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Terms of Service — Sery.ai

Effective date: 2026-05-05

Last updated: 2026-05-05

1. These Terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a legal agreement between you ("User," "you") and Sery — a project operated independently as a pre-incorporation initiative, with primary operations in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada("Sery," "we," "us") governing your use of:

  • The Sery.ai website at sery.ai and its subdomains.
  • Your Sery.ai account (if you create one).
  • The Sery.ai paid AI tier and any paid features.
  • The auto-updater endpoint that serves Sery Link binary releases.

Collectively, "the Service."

These Terms do not govern the Sery Link desktop application source code. That software is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later) and is governed entirely by that license. You may use, copy, modify, and redistribute the desktop application under the AGPL without agreeing to these Terms.

2. Acceptance

By creating a Sery.ai account, visiting sery.ai, or using any feature of the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

If you are accepting on behalf of a company or organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity.

3. The Service

Sery.ai is a hosted service that complements the Sery Link desktop application. The Service includes:

  • Account management: creating and managing your Sery.ai account and workspace.
  • Machine pairing: letting you connect multiple Sery Link installs to one workspace via workspace keys.
  • AI tier: paid access to AI-powered query features that use Anthropic Claude to answer questions in plain English about the files you have indexed locally.
  • Binary distribution: hosting signed Sery Link release artifacts and the auto-updater manifest.

4. Your account

4.1 Eligibility

You must be at least 13 years old (or the minimum age in your jurisdiction, whichever is higher) to create an account.

4.2 Account security

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials and workspace keys. Notify us immediately at [email protected] if you suspect unauthorized access.

4.3 One person per account

Each account is for a single natural person. You may not share account credentials. You may run Sery Link on unlimited machines under your workspace, but those machines belong to a single person's account.

5. Plans and payment

5.1 Free plan

The Free plan provides:

  • Unlimited local use of Sery Link, including unlimited machines you own connected to a single workspace, all local features (column-aware search, per-file profiles, remote sources), and zero outbound network traffic on the local path.
  • Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) AI, unlimited. When you supply your own API key for a supported LLM provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.), your queries travel directly from your machine to that provider under your key, never reaching our servers (see §7.2.1 and Privacy Policy §3.4.b). Because we do not pay for those LLM calls, we do not meter them.
  • A limited Sery-hosted AI quota. As of the Effective Date this is fifty (50) Sery-hosted AI queries per calendar month. Current quota is published at sery.ai/pricing and may change with notice under §5.6.

No account is required for local use; an account is required to use the Sery-hosted AI tier (because we need to count queries against your quota and bill you if you upgrade).

5.2 Plus plan

The Plus plan is $19 USD per month, or $190 USD per year (equivalent to roughly $15.83 per month — two months free) (local currency equivalent; taxes may apply). Plus includes:

  • Everything in Free.
  • Unlimited Sery-hosted AI queries (no API key required on your part — we handle the LLM relationship and pay the per-call cost out of your subscription).
  • Up to five (5) invited machines sharing your workspace on one bill. The Plus subscriber holds the workspace key and may share it with up to five additional machines (e.g., a teacher sharing with classroom devices, a consultant sharing with clients, a household sharing across family members). All AI queries from invited machines count against the Plus subscriber's (unlimited) quota; invited machines have no separate billing relationship with us. See §6.5 for the subscriber's responsibility for invited members.
  • Priority model queue, email support, early access to new features.

5.3 No Team or Enterprise tier in this version

These Terms cover only the Free and Plus plans. Sery may, in future, introduce a Team or Enterprise tier with additional features (such as Single Sign-On, audit logging, role-based access, or custom deployments). When and if such tiers launch, they will be governed by either an updated version of these Terms (notified under §15) or by a separate written agreement.

5.4 Billing

The Plus plan is billed monthly or annually in advance, charged to the payment method you provide, processed by Stripe. We do not store your card number. Annual prepayments are non-refundable except as required by law or as described in §5.5.

5.5 Cancellation and refunds

You may cancel at any time from your account settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period; you retain access to the Plus tier until then, and your account drops to Free afterwards.

Refunds for unused portions of a billing period are not offered by default. If you believe you are entitled to a refund for any reason — billing error, extended service outage, etc. — contact [email protected] and we'll review case by case in good faith.

5.6 Price changes

We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice sent to your account email. If you do not agree to the new price, cancel before the next renewal.

5.7 Failed payments

If a payment fails, we will retry for up to 14 days. After that, the account reverts to free-tier features until the account is brought current.

