Terms of Service

These terms of service ("Terms") are the agreement between you ("you", "your") and Dmitry Kolesnikov, Postal address available on request at ask@assay.it while our registered address is being set up. ("we", "us", "our"), which operates https://assay.it and the application at https://app.assay.it (together, the "Service").

assay.it is an experiment run by one person, not a company. What you pay is set to cover what an analysis costs to run — the AI models and the compute behind it — rather than to turn a profit. That shapes these Terms: they are written to be short and honest rather than to squeeze every advantage out of you, but they also say plainly what you should not expect from a service run by one person. Please read section 4 in particular — it explains what the analysis you receive actually is, and what it is not.

By creating an account or using the Service, you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service. Our Privacy Policy forms part of this agreement.

You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service. By using it you confirm that you are. If you are accepting these Terms on behalf of a company or other organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it, and "you" means that organisation.

Terms of Service Sections

1. What the Service does

You give the Service a document — a link to a public page, or a text or Markdown file you upload. The Service reads it, extracts the claims the author makes, checks those claims against public sources using automated research and AI models, and produces a written analysis ("dossier") with a verdict and citations for each claim.

The Service runs asynchronously. A typical analysis takes several minutes. We email you when it finishes. Your dossiers are private to your account: we do not publish them, index them or show them to other users.

The Service is an early-stage product under active development. Features may appear, change or be withdrawn. Where a change would materially reduce what you have already paid for, section 8 applies.

2. Your account

You need an account to use the Service. You sign in through our identity provider, and you must give information that is accurate and keep it current — in particular an email address you actually read, since that is how we tell you that a job has finished, that a payment succeeded, or that these Terms are changing.

You are responsible for what happens under your account. Keep your sign-in credentials secure, use multi-factor authentication where your provider offers it, and tell us at ask@assay.it as soon as you suspect unauthorised access. We will help you secure the account; we cannot refund credits spent by someone you allowed to use your credentials.

One account is for one person or one organisation. Do not share an account with people outside your organisation, and do not resell access to it.

Access the Service through the web application or through an official API we publish. Do not access it with bots, scripts or scrapers by other means, and do not attempt to circumvent rate limits or metering.

3. Your documents and content

"Your Content" means everything you submit to the Service: the links you give it, the documents you upload, and the prompts you write.

You keep it. Your Content is yours. We claim no ownership of it. You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, copy, transmit and process Your Content, and to pass it to the providers listed in our Privacy Policy, strictly for the purpose of running the analysis you asked for, delivering the result to you, and keeping it available to you afterwards. That licence exists so that we can operate the Service; it ends when you delete the content or close your account, subject to backups rotating out.

We do not train on it. We do not use Your Content, or the dossiers generated from it, to train, fine-tune or evaluate any AI model, and we do not license it to anyone for that purpose. We do not use it to develop features for other customers.

The dossier is yours. As between you and us, you own the analysis the Service produces for you, and you may use it for any lawful purpose, including internally at work and in your own decisions and reports. We retain a licence to store and serve it back to you, and to use aggregate, non-identifying operational metrics about it. Note that machine-generated output may not attract copyright protection in some jurisdictions, and that we cannot promise the same or similar output will not be generated for another user analysing the same document.

What you promise about Your Content. By submitting it you confirm that:

you own it, or you are otherwise entitled to submit it to a third-party service for automated analysis;
submitting it does not breach a confidentiality obligation, licence, non-disclosure agreement or employment duty that you are bound by;
it does not contain other people's personal data beyond what the analysis genuinely requires, and where it does, you have a lawful basis for it (see section 11 of the Privacy Policy);
it does not contain special category data such as health, biometric or political data;
it does not contain malware or code intended to disrupt the Service.

Links you submit. When you give the Service a link, it fetches that page from the public internet on your instruction. You are responsible for the target: submit only pages that are publicly accessible and that you are permitted to have retrieved and analysed. Do not use the Service to defeat a paywall, a login wall, a robots exclusion or any technical access control, and do not point it at material you obtained unlawfully. We may refuse or stop a job at any target for any reason, including on the request of the site's operator.

