Terms & Conditions

What applies to you, and what needs an account

Tierslate works without an account - the editor, the templates, the walkthrough player and every export it offers - and most of what follows applies to you from the moment you open the page rather than from the moment you sign in to anything. These sections apply to you now:

• The service.
• How you may use it.
• Who owns what.
• Liability.
• Governing law, and where a dispute is heard.

The rest of what is written below depends on having an account, and it begins to apply to you when you have one rather than when you read it. Those parts are:

• having an account at all, and what you are responsible for once you do.
• share links, and what happens to boards we hold for you.
• paid plans and your right of withdrawal.
• closing your account, and us ending your access.

Whether an account can be made is something you can see, and not something this page can tell you. It is a property of the running service rather than of this document, and this document is written once and read later - so rather than state it and risk being out of date on the day you read it, here is the test: if Tierslate offers you no way to sign in, there is no account to be had, nothing in the parts listed above has started applying to you, and the editor is yours to use under the rest of these Terms. If it does offer you one, they apply from the moment you take it.

Two things hold in either case, and both are said again where they belong. Whether anything is for sale is something you can see rather than something this page can tell you, and if it is, the price comes before the charge - see Paid plans. The rules on how you may use the service bind everybody, account or no account - see How you may use it.

The service

Tierslate is a web application for drawing system and database architecture, recording a narrated walkthrough of a diagram, and editing a board with other people in real time. It runs in a browser and there is nothing to install. Drawing and playing a walkthrough back need nothing but the page; sharing a board needs an account - see what applies to you - and having more than one person hold the pen in the same board at once is part of a paid plan - where it is not included, everybody else in the board still follows along, plays the walkthrough and exports it, they simply cannot type. See Paid plans.

The service is in beta and there is no uptime guarantee. Features may change, break or be removed, it may be down without notice, and it is provided as it is and as it is available. Beyond the liability below, and beyond warranty rights you have by law that cannot be excluded, we promise no particular availability or fitness for a purpose. Keep your own copies of work that matters to you; a board can be exported from inside the editor at any time.

Where something is given to you free of charge during the beta - a capability that is otherwise part of a paid plan - it is given for the beta and may become chargeable when the beta ends, with notice. Nothing you made while it was free is taken away when that happens: boards you made during the beta stay yours, stay openable and stay exportable, and what changes is only what you may make more of.

Your account

Needs an account

You sign in with any Google account, or with a one-time link sent to your work email. Emailed sign-in links open new accounts for work email addresses only; for a personal address such as gmail.com, use Google. Either way there is no password to set; if you lose access to that email account you lose access to Tierslate. You are responsible for what happens under your account. You must be at least 16 and old enough to enter into a binding contract where you live, and the information you give must be accurate.

How you may use it

These rules bind everybody who uses Tierslate, with an account or without one - they are the part of these Terms that applies from the first board you draw. See what applies to you for the parts that do not.

You agree not to:

• break the law, or infringe anyone’s intellectual-property or privacy rights, with what you put into the service;
• upload malware, or try to reach accounts, boards or systems you were not given access to;
• probe, overload or disrupt the service, or work around its access controls or usage limits;
• resell or redistribute the service, or use our non-public materials to build a competing product.

Your content, and share links

Needs an account

Your boards are yours, whether or not you have an account. We claim no ownership of the diagrams, recordings, notes or images you create, we do not use them to train anything, and we do not sell them. The licence below applies only to content we actually hold, which means content in an account: a board drawn without one stays in your own browser and is not transmitted to us, so there is nothing for it to cover. To run the service for you we need a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence for one purpose only: to store, back up, transmit, render and display your content to you and to the people you share it with, and to make the technical copies that requires. It ends when you delete the content or your account. You are responsible for having the rights to what you put in.

Sharing needs an account, and where a board can be shared this is what a share link is. A share link carries a capability token in the URL fragment, the part after the #. The token is the key: whoever holds a valid link has the access that link grants, to view or to edit, whether or not you meant to give it to them. Because it sits in the fragment it never reaches our servers and stays out of our logs, but it travels anywhere the link is copied, forwarded or pasted. You revoke access by rotating a board’s links; removing somebody from a board does not claw back a link they already hold.

