Terms of Service

1. What the Service does

Hooty reads the pages of a website you nominate, builds a searchable index from them, and provides an assistant that answers questions using that index. It is delivered as a hosted service: a console for configuration, an embeddable widget, and an API.

We may change, add to or discontinue features. Where a change removes material functionality from a paid plan, we will give reasonable advance notice by email or in the console, and you may terminate under section 10 if the change materially disadvantages you.

2. Eligibility and your account

• You must be at least 18 years old and legally capable of entering into this agreement.
• If you use the Service on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and "you" means that organisation.
• You must give accurate registration information and keep it current.
• You are responsible for all activity under your account and for keeping your credentials secure. Tell us promptly at legal@hooty.to if you believe your account has been compromised.

Authentication is provided through a third-party identity provider. We never receive or store your password. We require a verified email address before a workspace is created.

3. Plans, fees and payment

Paid plans are billed in advance on the period you choose. Prices, included allowances and any usage-based charges are those published on our pricing page and shown in the console at the time you subscribe.

Payments are processed by Paddle.com Market Ltd, which acts as the merchant of record and seller for the transaction. Your purchase is therefore also subject to Paddle’s buyer terms, and Paddle is responsible for billing, invoicing and applicable sales tax or VAT.

• Subscriptions renew automatically for successive periods until cancelled. You may cancel at any time in the console; cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for.
• Upgrading takes effect immediately and is charged pro rata. Downgrading takes effect as described in the console at the time you make the change, and no refund is due for the remainder of a period already paid for, except as set out in our Refund Policy or required by law.
• Where a plan permits usage beyond its included allowance, that usage is charged at the published rates and drawn from your account balance.
• Fees are exclusive of taxes unless stated otherwise. Taxes are handled by the merchant of record.
• If a payment fails, we may suspend paid features after notifying you and allowing a reasonable period to correct the problem.

We may change prices for future periods. We will give at least 30 days’ notice by email before a price change affects you, and you may cancel before it takes effect.

4. Acceptable use

You must not, and must not permit anyone else to:

• use the Service in breach of any law, or to process content that is unlawful, infringing, defamatory, or that you have no right to use;
• ask us to crawl a website you neither own nor are authorised to have crawled and indexed (see section 5);
• circumvent, disable or interfere with security, rate limits, quotas or access controls, including by creating multiple accounts to exceed an allowance;
• attempt to access another customer’s data, index or conversations;
• reverse engineer, decompile or attempt to derive the source code or underlying models of the Service, except to the extent that restriction is prohibited by law;
• use the Service to build a competing product, or to train, fine-tune or evaluate a machine-learning model on its outputs;
• resell, sublicense or make the Service available to third parties other than as visitors to your own website, unless we agree in writing;
• send automated traffic that materially degrades the Service for others, or use it to distribute malware, spam or phishing content;
• use the Service to process special categories of personal data (such as health, biometric or political data) or payment card data, unless we have agreed to that in writing.

5. Your websites and content

"Customer Content" means the websites and pages you ask us to crawl, anything you upload or enter, the index we build from it, and the conversations your assistant has with your visitors.

You warrant that, for every website and page you submit, you either own it or have the necessary rights, licences and permissions for us to access, copy, store, process and index it and to generate answers from it. Our crawler acts on your instruction. Whether a page may lawfully be crawled is a question you are in a position to answer and we are not.

You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, copy, transmit, display and process Customer Content, and to create derived representations of it such as text extracts and vector embeddings, solely for the purposes of providing, securing and supporting the Service to you. This licence ends when the content is deleted, except for backups pending their ordinary deletion cycle.

As between you and us, you retain all rights in Customer Content. We do not sell it, and we do not use it to train machine-learning models for ourselves or for anyone else.

How our crawler behaves is documented publicly. It identifies itself as HootyBot, honours robots.txt, and can be blocked. If you are a site owner and believe we have crawled your site without authority, write to legal@hooty.to and we will remove the content and, where you ask, block the domain from future crawling.

We may remove or refuse to index content that we reasonably believe breaches these Terms or the law, or in response to a valid notice from a rights holder. Where practicable we will tell you first.

6. AI-generated answers

The Service uses large language models. Its answers are generated, not retrieved verbatim, and they can be incomplete, out of date or wrong even when the underlying pages are correct. Answers are not advice.

Your assistant speaks to your visitors under your branding and on your website. As between you and us, you are responsible for what it says there, for reviewing its configuration and for the impression it gives. We give you controls for that purpose — including the source pages it may use and the instructions it follows.

You must not deploy the Service in a way that presents its output as professional advice, or rely on it without human review, in the following contexts: medical, legal, financial or tax advice; emergency or safety-critical information; decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on an individual, including credit, employment, housing or insurance decisions.

