Terms of Service

Who we are and what you are agreeing to

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) are a binding agreement between you and Railgun(“Railgun”, “we”, “us”) covering the Railgun applications, websites, extensions and services, including Railgun Chat, Railgun Mail, Railgun Meet and Railgun Pixel (together, the “Service”). By creating an account, installing an application or otherwise using the Service, you accept these Terms and our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated by reference.

If you use the Service on behalf of an organisation, you represent that you have authority to bind that organisation, and “you” includes it. If you do not agree to these Terms, do not use the Service.

Eligibility

You must be at least 16 years old to use the Service. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use the Service only with the involvement and consent of a parent or legal guardian who agrees to these Terms on your behalf. You may not use the Service if you are barred from doing so under the laws of any applicable jurisdiction, or if we have previously suspended or removed you from it.

Your account and your keys

Railgun is designed so that the cryptographic keys protecting your messages are generated and held on your devices. We do not have them, we cannot reset them, and we cannot decrypt content protected by them. This is the point of the product, and it has a consequence you must understand: if you lose your devices and your recovery material, your encrypted history is gone. Keep your recovery codes somewhere safe. Losing access to keys is not a defect in the Service and is not something we can remedy.

You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, for keeping your credentials and linked devices secure, and for telling us promptly at security@railgun.chat if you believe your account has been compromised. You may not share an account, sell or transfer it, or let anyone else use it.

Usernames are allocated first come, first served. We may reclaim a username that impersonates a person or organisation, infringes a right, is inactive for an extended period, or is being held for resale.

Acceptable use

We do not read your messages, so we rely on you and on the reports of other users to keep the Service safe. You agree not to use the Service to:

• Harass, threaten, stalk, defraud or abuse any person, or distribute content that exploits or endangers minors.
• Send unsolicited bulk messages or email, or use Railgun Mail to send mail on behalf of an address you do not control.
• Infringe anyone’s intellectual property, privacy or other rights, or distribute malware.
• Break the law where you are, where we are, or where the person you are talking to is.
• Probe, scan, overload or interfere with the Service or its networks, bypass rate limits, or access accounts or data that are not yours.
• Reverse-engineer the Service except to the extent applicable law expressly permits, or build a competing service by scraping it.
• Resell, sublicense or offer the Service as a service to third parties without a written agreement with us.
• Use automated means (bots, scripts, extensions other than ours) to create accounts or to operate an account at a scale no person would.

We may investigate suspected violations using metadata we hold and reports we receive, and may suspend or terminate accounts, remove content we host, and cooperate with law enforcement where we are legally required to. Because we cannot decrypt end-to-end encrypted content, enforcement in encrypted conversations depends on reports from participants.

Encryption: what it does and does not do

Encryption protects the content of a message in transit and at rest on our servers. It does not protect the message on a device that has been compromised, from a person you have chosen to send it to, from a screenshot, or from a copy made by a client we did not write. It does not hide who you talk to from the network operator between you and us, and it does not make you anonymous.

During the beta, the encryption in some shipping clients is narrower than the architecture it is being built toward. The Privacy Policy and the encryption reference describe, per client and per feature, what is encrypted today. Those pages control over any marketing description, and we update them when the software changes. You should rely on them, not on a headline, when deciding what to send.

Beta software

The Service is offered in beta. Features may be incomplete, may change or be withdrawn without notice, and may contain defects that cause loss of data, missed messages or interrupted calls. We may reset, migrate or delete beta data as part of moving to a stable release. Beta access, and any plan or credit granted for testing purposes, is a courtesy that we may withdraw at any time, and it does not create an entitlement to the same terms after the beta ends.

Plans, credits and payment

Some parts of the Service are free; others require a paid plan or prepaid credits. Prices, allowances and what each plan includes are described on the pricing page at the time you buy, and that description is part of these Terms for that purchase.

Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel. Cancelling stops the next renewal; it does not refund the current period. Credits are consumed by metered features (for example translated meeting minutes and transcription) at the rates shown when you buy them. Credits are not money, carry no cash value, cannot be transferred between accounts and are not refundable once purchased, except where the law where you live requires otherwise. We may expire unused promotional credits; purchased credits do not expire while your account is in good standing.

Price changes. We may change prices with at least 30 days’ notice by email or in the product. A change takes effect at your next renewal after the notice period; if you do not agree, cancel before then.

Chargebacks and failed payments. If a payment fails, or you dispute a charge with your bank instead of contacting us, we may suspend paid features immediately and the account until the amount is resolved. We may recover the disputed amount, the payment processor’s fees and any credits consumed against it.

Taxes. Prices exclude taxes unless stated. You are responsible for any taxes that apply to your purchase, other than taxes on our income.

App stores. Purchases made through Apple or Google are billed by them under their terms, and refunds for those purchases are handled by them, not by us.

