Terms of Service

You may use Paddek only if you are at least 16 years old, or older where the law where you live sets a higher age for consenting to online services on your own behalf. If you are below that age, a parent or legal guardian must hold the account.

If you open an account for a company, charity, school or other organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to accept these Terms on its behalf. In that case “you” means both you and that organisation.

You may not use the service if we have previously terminated your account, or if you are located in a country subject to sanctions that would make providing the service unlawful.

You need an account to create links and Bio Pages. Give us an email address you actually control — we use it to verify the account, to reset passwords, and to tell you about changes that affect your service. We may require you to verify the address before some features become available.

You are responsible for everything done through your account and for keeping your credentials secure. Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes, so we cannot read yours and cannot tell it to you or to anyone claiming to be you. If you think someone else has access, change your password and write to [email protected] immediately.

An account belongs to one person. Sharing one login across a team is not a substitute for the team features on the Business plan, and it defeats the activity log that tells you who changed what.

There is a free plan and there are paid plans. Current prices, limits and features are on the pricing page, and the limits shown there are the ones the service enforces.

• Paid plans are billed in advance for the term you pick, monthly or yearly, and renew automatically at the then-current price until you cancel.
• You can cancel at any time from your billing settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for; you keep your plan’s features until then, and you are not billed again.
• Upgrades take effect immediately.
• Downgrades do not delete anything. Links and Bio Pages you have already created keep working; you simply cannot create new ones while you are above the lower plan’s limit. Features that belong to the higher plan stop being available at the change.
• Prices exclude taxes unless stated otherwise. Where we are required to collect VAT, sales tax or an equivalent, it is added at checkout.

If we change the price of a plan you are on, we will tell you before the change applies to a renewal, and you can cancel before then.

Depending on how this deployment is configured, payment is either taken through a third-party payment processor on its own hosted checkout, or invoiced directly and confirmed by an operator. In neither case do we store your full card number — a hosted checkout keeps card data with the processor, and an invoice never involves one.

If a renewal payment fails, we will mark the subscription past due and may retry. If it stays unpaid we may move the account to the free plan or suspend paid features. Links you have already created are not deleted because of a failed payment, but features that belong to a paid plan stop working.

Refunds

Paid periods are not refundable on a pro-rata basis when you cancel partway through — you keep access for the rest of the term instead. We will refund a charge that was clearly a mistake, such as a duplicate payment or a renewal on an account you had already asked us to close. Write to [email protected] within 30 days of the charge.

If you are a consumer, nothing here limits any statutory right of withdrawal or refund you have where you live.

The Acceptable Use Policy forms part of these Terms. It covers every destination you point a link at, every Bio Page you publish, every custom domain you connect and every request you make through the API — not just the pages hosted on our own domains.

Anyone can report a link to us at /report, without an account. We investigate reports and act on them under the enforcement ladder set out in that policy.

Your content stays yours. That includes destination URLs, link titles and notes, Bio Page text, images you link to, and anything else you put into the service.

To run the service we need permission to handle that content: you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce, transmit and publicly display it strictly for the purpose of operating and supporting Paddek — serving your Bio Page to visitors, rendering a QR code, generating a link preview, and taking backups. The licence ends when you delete the content, apart from copies that remain in routine backups until they age out.

You confirm you have the rights to everything you publish through us and that publishing it does not infringe anyone else’s rights or break any law.

Custom HTML blocks on Bio Pages are sanitised on the server before they are stored, which removes scripts, event handlers and other active content. That is a security control, not an editorial review: we may still remove content that breaks these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy.

A short link is a pointer, not a copy. You choose the destination, you can change it at any time, and the content at the other end remains entirely yours and entirely your responsibility.

We may disable a link. If a link breaches the Acceptable Use Policy we may stop it resolving, with notice where that is practical and without notice where the risk to visitors is immediate — phishing and malware being the obvious cases. A disabled link returns a page explaining that it is no longer available rather than redirecting anywhere.

Links can stop working for other reasons too. A short link stops resolving when:

• you delete it, or delete your account;
• it reaches an expiry date or click limit that you configured on it;
• your account is terminated or closed — including where it lapses because a renewal went unpaid and the account was subsequently closed. A suspension on its own blocks sign-in and leaves your links resolving; taking a link down is a separate decision made link by link;
• it was issued on a custom domain and that domain is removed, fails verification, or its DNS stops pointing at us.

Plan for that. If a short link is going onto printed material, packaging or a QR code you cannot recall, treat the account it lives in as part of the campaign’s infrastructure.

Slugs are allocated, not owned. Some are reserved by the platform so they cannot shadow a product route, and a slug you release by deleting its link may later be issued to someone else. We do not reserve a slug for you before you create the link.

