1. Who these terms are between
These terms govern the Knit Hosted service at hosted.getknit.app ("the service"), provided by Jeffrey Walter Mixon, a sole proprietor in the United States ("we", "us"). You accept them by ticking the box that refers to them when you create your account, and again when you buy a plan at checkout, where the renewal terms are shown to you before you pay; creating a workspace or buying a spool is also acceptance. If you act for an organisation, you confirm that you may bind it, and "you" includes it.
You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live, to use the service.
2. What the service is
The service runs instances of Knit Spool — an open-source relay for the Knit messenger — on infrastructure we operate ("spools"). Each spool has a hostname we assign under spool.getknit.app, a TLS certificate we maintain, and a ceiling on concurrently connected devices set by the plan you choose. You configure it from a dashboard: its access token, whether it is open, its proof-of-work level, and an optional shared room (a "commons").
A spool is a single-purpose service. It runs only the released Knit Spool daemon, accepts only Knit's own protocol, and holds and forwards sealed frames between Knit devices. You have no shell or administrative access to the container, cannot run other software on it, and cannot use it as a proxy, VPN or general-purpose server; it does not provide access to the internet or to any other service.
Knit Spool itself is free software licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later. These terms cover our hosting of it; they do not alter that licence or restrict your right to run Knit Spool yourself.
3. Accounts and workspaces
You sign in through our identity provider. A spool belongs to a workspace, not to the person who created it; anyone you invite to the workspace can see its spools, and workspace administrators can buy, configure, cancel and delete them. You are responsible for who you invite and for what they do.
Keep your sign-in credentials and your spools' access tokens confidential. Anyone holding a token can connect devices to that spool. Tell us at once if you believe either has been compromised (support@getknit.app); the dashboard lets you rotate a token without downtime.
4. Fees and billing
Purchases are processed by Polar Software Inc. ("Polar") as merchant of record: Polar is the seller on your invoice, collects payment and any applicable tax, and its Checkout Buyer Terms at polar.sh/legal/checkout-buyer-terms govern the payment transaction. Prices are shown on the pricing page in United States dollars (USD) and you are charged in USD. Card details are entered on Polar's checkout over an encrypted connection and handled by Polar and its payment processor under the PCI DSS; they never reach our systems.
Each spool is one seat on a monthly plan. A plan renews automatically. Polar charges the payment method you gave at checkout for every seat the plan holds, at the plan's monthly price shown on the pricing page, on the same day each month, and keeps doing so until you cancel. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period already paid for. Adding a spool to a plan you already have adds a seat, and the remainder of the current month is charged pro rata on that plan's next invoice.
Cancelling a plan ends its renewal. Every spool on it keeps running at full service until the end of the period already paid for, and is then removed together with its data. Deleting a spool removes it on our next pass and forfeits the remainder of the period; its seat stays paid until the period ends and may be taken by a new spool on the same plan at no extra charge. At each renewal the plan is charged for one seat per spool running at that time; a plan with no spools running does not renew.
A month is the unit of purchase. Fees for a period that has begun are not refunded, except: where a spool was never provided; where you are a consumer with a right of withdrawal (below); where the law of your country otherwise requires it; or where we or Polar decide to refund. Polar, as the seller, may cancel a purchase and refund it at its own discretion under its buyer terms. Any refund is issued by Polar to the payment method you used. The way to stop paying is to cancel before the next renewal.
If you are a consumer in the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you may withdraw from a purchase within 14 days of making it, without giving a reason, by sending a clear statement to support@getknit.app (for example: "I withdraw from the purchase of spool [hostname] made on [date]"). Because you ask us at checkout to provide your spool at once, you pay for the days it was available before you withdrew, in proportion to the month's price, and Polar refunds the rest. The right applies to the purchase, not to each monthly renewal.
If a renewal payment fails, your spools keep running while Polar retries the payment and we email you. If payment has not succeeded seven days after the renewal date, the plan ends and its spools are wound down and removed.
Changing a spool's plan is not yet self-service; contact us and we will arrange it. We may change prices for future periods with at least 30 days' notice by email; a change never affects a period already paid for.
5. Acceptable use
You may not use a spool, or let anyone else use it, to break the law or to help someone else break it. In particular you may not use it to store, relay or distribute material that sexually exploits or endangers children, that infringes another person's rights, or that you have no right to distribute; to spread malware or to command it; to send unsolicited bulk messages; to harass, threaten or defraud anyone; to attack, overload or probe other systems; to circumvent the device ceiling or other limits of your plan; to interfere with the fleet or with other customers' spools; or to resell the service or sell access to your spool.
You may not buy or use the service if you are in, or ordinarily resident in, a country or territory subject to comprehensive United States sanctions, or if you or the organisation you act for appear on a United States, EU or UK sanctions list. You may not let a spool be used from such a territory or by such a person, or in breach of United States export control law. Knit Spool is publicly available open-source software; the service is provided from the United States and the European Union and is subject to their laws.
