Kit's terms and its deliverability guide answer different questions

The revenue mechanism

Kit, previously known as ConvertKit, markets itself specifically to independent creators and publishers, and two of its own documents together shape what a creator can actually rely on: the platform's terms of service, which govern account-level rights, and its help centre article on Gmail and Yahoo's 2024 requirements, which governs the technical mechanism by which mail actually gets delivered. These are not the same document and answer different questions: the terms describe what happens to a creator's content and account, and the help article describes what a creator must configure so the underlying send actually works.

What the documents show

Kit's terms state that a user grants Kit a non-exclusive, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free right to use submitted content to provide the service, and to generate anonymised data on a perpetual basis; the terms also state that a subscription automatically renews and that fees already paid are not refunded if a creator cancels before the end of a paid period. Separately, the help article on the 2024 requirements repeats the 5,000-email daily threshold and states the specific technical bar Kit asks creators to clear: a verified sending domain, a DMARC record set to at least p=none, and a spam-complaint rate kept below 0.3%. The article states Kit lets a creator complete domain verification and DMARC setup without leaving the Kit dashboard, and it directly warns creators not to remove a DMARC record once it has been added, whether from Kit or from the domain itself.

The assumptions exposed

Neither document, read alone, answers what a creator most wants to know, which is whether a subscriber list can be exported and taken to another platform if the creator leaves; the terms as retrieved do not spell out a specific export or portability guarantee in the passage covering content rights. Completing Kit's in-dashboard DMARC setup satisfies the mailbox-provider requirement described in the help article, but it says nothing about the separate, contractual question of content and data rights the terms of service govern; treating a completed technical setup as evidence of contractual protections is a category error the two documents' separation makes clear once they are read side by side.

What to check before you rely on it

This is an editorial checklist. A creator should read the terms and the deliverability guide as answering different questions, confirm what data-export options actually exist through direct product testing rather than assuming the terms guarantee one, and verify the DMARC record has not been altered since setup, as the help article specifically warns can happen.

• Has subscriber list export actually been tested, independent of what the terms describe about content rights?
• Is the DMARC record still in place and unmodified since it was first configured?
• Is the spam-complaint rate for Kit-sent mail being tracked against the stated 0.3% ceiling?

Reading only one of Kit's two documents leaves half of what a creator needs to know about the platform unanswered.