Terms of service

These terms are an agreement between you and Format.dev Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (registered office 111 Ryhall Road, Stamford PE9 1UJ). We trade as Format. By creating an account or using the service, you accept these terms.

Format is in beta. We've written these terms to be readable, but they are still a contract. If you have a separate signed agreement with us, that agreement wins wherever the two conflict.

What Format is

Format is a platform for building and generating PDFs with web technology. It gives you the tools to design documents and the infrastructure to render them.

That includes our website, documentation, dashboard, rendering APIs, command-line tools, SDKs, and Studio, our authoring environment. We refer to all of it as the service.

Our open-source packages, including the SDKs and CLI, ship under their own licenses. Those license files govern your use of that software. These terms govern the hosted service.

Who can use Format

You must be at least 18 and able to enter a contract. Format is built for businesses and professional use. If you accept these terms on behalf of a company, you confirm you have the authority to bind it, and "you" means that company.

Your account

You sign in with GitHub. You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping your GitHub credentials secure. Tell us straight away at [email protected] if you suspect unauthorized access.

Beta, pricing, and changes

Format is currently free while in beta. We plan to introduce paid plans. When we do, we will give you at least 30 days' notice before anything you use starts costing money. You will never be charged without agreeing to a plan first.

Because this is a beta, the service will change. Features may be added, altered, or removed, and APIs may change between versions. We work to keep breaking changes rare and announced, but we cannot promise a stable interface yet.

Service commitment

We take reasonable care to keep Format available, secure, and working as documented. That is a genuine commitment, but during beta it is not a guarantee. We do not promise a particular uptime, and the service may be interrupted for maintenance or by problems outside our control.

We take the same care with your data. Documents you render are retained for at most 30 days and then deleted, as described in our privacy policy. Even so, keep your own copies of anything important. Do not treat Format as storage.

Your content

You keep all rights to the content you send us. We claim no ownership over your templates, your HTML, your assets, or the PDFs we generate from them.

You grant us the limited license we need to run the service. That means receiving, processing, storing, and delivering your content, and rendering it into documents. We use your content for nothing else.

You are responsible for your content. You confirm that you have the rights to it and that using it with Format breaks no law and infringes nobody's rights.

Acceptable use

Don't use Format to:

• Create or distribute content that is illegal in the UK or in your own jurisdiction
• Produce fraudulent documents, such as fake invoices, forged records, or phishing material
• Distribute malware or content designed to harm systems or people
• Send spam or generate documents for unsolicited bulk messaging
• Probe, overload, or disrupt the service, or bypass rate limits and usage restrictions
• Resell the service itself without an agreement with us

We may suspend or close accounts that break these rules. Where the situation allows it, we will warn you first.

Suspension and closing your account

You can stop using Format and delete your account at any time by emailing [email protected].

We can suspend or terminate your access if you break these terms, if the law requires it, or if we discontinue the service. If we discontinue Format, we will give you at least 30 days' notice. When an account closes, its data is deleted as described in our privacy policy.

Intellectual property

We own Format: the service, the website, and our branding. These terms give you no rights to them beyond using the service. Our open-source packages remain governed by their own licenses.

Privacy

Our privacy policy explains what data we collect and how we handle it, including the documents you render. It is part of these terms.

Disclaimers and liability

Format is provided "as is" during beta. Beyond the commitments made above, we make no warranties, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability is capped at what you paid us in the previous 12 months. If you paid nothing, it is capped at £100. We are not liable for indirect losses. That includes lost profits, lost data you could have backed up, and business interruption.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited under English law, including liability for death, personal injury, or fraud.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the service evolves. For significant changes we will email account holders at least 14 days before the changes take effect. Continuing to use Format after that means you accept the new terms. If you don't, you can close your account.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. If you use Format as a consumer elsewhere, you keep any protections your local law gives you that cannot be excluded.

Contact

Questions about these terms: [email protected].