Court Rules
Plain English, no lawyer-ese. Last updated June 5, 2026.
The short version
Dinkin is a free app for pickleball players to coordinate games. You sign up with a phone number, post pings, find players, show up, and play. We don't sell your data and we don't show your phone number to anyone. Use Dinkin to find real games with real people. Be decent about it. You have to be 18 or older.
Who we are
Dinkin is operated by Negative Space Bar LLC, a Michigan limited liability company doing business as Dinkin. Throughout these rules, "Dinkin," "we," "us," and "our" mean Negative Space Bar LLC, d/b/a Dinkin. When you agree to these rules by using the app, you're entering an agreement with Negative Space Bar LLC.
Mailing address for legal notices: 600 Broadway Ave NW, Ste 616, Grand Rapids, MI 49504. For everything else — questions, feedback, deletion requests — letsplay@dinkin.app is faster and we answer.
Your account
You sign up with a phone number and a one-time SMS code. That's the whole account. You're responsible for keeping your number active and for anything posted from your account, so don't share it. If you lose access to the number, email us and we'll sort it out.
You must be 18 or older to use Dinkin. When you sign up, you're confirming you're 18 or older. If we learn an account belongs to someone under 18, we'll delete it.
We don't currently support email or social sign-in. One phone, one account.
SMS from Dinkin
When you sign up or sign in, we send you a one-time verification code by SMS through Twilio Verify. By entering your number, you consent to receive that code. Standard message and data rates from your carrier may apply.
We may also send occasional account-related texts: security alerts, reactivation prompts if your account has been dormant, help with account recovery, and notices about important service changes. These are operational, not marketing. We don't send promotional blasts or "we miss you" nudges.
Privacy
Your phone number is never shown to other Dinkin players. Not to friends, not to people in your groups, not on public pings. Ever.
When you look someone up by phone to add them as a friend, your browser hashes their number with SHA-256 before it leaves your device. We compare hashes on the server. The actual number you typed never reaches us. Same thing happens with your own number when we check it against the friend graph.
We use your location for two things: showing you public pings nearby, and calculating the rough distance from a poster to you on public pings. We store an approximate lat/lng, not an address, and we don't keep a history of where you've been. Turn location off in your phone or browser and the discovery features stop working, but the rest of the app keeps running.
We use Cloudflare to host the app and Twilio to send verification codes. Both are mainstream services with their own privacy practices. We do not sell your data to anyone, for any reason.
Dinkin is free today and doesn't run ads. We may introduce ads or a paid tier in the future. If we do, we'll tell you in the app before it happens, and free features you rely on now won't get yanked behind a paywall without notice.
Your friends list, your groups, and your private friend nicknames aren't visible to other Dinkin players. The skill rating, first name, and last initial on your profile are visible to people you ping or who ping you.
To fix bugs and help with problems, the Dinkin team can view account data in a read-only mode. We can't post pings, join games, or change anything as you.
How to behave on Dinkin
Be a decent court partner. Don't harass people, don't use slurs, don't spam, don't post fake pings, don't show up to a game you confirmed and then ghost repeatedly. Pings should be real games you actually intend to play.
If someone reports you or we notice a pattern, we can remove pings, suspend your account, or ban you outright. We don't owe you a warning, but we'll usually give one for small stuff. Safety issues and harassment skip the warning.
If something's going wrong on Dinkin, email us at letsplay@dinkin.app. If something's going wrong at the courts, call the people who handle that: the facility, local authorities, whoever's appropriate. Dinkin can't intervene in person.
Content you post
Anything you write in a ping, a note, a status update, or a nickname stays yours. By posting it, you give Dinkin a license to display it to the audience you picked, store it on our servers, and back it up. That's it. We don't republish your stuff anywhere else.
When you delete a ping, we stop showing it. When you delete your account, we stop showing everything tied to you. See below.
The service is as-is
Dinkin is a free app run by one person. We do our best to keep it up, but we don't guarantee uptime, response time, or that any specific feature will keep working. We can change or remove features without notice.
We can't guarantee a game will fill, that the people who confirmed will show up, or that the people you meet through Dinkin are who they say they are.
What Dinkin isn't responsible for
Read this part. Dinkin is a coordination tool. The actual playing of pickleball is between you and the other humans on the court, and we're not part of it.
We're not responsible for: injuries you suffer at the courts or on the way there, injuries you cause to someone else, property damage of any kind, lost or stolen gear, disputes between players (scoring fights, line calls, no-shows, money owed for court fees, anything else), harassment or bad behavior between users that we didn't catch in time, the condition or safety of any court or facility, whether the people you meet are who they say they are, or any other physical, financial, social, or emotional fallout from games coordinated through the app.
You use Dinkin at your own risk and you play at your own risk. Use the same judgment you'd use meeting anyone from the internet in a public place.
If a claim, lawsuit, or demand comes at Dinkin because of something you did, posted, or were involved in on or off the app, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it, including legal fees.
To the fullest extent the law allows, Dinkin is not liable for any indirect, incidental, or consequential damages of any kind that come out of your use of the app.
Delete your account
For now, email letsplay@dinkin.app from the phone number tied to your account and ask us to delete it. We'll remove your account row, your pings, your groups, and your friend connections. We may keep aggregate, non-identifying stats (e.g., "X games were coordinated last month"). Twilio's SMS verification logs age out on their own per their retention policy.
A self-serve delete button is on the roadmap.
Changes to Court Rules
We can update these rules as Dinkin changes. For meaningful changes, we'll surface a notice in the app before they take effect. For small fixes (typos, clarifying a sentence) we'll just update the page and bump the "last updated" date. If you keep using Dinkin after a change, you're accepting the new version. If you don't like it, delete your account.
Governing law
These rules and any dispute that comes out of them are governed by the laws of the State of Michigan, without regard to its conflict-of-law principles. If something has to go to court, it goes to the state or federal courts located in Michigan, and you and Negative Space Bar LLC both agree to that.
Contact
Questions, reports, deletion requests, anything else: letsplay@dinkin.app. For formal legal notices, use the mailing address listed under "Who we are."