Terms of Service

Status: draft pending legal review; effective on publication. Dated 2026-09-07.

These terms describe what Waffle offers, what it does not promise, and what is expected of you. Like PRIVACY.md, every statement is derived from this repository and cites where it can be checked. Governing law, the provider's identity and its contact route were ruled on by the owner on 2026-09-07 and are stated below. Where a term would still normally be filled in with boilerplate — liability caps, arbitration, suspension grounds — this draft leaves a stated gap instead, because inventing one would be worse than having none. Those gaps are listed at the end.

1. Who provides Waffle

Waffle is provided by Waffle Corp, a Delaware corporation, of 2093 Philadelphia Pike #2073, Claymont, DE 19703, United States. It is the same entity named as copyright holder in NOTICE and README.md ("License & trademark") and rendered by the app's About surface, whose values are held against those files by a test (apps/web/src/library/aboutWaffle.ts).

Waffle Corp is also the data controller for the purposes of PRIVACY.md.

Contact: [email protected] — one mailbox for support, for anything about these terms, and for security reports. The same address appears in SECURITY.md and in Settings → About, bound by aboutWaffle.test.ts so none of the three can move alone.

Where to read these terms. The build ships this document beside the app bundle as TERMS.txt, byte for byte as it stands in the repository; Settings → About links it beside the Privacy Policy, and the sign-in sheet links both before you type an email address.

2. What the service is today

Waffle is a local-first everything-library: your notes, links and files live as ordinary files in an ordinary folder on your own device (ADR-004; README.md).

There are several ways to run it, and they are not the same offering:

• The local app — desktop (Tauri), mobile (Capacitor), or the web app at app.waffle.page. This works with no account and no server. It is the whole product for most purposes.
• An optional account — email sign-in only. Signing in uploads nothing (ADR-023).
• Personal Sync, shared folders, and publishing — built to varying degrees and not activated in production. Personal Sync's production composition is owner-gated and inactive (docs/21-sync-wire-contract.md §7); the shared-folder claim route ships inactive (README.md); public link publishing is NO-GO pending an explicit owner decision (README.md).

Do not rely on any hosted capability being available. The engineering contract states directly that local success "does not imply hosted deployment, user migration, uptime evidence or production activation" (docs/21 §7). There is no uptime commitment, no service level, and no evidence base for one.

Production at app.waffle.page is promoted deliberately by tag and rolled back the same way (docs/recipes/promote-production.md). A staging deployment also exists and is not intended for real use.

3. Your content is yours

This is a structural property of the design, not a concession.

• Your library is a normal folder. Waffle reads and writes .md files with YAML frontmatter and ordinary files beside them; everything it writes stays readable by Obsidian, Finder and grep (README.md; ADR-004).
• You do not need Waffle to read your own data, and removing Waffle does not remove your library.
• Waffle claims no ownership of, and no licence to, your content. Nothing in this repository asserts one, and no feature that would need one (publishing, catalog contribution) is built or enabled.
• Deletes are soft. Files move to .trash/ inside your own vault; nothing in the app hard-deletes your bytes (ADR-021).
• The index is disposable. The SQLite mirror is rebuildable from your folder and lives in app-local storage, never inside your vault (ADR-013, amended 2026-08-09).

If Personal Sync or shared folders are later enabled for you, the content stays yours; what Waffle would hold is ciphertext, and what the provider can observe regardless is enumerated in PRIVACY.md rather than summarised.

4. Accounts

• An account is optional and permanently so. First launch has no registration wall; accountless use is a first-class mode, not a trial (ADR-023; docs/14-identity-sync-and-encryption.md).
• Sign-in is an email magic link. No password exists, so none is stored (docs/21 §7).
• Signing in is not consent to upload. Sync, Share and Publish are separate explicit actions, each with its own recorded consent (ADR-023).
• You are responsible for the email account you sign in with, since access to it is access to your Waffle account.
• Encryption recovery is separate from account recovery. Regaining access to your email does not by itself recover your encryption keys. If you lose every authorized device and your recovery code, encrypted data cannot be recovered — including by us (docs/14 § "Invitations and recovery"; packages/core/src/crypto/recoveryAnchor.ts).

