This isn't legal advice, and anything with real money or sensitive data deserves a professional. But a small project shared publicly has a short list of obligations worth knowing about.

If you collect any personal data

Even just email addresses. You need to tell people what you collect, why, how long you keep it, and who else sees it. That's a privacy policy, and it can be a page of plain English.

You also need a lawful basis for holding it. For a signup form, consent — freely given, specific, and not bundled into something else. A pre-ticked box isn't consent.

If you use cookies or similar

Strictly necessary cookies — a session for a logged-in user — generally don't need consent. Analytics and advertising cookies generally do, before they're set, with a genuine option to decline.

The simplest compliant answer for a small project is to not use tracking cookies at all. Server-side or cookieless analytics avoids the whole banner problem.

If you charge money

Terms of service, a refund policy, and clarity about what people are buying. In many places, digital goods carry specific consumer rights around cancellation.

Sales tax and VAT depend on where your customers are, not where you are. This is genuinely complicated, which is why merchant-of-record providers exist — they handle it for a percentage, and for a solo developer that's usually the right trade.

If you accept user content

A terms of service saying what's allowed, and a way to remove content and users. Without this you have no stated basis for removing anything.

Licence your code

If you publish a repository with no licence, nobody may legally use it. Pick one deliberately — permissive if you want it used freely, copyleft if you want derivatives shared.

legal-checklist.txt
My project: <what it does>
It collects: <data>. It charges: <yes/no, how>. Users are in:
<countries>. User-generated content: <yes/no>.

List what I most likely need — privacy policy, terms, cookie consent,
refund policy, licence — and for each, what it actually has to say.

Flag anything here that genuinely needs a professional rather than a
template, and say why.

This isn't legal advice and I understand that.

A short honest policy describing what you actually do beats a long copied one describing practices you don't follow.