Ornithopter Terms

Ornithopter is a small business with a big goal.

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General Terms

By using these services you agree to our terms.

You are responsible for moderating the content within your group, and managing your group ACLs.

We are not a managed moderation service, nor are we a content/copyediting service. It’s up to you to make your own community.

Users on the free trial month are limited to one server.

Servers are capped at 10 per account by default. You may ask us to remove the limit.

Member of a marginalized group? Get a 12 month fully featured trial (one server), and then 25% off for 2 years. See promotion terms.

You agree that you are authorized to do business on behalf of the organization you work with.

You must be at least 18 years old.

For now we are accepting US customers only.

Service License

Ornithopter’s services are granted to you on a limited basis. In particular these services are:

Billing

Ornithopter’s services are billed either monthly or yearly based on your plan.

We will ask for payment details after your first free month, and will bill you at the end of your second.

We do not prorate based on days, the minimum unit for subscriptions is one month, you are billed on that day each month.

Bills are due within 14 days. Failure to pay can result in suspension of service.

Credits to your account will be added as soon as practical and may appear on the following month’s invoice.

Our Content & Your Feedback

You agree to not impersonate Ornithopter.

You agree that feedback and product ideas are given freely and without restriction.

We depend on your communication to know if things are going okay.

Your Content

Your content is your own. You grant us permission to store and copy user data. An example of copying is backups or site migrations.

If you make content public that’s your choice. You give us permission to serve your content. Due to the nature of the software you should assume all content in bivouac could become public.

The legaleze for that is: you grant Ornithopter a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, sublicensable license to copy and publish content.

Do not post the following content:

Limitation of Warranty

Use of these services does not include warranty for:

We can’t restore what you haven’t chosen to backup. If you disable backups we may not be able to recover your data.

Support

Customers of the hosted version of bivouac gain access to basic email based support for issues including: service problems, bivouac usage tips, planning, billing, privacy, etc.

Support tickets and infrastructure features are available based on the tier you pay for (e.g. Domains, SSO, and API integrations). You may optionally pay a la carte pricing for specific levels of support. See more in Pricing.

Self-hosters may optionally pay money for support, at whatever price they choose. We may not be able to support every configuration of the software.

Ticket SLA:

Service Level Agreement

SLA subject to change (just like the rest of the agreement).

Uptime SLA is per each individual server, not your whole bill.

Typical system maintenance or modifications can cause transient or intermittent errors for up to 5 minutes.

If you spot something, please reach out to us ASAP.

Outage credits eligible in chunks of 15 minutes, if the outage lasts longer than 15 minutes.

You must submit a support ticket for the credit to apply.

This does not include planned downtime.

Liability Cap

Refunds for violation of contract are capped at 1 month of usage.

We will not refund you more than you’ve paid that month.

You must bring up your refund concern within 14 days, or we will consider the matter settled.

If you have a yearly contract and believe the terms were violated, you may be refunded for your unused months.

Acceptable Use

Ornithopter is a small business and can’t handle risky users. Failure to behave can lead to a termination without a refund. Please use your common sense and ask if you aren’t sure.

Expressly Disallowed:

You are responsible for moderating your communities to align with these rules. We will not peer with groups that are problematic.

Our hosted servers should comply with the Mastodon Server Covenant, a code of conduct for most Fediverse servers.

We may choose to override your moderation decisions or remove you for any reason.

Be the kind of person we don’t have to make a rule for.

Good vs Bad Fits

Promotions

Ornithopter offers the following promotions:

First Month

Your first 30 days are free, with the following conditions:

25% - Marginalized Folks

This generally applies to any group that is underrepresented, marginalized, disadvantaged, less privileged, or vulnerable. Originally this considered three base categories (POC, Women, LGBT), but if you’re in a group that is marginalized (e.g., disability, ethnicity, religion etc), hit the checkmark.

If you say you qualify as a member of a marginalized group, you can receive 25% off your first two years a paid customer.

You’re also eligible for 12 months of a free trial, not just 1 month!

No yearly commitment necessary (individual product yearly pricing is cheaper than month-to-month).

Must be used within the first three years to apply (one year free, two years 25% off).

Contact us to apply the discount to your account.

Referrals

Paying users may refer a friend and you both receive 10% off. Valid for their first 24 months paying.

If you refer multiple people a max of two will apply on any bill. Spare credits will be applied later.

Your participation is for your own benefit, not another third party. You cannot pay someone else to get the referral or accept payment for a referral.

Your friend or business contact must be a separate entity you mutually know. You may not refer yourself.

We reserve the right to deny you the referral discount if you attempt to circumvent the spirit of the referral program.

You may not post referral links publicly (like on coupon websites). You may not spam others about Ornithopter or we may cancel your account without a refund.

Your referral links are managed in your account settings.

Privacy

Ornithopter values privacy, and does not sell your data. We are a human-made business that does not use generative AI for our own content.

Due to the nature of the software you should assume all content in bivouac could become public.

Data Collected

We don’t like extra data. We only store your data as long as we need it.

Data shared:

Cybersecurity Monitoring

We collect security and performance data centrally (self-hosted Wazuh).

This data is used by us to respond to attacks.

If we are contacted by (or need to contact) law enforcement about an event we will generally try to notify you.

Due to the nature of how the mirroring works, we might not have details on the threat actor who created the content (Tor Onion v3).

Upstream Providers summarized

Ornithopter Hosting works with the following providers to render your service.

Name Purpose Risk Spiciness Read More
Porkbun DNS Low/None Low Porkbun Privacy Policy
Vultr Hosting server-side key access Medium Vultr Privacy Policy
Backblaze Encrypted backups Low/None Low Backblaze Privacy Policy
Crowdstrike Antivirus Machine Learning High Crowdstrike Privacy Policy
Bunkerweb Web Application Firewall Shared threat intel High BunkerWeb Privacy Policy
Stripe Payments Billing data Medium Stripe Privacy Policy

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