Terms of Service

Effective September 19, 2026

Thank you for using Subcanvas. Because we don't know every one of our users personally, we have to put in place some Terms of Service to help keep the ship afloat.

When we say "we", "our", or "us" in this document, we are referring to Trevin Lee, who operates this service. When we say "Services", we mean this website and the Subcanvas application delivered through it. When we say "you" or "your", we are referring to the people or organizations that own an account or an org on the Services.

We may update these Terms of Service ("Terms") in the future. Whenever we make a significant change, we will refresh the date at the top of this page and take any other appropriate steps to notify account holders.

When you use our Services, now or in the future, you are agreeing to the latest Terms. There may be times where we do not exercise or enforce a right or provision of the Terms; however, that does not mean we are waiving that right or provision. These Terms do contain a limitation of our liability.

If you violate any of the Terms, we may terminate your account. That's a broad statement and it means you need to place a lot of trust in us. We do our best to deserve that trust by being open about how the Services work (the source code is public) and keeping an open door to your feedback at legal@subcanvas.app.

Account Terms

• You must be at least 13 years old to use the Services. Where the law requires an older age to agree to terms like these without a parent or guardian, you must be that age.
• You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account and password and for ensuring that any of your users do the same. We cannot and will not be liable for any loss or damage from your failure to comply with this security obligation.
• You may not use the Services for any purpose outlined in the Use Restrictions below, and you may not permit any of your users to do so, either.
• You are responsible for all content posted to and activity that occurs under your account, including content posted by and activity of any users in your org.
• You must be a human. Accounts registered by "bots" or other automated methods are not permitted.

Use Restrictions

When you use the Services, you acknowledge that you may not:

• Collect or extract information and/or user data from accounts which do not belong to you.
• Circumvent, disable, or otherwise interfere with security-related features of the Services.
• Trick, defraud, or mislead us or other users, including but not limited to making false reports or impersonating another user.
• Upload or transmit (or attempt to upload or to transmit) viruses or any type of malware, or information collection mechanism, including 1×1 pixels, web bugs, cookies, or other similar devices.
• Interfere with, disrupt, or create an undue burden on the Services or the networks or the Services connected.
• Harass, annoy, intimidate, or threaten others, or anyone engaged in providing any portion of the Services to you.
• Use the Services in a manner inconsistent with any applicable laws or regulations.

Accounts found to be in violation of any of the above are subject to cancellation without prior notice. Violations can be reported with the Report button on any public project, or by emailing legal@subcanvas.app with detailed information about the content or behavior you are reporting and how you found it, including addresses or screenshots. We will not disclose your identity to anyone associated with the reported account.

Public Projects

A project is private unless you make it public. Everything in a public project, including nested documents and the descriptions on nodes and arrows, can be read by anyone on the internet who has the link. Do not make a project public if it holds anything confidential. Making it private again stops new visits, but cannot take back what someone has already seen or copied.

Payment, Refunds, and Plan Changes

• If you are using a free version of the Services, it is really free: we do not ask you for your credit card and, just like for customers who pay for our Services, we do not sell your data.
• Paid plans are billed per editor, per month, in advance, through Stripe. If you are upgrading from a free plan to a paid plan, we will charge your card immediately and your billing cycle starts on the day of upgrade. When you add or remove editors during a cycle, the change in price is prorated.
• All fees are exclusive of all taxes, levies, or duties imposed by taxing authorities. Where required, we will collect those taxes on behalf of the taxing authority and remit them. Otherwise, you are responsible for payment of all taxes, levies, or duties.
• We want our customers to be treated fairly. If you were charged in error, or were charged after you meant to cancel, write to legal@subcanvas.app and we will work it out with you, including a full or partial refund where that is the fair result.

Cancellation and Termination

• You are solely responsible for properly canceling your paid plan. You can do it at any time from Billing in the Services. An email request to cancel is not automatically considered cancellation. If you need help canceling, you can always contact us at legal@subcanvas.app.
• If you cancel a paid plan before the end of your current paid up month, you will not be charged again. We do not automatically prorate unused time in the last billing cycle. When a paid plan ends and an org has more editors than the free plan includes, the org becomes read-only after the grace period shown in the Services, until it fits the free plan or subscribes again. No content is deleted because of this.
• An owner can delete an org from its settings. To delete your account, write to legal@subcanvas.app from the email address on the account. All of your content will be inaccessible from the Services immediately upon deletion. Within 30 days, all content will be permanently deleted from active systems and logs. Within 60 days, all content will be permanently deleted from our backups. We cannot recover this information once it has been permanently deleted.
• We have the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of our Services for any reason at any time. Suspension means you and any other users on your account will not be able to access the account or any content in the account. Termination will furthermore result in the deletion of your account or your access to your account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all content in your account. We also reserve the right to refuse the use of the Services to anyone for any reason at any time. We have this clause because statistically speaking, out of all the accounts on our Services, there is at least one doing something nefarious. There are some things we staunchly stand against and this clause is how we exercise that stance.
• Verbal, physical, written or other abuse (including threats of abuse or retribution) of anyone who works on the Services will result in immediate account termination.