Please keep it modest. The Service is intended for reading documents, not for bulk ingestion. Do not queue the Service against an entire site, an archive or a corpus.

4. The nature of the analysis — read this one

This is the most important section in these Terms, and it is the one most likely to matter to you in practice.

The output is machine-generated. Dossiers are produced by large language models and automated web research. No human reviews a dossier before you receive it. Language models make mistakes: they misread documents, they miss context, they can cite a source that does not say what the citation claims, and they can state something false with complete confidence. This is a property of the technology, not a defect we have overlooked.

A verdict is an opinion, not a finding of fact. When the Service labels a claim "supported", "contested", "contradicted" or "unverifiable", that is the automated assessment of one tool against the public sources it happened to find at that moment. It is not a determination that the document's author is wrong, dishonest, negligent or acting in bad faith, and it must not be represented as one. Another run, another day, or a wider source set may reach a different conclusion.

Verify before you rely. The Service is a research aid that tells you where to look and what to question. It is not a substitute for reading the document yourself, for following the citations, or for professional judgement. Do not make an architectural, procurement, financial, legal, medical, safety or employment decision on the basis of a dossier alone. You are responsible for the decisions you make and for verifying anything you rely on. Every citation is there so that you can check it — please do.

It is not advice. Nothing the Service produces is legal, financial, investment, medical, safety or other professional advice, and no professional relationship arises between you and us.

Your responsibility when you pass it on. If you share a dossier or quote it — internally, publicly, to a vendor, or to a client — you are responsible for how you present it. Do not present a machine-generated verdict as a verified fact, as our conclusion, or as an accusation against a named person or company. If you republish any part of a dossier, make clear that it is automated analysis and that it may be wrong. You should independently verify any statement about an identified third party before you repeat it, and you are responsible for any claim brought over your republication.

No performance promise. We do not warrant that any particular claim will be identified, that any verdict will be correct, that any cited source exists or supports the point cited, or that the analysis is complete. The disclaimers in section 12 and the limits in section 13 apply to all of this.

If a dossier is obviously broken — empty, truncated, or plainly about the wrong document — tell us at ask@assay.it and we will re-run it or return the credits. See section 6.

5. Credits, prices and payment

How pricing works. The Service is pay-as-you-go. There is no subscription and no recurring charge. You buy credits in advance, in packages, and each analysis consumes credits according to its size and the resources it uses. We show you the estimated cost of a job before you start it, and the job will not start if your balance is insufficient.

Prices. Current package prices and credit costs are shown in the Service at the time of purchase, in euro (EUR). The total you will pay, including any tax, is shown at checkout before you are bound, and that displayed total governs. We may change prices for future purchases; a change never affects credits you have already bought, which remain valid at the rate at which they were purchased.

Who sells you the credits. Credits are sold to you by Stripe, acting as merchant of record through its Link service, and not by us. Your receipt and invoice will show "Sold through Link" alongside our name. This means Stripe is the seller and the contracting party for the purchase itself: Stripe takes the payment, issues the invoice, is responsible for charging and remitting any VAT or sales tax, and applies the consumer protections that go with the sale, including any cooling-off period required where you live. The purchase is therefore subject to Stripe's own terms as well as to this section.

Two agreements. Buying credits is a contract between you and Stripe. Using the Service is a contract between you and us, and that is what these Terms govern. Both apply to you, and neither replaces the other. Nothing in this arrangement reduces the rights you have against us in respect of the Service itself.

Payment. Payment is taken on a Stripe-hosted checkout page. Credits are added to your balance once Stripe confirms the payment. We never receive or store your card number. Our name appears at checkout and on your bank statement.

Credits are a prepayment, not money. Credits have no cash value, cannot be exchanged for cash except as set out in section 6 or where the law requires, cannot be transferred between accounts, and cannot be sold or traded.

Credits do not expire for as long as your account is open. If we ever introduce an expiry period, it will apply only to credits bought afterwards, and we will tell you before you buy them.

When credits are charged. Credits for a job are deducted when the job is accepted, on the basis of the estimate we showed you. If a job fails, or you stop it before it completes, the credits charged for it are returned to your balance automatically. Your balance and transaction history are visible in your account.