If you remove a spool's token, anyone with its address can connect. You remain responsible for what an open spool relays and for the reports it attracts.
A spool relays sealed frames we cannot open, so we cannot inspect what passes through it. We act on what we can see: connection patterns that endanger the fleet, reports about a hostname or a commons, and requests from authorities that bind us. Depending on the case we may require a spool to use a token, raise its proof-of-work level, lower its device ceiling, suspend it, or remove it. Where a breach can be put right we contact you first and give you a reasonable time to do so. Where it cannot — including apparent child sexual abuse material, malware, attacks on the fleet, fraud, a sanctions breach, or a lawful order — we may suspend or remove the spool at once and end the agreement. We tell you what we did and why unless the law forbids it.
To report abuse of a spool, write to abuse@getknit.app with the hostname and what you saw. We reply to every report and act within what a relay of sealed frames allows. Notices of claimed copyright infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and notices of illegal content under the EU Digital Services Act, go to the same address, which is also our point of contact for authorities. Because we cannot see or remove an individual message, we act on the hostname, commons or workspace the notice identifies. We close the spools of workspaces that repeatedly infringe.
Up to four spools per workspace are available by default as a guard against abuse; we raise the limit on request.
6. Your content and your data
Messages passing through a spool are encrypted on your devices before they reach it. The spool stores sealed frames it cannot open for a limited time and forwards them to connected devices; we do not and cannot read, analyse or moderate them. You retain whatever rights you hold in them and are responsible for them.
What we hold about you, how long we keep it and how it is protected are set out in the privacy policy at hosted.getknit.app/legal/privacy-policy and, in plain language, at /privacy. Where we process personal data on your behalf as part of the service, we do so only to provide it.
7. Availability, changes and support
We aim to keep every spool running and reachable, but we do not promise any particular level of uptime and we do not promise to tell you about every interruption. Where we know a spool has been unreachable for a material time, we will tell you. The service is provided as is. We may carry out maintenance, move a spool between servers, update Knit Spool to a newer release, or change features of the dashboard; where a change materially reduces what you bought, we will tell you in advance.
Support is by email at support@getknit.app, and a person reads it. We do not offer a support response-time commitment.
8. Ending the agreement
You cancel a plan from the billing page in the dashboard, or from Polar's customer portal, which is linked from the dashboard and from Polar's emails. Every spool on the plan then runs to the end of the period already paid for and is removed with its data, and the plan does not renew. You delete a single spool from its own page in the dashboard; section 4 says what that does to its seat. Deleting your workspace cancels every plan in it. Cancellation is online, takes effect at the end of the paid period, and needs no call or letter. Questions about a charge, an invoice or a refund may go to us or to Polar's support.
We may suspend or end the agreement at once for a breach of section 5 that cannot be put right, where a charge for the service is reversed by your card issuer at your request, or where the law requires it; for any other breach we give you notice and a reasonable time to put it right first. We may also end the agreement for any other reason on at least 30 days' notice, in which case Polar refunds the unused part of any period already paid, at our instruction. If you dispute a charge, write to us or to Polar first; a chargeback raised without doing so may lead to the affected spools being suspended while it is open. Sections 6, 9, 10 and 11 survive the end of the agreement.
9. Disclaimer, limitation of liability and indemnity
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the service is provided without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure against every threat.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill, arising out of or in connection with the service; and our total liability for all claims in any twelve-month period is limited to the fees you paid for the service in that period. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.
If a third party makes a claim against us because you broke section 5, or because of what you or anyone you allowed to connect relayed through your spool in breach of the law, you will compensate us for the reasonable costs and damages that result, provided we tell you promptly and let you take part in the defence. If you are a consumer, this applies only to losses your breach caused and that were foreseeable.
10. Changes to these terms and general provisions
We may change these terms. We will email workspace administrators at least 14 days before a material change takes effect; using the service after that date is acceptance of the new terms, and if you do not accept them you may cancel before then. The current version is always at hosted.getknit.app/legal/terms.
These terms are the entire agreement between us about the service. If a provision is found unenforceable, the rest remain in effect. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these terms without our consent; we may assign them to a successor of the service on notice to you.
11. Governing law and disputes
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Before starting a claim, write to support@getknit.app and give us 30 days to resolve it. The state courts of Santa Cruz County, California, and the United States District Court for the Northern District of California have exclusive jurisdiction over disputes arising from these terms, except that either of us may bring a claim in small claims court. The payment transaction between you and Polar is governed by Polar's buyer terms. If you are a consumer in the European Union or the United Kingdom, nothing in this section takes away the protection of the mandatory laws and courts of the country where you live.