Terms of Service — DRAFT, NOT YET REVIEWED

This is a draft and does not bind anybody. It was written alongside the code so that its technical claims are accurate — what suspension does, why a restore does not restore readability, what a quota means — which is the half a lawyer cannot check without reading the source. Everything else needs review by someone qualified before it is published or relied on.

Nerchure Ltd, registered in England and Wales, provides Nectenda: real-time collaborative editing for Obsidian, as a hosted service and as software you can run yourself.

What we provide

The plugin is source-available under PolyForm Shield 1.0.0. You may read it, audit it, build it and compare the result. You may not use it to build a competing product. The licence text ships with it and governs it; nothing here changes that.

The hosted service stores and relays your encrypted data. The self-hosted licence entitles you to run the server yourself, within the seat and term limits your licence file states.

What you are responsible for

Your password, and your recovery key.

We cannot reset your password. It is not merely that we choose not to: your encryption keys are derived from it, so there is no mechanism by which anyone — you, us, or somebody holding our database — could recover your data without it. The recovery key issued when you register is the only alternative path.

If you lose both, your data is unreadable permanently. This is a direct consequence of the encryption being real, and it is the trade the product makes on your behalf. Save your recovery key somewhere you will still have it.

You are responsible for the lawfulness of what you store, and for the people you share folders with.

Storage limits, and what we may do about them

Your plan states a storage quota. Attachments are refused once you are over it; text editing is never blocked. That asymmetry is deliberate — a quota should cost you a file upload, never a paragraph you were writing.

Where an account is very substantially over its quota, or where usage is degrading the service for others, we reserve the right to suspend it, including on paid plans. Suspension refuses new connections; it does not delete data, and it is reversible. We will contact you first except where the service is actively at risk.

We may also suspend or terminate for non-payment, for unlawful use, or for attempts to disrupt the service or other customers.

Backups, and the limit of what a restore gives you

We take backups of the hosted service. Restoring data does not restore readability. Keys are derived from user passwords, so a restored account is only as recoverable as its users' passwords and recovery keys. A backup protects against our failures, not against a forgotten password.

Backups are per-instance rather than per-customer. We do not offer restoration of an individual account to a point in time.

Availability

We do not offer an uptime guarantee. The hosted service is provided as-is while it is in early availability.

Losing us does not cost you your notes. Obsidian is local-first and so are we: your notes remain plain files on your own disk whether or not this service exists. If we shut down, you keep everything you wrote.

The self-hosted licence

Describes Phase 12, which is not built yet. Included because terms are written before the thing they govern is sold — but nobody should read this section as describing current behaviour, and it must be checked against the implementation before anyone is offered a licence.

A licence file states a customer, a seat count and an expiry. It is verified offline; your server never contacts us to run, and our downtime is never your outage.

After expiry the server keeps working. It refuses new seats and new device slots; it does not block sync, existing users, or uploads by an existing seat. A lapsed invoice must never cost anyone their work.

Seat counts are self-enforced on your own hardware. We rely on you to honour them, and reserve the right to audit on reasonable notice.

Payment

Prices are stated at purchase. Subscriptions renew until cancelled. Refunds are handled by our payment provider, who is the merchant of record.

Liability

Left for review. The intended position is the conventional one for a service at this price: liability limited to fees paid, no liability for indirect loss, and nothing purporting to exclude liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Governing law

England and Wales.

Changes

If these terms change materially we will say so by email before the change takes effect. Continuing to use the service afterwards accepts the new terms.