Effective date: 2026-09-05 · Last updated: 2026-10-13

1. What these Terms cover

Tovu is a free, open-source project. In these Terms, “Tovu”, “we”, “us” and “our” mean the Tovu Team, who run tovu.dev and publish the Software, and any organisation that later takes over running it. Nothing is sold here today, and there are no ads.

These Terms cover two distinct things:

(a) The Site — the website at tovu.dev: reading it, its forms, its chat, and any account you hold on it. Sections 2–3.

(b) The Software — the Tovu application you download and install on infrastructure you control. Sections 4–8.

Sections 9 onward apply to both. There is no hosted or paid Tovu service today. If we later offer one, it will have its own terms and, where needed, a data processing agreement, and those will govern it.

Contact for anything in these Terms, including legal notices and security reports: contact form. General, non-private questions can also go to github.com/AINSEP/Tovu/issues.

2. Accepting these Terms, and changes

By using the Site or the Software you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use them.

We may change these Terms and will update the date at the top when we do. For a material change we will post a notice on this page at least 14 days before it takes effect. A change needed sooner for legal or security reasons may take effect at once. Changes apply going forward, not to disputes that arose before them. Continuing to use the Site or the Software after a change takes effect means you accept it.

Changes here do not retroactively change the licence under which you already obtained a copy of the Software. Whatever licence applied to the version you downloaded continues to apply to that copy.

3. Using the Site

3.1 Who may use it

You must be old enough to form a binding contract where you live, and at least 16 or the age of digital consent in your country if lower. There is no age gate, so we rely on you.

3.2 Acceptable use

Do not:

• Break the law, or use the Site to help someone else break it.
• Attempt unauthorized access to the Site, its admin interface, its database, its infrastructure, or anyone else's account.
• Probe, scan, or test the Site's security without asking first — see 3.4.
• Overwhelm it: no denial-of-service, no flooding, no scraping that degrades service, no circumventing rate limits.
• Submit anything unlawful, defamatory, harassing, infringing, or malicious, through a form or the chat.
• Submit anyone else's personal data without a lawful basis.
• Impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your affiliation.
• Use automated means to create accounts, submit content, or evade spam controls.
• Strip or alter any copyright, trademark, or attribution notice.

We may remove content, block access, or restrict use if we reasonably believe you have breached this section.

3.3 What you submit

You keep ownership of what you submit. You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store and use it for the purpose you submitted it for — answering you, publishing an approved comment, operating the Site. You confirm you have the right to submit it.

We are not obliged to publish, store, or retain anything you submit, and we may remove it. Approving a comment is not endorsement.

The site chat sends what you type to a third-party AI provider. Section 3.2 of the Privacy Policy says which one and what that means; read it before typing anything sensitive.

Chat answers are generated by AI. They can be wrong, incomplete, or out of date, and they are not legal, financial, security, or other professional advice. Check anything that matters before you rely on it.

How we handle personal data in what you submit is set out in our Privacy Policy, which is part of these Terms by reference.

3.4 Security research

We welcome good-faith security research. Report what you find using the contact form before disclosing publicly, give us a reasonable opportunity to fix it, do not access or modify anyone else's data, and do not degrade the service. We will not pursue legal action against research conducted on those terms. There is no paid bug bounty.

3.5 The Site's content

Text, documentation, design, and layout published on the Site belong to us or our licensors. You may read it, link to it, quote it with attribution, and save a copy for your own reference. You may not republish it wholesale, sell it, or present it as your own.

This is separate from, and narrower than, the licence to the Software in section 4. Do not assume the site copy and design are licensed the way the code is.

3.6 We may change or discontinue the Site

We may change, suspend, or discontinue the Site or any part of it at any time, without liability. It is a free website, not a service you have paid for. There are no ads on it today. If we later add features, including advertising, the Privacy Policy will change first and says what we will do. The Site may link elsewhere; we do not control or endorse those sites.

4. The Software: licence

4.1 Apache-2.0

The Software is made available under the Apache License, Version 2.0. That licence, not this document, determines what you may do with the Software. The authoritative text is the LICENSE file at the root of the repository; what follows describes it and does not replace it.

Apache-2.0 grants you, at no charge, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright licence to reproduce, modify, display, sublicense and distribute the Software and derivative works of it (§2), and an equivalent patent licence from each contributor covering the claims that contributor necessarily infringes through its own contribution (§3).

You may run it commercially, modify it, redistribute it, and keep your modifications private. Apache-2.0 is not copyleft.

Those grants are conditional (§4). When you redistribute the Software or a derivative work you must give recipients a copy of the licence, retain the copyright, patent, trademark and attribution notices you received, carry forward the NOTICE file, and mark any files you changed as changed.

Patent-litigation termination. Under §3, if you institute patent litigation alleging the Software or a contribution within it infringes a patent, the patent licences granted to you for that work terminate as of the date you file.

Where these Terms and Apache-2.0 conflict as to the Software, Apache-2.0 prevails. Sections 11 and 13 below are consistent with Apache-2.0 §7 and §8 and are not intended to narrow them; they are written more broadly only because they also cover the Site, which Apache-2.0 does not.