Metering. Our records of credits purchased and consumed are what we go by. If you think a charge is wrong, write to us within 60 days of it and we will look into it properly; if we got it wrong, we will correct it.

6. Right of withdrawal and refunds

If you are a consumer in the EU, EEA or UK

You have a statutory right to withdraw from a purchase of credits within 14 days of buying them, without giving a reason. Because credits are sold by Stripe as merchant of record (see section 5), that right is exercised against Stripe and administered through its refund process, which applies the cooling-off period required where you live. You can start that process from your receipt, or write to us at ask@assay.it and we will point you to it and support the request. You will be refunded to the payment method you used.

One qualification, which the law requires us to spell out. An analysis is digital content supplied immediately. When you start a job, you are asking us to begin supplying it at once, inside the withdrawal period. Before each job starts we ask you to confirm exactly that — that you request immediate performance, and that you accept you lose your right of withdrawal in respect of the credits that job consumes. We record that confirmation against the job.

The effect is that withdrawal covers the credits you have not yet spent, refunded in full at the price you paid. It does not cover credits already consumed by analyses we have run for you, because you asked us to run them and we did. If you have consumed part of a purchase, we will treat the unused remainder as refundable and, where a claim is made for the consumed portion, we will provide the record of your confirmation.

This qualification is what the law allows and no more. It does not affect your right to withdraw from credits you have not used, your rights if the Service is faulty, or any other mandatory consumer right you have.

Everyone, at any time

Beyond the statutory right above, we apply the following as a matter of policy, whether or not you are a consumer. These are our commitments, not Stripe's; ask us and we will arrange them.

Failed jobs are free. If a job fails, the credits are returned automatically. You do not need to ask.
Broken output. If a dossier is empty, truncated, or plainly not an analysis of the document you submitted, write to us and we will re-run it or return the credits. This covers the Service malfunctioning; it does not cover you disagreeing with a verdict, since a verdict is an opinion (see section 4).
If we terminate without cause, or discontinue the Service, we refund your unused credits — see section 11.
If you close your account voluntarily more than 14 days after purchase, unused credits are not refunded, unless you ask us within 12 months of purchase and the amount is more than trivial — in which case, ask, and we will usually say yes. We would rather refund you than keep money for a service you did not use.

Refunds are not available for credits consumed by analyses we successfully ran, or where an account was terminated for breach of these Terms.

7. Prohibited use

The Service is a professional tool and we expect you to use it for professional work, including commercial work for your employer, your clients or your own business. That is what it is for. The following, however, are not permitted:

Using the Service for any unlawful purpose, or in breach of any law applicable to you — including export control, sanctions, copyright and data protection law.
Submitting content you have no right to submit, or using the Service to bypass a paywall, login wall, robots exclusion or other access control.
Using the Service, or a dossier it produces, to harass, defame, threaten or run a campaign against a person or company, or presenting an automated verdict as a proven finding of dishonesty or wrongdoing.
Submitting content that infringes someone's intellectual property rights, privacy or publicity rights.
Crawling, scraping or bulk-extracting from the Service, or using it to bulk-process a corpus rather than to read documents.
Using output from the Service to train, fine-tune or benchmark a machine learning model, or to build or assist a competing service.
Reselling, sublicensing or white-labelling access to the Service, or offering it to third parties as your own, without our written agreement. Selling your professional work product that draws on a dossier is fine — reselling the Service itself is not.
Probing, scanning, load-testing, reverse engineering or attempting to defeat the Service's security, rate limits, metering or account isolation, or accessing another user's data.
Interfering with the Service or the infrastructure it runs on, or using it to send unsolicited commercial communications.
Choosing a username or profile that impersonates someone, or that is unlawful or abusive.

Security research is welcome, provided you act in good faith, do not access other users' data, do not degrade the Service, and report what you find to ask@assay.it before disclosing it. We will not pursue you for research conducted on that basis.

8. Availability and changes to the Service

We do not offer a service level agreement and we do not promise any level of uptime. The Service is operated by one person on shared cloud infrastructure. It will sometimes be slow, and it will sometimes be down.

We may modify, add to or withdraw features, and we may set or change reasonable technical limits — on document size, job duration, rate of submission or storage. We may suspend the Service temporarily for maintenance, or to protect it or its users from an active threat. Where we can give notice, we will.

