Terms of Service

1Binding Arbitration

ANY CLAIM, DISPUTE, OR CONTROVERSY OF WHATEVER NATURE ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OF SERVICE OR TO THE SITE OR SERVICES SHALL BE RESOLVED BY FINAL AND BINDING ARBITRATION ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS, IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROCESS DESCRIBED IN THE SECTION TITLED "DISPUTE RESOLUTION AND ARBITRATION" BELOW, SEATED IN KING COUNTY, WASHINGTON. YOU AND STELQ ARE EACH GIVING UP THE RIGHT TO A TRIAL BY JURY AND THE RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION. PLEASE READ THE SECTIONS TITLED "DISPUTE RESOLUTION AND ARBITRATION" AND "CLASS ACTION AND JURY TRIAL WAIVER" CAREFULLY.

2About the Services and Our Role

2.1 What STELQ Is

STELQ is a software company that sells machine-readable web intelligence. We operate automated systems that search the public web, retrieve and clean page content, and use artificial intelligence to synthesize what they retrieve into answers, reports, and event notifications. We sell access to those systems as software.

2.2 The Four Surfaces of the Services

The Services consist of four surfaces, and different parts of these Terms apply with different force to each.

• The API platform (the "API"). Paid programmatic services reachable over REST, over the Model Context Protocol ("MCP"), and from the Console: search (ranked web results with URLs, titles, snippets, dates); content (a URL returned as cleaned, readable page text); answers (a grounded, cited natural-language answer); research (asynchronous deep research in which many pages are crawled and synthesized into a long cited report, at selectable depths); and monitors, which we also call "Watches" (a standing query that re-runs on a cadence, detects developments, and emits events and signed outbound webhooks).
• The Console and Workspace. A logged-in web and mobile surface (the "Console") for account, key, billing, and usage administration, containing a conversational workspace (the "Workspace") in which you hold threads, run research, create Watches, run programs, and store and search your own results.
• STELQ Live. Public, algorithmically generated pages at stelq.com/live and its story pages ("STELQ Live"), open to anyone with no account required, governed by its own section below.
• Public documentation. Human-readable documentation at stelq.com/docs and a machine-readable documentation endpoint requiring no API key. Documentation is informational; it is not a warranty, a specification, or a service level commitment.

"Input" means anything you send to the Services: a query, prompt, URL, research brief, Watch specification, thread message, or file. "Output" means anything the Services return or generate for you: search results, extracted content, answers, reports, Watch events, thread synthesis, embeddings, and derived artifacts. "Credit" means the prepaid balance described below.

2.3 What STELQ Is Not

STELQ is not a law firm, a news organization, a financial institution, a bank, a money transmitter, an escrow agent, a broker-dealer, an investment adviser, an insurer, a medical or healthcare provider, an accounting firm, a credit reporting agency, a background screening provider, or a professional advisory service of any kind.

• STELQ does not provide professional advice. Nothing the Services produce is legal, financial, investment, tax, accounting, medical, safety, employment, immigration, or other professional advice, and none of it substitutes for a qualified professional accountable to you.
• STELQ is not a news organization and does not practice journalism. STELQ Live pages, research reports, answers, and Watch events are machine-generated from third-party sources, and no human editor reviews them before publication or delivery. We do not employ reporters, conduct interviews, fact-check, or follow any press code of practice.
• STELQ is not a consumer reporting agency. The Services and Output may not be used as a factor in establishing a person's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, housing, or any other purpose regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1681 et seq., or any analogous law.
• STELQ does not hold your money. Credit is a prepayment for Services. It is not a deposit, is not held in trust or segregated for you, earns no interest, is not insured, and is not a stored-value instrument, gift certificate, or prepaid card. Card processing is performed by a third-party processor; we never see full card numbers.
• STELQ does not verify what it retrieves. That a source says something, and that STELQ repeats or summarizes it, is not a representation by us that it is true.

2.4 Beta Status; No Service Level Commitment

Portions of the Services are in beta, and we maintain them on a commercially reasonable basis. These Terms create no service level agreement, uptime, latency, or throughput guarantee, availability or support commitment, or credit or remedy for downtime. Signup may be gated during a private beta, and we may accept, queue, or decline any signup at our discretion. Any published performance figure — latency, cost, benchmark result, or source count — describes a past measurement, not a promise.

3Eligibility

3.1 Age Requirement

You must be at least eighteen (18) years of age to create an account or use the Services, and by using them you represent and warrant that you are. The Services are not directed to children. STELQ does not knowingly collect personal information from, or direct the Services to, anyone under 18, and if we learn we have collected information from a child under 13 we will delete it. If you believe a child has provided us information, write to privacy@stelq.com.

3.2 Prohibited Use and Jurisdictions

You may not use the Site or Services where such use is prohibited by law. You are solely responsible for ensuring your use complies with all laws applicable to you, including data protection laws, laws governing automated access to computer systems, and the export control and sanctions requirements below.

3.3 Eligibility Changes

STELQ may, in its sole discretion, refuse to offer the Site or Services to any person or entity, and may change its eligibility criteria at any time without notice.

4Accounts, Credentials, and API Keys

4.1 Account Creation

To access most of the Services you must create an account. You agree to provide accurate, current, and complete information and keep it updated. We may require verification of your email address and may apply automated bot protection and fraud and identity signal checks to any signup attempt, as described in our Privacy Policy.

4.2 Account Responsibilities

• You are responsible for all activity on your account and for safeguarding all login information, passwords, API keys, webhook secrets, and other credentials (collectively, "Credentials").
• You will register for your own use or for an entity you are authorized to bind — and if you accept these Terms for an entity, you represent that you have that authority and that it is duly organized and in good standing. You will create only one account for yourself or that entity unless we agree otherwise in writing.
• You will not assign or transfer your account without STELQ's written consent. Any person accessing your account with your Credentials is deemed an authorized user, and you are responsible for their actions as if they were your own.
• You will not provide false registration information, and will not register using a disposable, aliased, or deliberately obscured email address to obtain duplicate promotional Credit.
• If STELQ terminates or disables your account, you may not create another without STELQ's written consent.
• You will keep your contact information accurate and monitored. Notices sent to the email address on your account are effective when sent; a bounced or unread address does not excuse you from a notice.
• If you learn of unauthorized use of your account or any Credential, revoke it immediately, notify us at support@stelq.com or through the Console support desk, and cooperate with any resulting investigation.

4.3 API Keys Are Secrets

An API key is a bearer credential. Anyone holding it can spend your Credit and read your account's data through the API.

• Treat every API key as a secret. Do not commit keys to source control, embed them in client-side code, mobile apps, browser extensions, or any artifact a third party can read, paste them into public forums, screenshots, or shared documents, or transmit them over unencrypted channels.
• We store only a hash of each key. We cannot recover, display, or re-issue a lost key. If you lose one, create a new key and revoke the old one.
• You may create, name, cap, and revoke keys in the Console. Revocation applies to calls made after it propagates; requests already accepted may complete and may be billed.
• Webhook secrets are Credentials too. Where we sign an outbound webhook with your account secret, you are responsible for verifying that signature before acting on a delivery and for keeping the secret confidential. We are not responsible for your acting on an unverified or forged delivery.

4.4 You Are Responsible for Everything Done With Your Key

You are responsible for all use of the Services, and all charges incurred, under your account or with any Credential issued to it — whether by you, an employee or contractor, a customer of yours, software you wrote, a third-party tool you connected, an autonomous agent you configured, or any person who obtains the Credential, and whether or not you authorized or reviewed it. This allocation is deliberate and is a condition of our providing agent-accessible services. Your remedy for exposure you do not want is to set spend limits, rotate keys, and revoke Credentials promptly.

4.5 Rate Limits

We enforce per-account and per-key rate limits; requests exceeding a limit are rejected, typically with an HTTP 429 response. Rate, concurrency, size, and queue limits may change at any time. Rate limiting is not a breach by us and entitles you to no refund.

