Terms of Service.

1This agreement

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a binding contract between you and CoDuck, Inc., a Delaware corporation ("CoDuck," "we," "us"). They govern your access to and use of the CoDuck website, application, command-line tool, APIs, and the hosting we provide for the projects you build (together, the "Service").

You accept these Terms by creating an account, or by using the Service if you already have one. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

If you are entering into these Terms on behalf of a company or other organisation, you represent that you have authority to bind it, and "you" means that organisation.

2Eligibility and your account

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you are under 18, 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 and accepts responsibility for your use of it.

You must provide accurate account information and keep it current. We may require you to verify your email address before generating projects.

You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, including keeping your password secure. Tell us at support@coduck.ai as soon as you suspect unauthorised access.

One person or organisation per account. Do not share credentials, and do not create accounts by automated means or to evade a suspension.

3What the Service does

You describe what you want in plain language. CoDuck uses AI models to generate a working application — pages, a database, and the code that ties them together — and hosts it for you on a coduck.app subdomain or a custom domain you connect.

The Service is provided as an ongoing subscription and is continually changing. We add, alter, and remove features. We will not make a change that materially reduces the core functionality of a paid plan during a billing period you have already paid for, but outside that, the Service is not frozen at the state it was in when you signed up.

We may set reasonable technical limits — on generation volume, storage, database size, project count, or request rate — and change them with notice. Limits applying to your plan are described on our pricing page.

4Your content

"Your Content" means everything you put into the Service: your prompts, files you upload, code you write or edit, data your applications store, and the domains and credentials you connect.

As between you and us, you own Your Content. We claim no ownership of it.

You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, copy, transmit, display, and modify Your Content — but only to the extent needed to operate, secure, and support the Service for you. That licence includes sending your prompts and project code to the AI provider that performs the generation, and it ends when you delete the content or close your account, subject to the retention periods in our Privacy Policy.

You represent that you have the rights to Your Content and that our handling of it as described here will not infringe anyone's rights or break any law.

5Generated output

"Output" means the code, text, configuration, designs, and other material the Service generates in response to your prompts.

You own the Output generated for you, to the extent it is capable of being owned, and we assign to you whatever rights we have in it. You may use it for any purpose, including commercially, including after you stop paying us.

Two honest limits on that. First, AI systems produce similar output for similar prompts, so we cannot promise your Output is unique, and other customers may receive materially similar Output. Second, Output may include or resemble pre-existing open-source or third-party material; where it does, that material stays under its own licence and your rights come from that licence, not from us.

Output is generated automatically and is not reviewed by a person before you receive it. Section 12 explains what that means for reliance.

Your Output frequently depends on third-party open-source packages that we install on your behalf. Those packages are licensed to you by their authors under their own terms, which you are responsible for complying with.

6Our intellectual property

The Service itself — our software, models, prompts, interfaces, documentation, brand, and everything else we provide other than the Output — belongs to us and our licensors. These Terms grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service while your account is in good standing, and nothing more.

You may not:

• copy, modify, or create derivative works of the Service;
• reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract our source code, models, or system prompts, except to the extent that restriction is unenforceable by law;
• resell, sublicense, or provide the Service to third parties as a competing offering;
• use the Service, or Output obtained from it, to build or train a competing AI or website-generation product; or
• remove or obscure any proprietary notice.

Feedback you send us is genuinely useful, and we would rather not put a legal fence around it: if you send us suggestions, we may use them freely and without obligation to you. You keep no claim over a feature we build because you suggested it.

7Acceptable use

This section applies to how you use the Service and to everything you build, deploy, and publish with it.

Do not use the Service to:

• break the law, or help anyone else do so;
• infringe someone's intellectual property, privacy, or publicity rights;
• build or distribute malware, ransomware, credential harvesters, phishing pages, or anything designed to deceive people into giving up money or information;
• send unsolicited bulk email, or operate a service whose purpose is to send it;
• publish child sexual abuse material, content that sexualises minors, or non-consensual intimate imagery — we report this to the authorities and terminate immediately, without notice;
• harass, threaten, defame, or incite violence against anyone;
• attack, probe, overload, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to our infrastructure, another customer's project, or any third-party system;
• circumvent usage limits, credit metering, rate limiting, or a suspension, including by creating additional accounts;
• mine cryptocurrency, run distributed computation unrelated to your application, or otherwise use our compute for something other than running the site you built; or
• misrepresent yourself as another person or organisation, including by deploying a site that impersonates one.