If we discontinue the Service altogether, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email, keep your data available for export during that period, and refund your unused credits. If we make a change that materially reduces the core functionality you bought credits for, you may close your account and ask for a refund of unused credits within 30 days of the change.

9. Intellectual property and feedback

The Service itself — the software, the prompts, the models' orchestration, the interface, the name and the branding — is ours or our licensors'. These Terms give you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service while this agreement is in force, and nothing more. You may not copy, modify or create derivative works of the Service, or reverse engineer it, except to the extent that mandatory law says you may despite this restriction.

Rights in Your Content and in your dossiers are dealt with in section 3.

Feedback. If you send us a suggestion, bug report or idea, we may use it freely to improve the Service, without obligation or payment to you. You keep whatever rights you have in it; you are simply not charging us for the suggestion. Please do not send us anything confidential as feedback.

10. Complaints about an analysed document

Dossiers are private to the user who requested them; we do not publish them or make them available to the public. Even so, if you are the author, publisher or subject of a document and you believe the Service has been used in a way that infringes your rights — copyright, privacy or otherwise — write to ask@assay.it with:

your name and contact details;
identification of the document or material concerned, with a URL where possible;
what right you hold and what you say the infringement is;
a statement that your complaint is made in good faith and that the information in it is accurate.

We will look at it promptly and, where the complaint is well founded, remove or block the material, restrict the account concerned, or decline future requests against that source. We will tell you what we decided. If you are a website operator and simply do not want the Service fetching your pages, tell us and we will block the domain.

Please do not use this route to dispute the substance of a verdict about your product or your claims — for that, write to us anyway; we would genuinely like to know when the Service gets something wrong.

11. Suspension and termination

By you. You may close your account at any time by asking us at ask@assay.it. Export anything you want to keep first; ask us and we will help. Unused credits are handled under section 6.

By us, for breach. We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms — in particular section 7 — or if we are required to by law, or if your use presents a genuine risk to the Service or to other users. Except where the breach is serious, unlawful or ongoing, we will tell you what the problem is and give you a reasonable chance to fix it before we terminate. Credits are not refunded on termination for breach.

By us, without cause. We may also terminate your account without cause on 30 days' notice by email. In that case we will refund your unused credits and keep your data available for export during the notice period.

After termination. Your access ends and your data is deleted in accordance with the Privacy Policy, except records we are required by law to keep. Sections that by their nature should survive do survive — including sections 3 (rights in content), 4, 9, 12, 13, 14, 19 and 20.

12. Disclaimer of warranties

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind. We disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or usage of trade.

In particular, and without limiting section 4, we do not warrant that: the Service will meet your requirements or produce any particular result; the analysis will be accurate, complete, current or free from error; any claim will be correctly identified or correctly assessed; any citation will exist or support the point for which it is cited; the Service will be uninterrupted, timely or error-free; defects will be corrected; or the Service and its outputs are free of harmful components.

Consumers. Nothing in this section limits or excludes rights you have as a consumer that cannot be limited or excluded by law. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties; in those jurisdictions the exclusions above apply only to the extent permitted.

13. Limitation of liability

Please read this section together with section 4. The price of the Service reflects these limits; without them, a one-person business could not offer this Service at this price.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, neither we nor our directors, employees, contractors, agents, licensors or suppliers will be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, punitive or consequential loss, or for loss of profits, revenue, business, goodwill, anticipated savings, data, or the cost of substitute services, however caused and whether or not we were advised of the possibility.

In particular, and without limiting the above, we are not liable for any loss arising from a decision you took in reliance on a dossier, from an inaccurate, incomplete or missing verdict or citation, or from your republication of any part of a dossier.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, will not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, and (b) one hundred euro (EUR 100).

What we do not limit. Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for gross negligence or intentional misconduct, or for any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded under the law applying to you — including, if you are a consumer, your mandatory statutory rights.

These limits are a fundamental basis of the bargain between us, and they apply even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, in which case the above applies to the greatest extent permitted.

