here.
If you believe something on the site infringes an intellectual property right, our complaints page explains how to tell us: sonniss.com/dmca/.
What these terms promise about the libraries, and what they leave to your licence
Your licence is the document that tells you what you are getting and what you may do with it. It is written for that job, it is the one that governs the files, and it is given by us in our own name. These terms do not add to it and do not take anything away from it.
So this section does one job. It tells you not to read a promise into these terms that is not in your licence. If a promise about a library is not in your licence, in our refunds policy, or in the rights the law already gives you, then it is not a promise we have made.
To be clear about which way that runs: nothing in these terms limits, reduces or cuts down anything your licence promises you. If these terms and your licence ever say different things about the files you bought, your licence wins.
One honest detail. We are not the recordist. These libraries are recorded by independent publishers and there are thousands of libraries on this site. We cannot sit and listen to every file in every one of them. That is exactly why the promises about the product sit in your licence, in our name, where they are written down and mean something, rather than being scattered through a page like this one.
If you are a consumer, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives you rights over digital content: that it is of satisfactory quality, fit for its purpose, and as described. Nothing in these terms limits those rights, and our refunds policy explains how we put things right.
And one promise we can keep, so it is written down here. If a library you bought turns out to be the subject of a third party’s rights claim, tell us. Stop using it if we ask you to. We will then either refund what you paid for it, or, with your agreement, supply you with a comparable library instead.
Limits on our responsibility
This section sets the overall limit on what we owe you, whatever a claim is about.
What we never exclude. We do not limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit. If you are a consumer, that includes your protections under sections 47 and 65 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015. If you are buying for a business, it includes section 2(1) of the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977. These apply however our liability arises and whichever of our documents you are reading. Nothing in our terms or our licences takes them away, and nothing could.
The limit. Subject to the paragraph above, our total liability to you is limited to the greater of US$1,000 and everything you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. Our prices are in US dollars, so the figure is too.
What neither of us can claim from the other. Neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profit, or for loss of goodwill.
If you are buying for a business, the consumer protections above are not yours to rely on, because the law does not give them to businesses. The rest of this section applies to you in the same way.
Availability. We aim to keep the site up, and we cannot promise it will never be down. Losses from the site being unavailable fall under the limit above.
When you are responsible to us
If somebody brings a claim against us because you broke these terms, you cover us for it: the loss, the costs, and reasonable legal fees. We will tell you promptly if a claim like that arrives, and we may take over defending it at our own expense, in which case we will keep you informed and will not settle in a way that admits anything on your behalf without asking you first.
This does not apply to you if you are a consumer. It is about conduct on the site, and it is separate from the indemnity in your licence, which stands on its own.
If something goes wrong
Email [email protected] and tell us what has happened. We would far rather sort something out directly than have it go anywhere else.
Changing these terms
We can change these terms, and here is exactly how.
Why. To add or improve what the site does, to make technical adjustments, and for legal or regulatory reasons.
Notice. For any material change we will publish the new version, say when it takes effect, and give you at least thirty days before it does. Small corrections, like fixing a broken link or a typo, take effect when we publish them.
If you do not agree. Stop using the site, and close your account if you have one. That is all that follows.
Nothing reaches backwards. A licence you have already bought is governed by the version of these terms, and the version of your licence, that were in force on the day you bought it. Later changes do not alter it. This is the important one: what you bought is what you bought.
Every version stays published. Each version of this page is dated and numbered, and every previous version stays at sonniss.com/terms-of-service/previous-versions/, so you can always see what these terms said on any given day.
Law and courts
These terms, and any dispute about them or about anything you buy from us, are governed by the law of England and Wales.
The courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction, unless mandatory law gives you the right to bring a claim, or requires a claim to be brought against you, somewhere else.
There is no arbitration clause on this page, no class action waiver and no jury waiver. If we ever have a dispute, it goes to a court.
Other terms
These terms and the documents in the table above are the whole agreement between us. That does not limit anything either of us has said fraudulently.
If any part of this turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of it stands.
If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given it up.
If we ever sell or restructure the business, these terms and your licences move with it and your rights are unaffected. You cannot transfer yours to somebody else without asking us.
Notices to us go to [email protected]. Notices to you go to the email address on your order or your account.
Nobody other than you and us can enforce these terms. That does not affect the rights publishers hold in their own libraries, which are theirs, and which nothing here gives up.
Nothing here makes us partners, employer and employee, or agents for one another.
Contact
Sonniss Ltd
Colony, 5 Piccadilly Place, Manchester, M1 3BR, United Kingdom
Registered in England and Wales, company number 09377364
VAT number GB 205 1073 61
[email protected]