6. Acceptable use

When using the Service, you agree not to:

  • Violate any law or third-party right.
  • Reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract source code of the hosted Service (note: the desktop app is open-source, so this clause specifically targets the hosted backend).
  • Bypass, disable, or interfere with security features, rate limits, or access controls.
  • Use the Service to transmit malicious code, viruses, or spam.
  • Use the Service to process data you do not have the right to process.
  • Use Sery Link, or any Sery feature, to access, query, index, or egress data from a third-party source (such as S3, Google Drive, a relational database, or any other system Sery Link connects to) for which you do not hold independent, valid authorization. Sery does not verify your authorization to a third-party source; providing credentials to Sery Link is your representation that you are authorized to use them for the actions you perform.
  • Use the Service for illegal surveillance of any individual.
  • Use the Service to generate or distribute illegal content, including material that sexualizes minors or incites violence.
  • Use automated scraping to extract data or AI responses at a rate substantially above individual interactive use.
  • Resell access to the AI tier as your own product.

Violating these provisions is grounds for immediate suspension or termination of your account. We may report violations of law to appropriate authorities.

6.5 Plus subscribers: responsibility for invited machines

If you are a Plus subscriber and you invite one or more additional machines to use your workspace under your subscription (the "hub-and-spoke" model described in §5.2), you acknowledge and agree that:

(a) You are responsible for ensuring each invited person and machine has the right to process the data they add to the workspace, and that each invitee's use of the Service complies with these Terms and with Applicable Law.

(b) You are the primary point of contact for account-level matters (billing, plan changes, termination). Invited machines have no independent billing relationship with us, and Sery-hosted AI queries from invited machines count against your (unlimited) Plus quota — but if quotas change in the future, the Plus subscriber is the metering counterparty, not the invitees.

(c) You may revoke any invited machine's access at any time by rotating or removing the workspace key. We may, on reasonable notice to you, require you to revoke an invitee whose use of the Service we reasonably believe violates these Terms or Applicable Law.

(d) You remain the Controller of any Personal Data processed in your workspace under Applicable Data Protection Law. If an invited machine adds Personal Data of other individuals to the workspace, the legal basis for that processing is your responsibility, not ours.

(e) If a future Team or Enterprise tier launches, individual seat-based responsibilities will be governed by the updated terms applicable to that tier; this clause governs only the Plus hub-and-spoke model in this version.

7. Intellectual property

7.1 Our IP

"Sery," "Sery.ai," "Sery Link," and our logos are claimed as unregistered trademarks of the Sery project (which holds the sery.ai domain). The content of the sery.ai website (marketing copy, images, documentation) is our copyright unless otherwise noted.

The desktop application source code at github.com/seryai/sery-link is licensed to you under the AGPL-3.0-or-later. You retain the rights that license grants, independent of these Terms.

7.2 Your data

You retain all rights to the data on your machines and in your workspace. We do not claim ownership of your questions, answers, or any other content you process through the Service.

You grant us a limited, non-exclusive license to process your data solely to deliver the Service — e.g., to send your question to our LLM provider and return the answer. This license terminates when you close your account.

7.2.1 Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) mode — Sery is not a Processor for query data

The AI tier supports a Bring Your Own Key mode in which you configure the Sery Link desktop application with your own API key for a supported LLM provider (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI). When BYOK mode is active for a given query:

(a) The question text, column metadata, and answer text travel directly from your machine to the LLM provider you chose, under the API key you supplied. They do not transit our servers at any point.

(b) We are not a Processor of that query data under Applicable Data Protection Law, because we do not process it on your behalf — we do not receive it at all. Your relationship with the LLM provider, including any data-processing terms, is governed solely by your direct agreement with that provider.

(c) Our role in BYOK is limited to providing the Sery Link software (under the AGPL) and, if you hold a paid account, authenticating your Sery.ai session so the desktop application can unlock paid features. The authentication step sends your account token to our servers; the query does not.

(d) You are responsible for complying with the LLM provider's terms, paying their metered charges, and rotating or revoking the API key as you see fit. We cannot rotate or revoke keys on your behalf.

(e) If you switch out of BYOK mode to the Sery-managed AI path, §7.2 (general) and the Privacy Policy §3.4 apply to queries made on the managed path; BYOK terms apply only to queries you actually route through your own key.

This clause is a material benefit to you. We call it out explicitly because the privacy posture in BYOK mode is substantially stronger than in managed mode, and because it determines which party is legally responsible for the query data under GDPR, UK GDPR, and CCPA/CPRA.

7.3 Feedback

If you send us feedback, suggestions, or ideas about the Service, we may use them to improve the Service without obligation or compensation to you.

8. AI tier specifics

The AI tier uses a third-party large language model provider (currently Anthropic) to generate answers to your questions.