5. Fees

There are none today, and no billing exists in this codebase.

The design anticipates a paid managed service measured in cloud bytes, with local libraries never metered, but states that "exact limits are private commercial policy" and "exact commercial thresholds and grace periods live outside the public engineering repository" (docs/14 § "Storage boundary" and § "Quota and lapse behavior"). No such policy has been published, so no pricing term is stated here.

A storage ceiling already exists in the hosted schema, so state it rather than describing it as hypothetical. The public defaults are 5 GB per vault and 30-day retention of superseded blobs (ADR-035 as amended 2026-08-29; ADR-047 D11). Retained superseded versions count against that 5 GB, because a retention window whose copies were free would stop the ceiling describing anything real; encrypted thumbnails do not count, under an internal cap, because they are restore accelerators and most of their stored size is our own padding decision (ADR-047 D11). Those figures are the whole of the published policy: pricing, paid tiers and grace periods are commercial policy that lives outside this repository and has not been set.

Nothing you store is metered yet, because no object bytes move: the blob plane's migration, quota lanes and retention sweep are applied on the hosted database, while the transport that would use them is not wired (docs/21 §8 status; docs/00-state.md). When it is, the contract already commits to the behaviour: local editing continues, existing cloud data stays downloadable, nothing local is ever deleted, and lapse or cloud-trash expiry requires advance notice and an export path (docs/14).

If you configure your own AI provider key, you pay that provider directly and Waffle is not party to it (docs/19-private-knowledge-artifacts-and-ai.md).

6. Acceptable use

Short, because the architecture does most of the work.

• Do not use the browser extension or the capture path for bulk crawling or scraping. The extension "must never turn ordinary Save into background crawling or indiscriminate third-party republication" (docs/18-browser-capture.md). Saving pages you are looking at is the intended use; automated harvesting is not.
• Reading copies are private material. A saved reading copy is a personal copy of a page you deliberately shared to Waffle; it is never transmitted or published, and republishing someone else's content is your responsibility, not a capability Waffle grants (docs/18, "Privacy posture").
• Do not attempt to defeat the sandbox boundaries. Connectors run in a sandbox with a declared network allowlist and no library access — "data in, nothing out" (ADR-008). Circumventing that, or the shared-folder access rules, is out of bounds; SECURITY.md defines the same surfaces as in-scope for vulnerability reports, which is the right way to raise a flaw you find.
• Do not use shared folders to distribute unlawful content. Waffle cannot see shared content — it holds ciphertext — which means moderation is not possible and responsibility rests with you.
• Respect other people's rights in what you save, share, and publish.

7. Software licence and marks

• All rights are reserved. No licence is granted for Waffle's own code or documentation today (NOTICE; README.md; owner ruling, 2026-09-07). Using the app does not give you a licence to copy, modify or redistribute it.
• AGPL-3.0 is the licence INTENDED for publication, not one in force. The LICENSE file carries that text as a statement of intent; the repository is private, so there is no Corresponding Source a recipient could obtain, and a copyleft grant without it is a promise that cannot be kept. The app's About surface says exactly this and links the LICENSE.txt that ships beside the bundle so you can read the intended terms (apps/web/src/library/aboutWaffle.ts, RIGHTS_STATEMENT).
• No offer of Corresponding Source is made, and none is owed. An offer of source runs to people who received the code under a copyleft grant; with the grant withdrawn, nobody has (aboutWaffle.ts, SOURCE_ROUTE). If the source is published, that constant, the rights position and this clause move together in one change (docs/22-closed-off-by-default.md).
• Server-side catalog services are a separate, proprietary codebase and are not covered by that licence (ADR-019; README.md).
• The "Waffle" name and marks are not granted by the licence (README.md).
• Third-party components compiled into the built artifact are attributed in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md, and the build emits the same notices beside the bundle. That obligation attaches to distributing the artifact and is live today regardless of the repository's visibility (docs/22, "What survives being closed source").