4.6 Fraud Signals and Promotional Credit

Because we give free Credit to new accounts, we score signup attempts for indicators of duplicate or fraudulent registration; those signals and their retention are described in our Privacy Policy. You agree not to circumvent any mechanism limiting promotional Credit to one grant per person or entity — by creating multiple accounts, using canonically equivalent or disposable email addresses, masking your network origin, or manipulating device or browser characteristics. Credit so obtained may be revoked without refund and is grounds for termination.

5Acceptable Use

5.1 Prohibited Conduct

We need your help to keep the Services safe, lawful, and operational. You agree that you will not, and will not permit any person, agent, or system acting under your Credentials to:

• Violate any law or regulation, or any third party's intellectual property, privacy, publicity, contract, confidentiality, or other rights;
• Stalk, surveil, dox, harass, threaten, intimidate, defame, or build a covert dossier on a person, or compile or enrich a database of personal information without a lawful basis;
• Profile or target individuals or groups by race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, health status, sexual orientation, gender identity, immigration status, political affiliation, or trade union membership, or facilitate discrimination against them;
• Generate, refine, or distribute disinformation, synthetic content presented as authentic reporting, election interference material, or content designed to deceive as to its author or source;
• Generate or distribute spam, unsolicited bulk communications, phishing content, malware, ransomware, credential-harvesting pages, or code designed to disrupt or damage software, hardware, or telecommunications equipment;
• Use the Services in connection with weapons development or unlawful surveillance, or in any application where inaccurate Output could reasonably cause death, personal injury, or severe environmental or property damage;
• Direct crawling, retrieval, or automated access at a target in order to harm it, disrupt its operation, evade its access controls, obtain material behind an authentication barrier or paywall you are not entitled to access, or circumvent a rate limit, robots directive, licence, or contractual restriction that binds you;
• Impose, or risk imposing, a disproportionate load on STELQ's infrastructure or our providers', including through unthrottled parallelism or retry storms;
• Share, rent, lease, or transfer your Credentials, or operate the Services as a shared account for unaffiliated parties;
• Breach, probe, or bypass security, authentication, rate limits, spend limits, quotas, or any other access control, or interfere with the proper working of the Site or Services;
• Decompile, disassemble, or reverse engineer any part of the Services, or attempt to derive their source code, model weights, prompts, ranking logic, or algorithms, except to the limited extent law prohibits such restriction;
• Use the Services or Output to train, fine-tune, distil, or benchmark a competing search, retrieval, answering, research, or monitoring product or model;
• Resell, sublicense, syndicate, or redistribute raw Output, or mirror the Services, in a manner that substitutes for the Services themselves. Building your own products and agents on top of the Services, and delivering their results to your own customers, is expressly permitted;
• Misrepresent your affiliation with STELQ, impersonate any person, or use STELQ's marks in a way likely to cause confusion or that disparages STELQ;
• Remove, obscure, or alter any attribution, citation, source link, disclaimer, or AI-generation notice accompanying Output you republish, or present machine-generated Output to a third party as human-authored, human-verified, or editorially reviewed work when it is not; or
• Otherwise act in violation of STELQ's published guidelines and policies.

5.2 Content Standards

Input you submit and Output you republish must comply with law and must not contain or promote: child sexual abuse material or content sexualizing minors; violence, terrorism, self-harm, or hatred or discrimination against any individual or group; non-consensual intimate imagery; content infringing any third party's intellectual property, privacy, or publicity rights; or malware, phishing, or other malicious content.

5.3 Automated Agents and Autonomous Use

The Services are designed to be operated by software, including autonomous agents connected over MCP. That is a feature. It also means a misconfigured agent can spend money and retrieve content faster than a human can supervise. If you connect an autonomous agent, you — not the agent, not the platform hosting it, not the model provider — are responsible for what it does with your Credentials: its spending, request volume, choice of targets, and use of Output.

5.4 Enforcement

STELQ may, but has no obligation to, investigate and act against anyone who in our sole discretion violates this section — by throttling or blocking requests, revoking Credentials, removing content, suspending or terminating accounts, withholding promotional Credit, and reporting violations to law enforcement or affected third parties, with or without notice. We have no obligation to monitor your use, and any monitoring we do creates no duty to act.

6Prepaid Credit, Billing, and Payment

6.1 The Prepaid Credit Model

STELQ runs a prepaid credit model. You purchase Credit in advance through the Console, and we debit your balance as the Services perform work for you. There is no subscription, minimum commitment, or platform fee. Each billable request debits your balance at the published price for that operation; a request we do not fulfil is not a request we bill.

Your balance, usage history, and per-request charges are visible in the Console and exportable as CSV. Metering settles continuously, so a short-lived difference between a live balance and a rolled-up ledger figure is not a billing error. Absent manifest error, our records are authoritative as to what was performed and billed.

6.2 Pricing and Price Changes

Prices for each operation, including research pricing by depth and Watch pricing by cadence and size, are published in the Console and in our documentation at stelq.com/docs, and shown before you confirm a priced action in the Workspace. STELQ may change prices at any time. Price changes are prospective only: a change never re-prices work already performed or Credit already consumed. We publish changed prices before they take effect, and continued use constitutes acceptance. If you do not accept a new price, stop using that operation and request a refund of unused Credit.

6.3 Agent-, MCP-, and Automation-Initiated Charges

This subsection is the most important commercial term in these Terms. Read it before you connect an agent.

YOU EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZE STELQ TO DEBIT YOUR PREPAID CREDIT BALANCE FOR EVERY BILLABLE REQUEST MADE WITH YOUR CREDENTIALS, INCLUDING REQUESTS INITIATED AUTOMATICALLY, PROGRAMMATICALLY, OR AUTONOMOUSLY ON YOUR BEHALF BY SOFTWARE — INCLUDING SCRIPTS, SCHEDULERS, BACKGROUND JOBS, THIRD-PARTY PLATFORMS, LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS, AND AUTONOMOUS AGENTS CONNECTED OVER THE MODEL CONTEXT PROTOCOL (MCP) — TO THE SAME EXTENT AS CHARGES YOU INITIATE PERSONALLY AND INDIVIDUALLY. YOU ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT (A) SUCH REQUESTS MAY BE MADE AT MACHINE SPEED AND IN LARGE VOLUME; (B) YOU MAY NOT SEE, REVIEW, OR APPROVE ANY INDIVIDUAL REQUEST BEFORE IT IS MADE AND BILLED; (C) NO HUMAN CONFIRMATION STEP APPLIES TO API OR MCP REQUESTS; (D) A SINGLE INSTRUCTION GIVEN TO AN AGENT MAY RESULT IN MANY SEPARATE BILLABLE REQUESTS; AND (E) YOU ARE FINANCIALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL OF THEM. THIS IS AN AUTHORIZATION TO CONSUME PREPAID CREDIT YOU HAVE ALREADY PURCHASED. IT IS NOT AN AUTHORIZATION TO CHARGE A PAYMENT CARD OR BANK ACCOUNT; AUTOMATIC CHARGES TO A SAVED PAYMENT METHOD OCCUR ONLY IF YOU SEPARATELY ENABLE AUTO-RELOAD, WHICH IS OFF BY DEFAULT AND IS GOVERNED BY THE SEPARATE AUTO-RELOAD TERMS. YOUR STATED CONTROL OVER AGENT SPENDING IS THE PER-KEY SPEND LIMIT DESCRIBED IMMEDIATELY BELOW, TOGETHER WITH YOUR ABILITY TO REVOKE ANY CREDENTIAL AT ANY TIME. STELQ STRONGLY RECOMMENDS THAT YOU SET A SPEND LIMIT ON ANY KEY YOU GIVE TO AN AUTONOMOUS AGENT, AND YOU ACCEPT THE RISK OF NOT DOING SO.

For the avoidance of doubt, the Workspace's human-confirmation behaviour described below applies to the Workspace only. It is not a contractual limit on this authorization, does not apply to the API or MCP, and may change as the product evolves.