14. Indemnification

If you use the Service other than as a consumer, you agree to indemnify us and our directors, employees, contractors and agents against claims, losses, liabilities and reasonable legal costs brought by a third party and arising from: your breach of these Terms; Your Content, including a claim that it infringes a third party's rights or was submitted in breach of a confidentiality obligation; your submission of a link to material you were not entitled to have analysed; or your use or republication of a dossier.

We will notify you promptly of any such claim, let you control the defence with counsel of your choosing (subject to our reasonable approval), and cooperate at your expense. You may not settle a claim in a way that imposes an obligation or admission on us without our consent.

If you are a consumer, this section does not apply to you; your liability to us is limited to what general law provides.

15. Force majeure

We are not liable for any failure or delay in performing our obligations where it results from circumstances beyond our reasonable control — including natural disaster, war, terrorism, civil unrest, act of government, epidemic, fire, flood, strike, failure of a utility, of the public internet, or of a cloud, model or payment provider on which the Service depends.

Our obligations are suspended for the duration of the event, and we will use reasonable efforts to limit its impact. If such an event prevents us from providing the Service for more than 30 consecutive days, either of us may terminate this agreement, and we will refund your unused credits.

16. Taxes

Prices are shown in euro. Whether VAT or other sales tax is included in, or added to, the displayed price is stated at checkout, along with the total you will be charged.

Because Stripe sells you the credits as merchant of record (see section 5), Stripe is responsible for determining, charging, collecting and remitting any VAT, GST or sales tax on your purchase, and for issuing the invoice. We do not charge you tax on the purchase and do not account for it.

You are responsible for the accuracy of the tax information you give at checkout, including your country of residence or establishment and any VAT identification number you supply in order to be treated as a business customer. If you claim an exemption or a reverse charge, it is your responsibility to give valid details and to account for any tax due in your own country.

Any tax arising on your side from your use of the Service — income, withholding, import or otherwise — remains yours.

17. Changes to these Terms

We may change these Terms as the Service or the law changes. The date at the top of this page shows when they last changed.

For material changes we will email the address on your account at least 30 days before they take effect. If you do not agree, close your account before the change takes effect and we will refund your unused credits. Continuing to use the Service after that date means you accept the new Terms. Minor clarifications take effect when posted. A change never applies retroactively to a dispute that has already arisen.

18. General

Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service, and replace anything said before. Nothing here limits liability for fraudulent misrepresentation.

Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, or removed if it cannot be. The rest stays in force.

No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of it, and enforcing it later is not barred.

Assignment. You may not assign or transfer this agreement without our written consent. We may assign it to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of the business, provided the successor is bound by these Terms; we will notify you if we do, and you may close your account and take a refund of unused credits.

Notices. We give notice by email to the address on your account, or by posting in the Service. You give notice to ask@assay.it. Keep your email address current.

No third-party rights. No one other than you and us has any right to enforce these Terms.

Language. These Terms are written in English, and English governs their interpretation.

19. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of Finland, without regard to its conflict of law rules.

If you are a consumer, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer law of your country of residence. You may bring proceedings against us in the courts of Finland or in the courts of your own country of residence, and we may bring proceedings against you only in the courts of your country of residence.

Talk to us first. Before starting proceedings, please write to ask@assay.it and set out the problem. Most things can be sorted out by email, and we would rather fix a problem than argue about it. We will reply within 30 days. This is not a precondition to your legal rights — it is a request.

Consumer dispute bodies. If you are a consumer in Finland and we cannot agree, you may refer the matter to the Consumer Disputes Board (Kuluttajariitalautakunta, kuluttajariita.fi) after first contacting the Consumer Advisory Service (Kuluttajaneuvonta). Consumers elsewhere in the EU may use the dispute resolution mechanisms available in their own country.

If you are not a consumer, any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms will be resolved exclusively by the District Court of Helsinki, Finland, and both of us submit to its jurisdiction. We each agree to attempt a good-faith negotiation, and if that fails, mediation, before commencing litigation.

20. Contact us

Questions about these Terms, refunds, complaints and everything else go to ask@assay.it, where a person reads them.

Dmitry Kolesnikov
Email: ask@assay.it
Postal address available on request at ask@assay.it while our registered address is being set up.