4.2 Trademarks are not included

Apache-2.0 §6 grants no rights in the name or logo of a project, and neither do these Terms. You may say truthfully that your product is built on Tovu or is compatible with Tovu. You may not name your product in a way that suggests we published, endorsed, or support it, use the Tovu logo as your own, or present a modified version as the official Tovu.

4.3 Third-party components

The Software includes and depends on third-party open-source components, each under its own licence. Vendored ones are itemised in the NOTICE file; installed dependencies carry their licences in their own packages. Apache-2.0 does not extend to them, and complying with them if you redistribute is your responsibility.

4.4 Contributions

Unless you state otherwise when you submit it, a contribution you make to the Software is licensed under Apache-2.0, as section 5 of that licence provides. You confirm you have the right to contribute it.

5. Running it yourself

You run it. You are responsible for it. When you install Tovu on your own infrastructure you are operating a website, and everything about it is yours: the server, the database, the content, the configuration, the security, the backups, and legal compliance.

Specifically:

• You are the data controller for your visitors' personal data. It goes into your database and is never sent to us. We are not your processor and there is nothing for us to sign a data processing agreement about. You need your own privacy policy, your own lawful bases, and your own process for data subject requests.
• Configure it securely. In particular: set a real secret for COMMENTS_IP_SALT, or your commenters' IP hashes are trivially reversible; check what your theme actually loads in a browser, because a manifest that declares web fonts can send your visitors' IPs to a third party; decide whether to honor Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control; and if you enable the visitor site chat, know that whatever your visitors type goes to the model provider you configured, on your key and at your cost, and must be disclosed in your own privacy policy.
• Secure your server, database, credentials, certificates, and admin accounts.
• Backups. We do not have a copy of your site. If you lose it, it is lost.
• Updates. We do not update your install. Running an outdated version is your decision and your risk.
• Everything you publish, and everything your users publish through your install.
• The lawfulness of what you do with it — marketing, consumer, accessibility, and tax law included.

We cannot monitor, control, take down, or recover your install, and we cannot see your data.

5.1 The admin AI assistant uses the provider you choose

The admin assistant uses the AI provider you choose: your own API key with Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, or any compatible endpoint; a local model through Ollama; or a coding-agent CLI already on your machine, such as Claude Code or Codex. The request goes from your install directly to that provider; it does not pass through anything we operate. We do not supply, hold, or see your key, and we do not pay for your usage. Your relationship with that provider is governed by their terms, including whatever they do with what you send. Do not send it anything you are not permitted to disclose to a third party.

AI output can be wrong, can resemble output given to others, and can infringe someone else's rights. The assistant can also take actions in your site, such as editing or publishing content, when you let it. Check what it does before you publish it or act on it. You are responsible for what you publish and for your provider costs. Section 11.1 applies.

5.2 Plugins, themes, and extensions

Anything you install runs with the privileges of your site. A plugin or theme from a third party is that party's software under that party's terms, is not covered by these Terms, and is not something we warrant. Evaluate what you install.

5.3 Third-party services

The Site and the Software rely on services we do not control: AI providers, GitHub (downloads and desktop update checks), the npm registry, and any hosting, source-control, or tool service you connect. Each is governed by its own terms. We are not responsible for their availability, what they do with data you send them, their charges, or their output.

6. Pre-release software

Tovu is pre-1.0 and under active development. Interfaces, data formats, schemas, configuration, plugin APIs, and behavior will change, sometimes incompatibly. Features may be added, altered, or removed.

Some features in the codebase are incomplete, disabled, or explicitly non-functional reference implementations. Do not assume a feature works because you can see it. By way of example: the payment provider shipped with the Software is a non-functional reference implementation with no gateway behind it and cannot process a real payment.

Test upgrades before applying them to a site you care about, and keep backups.

7. No support obligation

We are not obliged to provide support, maintenance, updates, bug fixes, or security patches, and we guarantee no response time. Any help we give is a courtesy and creates no ongoing obligation.

8. Payments

We sell nothing today. There are no paid plans, no subscriptions, and no purchases, and the Software's payment machinery is a non-functional reference implementation (section 6). If we introduce paid or hosted services we will publish separate terms before taking any payment.

If you enable payments in your own install, you contract directly with your payment processor, you are the merchant of record, and PCI-DSS and consumer law obligations are yours. Note that the Software stores processor notifications verbatim as received; if yours includes customer names or emails, that personal data sits in your database and you must account for it.

9. Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains what the Site collects and is incorporated into these Terms. Two things worth repeating:

• The site chat sends what you type to a third-party AI provider — today, Google's Gemini API. Do not type anything into it you would not send to a third party.
• Member records in the Software cannot be permanently deleted — they can be disabled and their identifying fields overwritten, which is what we do on an erasure request. If you self-host and take on members, this applies to your install too.

10. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Site at any time, and stop using the Software by uninstalling it.

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Site if you breach these Terms, if we are required to by law, or if we discontinue the Site.

Termination does not reach into your install. We cannot and will not disable, revoke, or interfere with a copy of the Software you already hold. Your rights in that copy come from Apache-2.0 and end only as that licence says.