6.4 Spend Limits — Your Control

You may set a monthly spend cap on each API key in the Console. A key that reaches its cap stops making billable calls until the cap resets at the start of the next monthly period or you raise it. Spend limits are the primary control we give you over automation-initiated spending, and we provide them free of charge.

Spend limits are enforced on a best-effort basis against metered usage. Because metering and enforcement are distributed, a small amount of usage may be admitted at or just after the moment a cap is reached — for example, requests already in flight. A spend limit is a control, not a guarantee: overshoot at the boundary is possible, STELQ is not liable for usage admitted in that window, and you remain responsible for it. Spend limits do not apply to Credit purchases.

6.5 Auto-Reload

Auto-reload is optional and off by default. It automatically charges a saved payment method to top up your Credit when your balance falls below a threshold you set. If you enable it, you separately authorize recurring, merchant-initiated charges under the Auto-reload terms, a distinct document incorporated by reference only while auto-reload is on. You may turn it off at any time in the Console, effective immediately; declining it simply means your balance is not replenished automatically.

6.6 The Welcome Bonus and Other Promotional Credit

We may grant free starting Credit to new accounts (a "welcome bonus") and may run other promotions. Promotional Credit is a marketing grant, not a purchase. It is never refundable in cash; is limited to one grant per person or entity; is not transferable or combinable across accounts; may be consumed before purchased Credit; and may be withdrawn, reduced, or revoked at any time, including where we determine it was obtained through duplicate registration, misrepresentation, or circumvention of our fraud controls. Because it is not purchased, the "does not expire" rule below applies to purchased Credit only.

6.7 Nature of Credit; No Expiration; No Cash Value

• Credit is a prepayment for Services. It is not money, a deposit, a stored-value instrument, a gift certificate, or a prepaid card; it is not held in trust, is not insured, and earns no interest.
• Purchased Credit does not expire. We impose no expiration date, dormancy, maintenance, or inactivity fee, or breakage rule on purchased Credit, and will not adopt one retroactively.
• Credit has no cash value, and is not transferable. Unused purchased Credit may be refunded on request as described below, but may not otherwise be redeemed for cash, sold, assigned, gifted, pooled with another account, or used for anything other than the Services. Credit is denominated in United States dollars.

6.8 Refunds, Failed Work, and Billing Errors

• Consumed Credit is non-refundable. Once the Services have performed work for you, the Credit debited for it is spent, whether or not the Output was useful or supported the conclusion you hoped for. Dissatisfaction with the substance of a result or report is not a basis for a refund.
• Unused purchased Credit is refundable. Request it at any time at support@stelq.com or through the Console. We refund the unused purchased portion of your balance to the original payment method, less any promotional Credit and amounts subject to a pending dispute or chargeback, subject to our payment processor's timing. We may verify account ownership first.
• Failed research is automatically refunded. Research is charged at submission because the work begins immediately. If a research job fails, the charge is automatically refunded to your balance. The refund is idempotent — a failed job is refunded once and only once — and a scheduled backstop applies any refund missed at the moment of failure. You do not need to ask. This applies to jobs the Services record as failed, not to a job that completes and returns a report you did not like.
• Billing errors. If we charge you in error — a duplicate debit, or a debit for a request never performed — tell us and we will correct it and return the amount to your balance. Please report suspected billing errors within sixty (60) days of the charge appearing in your usage records.
• Discretionary adjustments and statutory rights. We may issue a goodwill credit in circumstances not covered above, in our sole discretion and without creating any precedent. Nothing here limits any non-waivable refund or cancellation right you have under consumer protection law.

6.9 Chargebacks and Payment Disputes

If you believe a charge is wrong, contact us first; a chargeback filed before contacting us prevents us from resolving the matter and costs us fees regardless of outcome. If a payment to us is reversed or charged back, we may reverse the corresponding Credit, including into a negative balance; suspend your account pending resolution; decline further Services until settled; and recover the disputed amount plus fees imposed on us and reasonable costs of collection. Initiating a chargeback for Credit you have already consumed is a material breach.

6.10 Payment Processing

Payments for Credit are processed by our third-party payment processor, currently Stripe, Inc., through hosted checkout. We do not receive, store, or process full payment card numbers. By purchasing Credit you agree to the processor's terms and privacy policy. We are not responsible for its acts or omissions — declines, holds, delays, fraud checks, currency conversion, issuer fees, or outages — and may change processors.

6.11 Taxes

Prices are exclusive of taxes. You are solely responsible for all sales, use, value-added, withholding, and other taxes arising from your purchase of Credit and use of the Services, other than taxes on STELQ's net income. Where law requires us to collect a tax we may add it to the amount charged. If you are exempt, provide valid documentation before purchase. STELQ does not provide tax advice.

7Research, Watches, and Programs

7.1 Research

The research service performs asynchronous deep research: it plans a line of inquiry, searches, retrieves and reads many third-party pages, and synthesizes what it finds into a long cited report. Depth affects how much work is performed, how long the job takes, how many claims the report supports, and what it costs; prices by depth are published in the Console and shown before you confirm.

Research is charged when the job is submitted, because the crawling, retrieval, and model inference begin immediately and cost us money whether or not you wait for the result. Cancelling or navigating away after submission does not reverse a charge for work already performed. A job the Services record as failed is refunded automatically.

What research does not promise. A report is a synthesis of the sources the Services could find and retrieve within the depth you selected. We do not represent that it is exhaustive, that it found every relevant source, that the sources found are the most authoritative available, that its citations resolve or will continue to resolve, that a citation supports the sentence it is attached to, or that the report is free of error. The number of sources cited is not the number of pages examined. A report may identify its own gaps; the presence or absence of an admitted gap is not a warranty about the rest of it.

7.2 Watches

A Watch (also called a monitor) is a standing query. Once created it re-runs automatically on the cadence you select — as frequently as every fifteen minutes — evaluates whether a genuine development has occurred, records events, and where configured delivers a signed outbound webhook. STELQ also runs its own Watches for STELQ Live and internal purposes; those run on our account and are never billed to any customer.

A WATCH RUNS ON A RECURRING BASIS AND INCURS A RECURRING CHARGE AGAINST YOUR CREDIT BALANCE EACH TIME IT RUNS, FOR AS LONG AS IT REMAINS ACTIVE. A WATCH CONTINUES TO RUN, AND CONTINUES TO CHARGE, UNTIL YOU PAUSE OR DELETE IT, UNTIL IT REACHES A STOP CONDITION YOU CONFIGURED, UNTIL YOUR CREDIT BALANCE OR SPEND LIMIT IS EXHAUSTED, OR UNTIL WE STOP IT. LEAVING A WATCH RUNNING IS A CONTINUING INSTRUCTION TO SPEND.

You are responsible for reviewing your active Watches and their cadences. Deleting the thread, tab, integration, or agent that created a Watch does not necessarily stop it; stop it in the Console. A Watch paused for insufficient balance may resume when your balance is restored.

Webhook deliveries are best-effort. We do not guarantee delivery, ordering, exactly-once semantics, or timeliness. Design your endpoint to be idempotent and to tolerate duplicates, gaps, retries, and out-of-order arrival, and verify the signature on every delivery. We are not liable for a delivery that is delayed, duplicated, dropped, or acted upon without verification.

7.3 Research Programs and the Authorized Spending Envelope

A research program turns a single ask into a tree of related research jobs, optionally including follow-up jobs that pursue gaps the earlier reports themselves identify. Because a program spends repeatedly without an individual confirmation for each job, it runs against an authorized spending envelope:

• Before a program starts, the Workspace presents its planned structure, the number of units, whether follow-ups are included, and the maximum total amount it may spend. By confirming, you authorize STELQ to debit your Credit for that program's work up to that maximum, without further confirmation for each constituent job.
• The envelope is a hard cap on that program. A program will not knowingly spend past its envelope; if the work cannot be completed within it, the program stops rather than exceeding it.
• The envelope is a maximum, not an estimate of the final price and not a commitment to spend the whole amount; a program that completes for less debits less. It applies only to the program it was authorized for — authorizing one program does not authorize another.
• Programs run asynchronously over time. You may stop a program; work already performed when you stop it is not refunded.

