Terms of Service

These terms ("Terms") govern your use of Vinculum, the hosted service at vinculum.run, operated by Whalefall Media LLC ("Vinculum," "we," "us"), based in the State of Idaho, USA.

By creating an account, signing in, or using the service, you agree to these Terms. If you don't agree, don't use the service.

If you self-host Vinculum from our open-source repository under the MIT License, you are not subject to these Terms — the MIT License governs your use. These Terms apply only to the hosted service.

1. The service

Vinculum is a coordination substrate for LLM-driven work. We provide:

• A multi-tenant Postgres-backed graph of typed entries, threads, branches, and projects
• An MCP-compatible tool surface, accessible from any MCP-speaking client (Claude Code, Claude.ai desktop, etc.)
• A real-time dashboard for browsing the graph, your sessions, and operational state
• On paid tiers: background intelligence (semantic search, thread title summaries, delta classification) running on our model provider keys

Tier limits, included features, and prices are listed at vinculum.run/pricing. The pricing page is the source of truth; if these Terms and that page conflict, the pricing page wins for plan composition.

We may add, remove, or change features. Material changes that reduce what your current plan offers will be announced at least 30 days in advance, and you will have the option to cancel for a prorated refund of any pre-paid period before they take effect.

2. Your account

To use the hosted service, you sign in with GitHub OAuth. By doing so:

• You confirm you are at least 13 years old. If you are between 13 and the age of majority in your jurisdiction, you confirm a parent or legal guardian agrees to these Terms on your behalf.
• You confirm the GitHub account is yours and the email associated with it can receive service notices.
• You agree to keep your GitHub credentials secure. You are responsible for activity under your account.
• You agree to notify us at security@vinculum.run if you suspect your account has been compromised.

One human, one account. Sharing accounts is not allowed; the Team plan exists for shared workspaces.

3. Acceptable use

You agree not to use Vinculum to:

• Violate the law or anyone's rights, including intellectual property and privacy rights
• Store or transmit malware, exploits, or any code intended to harm systems
• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to other users' data, our infrastructure, or any system you are not authorized to access
• Probe, scan, or attempt to compromise vulnerabilities in the service except via the disclosed coordinated disclosure path in SECURITY.md
• Generate or store content that violates the Anthropic Usage Policy when intelligence features are enabled — your usage of those features is also bound by Anthropic's terms
• Impersonate another person or entity, or misrepresent your affiliation
• Use the service to send unsolicited bulk communications
• Resell access to the hosted service, white-label it, or expose it as a third-party service to your own customers without a written agreement with us

We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these rules. For most violations we will warn first; for severe ones (active abuse, illegal activity, security incidents) we will act first and explain after.

4. Subscriptions, billing, cancellation

Free-tier accounts are free.

Paid plans (Pro, Team) are billed via Stripe on a monthly or annual basis, in advance. You authorize us to charge your payment method for the agreed amount and any applicable taxes.

• Trials. If your plan includes a free trial, you will not be charged until the trial ends. You can cancel during the trial without charge.
• Renewal. Plans auto-renew at the end of each period unless you cancel.
• Cancellation. Cancel anytime from Settings → Billing. You retain paid features through the end of the current billing period. We do not refund unused portions of a period except where required by law or where we have made a material reduction in your plan.
• Failed payments. We retry failed payments per Stripe's default schedule. If payment is not collected within 14 days, your account may be downgraded to the Free tier; your data is preserved.
• Price changes. We will give at least 30 days' notice before any price increase to existing customers, and you may cancel before the new price takes effect.

You are responsible for any taxes applicable to your purchase. Stripe handles tax calculation for jurisdictions where required.

5. Intellectual property

What's yours

You retain all rights to content you create or upload through the service. By using the service you grant us the limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to store, process, transmit, display back to you, and operate intelligence features on your content, for the sole purpose of running the service for you and the people you've shared with. This license ends when you delete the content or your account, except for backups still aging out under the schedule in our Privacy Policy.

We do not use your content to train any model — ours, Anthropic's, Voyage AI's, or anyone else's. Anthropic and Voyage AI's commercial terms also bind their handling of content we route to them.