Identical or similar answers may be generated for other customers. Outputs are not exclusive to you, save that outputs derived from your Customer Content are treated as your Customer Content.

7. The public demo

We offer a demo that builds a temporary assistant from a website address a visitor submits, without an account. If you submit an address there, section 5 applies to you: you confirm you are entitled to have that site crawled.

Demos are temporary, are limited in the number of pages and questions they allow, and are deleted automatically. They are provided as-is, with no availability commitment, and we may withdraw or limit the demo at any time. A site owner may ask us to delete a demo built from their site at legal@hooty.to, and we will do so.

8. Third-party services

The Service depends on third parties, including hosting, model and inference providers, authentication, payments and bot protection. Those providers are listed, and kept current, in our Privacy Policy.

We choose them with care and remain responsible to you for the Service, but we do not control them. We may change a provider; where the change affects how personal data is processed, we will update the Privacy Policy and give notice as that policy describes.

9. Intellectual property

We own the Service, including its software, models as configured by us, documentation, design and brand. Nothing here transfers any of it to you. You are granted a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service during your subscription, subject to these Terms.

If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without obligation or compensation. This does not give us any right in your Customer Content.

10. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time. Cancelling a paid plan is described in section 3 and in our Refund Policy.

We may suspend or limit your access, with notice where practicable and without it where the risk is immediate, if we reasonably believe that you are in material breach of these Terms, that your use threatens the security, integrity or availability of the Service or another customer, or that we are required to do so by law.

Either party may terminate for material breach that is not cured within 30 days of written notice. On termination, your right to use the Service ends. We will make Customer Content available for export for 30 days after termination, after which it may be deleted. Terms which by their nature should survive — including sections 9, 11, 12, 13 and 15 — survive termination.

11. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", and we disclaim all warranties, conditions and representations not expressly stated in these Terms, whether express, implied or statutory, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or arising from a course of dealing.

In particular, we do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that every page of a website will be reachable or crawlable, that an index will be complete, or that any generated answer will be accurate, current or suitable for a given purpose.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or, where you deal with us as a consumer, your mandatory statutory rights.

12. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, business or anticipated savings, however arising, even if advised of the possibility.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with this agreement is limited to the greater of (a) the fees you paid us for the Service in the twelve months immediately before the event giving rise to the claim, and (b) one hundred United States dollars.

These limits do not apply to your obligation to pay fees due, to either party’s liability under section 13, or to liability that cannot lawfully be limited as described in section 11.

13. Indemnity

You will defend, indemnify and hold us harmless against third-party claims, and against reasonable legal costs, damages and settlements arising from them, to the extent they arise out of:

• a website or content you asked us to crawl, index or process, including a claim that doing so infringed a right or breached a law;
• your breach of section 4 (Acceptable use) or section 5 (Your websites and content);
• the way your assistant was configured or deployed, or an answer it gave to your visitors, including a claim brought by one of those visitors;
• your breach of a law applicable to your use of the Service, including data protection and consumer law as it applies to your own visitors.

We will notify you promptly of any such claim, give you control of the defence (except that any settlement admitting fault or imposing an obligation on us needs our consent, not to be unreasonably withheld), and give you reasonable assistance at your cost.

14. Changes to these Terms

We may change these Terms. Where a change is material, we will give at least 30 days’ notice by email or in the console before it takes effect, and the console will ask you to accept the new version. If you do not accept, you may terminate before the change takes effect; continued use after that date means you accept it.

Every version carries a date, shown at the top of this page. We keep previous versions and will provide one on request to legal@hooty.to.

15. Governing law and disputes

This agreement, and any dispute arising out of or in connection with it, is governed by the laws of England and Wales, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. The parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

If you deal with us as a consumer resident in the European Union, the United Kingdom or another jurisdiction with mandatory consumer protection rules, this clause does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of your country of residence, nor of your right to bring proceedings in your local courts.

Before starting proceedings, please contact us at legal@hooty.to so we can try to resolve the matter directly.

16. General

• These Terms, with the Privacy Policy and Refund Policy, are the entire agreement between us on this subject and replace any earlier understanding.
• If a provision is held unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary or severed, and the rest remains in force.
• A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• You may not assign this agreement without our written consent. We may assign it to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, reorganisation or sale of assets, on notice to you.
• Neither party is liable for failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control, excluding payment obligations.
• Nothing here creates a partnership, agency or employment relationship.
• Notices to you may be sent to the email on your account or shown in the console. Notices to us go to legal@hooty.to.

17. Contact

Hooty.to. General and legal enquiries: legal@hooty.to. Privacy enquiries: privacy@hooty.to.