  • AI output is best-effort and may be wrong. Do not rely on AI answers for medical, legal, financial, or safety-critical decisions without independent verification.
  • You are responsible for how you use AI output. If you publish, distribute, or act on an AI answer, you are responsible for its accuracy and legality.
  • We do not use your question data to train models. See the Privacy Policy §4 for how we handle AI query data.
  • Rate limits: we may apply fair-use rate limits to prevent abuse. Sustained high volume may be throttled; we will notify you before any action.

9. Availability and support

The Service is provided on an "as available" basis. We strive for high uptime but do not guarantee it. We may perform scheduled maintenance with prior notice on the status page.

Support is provided by email at [email protected] on a best-effort basis during Pacific Time business hours (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada). We do not offer a formal service-level agreement (SLA) at this time.

10. Termination

10.1 By you

You may close your account at any time from account settings or by emailing [email protected].

10.2 By us

We may suspend or terminate your account if:

  • You materially breach these Terms.
  • A payment fails and remains uncured after 14 days.
  • We are required to do so by law.
  • We discontinue the Service (see §10.3).

We will give you as much notice as we reasonably can before termination, unless immediate action is required to protect the Service or other users.

10.3 Discontinuation

If we discontinue the Service entirely, we will:

  • Give at least 90 days' notice via email and sery.ai.
  • Provide a data export tool so you can retrieve your workspace metadata.
  • Issue a prorated refund for any unused paid period.
  • Not impair your use of the Sery Link desktop app for local features — the app will continue to work locally without the hosted backend, as its core functions (indexing, column-aware search, per-file profiles) are fully local.

10.4 Effect of termination

Upon termination, your right to access the Service ends. We delete your account data per the retention schedule in the Privacy Policy §6. Sections 6, 7, 11, 12, and 13 survive termination.

11. Warranty disclaimer

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that AI answers will be accurate.

11.1 No warranty for the Sery Link desktop application

The Sery Link desktop application is released under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0-or-later). The AGPL includes its own explicit disclaimer of warranty and limitation of liability (AGPL §§15–16).

These Terms do not add any warranty to the desktop application. Bugs, data loss, or other harm arising from your use of the locally-running desktop application — including when used entirely offline, without any hosted Service component — are governed by the AGPL's warranty disclaimer, not by any implied or express warranty from us.

If you modify and redistribute the desktop application under the AGPL, you are yourself the licensor of that modified version to downstream users; we are not their counterparty.

11.2 Local data — you are the sole custodian

The Sery Link desktop application stores its index, per-file profiles, and any cached results locally on your machines. We have no technical means to:

  • Read, copy, or exfiltrate your local data.
  • Remotely wipe, disable, or alter your local data.
  • Bypass your operating system's file permissions.
  • Decrypt your local data if you have enabled whole-disk encryption (FileVault, BitLocker, LUKS, etc.).

Accordingly, you are the sole custodian of your local data. Backups, access controls on your own machines, and protection against theft or loss of your devices are your responsibility, not ours. If you lose a device without a backup, the index and any purely-local state on that device are unrecoverable by us.

This clause is a statement of technical fact about the product's architecture, not a limitation of any obligation we owe you under Applicable Law.

12. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability to you for any claim arising from or related to these Terms or the Service will not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us for the Service in the 12 months preceding the claim, or (b) US $100.

We will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including lost profits, lost data, or business interruption, even if advised of the possibility.

Some jurisdictions do not allow these limitations. In those jurisdictions, our liability is limited to the minimum permitted by law.

13. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Sery (and any successor legal entity, once incorporated) and its operator, contributors, and affiliates from any claim, loss, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your violation of these Terms, your misuse of the Service, or your violation of any law or third-party right in connection with your use of the Service.

14. Dispute resolution and governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of British Columbia, Canada, and the federal laws of Canada applicable therein, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles.

Any dispute arising from these Terms will be resolved in the courts located in Vancouver, British Columbia, and you consent to personal jurisdiction there.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. For material changes, we will:

  • Email registered users at least 30 days before the new Terms take effect.
  • Post a notice on sery.ai.
  • Update the "Last updated" date at the top.

If you do not agree to the new Terms, your remedy is to stop using the Service and close your account before the effective date. Continued use after the effective date means you accept the updated Terms.

16. Miscellaneous

16.1 Entire agreement

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any other documents expressly incorporated by reference, are the entire agreement between you and us concerning the Service.

16.2 No waiver

Our failure to enforce any provision of these Terms does not waive our right to enforce it later.

16.3 Severability

If any provision is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full force and effect.

16.4 Assignment

You may not assign these Terms without our prior written consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, on notice to you.

16.5 No third-party beneficiaries

These Terms do not grant rights to anyone other than you and us.

16.6 Force majeure

Neither party will be liable for failure to perform due to causes beyond reasonable control, including natural disasters, war, pandemic, or government action.

17. Contact