Paid plans let you issue links on a domain you control. You must actually control it: we verify ownership through a DNS record you add — a TXT challenge, a CNAME, or an A record — and we re-check it periodically. Registering, renewing and paying for the domain is yours to handle.

We may stop serving a custom domain that fails verification, that is no longer pointed at us, or that is being used in breach of the Acceptable Use Policy. If you remove a domain from your account, the links issued on it stop resolving.

The owned-content proxy, where it is enabled, can only serve content from the same registrable domain as the branded host it is served under. That restriction is enforced on every request and is explained in the Acceptable Use Policy.

Paddek, its software, design, documentation and marks belong to [Your registered company name] or its licensors. These Terms give you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service — nothing more.

You may not:

• copy, modify or create derivative works of the service, or reverse engineer it, except to the extent that mandatory law says you may;
• resell, sublicense or white-label access to the service without our written consent;
• scrape, crawl or bulk-extract data from the service other than through the API and within the rate limits of your plan;
• use our name or marks in a way that suggests endorsement or affiliation.

If you send us feedback or a feature suggestion, we may use it without obligation or payment. You keep any rights you have in it.

Parts of the service depend on providers we do not control, and which ones are active depends on how this deployment is configured. They can include a payment processor, an email delivery provider, OAuth sign-in providers, our hosting and database providers, and an optional URL safety lookup service.

Your use of those providers is governed by their own terms and privacy policies. The Privacy Policy describes what each category receives.

We are not responsible for the content, availability or practices of any site a short link points to, whether it is yours or someone else’s. Following a link means leaving our service.

You can close your account at any time from your account settings. Closing it removes your links, Bio Pages and analytics from the service.

We may suspend or terminate an account where:

• it breaches these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy;
• payment for a paid plan remains outstanding after we have asked for it;
• we are required to by law, or by a valid order from a competent authority;
• continuing to serve it would put visitors, other customers or the service itself at risk.

Where the circumstances allow it, we will tell you what happened and give you a chance to respond. Where the harm is ongoing — active phishing, malware distribution, or content we are legally obliged to remove immediately — we act first and explain afterwards.

On termination, links stop resolving, Bio Pages stop being served, and your data is deleted after the retention period described in the Privacy Policy. Clauses that by their nature should survive — intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification and governing law — survive termination.

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely or error-free, or that any defect will be corrected.

Analytics are estimates. Click counts, unique-visitor counts and the breakdowns derived from them are measurements, not an accounting record. Automated traffic is filtered heuristically and imperfectly; browser privacy features, network caches and content blockers all affect what reaches us. Do not use them where an exact figure is legally or financially load-bearing.

Safety screening is not a guarantee. We screen destinations against a blocklist and heuristics, and act on reports, but we do not review every link and we cannot promise that every harmful destination is caught.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data or lost goodwill, even if it was told such damages were possible.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, and USD 100.

Nothing here excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, and any statutory rights you have as a consumer.

You will defend and indemnify [Your registered company name] and its officers, employees and contractors against claims, damages, losses and reasonable legal costs arising out of:

• content you publish or destinations you link to through the service;
• your breach of these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy;
• your infringement of a third party’s rights;
• your use of a custom domain, including anything served through it.

We will tell you about any such claim promptly and give you reasonable co-operation in defending it. You may not settle a claim in a way that imposes an obligation on us without our written consent.

We add, change and remove features. We may also change plan limits, rate limits and retention windows as the service evolves.

If we discontinue a paid feature that materially affects a plan you are on, you may cancel and ask us for a refund of the unused portion of your prepaid term.

We may also change these Terms. If a change is material we will give notice — by email to the address on your account, or in the product — before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the new version. If you do not, close your account before the change applies. The date at the top of this page always shows when it was last revised.

These Terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the laws of [Your governing jurisdiction], without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

The contracting party is [Your registered company name], at [Your registered business address].

If you are a consumer, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory rules in the country where you habitually reside.

Most problems are faster to fix than to litigate. Before starting formal proceedings, write to [email protected] with a description of the issue and what you would like to happen. We will try to resolve it with you within 30 days.

If that does not work, disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of [Your governing jurisdiction], except where the law where you live gives you the right to bring proceedings in your local courts.

Each party may still seek urgent injunctive relief from any court of competent jurisdiction to stop ongoing infringement or misuse.

Questions about these Terms:

• Legal — [email protected]
• Billing and general support — [email protected]
• Abuse and trust & safety — [email protected], or report a link at /report

Postal notices to [Your registered company name], [Your registered business address].