7.4 Confirmation in the Workspace

In the Workspace, an automated router may classify what you type and propose a course of action — a conversational reply, a cited answer, a research job, or a Watch. Where the proposal is billable, the Workspace shows the price and asks you to confirm before it runs; priced work in the Workspace is not intended to fire on a single click without a confirmed price. As stated above, this is a product behaviour, not a contractual limit on the charge authorization, and it does not apply to the API or to MCP. Routing and intake use automated classification and may be wrong. A proposal is not advice, and confirming one is your decision.

8The Workspace

8.1 Threads and Stored Content

The Workspace organizes your work into threads. A thread holds the messages you write, the Output the Services return, research reports, Watch specifications and run histories, canvases, exports, and setup state for unfinished work. This content is stored persistently for as long as your account remains open, so you can come back to it. It is not ephemeral and is not deleted at the end of a session.

8.2 Derived Content and Cross-Thread Recall

To make your own work searchable, the Services process your thread content into derived representations — text chunks and numerical embeddings produced by models we host — and index them so a later thread can retrieve material from earlier ones ("recall"). You acknowledge that recall is scoped to your account and does not make your content searchable to other customers; that in an organization account content is retrievable by any user with Workspace access, so you should not put personal material into a shared account; that derived representations are stored with the content they came from and deleted with it; and that recall retrieves what your threads contain, including anything inaccurate, without correcting it.

8.3 Export

You may export research folders as an archive and usage and billing records as CSV from the Console. Formats may change, and we do not warrant that an export is complete, captures every derived artifact, or will import into any particular third-party system.

8.4 Sensitive Data

Do not send the Services material you are not permitted to send to a cloud service — protected health information, payment card data, government-issued identifiers, or classified information. The Services are not designed or certified for it, and we offer no HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or equivalent compliance commitments. For a data processing agreement covering personal data you send us as a controller, write to privacy@stelq.com.

8.5 Deletion

You may delete threads and content from the Workspace. Deletion removes the content and its derived representations from the live Services; residual copies may persist in encrypted backups for a limited period and in records we are required to retain, as described in the Privacy Policy. Deleting a private thread does not retract anything already published publicly under the section titled "Deep Dives and the Publish-for-Free Rule."

9Deep Dives and the Publish-for-Free Rule

9.1 You Pay to Write an Analysis, Never to Read One

A deep dive is a paid analysis you commission on a story. The rule of the house is deliberate: payment buys the writing of an analysis, not access to one. Once a deep dive on a public story exists it is free for everyone to read, including people with no account. We will not paywall it after the fact, and we will not charge a second person to read what a first person paid to create.

9.2 The Licence You Grant When You Commission a Deep Dive on a Public Story

Before you commission a deep dive on a public story, the surface you click from — the public story page or the Console — states the price and states that the resulting analysis will be published publicly and made available free of charge. By confirming and paying, you grant STELQ a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, fully paid-up, royalty-free, transferable, and sublicensable licence to host, reproduce, store, index, publish, display, perform, distribute, excerpt, summarize, translate, adapt, create derivative works from, and otherwise make available that Output — in whole or in part, on the Site, on STELQ Live, in feeds, in search engines, in email to story followers, in machine-readable endpoints, and in any medium now known or later developed — and to permit others to do the same, free of charge and without any obligation of payment, accounting, or notice to you.

This licence:

• attaches only to the deep dive Output you commissioned on a public story. It does not attach to your private threads, private research, Watches, account data, or any deep dive commissioned on a story that is not public;
• is irrevocable and survives deletion of your thread, closure of your account, and termination of these Terms, because third parties will already have relied on the published analysis being free;
• does not transfer your ownership of the Output — as between you and STELQ you keep whatever rights you have in it, subject to this licence and to the fact that machine-generated Output may not be protectable by copyright at all; and
• is granted in exchange for the price you paid and the publication itself, which you agree is adequate consideration, waiving any claim to further compensation, royalty, or revenue share.

9.3 Deep Dives on Your Own Watches Stay Private

The publish-for-free rule applies only to a public story. An analysis you commission on a Watch of your own — one you created, or one you made yours by forking a public Watch under Section 10 — is private to your account. We do not publish it, we do not add it to STELQ Live, we do not make it free to anyone else, and no licence under Section 9.2 arises. It is your Workspace content, governed by Sections 8 and 14, and you may delete it.

Pinning a public Watch does not change this in your favour: a pin is a view of our public Watch, so an analysis commissioned through a pin is an analysis on a public story and Section 9.2 applies to it. Forking is what makes a Watch yours. The Console states which case you are in before you pay.

9.4 Attribution

We do not currently attribute published deep dives to the customer who commissioned them. Published analyses appear without a byline naming you, so do not commission one expecting public credit. We may introduce optional attribution in future; if we do it will be opt-in, and nothing here obliges us to add it.

9.5 Your Representations

You represent and warrant that the brief, prompt, and any material you supply for a deep dive are yours to supply, infringe no third party's rights, contain no confidential information you are not free to disclose, and do not direct the Services to produce content violating the Acceptable Use section.

9.6 Editorial Control and Removal

STELQ retains sole editorial and operational control over what appears on the Site and on STELQ Live, and may decline to publish, unpublish, edit, append a correction, or remove any published analysis at any time, for any reason or no reason. Having paid for a deep dive does not entitle you to control its presentation, placement, or continued availability, or to a refund if we remove it.

10Fork and Pin

Some Watches are public. You may interact with a public Watch in two ways:

• Pin — free. Pinning places a shared, read-only view of an existing public Watch into your Workspace so you can follow it alongside your own work. It does not create a new Watch, change the underlying Watch, or give you control over it, and is not billed. The pinned Watch remains ours; if we stop, change, or delete it, your pin reflects that.
• Fork ("make it mine") — paid. Forking creates your own Watch in your Workspace, seeded from the public Watch's specification and history, and thereafter running on your account, on your cadence, under your control, and at your cost. A forked Watch is a Watch for all purposes of these Terms, including the recurring-charge rule above. The Console shows the price before you fork.

Forking also changes what happens to analyses: a deep dive on a pinned public Watch is published for everyone under Section 9.2, while a deep dive on a Watch you have forked is private to you under Section 9.3.

The principle: we never charge for a copy, only for a change. Content inherited into a forked Watch — including historical summaries and generated images — is licensed to you for use within the Services and transfers ownership of nothing.

11STELQ Live

This section governs STELQ Live and applies to everyone who reads it, including people who have no account and have never paid us anything.

11.1 What STELQ Live Is

STELQ Live is a set of public web pages, each following a developing story, produced by STELQ's own automated Watches, which select stories, crawl public sources, and generate the page. Reading STELQ Live is free and requires no account.

11.2 STELQ Live Is Algorithmically Generated. It Is Not Journalism.

Every substantive element of a STELQ Live page — headline, standfirst, summary, timeline, closing criteria, and updates — is written by a machine learning model from crawled third-party sources. Read every page with the following in mind:

• No human editor reviews a STELQ Live page before it is published. There is no editorial desk, no fact-checking pass, and no legal read. Pages go live automatically.
• STELQ Live is not journalism and STELQ is not a news organization. We do not employ reporters, conduct interviews, seek comment from story subjects before publishing, or follow any press code of practice. The technical presentation of these pages — structured data markup, publication timestamps, keywords, and sitemap inclusion — exists so machines can parse them. It is a formatting convention. It is not a claim that the content is verified news.
• STELQ Live pages may contain errors. They may misstate facts, misattribute statements, misidentify people or organizations, misdate events, draw wrong inferences, omit critical context, rely on sources that are themselves wrong, or repeat rumour or reporting later retracted. They may be out of date the moment you read them.
• Nothing on STELQ Live is advice. It is not legal, financial, investment, medical, safety, or professional advice and must not be relied on for any decision of consequence. Verify independently before you act.
• Statements about people are machine-generated. Where a page names or describes an identifiable person or organization, the statement is a model's automated summary of what public sources reported. It is not a considered editorial assertion by any human at STELQ and should not be read as one. If a page says something about you that is wrong, tell us — see the correction channel below.

