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rather than of this document, and this document is written once and read later - so rather than state it and risk being out of date on the day you read it, here is the test: if Tierslate offers you no way to sign in, there is no account to be had, nothing in the parts listed above has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. Nothing here is for sale - see Free today. 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; editing a board with other people needs an account, and so does sharing one - see what applies to you.

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.

Your account

Needs an account

An account requires a Google account. Where Tierslate offers a way to sign in, signing in with Google is the only one, so there is no password to set; if you lose access to your Google 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.

Free today, and your right of withdrawal

Needs an account

Billing is not enabled. Nothing in the product can be bought, no payment is taken, and no payment details are collected. During the beta the paid tier’s features are switched on for everyone at no charge, which is a grant and not a purchase: no contract to pay for anything comes into existence, and the grant can end when the beta does. If paid plans are switched on, the price, the billing period and the plan terms will be shown to you and you will have to agree to them before anything is charged. Payments would then be handled by Stripe, and card details would be typed on Stripe’s own page and never reach our servers.

A consumer in the EU who buys a service or digital content at a distance normally has fourteen days to withdraw from the contract without giving a reason. Nothing is sold here today, so no right of withdrawal has arisen and there is nothing for you to withdraw from. Closing your account ends this agreement at any moment.

Open item, to be completed before billing is switched on. The day a paid plan can be bought, a full withdrawal notice becomes mandatory: the fourteen-day period and when it starts, a model withdrawal form, how to declare withdrawal, and the separate consent and acknowledgement needed before digital content is supplied inside that period. That notice does not exist yet, because nothing is on sale yet. It has to be drafted with a lawyer and be live before the first payment is accepted.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.