Fair use and ceilings

Every plan, including paid ones, is priced for use by a person or a team at a rate that people and teams actually reach. The Service enforces limits — per-day mail sends, meeting session lengths, automation and extension request rates, storage — and we may add or adjust limits to protect the Service. Where a limit is published on the pricing page, that number applies; where it is not, the standard is what a reasonable user of that plan would do. Use that is designed to sit at a ceiling continuously, to spread one workload across many accounts, to relay for third parties, or to consume metered resources that are not billed to you, is outside fair use and grounds for suspension without refund.

Sending mail through Railgun Mail uses a shared reputation. Sending mail that recipients report as unwanted, or that bounces at scale, harms every other user, and we may stop your sending immediately without notice to protect delivery for everyone else.

Your content

You own what you create and send. You grant us only the licence we need to operate the Service: to store, transmit, cache and back up your content, in encrypted form where the Service encrypts it, and to display it to the people you send it to. That licence ends when you delete the content or your account, subject to backups being cycled out and to copies that recipients already hold. We claim no other rights in your content and do not use it to train models or to advertise.

You are responsible for the content you send and for having the rights to send it. Where we host content in the clear — community and channel messages during the beta, public profiles, mail you send through us — we may remove it if it violates these Terms or the law.

Our software and marks

The Service, its clients, designs, names and logos are ours or our licensors’. Where we publish source code under an open-source licence, that licence governs the code; nothing in these Terms narrows it. These Terms give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the applications we distribute, on devices you control, for the purpose of using the Service. You may not use the Railgun name or marks to suggest endorsement without written permission.

If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without obligation to you.

Third-party services

Parts of the Service are delivered by providers we contract with — real-time media, speech recognition, translation, email relay, payment processing, push notification delivery and app distribution among them. Their involvement is described in the Privacy Policy. We choose providers carefully and bind them contractually, but they are not under our control, and an outage, change or breach at a provider may affect the Service. Features that depend on a provider may be unavailable in some regions or languages.

Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time from the application. Deleting your account removes your profile, keys we hold for delivery and undelivered messages queued for you; encrypted messages already delivered to other people remain on their devices.

We may suspend or terminate your access, with or without notice, if you materially breach these Terms, if we are required to by law, if your use creates risk or legal exposure for us or for other users, or if the account has been inactive for more than twelve months. We may discontinue the Service or any part of it with reasonable notice. On termination for breach, no refund is owed. Sections that by their nature should survive — including those on your content, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity and disputes — survive.

Disclaimers

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, that messages will be delivered, that calls will connect, that translations or transcriptions will be accurate, or that any content will be preserved. Railgun is not a substitute for emergency services and cannot be used to contact them. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranty exclusions; in those places these disclaimers apply to the fullest extent the law permits.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Railgun and its officers, directors, employees, contractors and licensors will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill or business opportunity, arising out of or related to the Service or these Terms, however caused and under any theory of liability, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim and one hundred United States dollars (US$100).

These limits apply together and reflect the price of the Service. They do not limit liability that cannot be limited under applicable law, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for consumers’ statutory rights in jurisdictions that do not permit their exclusion.

Indemnity

You will defend, indemnify and hold harmless Railgun and its officers, directors, employees, contractors and licensors from any claim, demand, loss or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your content, your use of the Service, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of any law or of any third party’s rights. We may take over the defence of any matter subject to indemnity, in which case you will cooperate with us.

Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which Railgun is established, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute that cannot be resolved informally will be brought exclusively in the courts of that jurisdiction, and you consent to their jurisdiction, except that either party may seek injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect its intellectual property or confidential information.

Talk to us first. Before filing a claim, you agree to email legal@railgun.chat with a description of the dispute and to try in good faith to resolve it with us for 60 days. Most problems are fixed this way.

Individual claims. To the extent permitted by law, you and Railgun agree that any dispute will be brought only on an individual basis and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective or representative proceeding. Where the law where you live gives you rights that this section cannot limit — including a consumer’s right to bring proceedings in their home courts — those rights are unaffected.

Export controls and sanctions

The Service includes encryption software that may be subject to export and import controls. You represent that you are not located in, and are not a national or resident of, a country or territory subject to comprehensive sanctions, and that you are not on any government list of restricted or denied parties. You agree to comply with all applicable export, re-export and import laws in your use of the Service.

Copyright and abuse reports

If you believe content hosted in the clear on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice to legal@railgun.chat identifying the work, the location of the material, your contact details and a statement made in good faith that the use is not authorised. We respond to valid notices and may terminate accounts of repeat infringers. Reports of abuse, harassment or illegal content go to abuse@railgun.chat; security vulnerabilities go to security@railgun.chat under the process on the security page.

Changes to these Terms

We may revise these Terms. For material changes we will give at least 14 days’ notice by email or in the product before they take effect, and the date at the top of this page will change. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept it; if you do not, stop using the Service and delete your account before then. Changes required by law or to address an urgent security issue may take effect immediately.

General

These Terms, the Privacy Policy and any plan-specific terms you accept at purchase are the entire agreement between you and Railgun about the Service. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect and the provision is enforced to the maximum extent permitted. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, or to an affiliate. Notices to you may be sent to the email address on your account. Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, agency or employment relationship.

Contact

Questions about these Terms: legal@railgun.chat.