Sections 3.3, 4, 11, 12, 13 and 15 survive termination.

11. Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

THE SITE AND THE SOFTWARE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.

We disclaim all implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, quiet enjoyment, and accuracy. We do not warrant that the Site or the Software will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free; that defects will be corrected; that the Software is free of vulnerabilities; that it is fit for your purpose or will comply with any law that applies to you; or that it will meet your requirements. No advice obtained from us creates any warranty not stated here.

Apache-2.0 §7 says the same for the Software, and places on you the responsibility for determining whether to use or redistribute it. This section is consistent with that.

Consumer rights. Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions. If you are a consumer you may have statutory rights that cannot be excluded — in the UK under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, in the EU under national consumer law, and in various US states. Nothing here limits them.

11.1 AI models, agents, and tools

Tovu lets you connect AI: models and providers you choose (including through your own API key), coding-agent CLIs, MCP tools, and other agents. You choose the AI, you set what it is allowed to do, and you are responsible for what you let it do. AI output is not guaranteed to be accurate, complete, safe, or original; it can be wrong or made up. Review what it does before you rely on it, publish it, or run it. Give it only the access it needs, and keep your own backups.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not responsible or liable for damage, loss, or other problems caused by an AI model, agent, or tool, whether it is one we ship, a third party’s, or one you connect, or caused by acting on its output. That includes wrong or unwanted edits; deleted, overwritten, or published content; data loss; leaked or exposed secrets, keys, or personal data; security incidents; bad or harmful code; inaccurate or made-up output; provider charges; and actions it takes on services you connect it to. To the same extent, we are not responsible or liable for downtime, data loss, data leaks or exposure, or security incidents from any other cause.

AI providers, CLIs, and MCP servers you connect are not ours. They run under their own terms (section 5.3), and we are not responsible for how they handle your data.

This section does not exclude liability for our fraud, willful injury to a person or property, gross negligence, or violation of law, or anything else the law does not let us exclude (see section 13).

12. Indemnity

You will indemnify and hold us harmless from any claim, loss, liability, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your use of the Site or the Software, your operation of a self-hosted install (including any claim by your own visitors about their personal data), content you submit or publish, your breach of these Terms or of any law, or your infringement of anyone's intellectual property or privacy rights.

We will tell you promptly about any claim we want indemnified, and you may control the defense provided you do not settle in a way that admits fault on our behalf or imposes an obligation on us without our written consent.

If you are a consumer rather than a business, an indemnity of this breadth may be unenforceable where you live.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, business, goodwill, anticipated savings, data or content — in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, and whether or not we were told such loss was possible.

In particular, we are not liable for data loss. You are responsible for your own backups.

Apache-2.0 §8 already excludes every contributor's liability for damages arising out of the licence or out of the use or inability to use the Software, expressly naming loss of goodwill, work stoppage, and computer failure. Nothing here increases that.

Cap. To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability for all claims combined relating to the Site, the Software, or these Terms is limited to US$10. The exclusions below for liability that cannot lawfully be limited still apply.

The Software and the Site are provided free of charge. These limits, with the disclaimers in section 11, reflect that and are a fundamental part of the basis on which we make the Software available.

What we do not exclude. Nothing here excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for willful injury to a person or property, for gross negligence, for violation of law, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded (for example under California Civil Code section 1668). If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

14. Export control and sanctions

You may not use, export, or re-export the Software in violation of any export control or sanctions law that applies to you. You confirm you are not located in, and are not a national or resident of, a country subject to a comprehensive embargo under any such law, and that you are not on any restricted-party or denied-persons list.

15. General

Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and Apache-2.0 are the whole agreement between us on their subject matter.

Severability. An unenforceable provision is modified to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable, or severed. The rest stands.

No waiver. Not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.

Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them, for example to a company we form to run Tovu, or as part of a merger or sale.

No agency. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, employment, or agency relationship.

Third parties. Nobody other than you and us may enforce these Terms.

Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something outside our reasonable control.

Notices. We give you notice by posting on the Site, or by email if we hold an address for you. Give us notice using the contact form.

Talk to us first. Before starting any formal claim, tell us about the problem and give us 30 days to try to resolve it.

Governing law and venue. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any claim goes to the state or federal courts in Los Angeles County, California, and both of us consent to their jurisdiction. Either of us may use small-claims court instead where it qualifies.

Individual claims only. To the extent the law allows, claims may be brought only individually, not as a plaintiff or class member in a class, collective, or representative action.

Time limit. To the extent the law allows, any claim must be brought within one year after the person bringing it knew, or should have known, about it.

If you are a consumer, your mandatory local law and your right to bring proceedings in your local courts are unaffected.

Language. These Terms are written in English. If translated and the versions differ, the English governs. Headings are for convenience.

About AI and reporting content

Tovu includes AI assistants. AI output can be wrong, misleading, harmful, or infringing. Review it before you publish it or rely on it. What you send to an AI provider is handled under that provider's terms and privacy policy. See the Privacy Policy for details.

Report AI content using the site's contact form. Include where you saw it and what happened, and avoid including secrets or unnecessary personal information.