11.3 AI-Generated Imagery

Hero images and other illustrations on STELQ Live are generated by artificial intelligence. They are illustrative: not photographs, not depictions of real events, places, or people, and not evidence of anything. Any resemblance to an actual person, location, document, or scene is unintended and coincidental. Do not treat an image on STELQ Live as documentation of what happened.

11.4 Stories Stay Published

Each story is created with closing criteria — a description of the checkable end state that would resolve it — written at creation and not subsequently edited. When a story resolves or expires, the page remains published and indexable by search engines. We do not automatically delete, unpublish, or de-index resolved stories, and a page you find may describe a situation that has since changed entirely. Always check the dates. This is an archive, not a representation that the content is current.

11.5 Corrections and Takedown — How to Reach a Human

If a STELQ Live page contains something about you, your organization, or anyone else that is inaccurate, misleading, unlawful, or that you believe should be removed, write to support@stelq.com.

• You do not need an account, a subscription, a lawyer, or any relationship with STELQ to use this channel. It is open to any member of the public.
• Please include the page URL, the statement at issue, what is wrong with it, where practicable a source showing the correct position, and a way to reach you.
• We review every report received through this channel, and will tell you what we did. We may correct the page, append a correction note, unpublish it, de-index it, adjust the underlying Watch, or decline to act.
• Copyright complaints follow a separate statutory process — send those to dmca@stelq.com. Formal legal notices, demands, and preservation requests go to legal@stelq.com and the postal address below; privacy rights requests go to privacy@stelq.com.

Nothing here obliges us to reach any particular outcome, and acting on a report is not an admission of liability or a waiver of any defence available to us.

11.6 Following a Story by Email

Anyone may ask to receive email updates about a STELQ Live story. Following requires confirming your email address: an unconfirmed request is inert and is never mailed. Every message carries a one-click unsubscribe that works without logging in, and a postal address for the sender. We use these addresses only for updates about the story you followed and administrative messages about the follow. Unsubscribing takes effect for future sends, and we do not sell follower addresses.

12Third-Party Sources, Retrieval, and Your Downstream Use

12.1 How Requests Are Fulfilled

To fulfil a search, content, answers, research, or Watch request, the Services query search infrastructure, retrieve pages from third-party websites at volume, and send retrieved text to machine learning models for synthesis. A single report citing a handful of sources may have involved retrieving well over a hundred pages. The Services rely on upstream search, retrieval, proxy, anti-bot, inference, and embedding providers, described categorically in our Privacy Policy and subject to change.

12.2 No Warranty as to Sources

STELQ makes no representation or warranty of any kind regarding third-party source content. We do not warrant that a source is accurate, complete, current, lawful, or authentic; that it will remain available, at the same URL, or in the same form; that any particular source will be found, retrieved, or included; that retrieval respects any preference a site operator may have expressed; or that a source's operator consents to or licenses the retrieval, storage, reproduction, summarization, or onward use of its content. Sources may be paywalled, licensed, jurisdictionally restricted, subject to database rights, or subject to terms restricting what may be done with them. We do not clear rights in third-party content and do not represent that Output is free of third-party rights.

12.3 Your Downstream Use Is Your Responsibility

You are solely responsible for what you do with content the Services retrieve and Output they generate. That includes copyright and neighbouring rights in retrieved text, quotations, and excerpts; sui generis database rights and other extraction rights; trademark and publicity rights; the terms of use, licences, and contracts of the sites content is retrieved from; confidentiality obligations; and the data protection law applying to personal data in what is retrieved. If your intended use requires a licence from the content owner, obtaining it is your responsibility, not ours. You warrant that you will not direct the Services at targets you are not entitled to access.

STELQ does not control, endorse, or assume responsibility for any third-party site, service, or content linked from or returned by the Services; your use of them is at your own risk and subject to their terms. Where you connect a third-party platform, model provider, or agent framework, your relationship with that provider is governed by your agreement with them.

13AI Output

13.1 The Nature of Output

Output is produced by automated systems, including large language models, operating over content retrieved from the public web. Machine-generated text has known and unavoidable failure modes. YOU ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT ALL OUTPUT IS PROVIDED "AS IS," WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OF ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, CURRENCY, RELIABILITY, ORIGINALITY, NON-INFRINGEMENT, OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE, AND THAT STELQ DOES NOT GUARANTEE: THAT A STATEMENT IN OUTPUT IS TRUE; THAT A CITATION EXISTS, RESOLVES, IS CORRECTLY ATTRIBUTED, OR SUPPORTS THE STATEMENT IT ACCOMPANIES; THAT OUTPUT IS CURRENT OR REFLECTS EVENTS AFTER IT WAS GENERATED; THAT OUTPUT IS COMPLETE OR CONSIDERED EVERY RELEVANT SOURCE; THAT OUTPUT IS FREE OF BIAS, OMISSION, OR FABRICATION; THAT IDENTICAL INPUTS PRODUCE IDENTICAL OUTPUTS; OR THAT OUTPUT IS FREE OF THIRD-PARTY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS.

Models state untrue things with complete confidence, invent citations, misattribute quotations, conflate similarly named entities, and present stale information as current.

13.2 Human Review Is Required

You must independently review and verify Output before relying on it, acting on it, publishing it, or delivering it to anyone else. You are solely responsible for every decision made and action taken on the basis of Output — by you, your employees, your customers, or any automated system you build. Do not deploy Output into a workflow that acts on it without human review where the consequences of an error matter. Where you deliver Output to your own users, you are responsible for disclosing that it is machine-generated and for whatever accuracy commitments you make to them; you must not make accuracy commitments on our behalf.

13.3 Output Is Not Professional Advice

Output is not legal, financial, investment, tax, medical, safety, engineering, immigration, or other professional advice, and no professional relationship is created between you and STELQ by your use of the Services. Consult a licensed professional in the relevant jurisdiction before acting on anything of consequence.

14Your Content and Intellectual Property

14.1 Ownership of Your Input

You retain all ownership rights you have in your Input. STELQ does not claim ownership of your Input.

14.2 Output

As between you and STELQ, and subject to the deep dive publication licence in Section 9 and to third-party rights, you own the Output generated for you and may use it for any lawful purpose, including commercially. You acknowledge that Output is machine-generated, may not be eligible for copyright protection in some jurisdictions, carries no representation from us about its intellectual property status, and may incorporate or closely paraphrase third-party source material in which others hold rights.

14.3 The Licence You Grant Us

By submitting Input to, or generating Output through, the Services, you grant STELQ a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence — sublicensable solely to service providers acting on our behalf and on our instructions — to host, store, reproduce, transmit, process, index, embed, analyze, display, and create derived representations of your Input and Output, solely in order to:

• operate, deliver, and fulfil the Services you requested, including transmitting Input and retrieved content to upstream search, retrieval, inference, and embedding providers, and storing your Workspace content and making it searchable to you across your own threads;
• secure the Services, prevent fraud and abuse, enforce these Terms, and maintain, troubleshoot, and support the Services, including reproducing a problem you reported; and
• comply with legal obligations.

This licence ends for an item of content when that content is deleted from our systems, except where we must retain it for legal compliance, and except that the Section 9 deep dive licence is perpetual and irrevocable by its own terms. Nothing here permits us to sell your Input or your private Output, and we do not. Aggregated, de-identified operational data — request counts, latency distributions, error rates, and cost figures containing no Input or Output text and nothing identifying you — may be used to operate, improve, and describe the Services.