Modifications to the Service and Prices

• Sometimes it becomes technically impossible to continue a feature or we redesign a part of our Services because we think it could be better. We reserve the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, any part of our Services with or without notice.
• Sometimes we change the pricing structure for our products. When we do that, we tend to exempt existing customers from those changes. However, we may choose to change the prices for existing customers. If we do so, we will give at least 30 days notice and will notify you via the email address on record. We may also post a notice about changes on our website or the affected Services themselves.

Uptime, Security, and Privacy

• Your use of the Services is at your sole risk. We provide these Services on an "as is" and "as available" basis. We do not offer service-level agreements, but do take uptime of our application seriously.
• We reserve the right to temporarily disable your account if your usage significantly exceeds the average usage of other customers of the Services. Of course, we'll reach out to the account owner before taking any action except in rare cases where the level of use may negatively impact the performance of the Service for other customers.
• We take measures to protect and secure your data, including encryption at rest by our database provider and access rules that limit each account to its own orgs. We enforce encryption for data transmission from the public Internet. Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose.
• When you use our Services, you entrust us with your data. We take that trust to heart. You agree that we may process your data as described in our Privacy Policy and for no other purpose. We as humans can access your data for the following reasons:
  • To help you with support requests you make. We'll ask for express consent before accessing your account.
  • On the rare occasions when an error occurs that stops an automated process partway through. When we can fix the issue without looking at any personal data, we do. In rare cases, we have to look at a minimum amount of personal data to fix the issue.
  • To safeguard the Services. We'll look at logs and metadata as part of our work to ensure the security of your data and the Services as a whole. If necessary, we may also access accounts as part of an abuse report investigation.
  • To the extent required by applicable law. We only preserve or share customer data if compelled by a US government authority with a legally binding order or proper request, or in limited circumstances in the event of an emergency request.
• We use third party vendors and hosting partners to provide the necessary hardware, software, networking, storage, and related technology required to run the Services. They are listed in the Privacy Policy.

Copyright and Content Ownership

• All content posted on the Services must comply with U.S. copyright law. To report content that infringes your copyright, send a notice to legal@subcanvas.app that identifies the work you own and the address of the content on the Services, and includes your contact details, a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized, a statement under penalty of perjury that the notice is accurate and that you are the owner or are authorized to act for the owner, and your signature.
• You give us a limited license to use the content posted by you and your users in order to provide the Services to you, but we claim no ownership rights over those materials. All materials you submit to the Services remain yours.
• We do not pre-screen content, but we reserve the right (but not the obligation) in our sole discretion to refuse or remove any content that is available via the Service.
• The Subcanvas software is open source under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. That license, not these Terms, governs your use of the source code. These Terms cover only this hosted Service; a copy of Subcanvas that someone else runs is their service, under their terms. The Subcanvas name and logo are not covered by that license; please ask at legal@subcanvas.app before using them to promote something of your own.

Features and Bugs

We design our Services with care, based on our own experience and the experiences of customers who share their time and feedback. However, there is no such thing as a service that pleases everybody. We make no guarantees that our Services will meet your specific requirements or expectations.

We also test our features before shipping them. As with any software, our Services inevitably have some bugs. We track the bugs reported to us and work through priority ones, especially any related to security or privacy. Not all reported bugs will get fixed and we don't guarantee completely error-free Services.

Sign-in and Other Third-Party Services

You can sign in with Google or GitHub, and paid plans are charged through Stripe. Those are services we do not run, and their own terms apply to your use of them. We are not liable or accountable for any third-party service, or for anything a link in a document leads to.

Liability

We mention liability throughout these Terms but to put it all in one section:

You expressly understand and agree that we shall not be liable, in law or in equity, to you or to any third party for any direct, indirect, incidental, lost profits, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, data or other intangible losses (even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages), resulting from: (i) the use or the inability to use the Services; (ii) the cost of procurement of substitute goods and services resulting from any goods, data, information or services purchased or obtained or messages received or transactions entered into through or from the Services; (iii) unauthorized access to or alteration of your transmissions or data; (iv) statements or conduct of any third party on the service; (v) or any other matter relating to these Terms or the Services, whether as a breach of contract, tort (including negligence whether active or passive), or any other theory of liability.

In other words: choosing to use our Services does mean you are making a bet on us. If the bet does not work out, that's on you, not us. We do our best to be as safe a bet as possible. If you choose to use our Services, thank you for betting on us.

Governing Law

The laws of the State of California, USA, govern these Terms, without regard to its rules on conflicts of law. Disputes will be heard in the state or federal courts located in California, and you and we accept their jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, this does not take away protections that the law of the place where you live gives you and that cannot be waived by agreement.

If you have a question about any of these Terms, please contact Trevin Lee at legal@subcanvas.app.

Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0