Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (the Terms) form a binding agreement between you and Torsten Labs DOO covering the poolse platform, its APIs, SDKs, dashboard, documentation, and public demo (together, the Service).

By creating an account, calling the API, installing an SDK package under a paid plan, or paying an invoice, you accept these Terms. If you are accepting on behalf of a company, you confirm that you have authority to bind it, and "you" then means that company.

Read § 15 and § 17 carefully — they limit our liability. If you are a consumer, nothing in these Terms takes away rights your local law gives you and does not allow you to waive.

1. Definitions

• Service — the poolse hosted backend, REST API, realtime transport, dashboard at dashboard.poolse.dev, official SDK packages, documentation, and the public demo at poolse.dev/chat.
• Customer Content — everything you or your End Users send through the Service: messages, attachments, display names, identifiers, conversation metadata, call records, push notification content, webhook payloads.
• End User — a person who uses your application and whose chat or call activity flows through your tenant. Your users, not our users.
• Tenant — the isolated workspace holding your Customer Content, keys, and configuration.
• Order — a plan you subscribe to through the checkout, a paid plan we activate at your request and invoice, or a written order form we both sign.
• AUP — the Acceptable Use Policy, incorporated into these Terms.
• DPA — the Data Processing Addendum, incorporated into these Terms.

2. The Service

We provide chat and calling infrastructure: messaging, presence, typing signals, reactions, threads, attachments, voice and video calls and rooms, push notifications delivered with your own Apple and Google credentials, webhooks, and an audit trail, reachable over a REST API and a WebSocket transport, with client libraries for TypeScript, React, React Native, and native iOS and Android call handling.

We may improve, change, or extend the Service at any time. Where a change removes or materially degrades functionality you are using on a paid plan, we give at least 90 days' notice by email and in the dashboard, and we maintain the previous behaviour for that period where it is technically possible to do so. Security fixes and changes we are legally required to make can take effect immediately; we tell you as soon as we can.

Features labelled beta, preview, or experimental are exactly that: they may change or disappear without the notice period above, they carry no availability commitment, and they are excluded from § 15's already limited warranties.

3. Accounts and eligibility

You must be at least 16 years old — or the age of contractual capacity where you live, if higher — and not barred from receiving the Service under any applicable law or sanctions programme (§ 19).

You are responsible for the accuracy of your account details, for everything done under your account, and for keeping credentials safe. Tell us at [email protected] as soon as you suspect unauthorised access. We are not liable for losses caused by someone else using credentials you failed to protect, but we will help you contain the incident.

4. API keys and tokens

API keys authenticate your server, not your users. You must:

• keep secret keys server-side and out of browsers, mobile binaries, public repositories, and client bundles;
• mint short-lived tokens server-side for browser and mobile clients, as the documented integration pattern describes;
• rotate a key immediately if it may have been exposed, and tell us if the exposure may have affected End User data;
• scope keys to the least privilege the integration needs.

A key that leaks because it was shipped to a client is your responsibility. We may revoke a key without notice if we have reasonable grounds to believe it is compromised or being used in breach of the AUP; we tell you as soon as we do.

5. Your responsibilities for End Users and content

You decide what your application sends us, so you carry the obligations that come with it. You must:

• have a lawful basis for every piece of personal data you route through the Service, and give your End Users the privacy information their law requires;
• publish your own terms and privacy notice covering your application, and not represent poolse as the controller of your End Users' data;
• obtain any consent your law requires — including parental consent where your product is directed at children;
• handle your End Users' rights requests, since you hold the relationship and we usually cannot identify an individual End User;
• not route special categories of personal data, payment card data, or data subject to sector-specific regimes such as HIPAA through the Service unless we have agreed that in writing and you have done your own assessment;
• enforce the AUP against your End Users, and give us a way to reach you about abuse.

You retain all rights in Customer Content. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, transmit, encrypt, back up, and display it solely to provide and secure the Service and as instructed under the DPA. That licence ends when the content is deleted, except for backups aging out on their normal cycle. We do not use Customer Content to train machine-learning models, and we do not mine it for any purpose of our own.

6. Acceptable use

The AUP is part of these Terms and applies to you and to your End Users. Breaching it is a breach of these Terms.

7. Fees, billing, and the Merchant of Record

Who you pay. Paid plans are sold through Lemon Squeezy, LLC, which acts as our Merchant of Record and authorised reseller. Lemon Squeezy takes the payment, determines and remits applicable sales tax and VAT, issues the invoice, and processes refunds and chargebacks. Your purchase transaction is therefore with Lemon Squeezy, on its terms, while your right to use the Service is governed by these Terms with us. Where the two genuinely conflict on the transaction itself — payment method, tax treatment, invoicing — the Lemon Squeezy terms control; on everything about the Service, these Terms control.

