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Terms of service

These are experimental Alpha terms. They cover a free, invite-gated command-line tool that is expected to break, and a static website that describes it. They are not a finished company's permanent legal documents, and they are written to be short enough that you will actually read them.

Last updated 2026-08-18, for v0.0.0.

These are Alpha terms, and they will be replaced

Ophiuchus is a time-boxed experiment, not a product with a settled legal footing. These terms will change as the Alpha runs, and they will be replaced outright if Ophiuchus becomes something you can buy. Two clauses below — who these terms are with, and which law applies — are unresolved, and say so in place rather than guessing.

What this covers, and what you are agreeing to​

Two things: this website, and the Ophiuchus Alpha you install and run on your own machine. If you use either, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Alpha — nothing is lost, because nothing has been paid.

There is no hosted Ophiuchus application and no hosted relay, so there is no service being provided to you on an ongoing basis. What you get is software you run yourself, plus a relay process you also run yourself. The sign-in page exists only to say that plainly.

If you point Ophiuchus at a relay somebody else operates, your use of that relay is between you and whoever operates it. These terms do not cover it, and cannot.

The Alpha is an experiment, and it may simply stop​

Ophiuchus is being run as a falsification experiment: it is trying to find out whether a structured handoff actually saves a recipient time. Concluding that it does not, and stopping, is an acceptable outcome and a real possibility.

So, plainly, and with no small print underneath:

  • No availability commitment. No uptime target, no SLA, no maintenance window.
  • No support commitment. No response time, no support hours, no ticket queue.
  • No compatibility commitment. The Context Capsule format may change in a way that makes an older capsule unreadable, without a migration path.
  • No continuity commitment. The Alpha may be discontinued at any time.

The pricing page says the same thing about the Alpha, and the docs list what the Alpha does not do at all.

Access is invite-gated, and it can be withdrawn​

Alpha access is granted at our discretion, one person at a time, and it can be withdrawn at any time — including without notice, and including for no stated reason. The repository is private and there is no public install path, so withdrawal of access is a real thing rather than a formality.

Do not build anything you depend on around continued Alpha access.

We would withdraw access for the acceptable-use breaches below. We might also withdraw it because the experiment ended, which is not a judgement about you.

Acceptable use​

While using the Alpha, do not:

  • use it for anything unlawful, or to help somebody else do something unlawful;
  • put another person's personal data, an employer's confidential material, or regulated data into a capsule when you do not have the right to move it;
  • put production secrets or live credentials into a capsule — the advisory secret scan is a seatbelt, not a vault, and Safe use explains why;
  • attack, overload, or probe this website or any relay you do not operate;
  • share your invite, or pass Alpha access on to somebody who was not granted it;
  • present the Alpha as production-ready, certified, compliant, or audited by anyone, because it is none of those things.

You are responsible for what you choose to put into a capsule, and for who you give the capability token to. Anyone holding that token can read the capsule until it expires.

What you put into a capsule stays yours​

You keep everything you own in the content you capture. No ownership of it is claimed, and no licence to use it is asked for.

In the ordinary Alpha flow your capsules do not reach us at all: the relay is a process you run, on loopback by default, and there is no hosted relay to send anything to. Ophiuchus also sends no telemetry, which is a design decision recorded in ADR-0005 and described on Privacy and safe use.

Whoever operates the relay you use can read what you send through it. There is no end-to-end encryption in v0.0.0. If that relay is somebody else's, the person you are trusting is them, not us.

What is not included, stated so it cannot be assumed​

None of the following is provided under these terms, in v0.0.0:

  • end-to-end encryption;
  • a hosted application, an account system, or a hosted relay;
  • enterprise controls — no SSO, no SCIM, no RBAC, no audit log, no DLP;
  • any compliance certification, attestation, or security review by a third party;
  • a data-processing agreement;
  • a data-retention or data-preservation guarantee. A capsule expires and is gone, and the relay's own ceiling can expire it earlier than the capsule claims.

If a page anywhere on this site reads as though one of these exists, this list wins and the other page is a bug worth reporting.

Nothing is for sale under these terms​

The Alpha is free. There is no checkout on this site, no price is published, and no payment can currently be taken — the pricing page explains why the buy button is absent rather than fake.

If a paid Founding plan ever opens, the refund and cancellation policy applies to it, and these terms will be amended before the first charge rather than after it. Charging will not start quietly under terms written while everything was free.

No warranty​

The Alpha and this website are provided as is and as available, without warranty of any kind, to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law. That includes no warranty that the Alpha is fit for a particular purpose, that it is free of defects, that a capsule will be delivered, that a capsule will still be retrievable when the recipient looks for it, or that its output is accurate.

This is not boilerplate hedging on a mature product. It is an accurate description: the Alpha is early software with known rough edges, and the docs name them.

Limitation of liability​

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, we are not liable for:

  • work, context, or capsules that are lost, expired, consumed, or never arrive;
  • anything a relay operator, or anyone you gave a capability token to, does with what you sent them;
  • decisions taken by you or by a coding agent on the basis of a capsule's contents — a received capsule is untrusted input, and the Alpha renders it as the sender's claim rather than as fact;
  • indirect, incidental, or consequential loss of any kind.

You have paid nothing for the Alpha, so any cap on liability measured by fees paid is zero. That is stated for accuracy, not as a trick: the exposure is symmetric with the price.

Who these terms are with, and which law applies​

These terms are between you and LEGAL_ENTITY_TBD. They are governed by the law of GOVERNING_LAW_TBD, and any dispute belongs to that jurisdiction's courts.

Both of these placeholders are unfilled, and neither is a real value

LEGAL_ENTITY_TBD and GOVERNING_LAW_TBD are placeholders. No legal entity has been formed for Ophiuchus and no governing jurisdiction has been chosen, so there is no name and no jurisdiction to print here yet. Inventing either one would be worse than an obvious gap: it would name a party that cannot be held to anything and a forum that has no claim.

Until they are replaced, the practical position is that the Alpha is operated by its author as an individual, the disclaimers above are what is being asserted, and their enforceability depends on the law that eventually applies. Both placeholders are filled in once, here, when the corporate decisions are made.

No physical address, registration number, or tax identity is published on this site, for the same reason: there is not one yet.

Changes to these terms​

These terms can change during the Alpha. When they do, the last-updated date at the top changes with them. There is no notification mechanism, because there is no account system and no mailing list to notify you through — checking this page is the only way, which is a real limitation rather than a disclaimed one.

Two changes will not be made quietly: introducing a charge, and introducing product telemetry. Each requires this page, or Privacy and safe use, to be amended first.

Ending it​

You end this by stopping: uninstall the Alpha, or just stop running it. There is no account to close, no subscription to cancel, and no data of yours held anywhere to delete, because a capsule expires on its own and nothing is stored about you.

We end it by withdrawing your access, as described above. The disclaimers and the limitation of liability outlive the end of your use, for anything that happened while you were using the Alpha.

Contact​

There is one contact route for the Alpha, and it is the same channel used to request Alpha access.

That channel is recorded in exactly one place — the quickstart — so that it cannot be filled in inconsistently across pages.