Terms of Service
Last updated: 31 August 2026
1. Scope
Votepit Cloud ("Service") is operated by Silvio Lindstedt und Maik Gräfendorf GbR (address and contact details in the Legal Notice) and is a hosted feature-voting-board offering in the plans Free (1 board), Lite (€4.99/month or €50/year) and Pro (€19/month or €190/year, includes Agent API/MCP access). The exact feature scope of each plan is shown on the pricing page. These Terms apply to the hosted Cloud service; the self-hosted Community Edition is governed by its own MIT license instead.
2. Contract formation and payment
Paid plans are billed through Paddle.com Market Limited, acting as Merchant of Record. Paddle is your contractual partner for the payment itself, appears on your invoice, handles applicable sales tax (VAT/OSS), and is your contact for payment disputes and chargebacks. Votepit remains your contractual partner for providing the Service itself. By subscribing to a paid plan you also accept Paddle's own Buyer Terms.
3. Term and cancellation
Paid plans bill monthly or annually depending on the billing period you choose; you may cancel at any time, effective at the end of the current billing period, using the cancellation option in your account's Billing page — no need to contact support. If you downgrade or cancel a paid plan, or delete your account, a 30-day grace period applies during which your data is retained rather than immediately deleted; boards exceeding the new plan's limit are frozen (read-only, still publicly readable) instead of removed. Data that remains over the account's limit once the 30-day grace period ends is deleted automatically. See the Refund Policy for how refunds are handled.
4. Service description / availability ("as is")
The Service is operated with reasonable care. We do not promise any specific uptime or SLA beyond what applies by law. Maintenance windows are announced where reasonably possible. You are solely responsible for the lawfulness of content you process through the Service — see the Acceptable Use Policy.
5. Limitation of liability
We are liable without limitation for intent and gross negligence, and under mandatory statutory provisions (e.g. the Product Liability Act, or injury to life, body or health). Beyond that, liability for slight negligence is limited to breaches of material contractual obligations (cardinal obligations) whose fulfilment is essential to the proper execution of the contract and on which you may regularly rely; in such cases liability is limited to the foreseeable, typical damage. This limitation does not apply to claims arising from an assumed guarantee or from fraudulently concealed defects.
6. Right of withdrawal (consumers)
If you are a consumer, you generally have a 14-day right of withdrawal from a paid contract under §§ 355, 356 BGB. Full details, including the sample withdrawal form and how the right of withdrawal can end earlier once the Service has been fully performed at your express request, are set out in the Refund Policy.
7. Consumer dispute resolution
We are not willing and not obliged to participate in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board. Note: the EU Online Dispute Resolution platform was discontinued by the European Commission on 20 July 2025 and is no longer available.
8. Acceptable Use Policy
The Acceptable Use Policy is part of these Terms. Breaches may lead to suspension or termination of affected boards or accounts — see the Acceptable Use Policy for details and our notice-and-action procedure for reports of unlawful content.
9. Data protection
See our Privacy Policy for how we process personal data. Every Cloud account can download its Data Processing Agreement (DPA) directly from account settings — no request needed.
10. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms with reasonable notice. Where a change is material — in particular a price change — existing customers have a special right of termination.
11. Final provisions
German law applies. For consumers, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection afforded by mandatory provisions of the law of the country in which you have your habitual residence. If you are a business (merchant) within the meaning of the German Commercial Code (HGB), a legal entity under public law, or a special fund under public law, the exclusive place of jurisdiction for all disputes arising from or in connection with these Terms is our registered seat (see Legal Notice). This does not affect the mandatory statutory place of jurisdiction available to consumers under Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012 (Brussels Ia), which you may always invoke regardless of this clause. See the Legal Notice for our address and further details.
12. Board operator role (draft — pending attorney review)
Draft, not yet reviewed by counsel — pending attorney sign-off before this text goes live for production Cloud customers (see docs/legal.md §5). By creating a board you act as its operator within the meaning of this clause: you are solely responsible for the board's content, for moderating it, for setting and enforcing any additional board-specific rules (which may not fall below the Acceptable Use Policy's platform-wide minimum, see the Acceptable Use Policy), and for your own legal compliance regarding that content (e.g. any Impressum, Datenschutz, or Jugendschutz obligations that apply to you as operator). Votepit provides the hosting infrastructure (software-as-a-service) for your board and, beyond the notice-and-action procedure described in the Acceptable Use Policy and clause 16 below, assumes no general editorial responsibility for content you or your board's participants publish.
13. Platform intervention right (draft — pending attorney review)
Draft, pending attorney review. Independent of your own moderation as board operator, Votepit may remove or restrict content, or suspend or close individual boards or accounts — temporarily or permanently, and in serious cases without your prior consent — where this is necessary for legal reasons (e.g. a court or authority order, or manifestly unlawful content), for the security or integrity of the Service, or because of a breach of the Acceptable Use Policy. You cannot exclude or restrict this right by contract or by your own board rules; it exists independently of, and in addition to, your own responsibility as board operator under clause 12.
14. No general monitoring obligation (draft — pending attorney review)
Draft, pending attorney review. Votepit does not generally monitor, and is under no obligation to actively monitor, the content published on hosted boards, nor to actively seek facts or circumstances indicating unlawful activity (see Art. 8 DSA / Regulation (EU) 2022/2065). We act on content we become aware of, in particular through the notice-and-action procedure described in the Acceptable Use Policy and clause 16, and through the platform intervention right in clause 13 — not through routine pre-screening of what is posted.
15. Indemnification (draft — pending attorney review)
Draft, pending attorney review. To the extent permitted by law, you indemnify Votepit against third-party claims (including reasonable legal defence costs) arising from: unlawful content you or your board's participants publish; your own breaches of data protection law in operating your board; infringements of third parties' intellectual property or personality rights caused by content you are responsible for; or your breach of the Acceptable Use Policy. This indemnification does not extend to Votepit's own statutory obligations or to claims arising from Votepit's own breach of law — in particular, it does not cover Votepit's own duties under the GDPR, the DSA, or these Terms (§ 307 BGB).
16. Reason and appeal for moderation actions (draft — pending attorney review)
Draft, pending attorney review. When content is removed under the platform intervention right (clause 13) or your own board moderation, the acting moderator records one of the following reason categories: a breach of a community rule (community_rule), unlawful content — copyright infringement (illegal_copyright), a privacy/personality-rights violation (illegal_privacy), a threat (illegal_threat), fraud (illegal_fraud), or another form of unlawful content (illegal_other) — or another reason not covered above (other). Where the author's contact details are known, they are notified of the removal, the reason given, and the rule it is based on, and may submit an appeal against the decision; appeals are reviewed by a board moderator or account admin distinct from the original reviewer where the account has one, and the author is informed of the outcome.