Publishing a board is a different act from sharing one, and it cannot be taken back from anyone who has already copied it. Where Tierslate lets you open a board to anonymous readers, doing so makes that board readable by anybody who reaches it without an account and without an invitation, and any image you have put on it is served publicly too. Un-publishing stops us serving it to new readers; it does not recall a copy somebody already took. Publishing does not give us any rights in your board beyond the licence above - it is still yours - and it is not a submission of your work to us for any other purpose.

Paid plans, and your right of withdrawal

Needs an account

Whether anything is on sale is something you can see, and not something this page can tell you - it is a property of the running service, and this document is written once and read later. The test is the one you can apply yourself: if Tierslate offers you no way to pay, nothing in this section has started applying to you and the editor is yours to use under the rest of these Terms. Where it does offer you one, everything below applies from the moment you buy.

You are told the price before you are charged, never after. The amount, the currency, what it is for, and - for a plan - how often it recurs are shown to you at the point of purchase, and you have to agree to them before any payment is taken. Inside the EU and the UK the figure shown to a consumer is the gross price: VAT is inside it, not added at the end. Payment itself is handled by Stripe on Stripe’s own page; card numbers never reach our servers.

A plan renews until you stop it, at the interval you chose, at the price you agreed. You can cancel at any time and cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for - you keep what you bought until then, and you are not charged again. We do not charge you for a price change you have not agreed to.

A plan is priced by the person who holds the pen. Reading a board is free on every plan and never counts against anything you pay for; being able to edit, or to own a team, is what a seat is, and a plan includes a stated number of them. If a plan ends or its seats are reduced while more people hold editing roles than it covers, nobody is removed from anything - the extra roles simply read as view-only until the plan covers them again.

Each plan has limits, and they are shown to you inside the product rather than written into this page - how many boards you may have, how much may go on one, how many people may edit at once, which export formats are included and how many exports a month the free plan allows. They are what your plan entitles you to, and we enforce them. We will not reduce the limits of a plan you have already paid for during the period you have paid for; where we change them for the future, a material reduction is notified in the same way as a change to these Terms.

A discount code applies once and not for ever. Unless the code itself says otherwise, it reduces the first payment only, each code may be redeemed once, and the plan then renews at the ordinary price you were shown - so a code that takes a first month to nothing is a free first month, not a free subscription. The renewal price is the one displayed at checkout beside the discount.

What survives the end of a plan. Ending or cancelling a plan does not delete anything and does not take back work you have already done: boards you made stay yours and stay openable and exportable, and anything bought outright stays bought. What the free plan does not include is making MORE - new boards past its limit, and the paid capabilities above.

A template you own - owned with AI credits, or bought outright before credits replaced money for templates - is yours once, by you, and is not taken back. It is not tied to a plan or to a team: it stays available to your account if you change teams, and if a paid plan of yours ends. What you are buying is the right to open it, use it and build your own boards from it, for as long as this service runs - it is a licence to use it here, not ownership of the template itself, and it does not let you resell or redistribute it. Templates included with a plan rather than bought are also kept when the plan ends, and both are subject to what the service section says about the service itself ending.

If you are a consumer in the EU, you have fourteen days to withdraw from a purchase, without giving any reason and without penalty. The fourteen days run from the day the contract is concluded. To withdraw, tell us so in a clear statement - an email saying you withdraw is enough, and you do not have to use any particular form of words, and it goes to the contact address at the foot of this page. Sending it before the fourteen days are up is what counts, not when it arrives. We will refund what you paid, using the same means of payment you used, without undue delay.

Two things the law lets us do that we want you to know before you buy, because both of them cost you something. For a subscription, if you ask us to start it immediately and then withdraw inside the fourteen days, we may keep a proportionate amount for the part you actually had. For a one-off purchase of digital content - a recharge of AI credits, or a template bought before credits replaced money for templates, available to you at once - the withdrawal right can be lost entirely once we begin supplying it, but only if you expressly asked us to begin inside the fourteen days and acknowledged that doing so ends the right. We will not treat that right as lost unless you were asked for both, plainly, and gave both, before delivery.