Card data. Card details are entered on Lemon Squeezy's hosted checkout and never reach our systems.

Plans we invoice directly. Until self-serve checkout opens, paid plans are activated by us on request and invoiced directly by Torsten Labs DOO, not through Lemon Squeezy. For those plans: we issue the invoice, monthly in advance; payment is due within 14 days by the method stated on the invoice; prices exclude VAT and other taxes, which we add where the law requires us to, and where you must account for the tax yourself (for example under a reverse-charge rule) the invoice says so; and refunds under the Refund & Cancellation Policy are paid back by the method you paid with. Everything else in this section applies to them too, except what is specific to Lemon Squeezy's checkout.

Plans and renewal. Subscriptions are billed in advance, monthly or annually as chosen at checkout, and renew automatically for the same period until cancelled. You may cancel at any time, effective at the end of the current period; the Refund & Cancellation Policy sets out what happens to money already paid.

Prices and taxes. Prices are shown at checkout in the stated currency. Tax is calculated and displayed there according to your billing location. We may change prices for a future billing period on at least 30 days' notice by email; the new price applies from your next renewal, and if you do not accept it you may cancel before that renewal takes effect.

Usage limits. Each plan carries the limits published on the pricing page: monthly active users, voice and video call minutes, and the other limits listed there. We meter usage and apply those limits automatically. When a limit is reached, the Service refuses the usage that would go over it (for example a new monthly active user, or a new call) until the next month or an upgrade; people already active and calls already connected carry on. We never charge for overage.

Non-payment. If a payment fails or an invoice goes unpaid, we will notify you (and, for checkout purchases, Lemon Squeezy will retry the charge). If it remains unpaid 14 days after the due date, we may suspend the workspace, which refuses API and realtime requests until payment is made; if it remains unpaid 30 days after the due date, we may downgrade or terminate under § 14. We will not delete Customer Content for non-payment without giving you the export window described there.

The free plan is free, perpetual within its published limits, and provided as-is. We may change its limits on 30 days' notice, and we may terminate a free account that has been inactive for 12 months after giving you 30 days' notice and a chance to export.

8. Refunds

Set out in the Refund & Cancellation Policy, including the statutory withdrawal right for consumers in the EU/EEA and the UK.

9. Intellectual property

Ours. The Service, the backend, the dashboard, the brand, the documentation, and everything in them stay ours (or our licensors'). These Terms grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the Service during the term, and nothing more. You may not copy, reverse-engineer, decompile, or create derivative works from the hosted Service, resell or sublicense access to it, or use it to build a directly competing chat-infrastructure product, except to the extent that restriction is unenforceable under applicable law.

The SDKs. From version 3.0.0, the @poolse/* SDK packages are published under the poolse SDK License: you may use, copy and modify them to build applications on the Service, but not use them with any other backend or to build a competing service. Versions before 3.0.0 remain under the MIT licence. Using the SDK against our hosted backend still requires an account and compliance with these Terms.

Yours. Customer Content is yours, as set out in § 5.

Feedback. If you send us ideas, suggestions, or bug reports, we may use them without restriction, obligation, or payment. We will not claim any right in your confidential information because you mentioned it while reporting a bug.

10. Confidentiality

Each of us may receive non-public information from the other. The receiving party will protect it with at least reasonable care, use it only for this agreement, and disclose it only to people who need it and are bound by equivalent duties. This does not cover information that is public through no fault of the recipient, was already known, is independently developed, or must be disclosed by law — and in that last case, the recipient tells the other party first where it lawfully can.

11. Data protection

The DPA governs our processing of personal data contained in Customer Content and is incorporated into these Terms. It takes effect automatically when you accept these Terms; you do not need to sign a separate copy, though we will countersign one on request to [email protected]. Our handling of your own account and billing data is described in the Privacy Policy.

12. Third-party services

The Service depends on third parties listed in the subprocessor page, and you may connect it to your own. We are not responsible for third-party services, their availability, or their terms, and their failure does not make us liable beyond § 17. Where a third party fails in a way that affects you, we will tell you what happened.

13. Support and availability

We aim for high availability and monitor the Service continuously, but these Terms carry no contractual uptime commitment and no service credits. We would rather say that than publish a number we have not committed to operationally. A written service level agreement is available for annual enterprise plans — ask at [email protected].

Support runs by email at [email protected] during business days in Central European Time. Paid plans get priority handling.

Planned maintenance is announced in advance where it will be disruptive. Emergency maintenance may happen without notice.

14. Term, suspension, and termination

Term. These Terms run from the moment you first accept them until your account is closed.

You may terminate at any time by cancelling in the dashboard. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid period unless the Refund Policy gives you something more.

