legal
Terms of Service.
What the service does, what it charges, and what it does not promise. This page is a draft and incomplete.
Who these terms are with
Until the operator details are filled in, the contracting party is not stated on this page. The same gap is listed on the imprint.
How the service works
Everything in this section is how the system behaves today and can be checked against it.
Credits, not a subscription
Usage is billed against a credit balance. Each request is charged what the provider reported it cost, per stage — not an estimate from text length. A confirmed email address receives €5 in starting credit, once per address.
A failed request is not charged
If a request errors, it is recorded in the usage log with status 'error' and the balance is left alone. Only completed answers are billed.
Requests stop when credit runs out
At a zero balance the API returns 402 rather than continuing and leaving a debt. There is no overdraft.
API keys identify your account
Keys begin with clst_live_ and are shown once; only a hash is stored. Anything done with a key is billed to the account it belongs to, so a leaked key is your cost until you revoke it. Keys can be revoked at any time under API keys.
Rate limits apply
120 requests per minute per origin. Exceeding it returns 429 with a Retry-After header rather than dropping the request silently.
Deleting your account removes it
Sessions, tokens and API keys are deleted outright; address, name and password hash are replaced. The account row is retained in anonymised form so billing and usage records do not point at nothing — after that step it holds no personal data, and the address can be registered again.
What is not promised
No uptime guarantee
There is no SLA. CALEST depends on upstream model providers, and when one fails the request falls back to a cheaper tier or errors — it does not queue.
No guarantee about the answer
Compilation improved measured success rates on three of five models we tested and did nothing on two. That is evidence about a benchmark, not a promise about your task. Answers are produced by third-party models and can be wrong.
Model availability can change
Which upstream model serves a tier can change without notice. The tier names and their prices are published at /models, and that endpoint is the current truth.
Acceptable use
- Do not use CALEST to produce content that is unlawful where you are, or that targets, harasses or endangers a person.
- Do not attempt to extract other accounts' data, bypass the rate limit, or resell access in a way that hides that CALEST is involved.
- Do not send personal data of others that you have no basis to process. Requests are stored with your account.
Accounts that breach this may be suspended. What happens to a remaining credit balance in that case is a decision the operator has to state.
Your data
What is stored, which processors are involved and how deletion works is described on the privacy page. The short version: what you send is used to carry out your request. It is not sold, and it is not handed to anyone to train a model on.
Payment, refunds and cancellation
Credit is bought through Stripe; card details never reach CALEST. Beyond that, the commercial terms are not settled — and an invented refund rule would be a promise to every reader that nobody has checked.
Liability, governing law and changes
These are legal decisions, not technical ones. They belong to the operator and are not stated here yet.