Nothing in this section takes away any right you have as a consumer that the law does not allow us to take away, and where anything above conflicts with such a right, the right wins.

Open item, and it is open right now rather than later. A complete withdrawal notice is more than the paragraphs above: it needs a model withdrawal form a reader can fill in, and - before any digital content is supplied inside the fourteen days - an explicit request and acknowledgement collected at the point of sale and recorded. That request and acknowledgement are not implemented in this product today, and no model form exists yet. Both have to be drafted with a lawyer and be live before the withdrawal paragraphs above can be relied on for a one-off purchase.

Who owns what

The Tierslate software, its name, its look and feel and its icon library belong to its operator or to its licensors. These Terms give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the service and nothing more. Third-party technology logos available inside the editor remain the property of their respective owners.

What you may not do with the software itself. Except where the law expressly says you may - and those permissions are set out in the next paragraph - you agree not to copy, modify, translate or create derived works from the Tierslate software; not to reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble it, or otherwise try to derive its source code, its structure or the ideas behind it from the form in which it reaches you; not to remove, obscure or alter any notice of ownership in it; not to rent, lease, lend, sublicense, sell or otherwise make it available to anybody else; not to extract or re-use its content, its template library or its icon set other than through the features provided for that; and not to use automated means to harvest it, or to use it or anything learned from it to build or train a competing product or service. That the software runs in your browser, and is therefore readable there, is not permission to do any of these things.

And what the paragraph above cannot stop you doing, said plainly rather than left for you to discover. Nothing in it prevents you from observing, studying or testing how the software works while you are using it in a way you are entitled to, nor from decompiling it so far as that is indispensable to make it work with other software you are entitled to use, nor from doing anything else that the law gives you the right to do regardless of what a contract says. Where the paragraph above goes further than the law allows, it applies only as far as the law allows and the rest of it stands.

Liability

We are fully liable, without any limit, for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under mandatory product-liability law, and where we have expressly given a guarantee.

For slight negligence we are liable only where we breach a duty that is essential to performing this agreement and that you are entitled to rely on being performed, and then only for the damage that is foreseeable and typical for an agreement of this kind.

Any further liability is excluded. In particular we are not liable for lost profits or goodwill, or for loss of data you could have avoided by keeping your own copies. Nothing in these Terms limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited, or affects rights you have as a consumer that the law does not allow us to take away.

Ending this agreement, and changes to it

Needs an account

You may stop at any time. Stop using the service; and if you have an account, ask us to delete it and everything in it. There is no notice period and no fee; deletion requests go to the contact address at the foot of this page.

We may suspend or end your access if you breach these Terms, or if the way you use the service risks harm to it or to other people, and where it is reasonable we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right. We may also end the service itself, with reasonable notice, so that you can export your boards before it closes. If we end your access or close the service while you have paid for a period that has not run out, we refund the part you have not had, unless we ended it because you breached these Terms. When this agreement ends the licence above ends with it, except for copies we must keep to comply with the law; what is deleted and when is set out in our Privacy Policy.

We may update these Terms as the product changes. When we do we will change the “last updated” date above, and for a material change we will give notice in the app or by email before it takes effect. If you do not accept a change, stop using the service and ask us to delete your account. If you are on a paid plan and the change is one that affects you, you may end the plan when the change takes effect rather than at the end of the period, and we refund the part you have paid for and not had.

If any part of these Terms turns out to be invalid or unenforceable, the rest of them stay in force, and the invalid part applies as far as the law does allow.

Governing law, and where a dispute is heard

These Terms are governed by the law of Germany. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the EU or EEA, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in.

If you are a consumer, we do not ask you to agree to an exclusive court. Under EU rules you may bring a claim against us in the courts of the country you live in or in the courts where we are established, and we may bring a claim against you only in the courts of the country you live in.

We are not obliged, and not willing, to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.