Terms of Service

When we say “Company”, “we”, “our”, or “us” in this document, we are referring to Nikolaus Graf.

When we say “Services”, we mean any product created and maintained by Nikolaus Graf. That includes Serenity Notes and Serenity SDK, whether delivered within a web browser, desktop application, mobile application, or another format.

When we say “You” or “your”, we are referring to the people or organizations that own an account with one or more of our Services.

When you use our Services, now or in the future, you are agreeing to the latest Terms of Service. That's true for any of our existing and future products and all features that we add to our Services over time. There may be times where we do not exercise or enforce any right or provision of the Terms of Service; in doing so, we are not waiving that right or provision. These terms do contain a limitation of our liability.

If you violate of any of these terms, we retain the right to suspend or terminate your account.

Account Terms

You are responsible for maintaining the security of your devices and email account. The Company cannot and will not be liable for any loss or damage from your failure to comply with this security obligation.
You may not use the Services for any purpose outlined in our Use Restrictions policy further down in the Terms of Service.
You are responsible for all content posted and activity that occurs under your account. That includes content posted by others who either: (a) have access to your login credentials; or (b) have their own logins under your account.
You must be a human. Accounts registered by “bots” or other automated methods are not permitted.

Payment, Refunds, and Plan Changes

If you are using a free version of one of our Services, it is really free: we do not ask you for your credit card and — just like for customers who pay for our Services — we do not sell your data.
For paid Services that offer a free trial, we explain the length of trial when you sign up. After the trial period, you need to pay in advance to keep using the Service. If you do not pay, we will prevent you to create new content with your account and it will stay in that state until you make a payment.
If you are upgrading from a free plan to a paid plan, we will charge your card immediately and your billing cycle starts on the day of upgrade. For other upgrades or downgrades in plan level, the new rate starts from the next billing cycle.
We process refunds on a per-case basis. For refunds, please contact us at hi@serenity.re

Cancellation and Termination

You are solely responsible for properly canceling your account. Within each of our Services, we provide a simple no-questions-asked cancellation link. An email or phone request to cancel your account is not automatically considered cancellation. If you need help cancelling your account, you can always contact our Support team.
All of your content will be accessible, but not updateable from the Services immediately upon cancellation.
If you cancel the Service before the end of your current paid up month, your cancellation will take effect immediately, and you will not be charged again. We do not automatically prorate unused time in the last billing cycle.
We have the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of our Services for any reason at any time. Suspension means you and any other users on your account will not be able to access the account or any content in the account. Termination will furthermore result in the deletion of your account or your access to your account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all content in your account. We also reserve the right to refuse the use of the Services to anyone for any reason at any time. We have this clause because statistically speaking, out of the hundreds of thousands of accounts on our Services, there is at least one doing something nefarious. There are some things we staunchly stand against and this clause is how we exercise that stance. For more details, see our Use Restrictions policy.
Verbal, physical, written or other abuse (including threats of abuse or retribution) of Company employee or officer will result in immediate account termination.

Modifications to the Service and Prices

Sometimes it becomes technically impossible to continue a feature or we redesign a part of our Services because we think it could be better or we decide to close new signups of a product. We reserve the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, any part of our Services with or without notice.
Sometimes we change the pricing structure for our products. When we do that, we tend to exempt existing customers from those changes. However, we may choose to change the prices for existing customers. If we do so, we will give at least 30 days notice and will notify you via the email address on record. We may also post a notice about changes on our websites or the affected Services themselves.

Uptime, Security, and Privacy

Your use of the Services is at your sole risk. We provide these Services on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We do not offer service-level agreements for most of our Services, but do take uptime of our applications seriously.
We reserve the right to temporarily disable your account if your usage significantly exceeds the average usage of other customers of the Services. Of course, we'll reach out to the account owner before taking any action except in rare cases where the level of use may negatively impact the performance of the Service for other customers.
We take many measures to protect and secure your data through backups, redundancies, and encryption. We enforce encryption for data transmission from the public Internet.
When you use our Services, you entrust us with your data. We take that trust to heart. You agree that Serenity Notes may process your data as described in our Privacy Policy and for no other purpose. We as humans can access your data for the following reasons:

To help you with support requests you make. We'll ask for express consent before accessing your account.
To safeguard Serenity Notes. We'll look at logs and metadata as part of our work to ensure the security of your data and the Services as a whole. If necessary, we may also access accounts as part of an abuse report investigation.
To the extent required by applicable law.

We use third party vendors and hosting partners to provide the necessary hardware, software, networking, storage, and related technology required to run the Services. You can see a list of all third party vendors in the Privacy Policy.