You are responsible for the applications you deploy through us and for the people who use them. If your application collects personal data from its own users, you are the controller of that data. You need your own lawful basis, your own privacy notice, and your own consents — ours do not cover your users, and we do not review your application to check.

Some uses are not prohibited but do carry consequences you should know about. Generated code is not reviewed by a person before you receive it, so if you are building something in a regulated area — payments, health, credit, or anything where a defect causes real-world harm — Section 12 applies and the obligation to get it reviewed is yours.

8Plans, credits and billing

Some parts of the Service are free. Paid plans are billed in advance on a recurring basis through our payment processor, Stripe, at the prices shown at checkout. Card details are entered directly with Stripe on their own hosted checkout page — they never reach our servers, and we cannot see or store them.

Credits. Generation consumes credits. Subscription plans include a credit allowance that refreshes each billing cycle and does not roll over — anything unused at the end of a cycle is gone. Top-up credits you buy separately do not expire while your account is open.

Which credits get used first. Where you hold both, a generation draws on your top-up credits first, and only then on your subscription allowance for the cycle. This is deliberate: your subscription allowance expires at the end of the cycle and your top-up credits do not, so spending the perishable balance last would waste it.

Refunds. Fees are non-refundable, except where the law requires otherwise or where we grant a refund at our discretion. Cancelling does not refund the period you have already paid for, and we do not publish a money-back window. If you think your situation warrants a refund, email support@coduck.ai and a person will look at it — we would rather be asked than have you dispute a charge.

Renewal and cancellation. Subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled. You can cancel at any time from your account settings, effective at the end of the current paid period. Cancelling stops future charges.

After cancellation. Your deployed sites keep serving for 30 days after your paid period ends. After that we put them to sleep — the site stops serving, but we do not delete your projects or their data, and starting a plan again wakes them back up automatically.

Failed payments. If a charge fails we set your account to past due, retry the charge on our processor's schedule, and email you — first when the charge fails, and again before the final attempt. Your sites and paid features keep running while we retry. If the final attempt also fails, the subscription ends and your account returns to the free plan, at which point the 30-day window described above begins.

Chargebacks. If you dispute a charge with your bank, we zero the credit balances on the account — both subscription and top-up — while the dispute is open. Talking to us first is almost always faster.

Price and tax. We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice before they apply to your next renewal. Prices exclude taxes unless stated; you are responsible for any tax other than tax on our income.

9Third-party services and your deployed sites

The Service integrates with third parties — payment processing, source control, domain registrars, search tools, email delivery, and the AI provider that performs generation. Those services are operated by others under their own terms, and we are not responsible for them. The current list is on our subprocessors page.

When you connect a third-party account to CoDuck, you authorise us to access it as needed to provide the feature you turned on. You can disconnect at any time.

Applications you deploy are served from our infrastructure. You are responsible for what they contain and what they do. We may take down a deployed site that breaches Section 7, and where the violation is not severe we will try to reach you first.

10Beta and preview features

We sometimes release features labelled beta, preview, experimental, or similar ("Beta Features"). They are optional, provided "as is" and with no warranty of any kind, and excluded from any service commitment or support obligation.

Beta Features may be changed, broken, or withdrawn without notice, and may lose data. Do not use them for anything you cannot afford to lose.

Using a Beta Feature does not put you under any confidentiality obligation to us — you are free to talk publicly about the product. If you tell us what you think of it, Section 6 applies to that feedback.

11Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time from your account settings.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you materially breach these Terms, if your use threatens the security, stability, or lawful operation of the Service or another customer, if payment fails and stays unresolved, or if we are required to by law.

Where the circumstances allow it, we will give you notice and a chance to fix the problem first. Where they do not — active abuse, a security threat, illegal content, or a legal requirement — we may act immediately and tell you afterwards.