14.4 Your Representations Regarding Input

You represent and warrant that you have all necessary rights, licences, consents, and permissions in your Input; that your Input and your use of Output infringe no third party's intellectual property, privacy, publicity, contractual, or other rights; that you have given any notices and obtained any consents data protection law requires for personal data in your Input; and that your Input violates neither the Acceptable Use section nor any law.

14.5 STELQ Intellectual Property

The Services — including the Site, Console, Workspace, STELQ Live, documentation, and all software, code, architecture, algorithms, ranking and retrieval logic, prompts, pipelines, models we develop, schemas, designs, graphics, text, and the arrangement of the foregoing ("STELQ Content") — are the property of Ostrel Software LLC or its licensors, protected by copyright, trademark, trade secret, patent, and other laws. Except for the limited right to use the Services under these Terms, you acquire no rights in them, and all rights not expressly granted are reserved.

14.6 Trademarks

STELQ, the STELQ logo and wordmark, stelq.com, and other STELQ graphics, headers, icons, and service names are trademarks or trade dress of Ostrel Software LLC. They may not be used for any product that is not STELQ's, in any manner likely to cause confusion, or in any manner that disparages STELQ. Truthful, nominative reference — for example, that your product is built on the STELQ API — is permitted.

14.7 Feedback

If you send us feedback, suggestions, bug reports, or ideas, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable licence to use them for any purpose, without restriction, attribution, confidentiality obligation, or compensation. Do not send us feedback you are not free to give on those terms.

15Copyright and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

15.1 Notification of Claimed Infringement

If you are a copyright owner or an agent and believe content on the Site, in the Services, or on STELQ Live infringes your copyright, you may submit a notification under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") by giving our designated Copyright Agent the following in writing (see 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)):

• (i) A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed;
• (ii) Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple works are covered by a single notification, a representative list of them;
• (iii) Identification of the material claimed to be infringing and to be removed or disabled, with information reasonably sufficient for us to locate it — for STELQ Live, the full page URL and the passage or image at issue;
• (iv) Your name, address, telephone number, and email address;
• (v) A statement of your good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
• (vi) A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury that you are authorized to act for the owner of the exclusive right allegedly infringed.

Our designated Copyright Agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement is:

Copyright Agent, Ostrel Software LLC 522 W Riverside Ave, Ste N Spokane, WA 99201, United States Email: dmca@stelq.com

Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) you may be liable for damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, if you knowingly and materially misrepresent that material is infringing.

15.2 Our Response

On receipt of a compliant notification we will expeditiously remove or disable access to the material identified and take reasonable steps to notify the affected account holder, or for STELQ Live record the action. We may forward a complete copy of your notification, including your contact details, to the affected person.

15.3 Counter-Notification

If you believe material of yours was removed by mistake or misidentification, you may file a counter-notification with our Copyright Agent containing what 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3) requires: your signature; identification of the material and where it appeared before removal; a statement under penalty of perjury of your good faith belief that it was removed by mistake; and your name, address, and telephone number, with a statement consenting to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the district of your address (or, if outside the United States, any district in which we may be found) and agreeing to accept service from the original notifier. We may restore the material if the complaining party does not file an action within the statutory period.

15.4 Repeat Infringers

STELQ will terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of users determined to be repeat infringers, and may terminate an account for a single egregious infringement.

16Changes to the Services

STELQ reserves the right, but undertakes no duty, to edit, review, delete, modify, or move any content on or through the Site and Services, without notice. STELQ may at any time add, change, limit, deprecate, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Services — including any endpoint, parameter, response field, model, depth, feature, integration, tool, cadence, price, quota, or rate limit — with or without notice. Where a change materially reduces core functionality you have prepaid for, we will take commercially reasonable steps to give advance notice, and your remedy is the refund of unused Credit in Section 6. Models may be changed or replaced at any time, which may change the character, length, style, cost, or latency of Output. We are not liable for any such change.

17Changes to These Terms

These Terms apply to all users of the Site and the Services.

• STELQ may change these Terms from time to time, and will post the latest version on the Site with an updated "Last Updated" date. We will endeavor to give notice of material changes through the Console or by email before they take effect; reviewing the Terms periodically remains your responsibility.
• Changes are prospective and do not apply retroactively to work already performed or Credit already consumed. The licence granted in Section 9 for a deep dive already published is not affected by any later change.
• Continued use after changes take effect constitutes acceptance. If you do not accept a change, stop using the Services and request a refund of unused Credit.
• Certain features carry additional terms — including the Auto-reload terms — which are incorporated by reference.

18Electronic Communications and Notices

18.1 Consent to Electronic Communications

By creating an account or using the Services, you consent to receive communications from STELQ in electronic form, and agree that everything we provide electronically satisfies any legal requirement that it be in writing. Communications may be sent by email to the address on your account, delivered in the Console, or posted on the Site.

18.2 Transactional and Service Communications

You will receive communications necessary to operate the Services: account and security notices, billing receipts, low-balance alerts, auto-reload receipts if enabled, Watch and research notifications you configured, support correspondence, and notices of changes to these Terms. These are part of the Services and cannot be opted out of while your account is active.

18.3 Marketing Communications

Marketing communications, if we send any, are opt-in and may be unsubscribed at any time using the link in the message or through your notification settings. Opting out of marketing does not affect transactional and service communications. Email updates for STELQ Live stories are governed by Section 11.6.

18.4 Notices to You; Notices to Us

Notices to you are sent to the email address on your account or posted in the Console, and are deemed given when sent or posted; keeping that address current and monitored is your responsibility. Legal notices to STELQ must be sent to legal@stelq.com and, for notices commencing a dispute, also by mail to the postal address in the Contact section.

19Suspension and Termination

19.1 Termination or Suspension by STELQ

STELQ may suspend, restrict, or terminate your access, and revoke any Credential, at any time, with or without notice, for any reason or no reason — including breach of these Terms, suspected fraud, abuse, or multi-accounting, non-payment, a chargeback, a legal requirement, a request from a provider we depend on, or to protect the Services, our providers, or other customers. STELQ shall not be liable for any suspension or termination.

On termination or suspension by us:

• Your right to access and use the Services ceases immediately, and requests made with your Credentials will be rejected.
• Active Watches and programs stop, and pending asynchronous work may be cancelled without refund of work already performed.
• Unused purchased Credit remains refundable to you on request through support, except that Credit we determine in good faith to be attributable to fraud, chargeback abuse, multi-accounting, or material breach may be forfeited; promotional Credit is forfeited in all cases.
• Amounts you owe us, including reversed or charged-back amounts, remain due. You may request an export of your account data within thirty (30) days of termination, subject to our retention policies and our right to withhold data where release would facilitate abuse; after that period we may delete your Workspace content and derived representations.
• Anything already published under Section 9 remains published; termination does not retract that licence.

19.2 Termination by You

You may stop using the Services and close your account at any time from the Console or by contacting support@stelq.com. On closure:

• Your Credentials are revoked and your active Watches and programs stop, ending recurring charges. Closing an account is the only certain way to stop all recurring charges; pausing a Watch, deleting a thread, or disconnecting an agent may not stop everything.
• Unused purchased Credit is refundable to your original payment method on request under Section 6. Purchased Credit does not expire, so you need not close your account to preserve it.
• Your Workspace content and derived representations are deleted under the Privacy Policy, subject to backup and legal retention, and anything already published under Section 9 remains published.

Termination does not affect rights or obligations accrued before termination, and the sections identified in Section 27.9 survive.

20Disclaimer of Warranties

STELQ has no obligation to review any Input, Output, or third-party content retrieved through, submitted to, or published on the Site and Services, and you are responsible for protecting your own systems from harmful content.