8. No warranty

The software is provided as is, without warranty of any kind, and without any implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. That disclaimer is stated here directly rather than borrowed: AGPL-3.0 sections 15 and 16 say the same thing, but that licence is intent rather than a grant in force (§7), so it disclaims nothing on its own today.

Beyond the licence, and specifically about the hosted parts: Waffle is pre-release. Sync is not activated, sharing ships with its claim route inactive, publishing does not exist, and support is one mailbox. Keep your own backups. Because your vault is an ordinary folder, ordinary backup tools work on it — which is the intended answer, not a workaround.

A limitation of liability has not been drafted, and the sentence above disclaims warranties without capping liability. Those are different terms and only one of them is written. This is one of the gaps below.

9. Suspension and ending

• You can stop at any time. Sign out, or simply stop using the app; your library is a folder you already control.
• Deleting your account does not delete everything. Rows on the shared-folder plane are never deleted, and there is deliberately no cascade from a provider's user record — because a handover is signed by two accounts and a claim row is another person's evidence, so one party's deletion may not silently erase another party's signed statement. The stated consequence is that shared-line rows outlive one participant's account (docs/21 §8.7). An owner-scoped erasure ceremony is recorded as a later, separate decision and does not exist today. This is a known open question, not an oversight.
• No suspension policy is written. Nothing in the codebase implements account suspension or termination by Waffle, and no grounds are defined.

10. Changes to these terms

Waffle is under active development and several described capabilities are not yet switched on. When one is, this document and PRIVACY.md should change in the same change that switches it on.

How changes will be notified, and whether continued use constitutes acceptance, is not settled. No notification mechanism exists in the product today.

11. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the state and federal courts located in Delaware are the venue for any dispute. Owner ruling, 2026-09-07.

That follows the provider: Waffle Corp is a Delaware corporation (§1) and the infrastructure is in us-east-1 (PRIVACY.md).

A choice of law does not displace rights you hold that cannot be waived. If you are a consumer in a jurisdiction whose mandatory consumer-protection rules apply to you regardless of this clause — the EU and the United Kingdom are the obvious cases — those rules still apply, and this clause is read subject to them. How far that reaches is one of the gaps below, and no dispute-resolution mechanism (arbitration, class-action waiver, informal-resolution period) is stated here because none has been drafted.

Open questions — for the owner and for a lawyer

Five questions that stood here on 2026-09-07 are now closed and are stated in the terms instead: the provider's legal name and registered address (§1), the contact route (§1), governing law and venue (§11), whether an offer of Corresponding Source is owed (§7 — it is not, because no grant is in force), and where these terms are served (§1). The rest are the lawyer's.

1. Limitation of liability. §8 disclaims warranties and caps nothing.
2. A dispute-resolution mechanism — arbitration, class-action waiver, an informal-resolution period — none of which §11 states.
3. Account deletion versus shared-plane retention (§9). The same conflict PRIVACY.md flags, seen from the contractual side.
4. Suspension and termination grounds (§9). None defined.
5. Change-notification mechanism and whether continued use is acceptance (§10).
6. Consumer-law posture. §11 reserves mandatory consumer rights in general terms; which regimes actually reach a Delaware provider serving a given user, and which clauses above they override, is a legal determination.
7. Whether separate terms are needed for the browser extension, which is distributed through Chrome, Firefox and Safari stores under their own policies, and for the mobile app under Apple's and Google's.
8. Pricing, paid tiers and grace periods (§5). The 5 GB ceiling and the 30-day retention are published defaults; everything commercial around them lives outside this repository and has not been set.