Terms of service

1. Who this is between

These terms are between whoever operates Vitreco (“we”) and the organization that subscribes (“you”). No company has been registered yet, and Vitreco is not yet sold — so there is nobody to name here and nothing to subscribe to. These terms take effect when both of those are true, and the name goes here first. If you accept these terms on behalf of an organization, you confirm you are authorized to bind it. Individual employees using the service do so under their employer's subscription, and their access is controlled by their employer.

2. What the service is

Vitreco lets people in an organization raise things anonymously: what they write is rewritten to remove identifying detail before anybody else reads it, and a topic is not shown to a leader until three different people have raised something under it. The exact scope and limits of that protection are described in the privacy notice, and you should read that section before deploying it, because your people will rely on it.

What Vitreco is not. It is not a formal whistleblowing channel, a grievance procedure, a crisis or self-harm service, or a substitute for any reporting mechanism you are legally required to operate. If you intend to use it as a statutory reporting channel — including under the EU Whistleblower Protection Directive — that is outside these terms and you must talk to us first, because the confidentiality, acknowledgment and record-keeping obligations that come with it are not ones the product currently promises.

3. Accounts and eligibility

• You must be at least 16 to hold an account.
• You are responsible for who you let into your workspace. Access is granted by your own administrators, and we act on what they tell us.
• Keep credentials confidential. If you believe an account has been compromised, change the password immediately from the account menu — that ends every other signed-in session at once — and tell us at [email protected].
• Do not share one account between people.

4. Acceptable use

You will not, and will not let your users:

• use Vitreco to harass, threaten, defame or unlawfully discriminate against anyone;
• attempt to identify the author of an anonymised message, or ask us to;
• use the service to retaliate against somebody for what they raised in it — this is the one that matters most, and repeated abuse of it is grounds for termination;
• probe, scan or test the security of the service without our written permission, or attempt to access another organization's data;
• upload malware, or content you have no right to share;
• resell, sublicense or use the service to build a competing product;
• place special-category data in it — health, biometric, sexual orientation, political or religious belief, trade union membership — beyond what a person may unavoidably disclose about themselves in the course of raising something.

5. What people write

Content submitted to your workspace is yours as between you and us. You grant us only the license needed to host, process and display it in order to run the service for you. We do not use it to train models, we do not analyze it across customers, and we do not sell it.

Because the service exists to strip identity from that content, we process it in ways you should be aware of: it is rewritten before storage of the displayed version, it is classified into a topic, and its sentiment is scored. All of that runs on our own servers with no third party involved.

6. Subscription, payment and renewal

• Fees, seat counts and billing period are as set out in your order.
• Subscriptions renew automatically for successive periods unless canceled before the end of the current one.
• Fees are exclusive of VAT, sales tax and any other applicable tax. You are responsible for applicable taxes other than taxes on our income.
• Fees are not refundable for a partial period, except where the law requires it or where we have materially failed to provide the service.
• The fee follows the size of your organization. A team covers up to 15 people and a larger one counts as more than one team, so adding people or teams can increase the fee and removing them can reduce it. Changes take effect when they happen and are prorated against the current period. The billing page shows the current figure and what the next team would cost, before you add it.
• Where you told us at signup how many people the subscription was for, that number is the minimum for the period you paid for, even if fewer people have joined yet. From the following period the fee follows the organization as above.
• We may change rates for a renewal period on 30 days’ written notice. If you do not accept the change you may decline to renew. This is separate from the fee following your size, which is not a rate change.
• Fees are stated and charged in US dollars.
• If payment fails we may suspend access after notice and a reasonable chance to fix it.

7. Cancellation, and what happens to your data

You may cancel at any time, effective at the end of the current billing period. On termination:

• your workspace stays readable for 30 days so you can export it;
• after that, we delete it and everything in it within a further 30 days, backups included on their normal rotation;
• we keep only what we are legally required to, such as invoices.

You can export at any time without asking us. This is deliberate: a tool that holds the things people were reluctant to say should never be able to hold you hostage with them.

8. Availability

We aim for high availability, without committing to a percentage we have not yet measured and will give advance notice of planned maintenance where we can. Vitreco currently runs as a single instance, which means brief interruptions during deploys. If you need a formal service level, that is a separate written agreement.

9. Suspension and termination by us

We may suspend or terminate access where you materially breach these terms, where use threatens the security or integrity of the service, or where we are required to by law. Except in an emergency we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.

10. Confidentiality

Each of us will protect the other's confidential information with at least reasonable care and use it only to perform this agreement. This does not cover information that is public through no fault of the receiver, independently developed, or lawfully received from a third party.

11. Warranties and disclaimers

We warrant that we will provide the service with reasonable skill and care. Otherwise, to the fullest extent the law allows, the service is provided “as is” and we disclaim all other warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that anonymity cannot be defeated. Rewriting removes names, pronouns and identifying detail, and the disclosure threshold requires three different people — but a small team, an unusual role, or something only one person could know may still make an author guessable to a colleague who is trying. Tell your people that.

12. Limitation of liability

Neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits, revenue or data, however caused. Each party's total liability under this agreement is capped at the fees paid in the twelve months before the claim.

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law. Liability for a breach of the data processing addendum is capped separately at three times the annual fees, which is the shape most enterprise buyers ask for and a position worth holding before they do.

13. Indemnity

You will indemnify us against third-party claims arising from your unlawful use of the service or from content your users submit in breach of section 4. We will in turn indemnify you against a third-party claim that the service itself infringes their intellectual property, provided you tell us promptly and let us handle the defense.

14. Data protection

Our respective obligations for personal data are set out in the data processing addendum, which forms part of these terms.

15. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. For material changes we will give 30 days’ notice to the account's administrators, and continued use after that constitutes acceptance. If you do not accept, you may terminate and receive a pro-rata refund of prepaid fees for the unused period.

16. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of the State of Utah, in the United States, and its courts have exclusive jurisdiction.

This does not override consumer or data protection law where you are. A customer in the EU keeps their rights under the GDPR and their local supervisory authority whatever this clause says. Any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the service will be resolved by final and binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules, seated in Salt Lake County, Utah, before one arbitrator. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court with jurisdiction. Claims are brought individually. Neither of us may bring a claim as a plaintiff or class member in a class, collective, consolidated or representative proceeding, and the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one party's claims or preside over any representative proceeding. If this paragraph is held unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim proceeds in the courts named above and the rest of this section still applies to every other claim.

You can opt out, and you have thirty days. Email [email protected] within thirty days of first accepting these terms, saying that you opt out of arbitration and naming your organization. Opting out costs you nothing else — it does not affect your subscription, your price or anything else in this agreement — and disputes then go to the courts named above. Either of us may still bring an individual claim in small claims court, and either of us may still ask a court for an injunction to protect intellectual property or to stop unauthorized access to the service.

17. General

These terms, your order and the addendum are the entire agreement between us. If a clause is unenforceable the rest stands. Neither of us may assign without the other's consent, except to a successor of the whole business. Failure to enforce a right is not a waiver of it.