WE TRY TO KEEP THE SITE AND SERVICES UP, ACCURATE, AND SAFE, BUT YOU USE THEM AT YOUR OWN RISK. THE SITE, THE SERVICES, ALL OUTPUT, AND ALL INFORMATION FROM OR THROUGH THE SITE AND THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITH ALL FAULTS, AND ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE, ARE DISCLAIMED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, ACCURACY, QUIET ENJOYMENT, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTIES ARISING OUT OF COURSE OF DEALING, USAGE, OR TRADE. THE SITE AND SERVICES MAY CONTAIN BUGS, ERRORS, OUTAGES, AND OTHER LIMITATIONS. STELQ DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICES WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, THAT RESULTS OBTAINED WILL BE ACCURATE OR RELIABLE, OR THAT THE SERVICES WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS. IN NO EVENT WILL STELQ OR ITS MEMBERS, MANAGERS, DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, CONTRACTORS, LICENSORS, OR AGENTS HAVE ANY LIABILITY WHATSOEVER FOR YOUR USE OF ANY INFORMATION, OUTPUT, OR SERVICE, OR OF THE SITE.

WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, STELQ SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ALL LIABILITY RELATED TO:

• AI AND MACHINE-GENERATED OUTPUT: INACCURATE, FABRICATED, INCOMPLETE, BIASED, STALE, OR MISATTRIBUTED RESULTS, CONTENT, ANSWERS, REPORTS, EVENTS, SUMMARIES, OR IMAGES, AND INVALID, DEAD, OR NON-SUPPORTING CITATIONS.
• STELQ LIVE: ANY ERROR, OMISSION, MISSTATEMENT, MISIDENTIFICATION, STALENESS, OR CHARACTERIZATION IN ANY ALGORITHMICALLY GENERATED PAGE, TIMELINE, HEADLINE, OR IMAGE, AND THE CONTINUED PUBLICATION AND INDEXING OF RESOLVED STORIES.
• AUTOMATION AND AGENTS: ACTIONS TAKEN, VOLUME GENERATED, TARGETS SELECTED, OR CREDIT SPENT BY ANY SCRIPT, TOOL, MODEL, OR AUTONOMOUS AGENT USING YOUR CREDENTIALS, AND ANY OVERSHOOT AT A SPEND LIMIT BOUNDARY.
• THIRD PARTIES, AVAILABILITY, AND YOUR DOWNSTREAM USE: THE CONTENT, AVAILABILITY, RIGHTS, OR TERMS OF ANY SOURCE RETRIEVED; THE ACTS, OMISSIONS, OR OUTAGES OF ANY UPSTREAM SEARCH, CRAWL, PROXY, INFERENCE, EMAIL, HOSTING, OR PAYMENT PROVIDER; DOWNTIME, LATENCY, RATE LIMITING, JOB FAILURE, DATA LOSS, AND FAILED OR DUPLICATED WEBHOOKS, EMAILS, AND NOTIFICATIONS; AND ANY CLAIM ARISING FROM WHAT YOU DO WITH RETRIEVED CONTENT OR OUTPUT, INCLUDING ANY COPYRIGHT, DATABASE RIGHT, CONTRACT, PRIVACY, OR PUBLICITY CLAIM BY A SOURCE OWNER OR THIRD PARTY.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where an exclusion is not permitted, it is limited to the minimum extent required by law, and any implied warranty that cannot be disclaimed is limited in duration to thirty (30) days from first use of the Services.

21Limitation of Liability

21.1 Exclusion of Indirect Damages

EXCEPT IN JURISDICTIONS WHERE SUCH PROVISIONS ARE RESTRICTED, STELQ AND ITS MEMBERS, MANAGERS, OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, CONTRACTORS, LICENSORS, AND AGENTS ARE NOT LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES (INCLUDING DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF BUSINESS, PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, GOODWILL, OR ANTICIPATED SAVINGS, REPUTATIONAL HARM, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, OR COST OF SUBSTITUTE SERVICES), WHETHER BASED ON BREACH OF CONTRACT, BREACH OF WARRANTY, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT LIABILITY, PRODUCT LIABILITY, OR ANY OTHER THEORY, AND WHETHER OR NOT STELQ HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. NO ADVICE OR INFORMATION OBTAINED BY YOU FROM US OR THROUGH THE SITE, THE SERVICES, OR ANY OUTPUT SHALL CREATE ANY WARRANTY, REPRESENTATION, OR GUARANTEE NOT EXPRESSLY STATED IN THESE TERMS.

21.2 Maximum Liability Cap

STELQ'S TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY AND ALL CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OF SERVICE, THE SITE, THE SERVICES, ANY OUTPUT, OR STELQ LIVE SHALL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF: (A) THE TOTAL AMOUNTS PAID BY YOU TO STELQ DURING THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM; OR (B) ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS ($100.00). THIS LIMITATION APPLIES IN THE AGGREGATE ACROSS ALL CLAIMS AND ALL CLAIMANTS UNDER A SINGLE ACCOUNT, AND REGARDLESS OF THE FORM OF THE ACTION, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR OTHERWISE. FOR CLARITY, IF YOU HAVE NEVER PAID STELQ ANYTHING — FOR EXAMPLE, IF YOU ARE A READER OF STELQ LIVE OR A USER OF FREE PROMOTIONAL CREDIT — THE CAP IS ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS ($100.00).

21.3 Essential Basis of the Bargain

YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT STELQ HAS SET ITS PRICES AND ENTERED INTO THESE TERMS IN RELIANCE UPON THE LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY AND THE DISCLAIMERS OF WARRANTIES AND DAMAGES SET FORTH HEREIN, THAT THOSE LIMITATIONS ALLOCATE RISK BETWEEN THE PARTIES AND ARE REFLECTED IN THE LOW, USAGE-BASED PRICE OF THE SERVICES, AND THAT THE SAME FORM AN ESSENTIAL BASIS OF THE BARGAIN. THE PARTIES AGREE THAT THE LIMITATIONS, EXCLUSIONS OF LIABILITY, AND DISCLAIMERS SPECIFIED IN THESE TERMS WILL SURVIVE AND APPLY EVEN IF FOUND TO HAVE FAILED OF THEIR ESSENTIAL PURPOSE.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of incidental or consequential damages, or of liability for death, personal injury, or fraud. There, our liability is limited to the greatest extent the law permits, and nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

22Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Ostrel Software LLC, its members, managers, officers, employees, contractors, licensors, subsidiaries, and affiliates, and their respective directors, officers, employees, and agents (the "Indemnified Parties") from all claims, damages, losses, costs, liabilities, judgments, settlements, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or in connection with:

• (i) Your access to or use of the Site and Services, including use with your Credentials by any person, script, tool, or autonomous agent;
• (ii) Any Input you submit and any Output you retrieve, republish, distribute, sell, or otherwise use, including any claim that your downstream use of retrieved content infringed a copyright, database right, trademark, publicity right, or contractual restriction;
• (iii) Any deep dive you commissioned that is published under Section 9, including any claim arising from the brief you supplied or the subject you chose;
• (iv) Any Watch, program, or crawl you configured, including any claim by the operator of a targeted site;
• (v) Your violation of these Terms, or of any law, regulation, or third-party right, and your breach of any representation or warranty herein;
• (vi) Products, applications, agents, or services you provide to your own customers using the Services, including any claim by one of your customers relating to the accuracy or fitness of Output;
• (vii) Any personal data contained in your Input, and any failure by you to give required notices or obtain required consents;
• (viii) Any chargeback, reversal, or unpaid amount attributable to your account, or any other wrongful, unlawful, or unauthorized use of the Services.

We may, at your expense, assume the exclusive defence and control of any matter subject to indemnification by you, and you agree to cooperate. You may not settle any matter in a way that imposes an obligation or admission on an Indemnified Party without our prior written consent. This obligation survives termination.

23Export Controls and Sanctions

You represent, warrant, and covenant that you are not located in, ordinarily resident in, or organized under the laws of any country or territory subject to comprehensive United States sanctions; that you are not identified on any United States government restricted-party list — including the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List, the Denied Persons, Entity, or Unverified Lists, or any comparable United Kingdom, European Union, or United Nations list; and that you are not owned or controlled by, or acting on behalf of, any such person.

