Instacart caps its total liability at the greater of $100 or what you paid it in the previous 12 months, which for most shoppers means a few hundred dollars for any failure, including one involving groceries, alcohol or prescription medicine. It also excludes damages for bodily injury, death and emotional distress, and states that the entire risk of using the service and of the products delivered to you rests with you. If you have a problem with a shopper or delivery driver you are asked to release Instacart from all claims, known and unknown, and to waive California Civil Code section 1542 protections. For unattended prescription delivery the release reaches Instacart's own negligence.
Almost every dispute goes to individual arbitration with no class action and no jury, and before you can even file you must complete a 60 day informal process with a personally signed notice. The arbitration clause reaches unusually far: it covers claims that arose before these terms took effect, sweeps in retailers, payment processors, advertisers and even your spouse and heirs as beneficiaries, and groups 25 or more similar claims into batches under a single arbitrator. Non-arbitrable claims must be filed in New Castle County, Delaware, wherever in the country you live. The real protections are a 30 day opt-out by email that does not reset when the terms change, a small claims carve-out, hearings in your own county, and preserved statutory rights for Canadian consumers.
The detailed privacy commitments live in a separate Privacy Policy that is not part of this document, so what you can judge here is the data handling the terms themselves authorise, and it is broad. Instacart processes your prompts and AI interactions to improve its models, keeps images of items you scan in store, keeps records of voice interactions, and may pass your data to third-party AI providers it can swap at any time. The prescription sections are the sharpest concern: they acknowledge that unencrypted text messages about your medication may be read by strangers and that unattended delivery can expose sensitive health information, then ask you to waive claims about exactly that.
You promise to defend and pay for Instacart and every retailer, plus their officers, directors, employees, agents and shareholders, against losses, penalties, fines and legal fees. The triggers go well beyond your own wrongdoing: any dispute between you and a retailer or delivery provider counts, as does anything done through your account by a spouse, a dependent or an AI agent. Instacart gets no matching obligation towards you, and this sits alongside a $100 liability cap running the other way. The one softening detail is that attorney and expert fees must be reasonable.
You keep ownership of the photos, lists, recipes and prompts you submit, and the licence you grant is tied to running and improving the service rather than to any purpose Instacart likes. Against that, the licence is worldwide, royalty free, transferable and sublicensable, covers modifying and distributing your content, and expressly includes training machine learning models. Feedback you send is handed over for any purpose with no payment, Instacart owns everything its AI generates, and it can remove your content at its sole discretion.
Instacart promises to notify you by email or in-app message when a change is material, and material changes to the arbitration clause will not reach claims you already raised. That is better than the bare posting model. However Instacart decides for itself what counts as material, no notice period is given, there is no archive of past versions, and your only way to reject a change is to stop using the service. Features and the service itself can change or disappear at any time with no notice at all.
Instacart reserves the right to suspend or close your account at any time, without notice, for any reason or no reason, which is the broadest termination language a consumer contract can use. There is no appeal process, no cure period, no notice requirement and nothing about exporting your order history or lists before you lose access. Instacart can also reverse refunds and charge your card on file for amounts it decides you owe, all on suspicion alone and at its sole discretion.
The Instacart+ auto-renewal is disclosed in capital letters, you can cancel yourself online from your membership page at any time, and price increases are notified before renewal so you can quit first. The weak points are refunds. Membership fees are treated as fully earned when paid, monthly fees are never refundable, and annual refunds only work if you cancel within five days and have not used a single benefit. Order refunds are discretionary, service fees are not returned on returned items, and cancellation fees are described only in a Help Center page outside the contract.
The terms are clearly written, split into numbered sections with plain-language summaries, and the arbitration clause is flagged in capital letters at the very top rather than buried. Acceptance happens simply by using the service, and the only age rule for the platform as a whole is your own promise that you are old enough to sign a contract, with no verification. Scope is broad, covering websites, apps, devices, APIs, embedded partner storefronts and any AI or agentic features Instacart may add later.