On termination, your right to use the Service ends. Your project source stays retrievable through the command-line tool, and through GitHub sync if you have connected a repository. We do not yet offer a one-click export of an entire account — until we do, email support@coduck.ai and we will put your data together for you by hand. We will honour a request made within 30 days of termination unless the law prevents us or the termination was for serious abuse.

Sections 4, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15, 17 and 18 survive termination, as does your obligation to pay anything already owed.

12AI output — what we do not promise

This section matters more than the rest of the disclaimers, so it gets its own heading.

The Service generates code and content automatically using AI models. It can be wrong. It can produce code that does not work, that works but is insecure, that handles edge cases badly, that is inefficient, or that is plainly unsuitable for what you intended. It can state things that are untrue.

You are responsible for reviewing, testing, and securing anything you deploy or rely on. That is true whether or not you can read the code. If you are using the Service to build something where a defect would cause real harm — handling payments, storing personal or health data, controlling anything physical, or supporting a legal or medical decision — have someone competent review it before it goes live.

We do not warrant that Output is accurate, complete, secure, non-infringing, or fit for any purpose, and we are not liable for decisions you make in reliance on it.

13Disclaimers

Except where the law does not allow it, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", and we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including 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 defects will be corrected, or that any data will not be lost. We do not offer a service-level commitment on any plan unless we have agreed one with you in a signed writing.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is the case, the exclusions above apply to the maximum extent permitted, and nothing here limits rights you have as a consumer that cannot be waived.

14Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, or lost or corrupted data, even if advised such damages were possible.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service is limited to the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred US dollars (US$100).

These limits do not apply to your obligation to pay amounts owed, to either party's liability for fraud or wilful misconduct, to your indemnity obligations under Section 15, or to any liability that cannot be limited by law — including, in some places, death or personal injury caused by negligence.

15Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless CoDuck and its officers, employees, and agents from any third-party claim, and any resulting damages, liabilities, and reasonable legal fees, arising out of Your Content, the applications you deploy, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of any law or third-party right.

We will tell you promptly about any claim, give you control of the defence, and cooperate reasonably. You may not settle a claim in a way that admits fault on our behalf or imposes an obligation on us without our consent.

16Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. When we make a material change we will give at least 30 days' notice by email or in the product before it takes effect, and update the effective date at the top of this page.

Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms. If you do not accept them, cancel before the effective date; where you have paid in advance for a period extending beyond it, we will refund the unused portion on request.

We keep a record of which version of these Terms you accepted and when.

17Governing law and dispute resolution

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

Talk to us first. Before starting any formal proceeding, email legal@coduck.ai describing the dispute. We will try in good faith to resolve it with you within 30 days. Most things end here.

Arbitration. Any dispute not resolved that way will be settled by binding arbitration seated in North Carolina, administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules or Commercial Arbitration Rules as applicable, before a single arbitrator. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court with jurisdiction.

Jury and class waiver. Both parties waive any right to a jury trial. Disputes will be resolved individually, and neither party may bring a claim as a plaintiff or class member in a class, consolidated, or representative action. If this waiver is found unenforceable, the arbitration agreement in this section does not apply to that dispute.

Opting out of arbitration. You may opt out of this arbitration agreement by emailing legal@coduck.ai within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, with your name and account email. Opting out costs you nothing else — the rest of these Terms still apply, and disputes go to the state or federal courts of North Carolina instead.

Exception. Either party may seek injunctive relief in court to protect its intellectual property or confidential information, and either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court.

18General

Entire agreement. These Terms are the entire agreement between us about the Service and replace any earlier understanding.

Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of substantially all our assets.

Severability and waiver. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in effect. Not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.

Notices. We will send notices to the email on your account. Send notices to us at legal@coduck.ai, or by post to REGISTERED POSTAL ADDRESS.

No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms create rights only between you and us.

Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by something outside its reasonable control.

Export and sanctions. You may not use the Service if you are subject to applicable sanctions or are located in an embargoed jurisdiction, and you may not use it in breach of export-control law.