Copyright and Content Ownership

All content posted on the Services must comply with EU copyright law. If you have found a case of copyright infringement, contact us at hi@serenity.re.
We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Services. All materials uploaded remain yours.
We do not pre-screen content, but reserve the right (but not the obligation) in our sole discretion to refuse or remove any content that is available via Serenity Notes.
The names, look, and feel of the Services are copyright© to the Company. All rights reserved. You may not duplicate, copy, or reuse any portion of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or visual design elements without express written permission from the Company. You must request permission to use the Company's logo or any Service logos for promotional purposes. Please email us at hi@serenity.re requests to use logos. We reserve the right to rescind this permission if you violate these Terms of Service.
You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Services, use of the Services, or access to the Services without the express written permission by the Company.
You must not modify another website so as to falsely imply that it is associated with the Services or the Company.

Features and Bugs

We design our Services with care, based on our own experience and the experiences of customers who share their time and feedback. However, there is no such thing as a service that pleases everybody. We make no guarantees that our Services will meet your specific requirements or expectations.

We also test all of our features extensively before shipping them. As with any software, our Services inevitably have some bugs. We track the bugs reported to us and work through priority ones, especially any related to security or privacy. Not all reported bugs will get fixed and we don't guarantee completely error-free Services.

Use Rescriptions

Restricted purposes

Violence, or threats thereof: If an activity qualifies as violent crime in the United States or where you live, you may not use Serenity products to plan, perpetrate, or threaten that activity.
Child exploitation, sexualization, or abuse: We don’t tolerate any activities that create, disseminate, or otherwise cause child abuse. Keep away and stop. Just stop.
Doxing: If you are using Serenity products to share other peoples’ private personal information for the purposes of harassment, we don’t want anything to do with you.
Malware or spyware: Code for good, not evil. If you are using our products to make or distribute anything that qualifies as malware or spyware — including remote user surveillance — begone.
Phishing or otherwise attempting fraud: It is not okay to lie about who you are or who you affiliate with to steal from, extort, or otherwise harm others.
Spamming: No one wants unsolicited commercial emails. We don’t tolerate folks (including their bots) using Serenity products for spamming purposes. If your emails don’t pass muster with CAN-SPAM (opens in a new tab) or any other anti-spam law, it’s not allowed.
Cybersquatting: We don’t like username extortionists. If you purchase a Serenity product account in someone else’s name and then try to sell that account to them, you are cybersquatting (opens in a new tab). Cybersquatting accounts are subject to immediate cancelation.
Infringing on intellectual property: You can’t use Serenity products to make or disseminate work that uses the intellectual property of others beyond the bounds of fair use (opens in a new tab).

While our use restrictions are comprehensive, they can’t be exhaustive — it’s possible an offense could defy categorization, present for the first time, or illuminate a moral quandary we hadn’t yet considered. That said, we hope the overarching spirit is clear: Serenity is not to be harnessed for harm, whether mental, physical, personal or civic. Different points of view — philosophical, religious, and political — are welcome, but ideologies like white nationalism, or hate-fueled movements anchored by oppression, violence, abuse, extermination, or domination of one group over another, will not be accepted here.

How to report abuse

Please let us know by emailing hi@serenity.re. If you’re not 100% sure if something rises to the level of our use restrictions policy, report it anyway.

Please share as much as you are comfortable with about the account, the content or behavior you are reporting, and how you found it. Sending us a URL or screenshots is super helpful. If you need a secure file transfer, let us know and we will send you a link. We will not disclose your identity to anyone associated with the reported account.

Someone on our team will respond to let you know we’ve begun investigating. We will also let you know the outcome of our investigation (unless you ask us not to, or we are not allowed to under law).

Liability

We mention liability throughout these Terms but to put it all in one section:

You expressly understand and agree that the Company shall not be liable, in law or in equity, to you or to any third party for any direct, indirect, incidental, lost profits, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, data or other intangible losses (even if the Company has been advised of the possibility of such damages), resulting from: (i) the use or the inability to use the Services; (ii) the cost of procurement of substitute goods and services resulting from any goods, data, information or services purchased or obtained or messages received or transactions entered into through or from the Services; (iii) unauthorized access to or alteration of your transmissions or data; (iv) statements or conduct of any third party on the service; (v) or any other matter relating to this Terms of Service or the Services, whether as a breach of contract, tort (including negligence whether active or passive), or any other theory of liability.

Changes to This Terms and Conditions

We may update our Terms and Conditions from time to time. Thus, you are advised to review this page periodically for any changes. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Terms and Conditions on this page.

These terms and conditions are effective as of 2021-02-09

Contact Us

If you have any questions or suggestions about my Terms and Conditions, do not hesitate to contact me at hi@serenity.re.

These Terms of Service have been adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies (opens in a new tab) / CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab)