Terms of Service

1. The service

Grounded is a multi-tenant platform: one deployment hosts many chatbots ("bots"). Each bot is created and configured by its own bot owner and answers questions from the knowledge that owner provides. By using the platform, as a bot owner or as an end user chatting with a bot, you accept these terms.

2. Roles

• The platform operator runs this deployment and provides the hosting, models, and tooling.
• Bot owners create bots, supply their knowledge, and decide who may access them.
• End users chat with bots under whatever access rules the bot's owner has set.

3. Who may use the platform

You must be at least 13 to hold an account. Where the law where you live sets a higher age for agreeing to an online service on your own — 16 in much of the European Economic Area — that higher age is the one that applies to you. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian has to read these terms and agree to them with you.

A bot owner who aims a bot at children is responsible for the extra rules that come with that audience. The platform does not check the age of the people chatting with a bot; its owner decides who gets in.

4. Bot owners' responsibilities

A bot answers from what its owner feeds it. The owner, not the platform operator, is responsible for:

• the knowledge and content they upload or ingest, including having the rights to use it;
• what their bot publishes to end users, including its persona, refusal behavior, and any embedded placement on their own sites;
• their end users: access rules, invitations, and how end-user conversations with their bot are retained and reviewed;
• the accessibility of the content they upload — a text alternative for every image, link text that says where the link goes, and headings and lists that keep their structure. The platform is built to WCAG 2.2 AA and says so on the accessibility page, but it cannot write an alt text for a picture it has never seen. Content the owner supplies is the owner's to make accessible;
• complying with laws applicable to their bot's content and audience.

5. Acceptable use

You may not use the platform to:

• host, ingest, or distribute illegal content, or content that infringes others' rights;
• harass, defraud, or deceive others, or impersonate a person or organization;
• probe, overload, or circumvent the platform's security, rate limits, access gates, or tenant isolation;
• attempt to access another tenant's bots, knowledge, keys, or conversations.

Bots you may not build here

This platform is for bots that answer questions from a body of knowledge. Some bots are off-limits whatever knowledge sits behind them. You may not configure, prompt, name, or present a bot that:

• works as a companion, romantic partner, or emotional-support presence — a bot whose point is an ongoing personal relationship with the user rather than answering their questions;
• holds itself out as a licensed professional, or lets a user come away believing it is one: a doctor, therapist, counselor, lawyer, accountant, or anyone else whose title is licensed. Mental health is the sharp edge of this rule. A bot may not offer therapy, diagnose, treat, or stand in for a clinician, however it is framed — "as a therapist would say" is the same bot with a softer wrapper;
• makes, or materially informs, a consequential decision about a person — whether someone gets a job, credit, housing, insurance, a school place, or access to healthcare. A bot may explain a policy to the person it affects. It may not sit in the loop that decides.

If your product needs one of these, this is not the platform for it. A bot that crosses these lines is suspended, and we do not wait for a complaint first.

6. AI-generated answers

Answers are generated by a large language model and are grounded to the knowledge the bot's owner provided. The platform verifies answers against that knowledge and prefers a refusal over a guess. Even so, answers are AI-generated and are not warranted to be accurate, complete, or current. Do not rely on a bot's answer as professional advice; verify anything that matters against the cited source.

The platform tells the people chatting with a bot that they are talking to an AI system, not a person. That disclosure belongs to the platform, not to the bot. A bot owner may not remove it, hide it, style it away, or instruct their bot to deny it. A persona can have a name and a manner; it cannot claim to be human. Asked directly whether it is a person, a bot answers honestly.

7. Bring-your-own model keys

A bot owner may connect their own LLM provider key. Usage on an owner-supplied key is billed by that provider to the key's owner, and the owner is responsible for that provider's terms and charges. Keys are stored encrypted and are never displayed after saving.

8. Plans, billing, and cancellation

The Free plan is free and stays free. Paid plans are optional, and this section is about them. Where paid checkout is not switched on for this deployment yet, nothing is charged and nothing here has anything to bite on.

What you pay, and when

A paid plan is billed monthly and in advance, in US dollars, at the price shown on the pricing page when you subscribe. Your billing month starts the day you subscribe, not on the first of the calendar month. A one-off token top-up pack is a single charge that does not repeat.

Paid plans renew automatically

A paid plan renews itself every month, at the same price, until you cancel it. There is no end date, and you are not asked again before each renewal. Card details are held by the payment provider; they never reach this platform.

Cancelling

Cancel from My Bots → Plan & billing → Manage billing, which opens the payment provider's own portal. Cancel there and it is done: no email, no phone call, no retention offer, and nobody asking why. You never have to contact us to stop paying.

Cancelling stops the next renewal. It does not cut short the month you have already paid for — the plan keeps working to the end of the period you are paid up through, and the account moves to the Free plan after that.

Price changes

Prices can change. If the price of a plan you are on goes up, we tell you at least 30 days before the renewal that would charge the new price, so you can cancel first. A charge that has already been taken is never re-priced afterwards.

Tax

Prices are shown without tax. Any sales tax, VAT, or GST that applies where you are is added at checkout and shown to you before you pay. Any other tax on your own use of the service is yours to handle.

When a payment fails

If a charge fails, the payment provider retries it over the following days and your plan keeps working the whole time it is retrying — a card that expired on a Tuesday should not take your bots offline. If the retries run out with the invoice still unpaid, the paid allowance stops and the account runs at the Free plan's allowance instead.

What happens to your bots when a plan ends

Lapsing is not deletion. Whether a plan ends because you cancelled it or because it went unpaid, your bots, their knowledge, and their history stay exactly where they are and the account runs at the Free plan's limits. Nothing is erased for not paying. Removing your data is something you do yourself — delete the bot, or delete the account, as described in the privacy policy.

Refunds

Cancelling part-way through a month is not refunded — you keep the rest of the month you paid for instead. Past that, the rule is simple: if the service did not do what it said it would, ask and you get your money back. A duplicate charge, a charge taken after you cancelled, or a month the platform was broken for you is a refund, not a discussion. Ask through the contact page under the Billing topic. This is on top of any refund or withdrawal right the consumer law where you live already gives you; we do not ask you to sign that away.

9. Copyright and takedown

Bot owners upload their own material, and we do not see it before they do. If something here infringes your copyright, tell us and we will act on it.

How to report it

Send the notice through the contact page under the Copyright topic. A notice we can act on contains all of this:

• what you own — enough to identify the work, or a list of them if there are several;
• where the infringing material is — which bot, and the page or answer you saw it in, precisely enough that we can find it without guessing;
• how to reach you — an email address we can reply to, and a mailing address;
• a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized by you, your agent, or the law;
• a statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and that you are the rights holder or authorized to act for them;
• your name, typed as your signature.

A notice missing a piece is not thrown away, but it is slower — we may have to come back and ask for the missing piece before we can do anything.

What we do with it

We acknowledge a complete notice when we receive it and aim to decide within 10 business days. If we remove or disable material, we tell the bot owner what went and why, and we pass them the notice so they can answer it.

If you think we got it wrong

A bot owner whose material was removed by mistake or misidentification can reply through the same route with: what was removed and where it was; a statement, under penalty of perjury, that they believe in good faith it was removed by mistake or misidentification; their name, mailing address, and email; and their consent to the courts named in section 13. We pass a counter-notice to whoever complained. If they do not tell us within 10 business days that they have gone to court, we may put the material back.

Repeat infringers

We keep a record of the complaints we act on. An account whose material is repeatedly taken down loses the account. The working rule is three upheld complaints, and sooner where the infringement is deliberate or large. A complaint the owner successfully answers does not count against them.

10. Suspension and termination

The platform operator may suspend or remove accounts or bots that violate these terms, abuse the service, or exceed configured usage caps, where practical with notice and immediately where required. That includes the bots section 5 puts off-limits and the repeat infringers of section 9. Bot owners may delete their own bots at any time.

11. Disclaimer and limitation of liability

The service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the platform operator is not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from use of the platform, from a bot's answers, or from content supplied by bot owners.

12. Changes to these terms

These terms may be updated as the platform evolves; the "last updated" date above reflects the current version. Continued use after a change means you accept the updated terms.

13. Who you are contracting with

The platform operator for this deployment is named, with its jurisdiction and contact address, on the about page. These terms are governed by the law of the jurisdiction stated there, and that is where disputes are heard.

Bring a claim within one year. A claim arising out of these terms or your use of the platform has to be filed within one year of the day you knew, or reasonably should have known, the facts behind it. After that it is too late to bring it.

Everything above in this section gives way to this: nothing in these terms removes a right you have under mandatory consumer-protection law where you live. If that law gives you longer than a year to bring a claim, or sends the dispute to the courts where you are, that law wins and the two paragraphs above simply do not apply to you. Consumers in the EU and the UK keep their own courts and their own time limits.

14. Contact

Questions about these terms, a legal notice, or a security report: use the contact page, which lists the right route for each and a plain email address. A copyright complaint has its own topic there and its own procedure in section 9. Questions about a specific bot's content or behavior go to that bot's owner first — they control it.