What's ours

The Vinculum service surface, dashboard, MCP tool implementations as deployed at vinculum.run, marketing copy, and brand are owned by Whalefall Media LLC. The open-source codebase at github.com/duskett/vinculum is licensed under MIT — you can self-host, fork, modify, redistribute under those terms. The hosted instance and its derivative customizations are not under MIT and are not granted to you by these Terms beyond your right to use the service per your subscription.

What's third-party

The service uses third-party software (open-source libraries, Anthropic, Voyage AI, Stripe, etc.). Their licenses and terms continue to apply to your use of them through us. The third-party processor list is in our Privacy Policy.

Feedback

If you send us feedback, suggestions, or bug reports, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable license to use them without obligation. We won't claim attribution of the idea is required, but it's also not promised.

6. Disclaimers

The service is provided "as is" and "as available." We do our best, but we make no warranties — express or implied — including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or uninterrupted operation.

Specifically, and without limiting the above:

• We do not promise the service will be available 100% of the time. We aim for high availability but do not commit to a specific SLA except as set out in a separate written agreement.
• We do not promise that intelligence features (summaries, classifications, embeddings) will be accurate, useful, or fit for any particular decision. They are produced by probabilistic models. You are responsible for any decisions you make based on them.
• We do not promise data will not be lost. We back up nightly to encrypted off-box storage, but you are responsible for keeping your own copy of anything you can't afford to lose. The dashboard's data export feature exists for this purpose.
• We do not promise the service is free of bugs. We promise to investigate and fix issues as fast as we reasonably can.

You are responsible for evaluating whether the service is suitable for your use case before relying on it for anything important.

7. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

• Indirect damages. We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary, or punitive damages — including loss of profits, revenue, data, or use — even if we were advised of the possibility.
• Cap on direct damages. Our total cumulative liability under these Terms in any 12-month period is capped at the greater of (a) the amount you actually paid us in that period, or (b) USD $100.
• No indemnity from us beyond this cap. Same cap applies to indemnity obligations.

Some jurisdictions do not allow limitations on implied warranties or exclusions of certain damages. In those jurisdictions, our liability is limited to the maximum extent permitted by law.

8. Indemnity

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Whalefall Media LLC and its operator from claims, losses, and expenses arising from (a) your violation of these Terms, (b) your content, including any third-party claim that your content infringes their rights, or (c) your misuse of the service.

9. Termination

You can terminate your account anytime from Settings → Account → Delete my account. We retain the data described in the Privacy Policy under the retention schedule there, and dispose of the rest within 30 days.

We can terminate or suspend your account if (a) you violate these Terms, (b) we are required to by law, (c) the service is being discontinued (we will give at least 60 days' notice and a working data export path), or (d) extended non-payment of a paid plan. We will tell you why unless legally prohibited.

Sections that by their nature should survive termination — intellectual property, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnity, governing law — survive.

10. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Idaho, USA, without regard to its conflict of laws rules.

For any dispute we cannot resolve informally, we both agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in Ada County, Idaho. You and Whalefall Media LLC each waive any right to a jury trial. If you are a US consumer, your state's consumer protection laws may give you additional rights that these Terms cannot waive.

We prefer to resolve issues by talking first. Email legal@vinculum.run before filing anything.

[pending_legal_review: arbitration vs. court, class-action waiver, and small-claims carve-out are intentionally not included in this v1. A lawyer should review whether to add them and how, given Idaho law and the customer mix expected.]

11. Changes to these Terms

We will update these Terms as the product and the law evolve. Material changes will be announced via in-product notice and email at least 30 days before they take effect. Continued use of the service after the effective date counts as acceptance. If you don't agree, cancel before the effective date and your service ends at the end of your current paid period (or immediately for free accounts).

The last-updated date below is pulled from this document's git history. Old versions live in the public git history at content/legal/terms.md.

12. Contact

• General: support@vinculum.run
• Legal: legal@vinculum.run
• Security: security@vinculum.run, or see SECURITY.md
• Mail: Whalefall Media LLC, [postal address — pending_legal_review]