Terms of use. There is less to govern than usual.

1. Acceptance and scope

Using charmingseal.com means you accept the terms on this page. If you would rather not, the remedy is to close the tab. Nothing else is asked of you here. There is no account to create, no service to log into, and no data of yours to export or delete, because none is held.

These terms cover two things: this website, and the terms on which the software is offered. They do not govern your own Charming Seal deployment. That one is yours, and section 5 says what follows from it.

2. The software, and the MIT licence

Charming Seal is released under the MIT licence. The authoritative text is the LICENSE file in the repository, and that text governs the code whatever this page says.

In substance it grants you the right to use, copy, change, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and sell the software, for any purpose, at no cost, on one condition: the copyright notice and the licence text travel with copies of the software. No attribution is required in anything your buyers see. The grant does not depend on these terms, or on this website continuing to exist.

3. As is, and the limit of liability

The MIT licence supplies the software as is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. It also states that the authors and copyright holders are not liable for any claim, damages or other liability arising out of the software or its use. Those are the licence's own terms, restated here so nobody meets them for the first time after an incident.

They are meant seriously. This software moves money, and a fault in it can move money in the wrong direction. That risk belongs to whoever deployed it. The same disclaimer applies to this website and to anything written on it.

Nothing here attempts to exclude a liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

4. No support and no uptime

No support is promised, for the website or for the software. There is no service level agreement, no ticket queue, no promised response time, and no guarantee that a later version will keep behaving the way this one does. This website may be changed, moved offline or withdrawn without notice.

Issues and security reports are read, and often acted on. That is a habit, not an obligation, and it should not be planned around. If your business needs somebody contractually bound to answer at three in the morning, pay a hosted platform for that. It is a fair thing to want.

5. Your deployment is yours

Once you deploy Charming Seal it is your application, on your infrastructure, under credentials only you hold. The project cannot reach it and holds no console on this side. The following are yours alone.

• The deployment. Hosting, updating, securing, backing up, and reading the code that will stand between a buyer's card and your bank.
• Compliance. Your PCI DSS obligations run through your own payment provider under your own agreement with them, not through this project. So do your tax, invoicing, consumer-law and refund duties, in every place you sell.
• Your buyers. Their contract is with you. Complaints, chargebacks, refunds and privacy requests are yours to answer. The DPA sets out who is controller of what.

6. The name and the seal

The code is MIT. The name Charming Seal, the wordmark and the seal artwork are not. They are not part of the licence grant, and no right to them is given here.

You may say plainly and truthfully that your product is built on Charming Seal, or that it is a fork of it. You may not use the name, the wordmark or the artwork as the name of your fork or your service, or in any way that suggests this project endorses, maintains, audits or supports what you are selling. If you are unsure whether a use crosses that line, ask before it goes to print.

7. Third-party services

A working shop talks to services you choose and pay for yourself: Stripe, PayPal, your host, your database provider, your email sender, your domain registrar. Each is governed by its own agreement with you. Each can change its terms, its fees or its willingness to serve your business without consulting this project, which is not a party to any of it and cannot intervene. A held payout, a closed account or a repriced plan is between you and that provider.

8. Changes to these terms

These terms may change. A changed version takes effect when it is published here, and the date and version at the top of the page move with it. Material changes will also be noted in the repository, so a record exists outside this website. Continuing to use the site after a change means accepting the changed terms.

No change here reaches back into the MIT licence. A grant already given stays given.

9. Ending

You end these terms by not using the website. The project can stop publishing the site at any time. Neither event touches your copy of the software: the MIT grant you already have is irrevocable, so your fork, your deployment and your shop carry on taking orders regardless of what becomes of this website or this project.

10. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the courts of that state are the venue for any dispute about them. If you are a consumer somewhere whose law gives you rights you cannot sign away, you keep those rights. If one part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest stands. The MIT licence carries its own terms, and nothing in this section alters them.

11. Questions

Write to hello@charmingseal.com. It is the single address for every enquiry. Licensing questions, press questions and requests to use the name all go to the same place. The companion documents are the privacy notice, the acceptable use policy, the DPA and the sub-processor list.