We may suspend immediately, in whole or in part, if: your use threatens the security, integrity, or availability of the Service or another customer; you or an End User breach the AUP in a way that requires immediate action; we are required to by law or a binding order; or an amount is overdue as described in § 7. We suspend no more than the situation needs, tell you why as soon as we can, and restore access once the cause is resolved.

We may terminate for material breach that you do not cure within 30 days of written notice; immediately for a breach that cannot be cured or that involves illegal content, fraud, or a sanctions issue; on your insolvency; or on 90 days' notice if we discontinue the Service entirely, in which case we refund the unused portion of any prepaid fee.

On termination: your right to use the Service ends. If we terminate, you may read Customer Content through the API for 30 days before we delete it; if you delete your account or workspace yourself, deletion takes effect at once. Deletion purges the rows and attachment objects and destroys the workspace's encryption key. Backups taken before the deletion are deleted within 35 days. Sections 5, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, and 22 survive.

15. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or trade usage. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of harmful components, or that it will meet your requirements.

The public demo at poolse.dev/chat is a public sandbox. Anything you type into it can be read by anyone who has the conversation link. Do not put confidential or personal information into it. We may clear demo data at any time without notice.

If you are a consumer, this section applies only so far as your local consumer law permits; your statutory guarantees are unaffected.

16. Indemnities

You cover us against third-party claims arising from Customer Content, from your application, from your or your End Users' breach of these Terms or the AUP, or from your infringement of someone's rights — including reasonable legal costs, provided we notify you promptly, let you control the defence of claims that are purely about money, and cooperate at your expense.

We cover you against a third-party claim that the Service as provided by us infringes that party's intellectual property rights, on the same conditions. We may, at our option, modify the Service to be non-infringing, obtain a licence, or terminate the affected part and refund the unused prepaid fee. This does not apply where the claim arises from Customer Content, from your modifications, from use in breach of these Terms, or from combining the Service with something we did not supply.

17. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for intent or gross negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded — including a consumer's mandatory statutory rights under the Law on Consumer Protection of the Republic of North Macedonia or the equivalent law where the consumer resides.

Subject to that:

1. Neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost goodwill, or loss or corruption of data, however caused and on any theory of liability, even if advised of the possibility.
2. Each party's total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to these Terms is capped at the greater of (a) the fees you paid or owed for the Service in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) EUR 100.
3. The cap in (2) does not apply to your payment obligations under § 7, to either party's indemnity obligations under § 16, or to a breach of § 10.

You are responsible for keeping your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. The Service is not a system of record.

18. Force majeure

Neither party is liable for a delay or failure caused by something outside its reasonable control — natural disaster, war, terrorism, civil unrest, epidemic, labour action, government act, failure of a public network or utility, or a large-scale internet or cloud provider outage. Payment obligations are not excused. If the event lasts more than 30 days, either party may terminate the affected Order and we refund the unused prepaid portion.

19. Export control and sanctions

You confirm that you are not located in, ordinarily resident in, or organised under the laws of a country or territory subject to comprehensive sanctions, and that you are not on any restricted-party list maintained by the United Nations, the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States (including the OFAC SDN list), or the Republic of North Macedonia. You will not make the Service available to anyone who is, and you will not use it for any purpose prohibited by applicable export-control law. Breach of this section is a material breach that we may act on immediately.

20. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of North Macedonia, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

The competent courts in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia have exclusive jurisdiction, and both parties submit to them.

If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of your country of habitual residence, and you keep the right to bring proceedings in the courts of that country. We would much rather you wrote to [email protected] first — we try to resolve complaints within 30 days.

21. Changes to these Terms

We may change these Terms. For a material change we give at least 30 days' notice by email to account holders and by a notice in the dashboard, and the change takes effect on the stated date. Continuing to use the Service after that date means you accept the new version; if you do not, cancel before it takes effect and we refund the unused portion of any prepaid fee. Non-material changes — clarifications, typographical fixes, updated links — take effect on publication. Every version is numbered and dated at the top of this page.

22. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms, the AUP, the DPA, the Privacy Policy, the Refund Policy, and any Order you have signed are the whole agreement, and replace anything said before. Your purchase order terms do not apply, even if we do not object to them.
• Order of precedence. A signed Order first, then these Terms, then the incorporated policies — except that the DPA controls on data protection and the Lemon Squeezy terms control on the payment transaction itself.
• Assignment. You may not assign without our written consent, which we will not unreasonably withhold. We may assign to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, and we will tell you.
• Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, it is limited to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stands.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a right once does not waive it.
• Notices. To you: the email on your account, or a dashboard notice. To us: [email protected], with a copy to the registered seat above for anything formal.
• No agency. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, employment, or agency relationship.
• Language. These Terms are drawn up in English. A translation is provided for convenience only; the English text prevails, except where a consumer's mandatory local law requires otherwise.
• Third-party rights. No one other than the parties has any right to enforce these Terms.

23. Contact