You will not access, use, export, re-export, transfer, or make available the Services, any Output, or any technology obtained from us in violation of United States export control or economic sanctions laws — including the Export Administration Regulations (15 C.F.R. Parts 730–774) and the regulations administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (31 C.F.R. Chapter V) — or of any comparable law that applies to you, and you will not use the Services in connection with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, missile technology, or any other prohibited end use. It is your responsibility to determine whether your use is prohibited. We may suspend or terminate access without notice or liability where we determine that continued provision would or might violate these laws.

24Governing Law

These Terms of Service and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or their subject matter (including non-contractual disputes and claims) shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Washington, United States of America, without regard to its conflict of law provisions and excluding the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

25Dispute Resolution and Arbitration

PLEASE READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY. IT AFFECTS YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS, INCLUDING YOUR RIGHT TO FILE A LAWSUIT IN COURT AND TO HAVE A JURY HEAR YOUR CLAIMS.

25.1 Informal Resolution First

Before initiating any arbitration or other proceeding, you agree to first contact STELQ at legal@stelq.com with a written description of the dispute, the relief you seek, and your contact information, and to attempt in good faith to resolve it informally for at least thirty (30) days. We will do the same before initiating a proceeding against you. This period is a condition precedent to arbitration, and the limitations period on any claim is tolled during it.

25.2 Mandatory Arbitration

Except for claims for injunctive or equitable relief and claims regarding intellectual property rights (which may be brought in any court of competent jurisdiction without posting a bond), and except for claims qualifying for the small claims exception below, any dispute arising under or relating to these Terms, the Site, the Services, any Output, or STELQ Live — whether in contract, tort, statute, or otherwise, and whether arising before, during, or after termination — shall be finally settled by binding arbitration under the Comprehensive Arbitration Rules and Procedures of the Judicial Arbitration and Mediation Service, Inc. ("JAMS") then in effect, by one (1) arbitrator appointed under those rules. The arbitrator has exclusive authority to resolve any dispute about the interpretation, applicability, enforceability, or formation of this arbitration agreement, except that a court shall decide any question about the enforceability of the class action waiver below. The award shall be final and binding, shall include a reasoned written decision, and may be entered as a judgment in any court of competent jurisdiction. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section.

25.3 Seat, Venue, and Language

Any arbitration shall be seated in King County, Washington, United States of America, and conducted in English. Where a hearing is required it may be held by videoconference or telephone by agreement or at the arbitrator's direction; and if you are an individual consumer whose claim does not exceed the amount for which JAMS permits a documents-only proceeding, you may elect a documents-only proceeding or a hearing in the county of your residence. For any claim not subject to arbitration, you and STELQ consent to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the state and federal courts in King County, Washington.

25.4 Fees

Filing, administration, and arbitrator fees are governed by the applicable JAMS rules, including any JAMS consumer minimum standards. The prevailing party in any action to enforce these Terms may recover its reasonable costs and attorneys' fees to the extent law and those rules permit.

25.5 Small Claims Exception

Notwithstanding the foregoing, either party may bring an individual action in small claims court for a dispute within the jurisdiction and monetary limits of that court, so long as the action remains in that court and on an individual, non-class basis.

25.6 Time Limit

To the fullest extent permitted by law, any claim arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Services must be filed within one (1) year after the claim arose, or it is permanently barred.

26Class Action and Jury Trial Waiver

WITH RESPECT TO ALL PERSONS AND ENTITIES, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THEY HAVE OBTAINED OR USED THE SITE OR SERVICES FOR PERSONAL, COMMERCIAL, OR OTHER PURPOSES, AND REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THEY HAVE EVER PAID STELQ ANYTHING, ALL CLAIMS MUST BE BROUGHT IN THE PARTIES' INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS ACTION, COLLECTIVE ACTION, CONSOLIDATED ACTION, PRIVATE ATTORNEY GENERAL ACTION, OR OTHER REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING. THIS WAIVER APPLIES TO CLASS ARBITRATION, AND, UNLESS WE AGREE OTHERWISE IN WRITING, THE ARBITRATOR MAY NOT CONSOLIDATE MORE THAN ONE PERSON'S CLAIMS AND MAY NOT PRESIDE OVER ANY FORM OF REPRESENTATIVE OR CLASS PROCEEDING. YOU AGREE THAT, BY ENTERING INTO THESE TERMS OF SERVICE, YOU AND STELQ ARE EACH WAIVING THE RIGHT TO A TRIAL BY JURY AND THE RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION, COLLECTIVE ACTION, PRIVATE ATTORNEY GENERAL ACTION, OR OTHER REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING OF ANY KIND. IF THIS PARAGRAPH IS FOUND UNENFORCEABLE AS TO ANY PARTICULAR CLAIM OR REQUEST FOR RELIEF, THAT CLAIM OR REQUEST SHALL BE SEVERED AND BROUGHT IN A COURT OF COMPETENT JURISDICTION IN KING COUNTY, WASHINGTON, AND ALL OTHER CLAIMS SHALL PROCEED IN ARBITRATION.

27General Provisions

27.1 Severability

If any part of these Terms is held invalid or unenforceable, that part will be construed to reflect the parties' original intent to the greatest extent permitted by law, and the remaining portions remain in full force and effect.

27.2 Waiver

A waiver of any term, condition, or breach in one instance does not waive it or any subsequent breach, and our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.

27.3 Assignment

STELQ may assign or transfer its rights and obligations without condition, including in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets. You may not assign or transfer your rights, obligations, or account without STELQ's prior written consent, and any attempt to do so is void.

27.4 Entire Agreement

These Terms, with the Privacy Policy, the Auto-reload terms (if enabled), and any additional terms incorporated by reference, are the entire agreement between you and STELQ regarding the Site and Services, superseding all prior agreements on the subject, including any prior version of these Terms. Documentation, marketing materials, benchmark publications, and support statements are informational and do not modify these Terms.

27.5 Interpretation and Binding Effect

Headings are for convenience only and do not affect construction. "Including" means "including without limitation." These Terms shall not be construed against the drafter, and they bind and inure to the benefit of the parties, their successors, and permitted assigns.

27.6 Force Majeure

STELQ shall not be liable for any failure or delay in performing its obligations where it results from a cause beyond STELQ's reasonable control, including acts of God, natural disasters, epidemic or pandemic, war, terrorism, riots, embargoes, sanctions, acts of civil or military authorities, labour disputes, fire, floods, power outages, internet, cloud, telecommunications, or datacenter failures, cyberattacks, changes in law, and the failure, degradation, or discontinuation of any third-party service, model, search, proxy, or payment provider on which the Services depend.

27.7 Relationship of the Parties; No Third-Party Beneficiaries

Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, franchise, fiduciary, or employment relationship, and neither party has authority to bind the other. These Terms confer no third-party beneficiary rights, except that the Indemnified Parties may enforce the indemnification section.

27.8 Notices

All notices to STELQ under these Terms — including notices of dispute under Section 25 — shall be sent by email to legal@stelq.com and by mail to:

Ostrel Software LLC 522 W Riverside Ave, Ste N Spokane, WA 99201, United States

All notices to you will be sent to the email address associated with your account or posted in the Console.

27.9 Survival

Sections 2.3, 4.4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 19 through 27 survive termination or expiration of these Terms and of your account, together with any other provision that by its nature should survive. Section 6 survives as to amounts owed, refunds, and chargebacks; Section 5 survives as to conduct during the term.

28Contact Information

If you have any questions about these Terms of Service, or need to reach us for any of the reasons described above, please contact us at:

Ostrel Software LLC (d/b/a STELQ) State of Organization: Washington, United States of America 522 W Riverside Ave, Ste N Spokane, WA 99201, United States

These Terms of Service were last updated on September 1, 2026, and apply to Ostrel Software LLC d/b/a STELQ.