Terms of service

1. Agreement to these terms

By creating an account, starting a trial, buying a plan or using the application, you accept these terms. If you use Leyden & Beam for an organization, such as a school, a publication or a press, you confirm that you may accept them for it, and "you" includes the organization.

You must be at least thirteen years old. If you are under eighteen, a parent or guardian must agree to these terms with you. The service is offered in the United States, and plans are sold in US dollars.

2. Your account and signing in

You sign in with a code sent to your email address; there is no password. Keep your email account secure, since whoever can read your email can sign in as you. Tell us at once if you think someone else has.

An account is one person. A seat on Studio or on a shop is also one person; seats may not be shared. Keep your email address current, since it is how we reach you and how you sign in. You are responsible for what is done under your account, including by the people you invite to your projects, within the roles you give them.

3. Subscriptions, trials and billing

Prices. The plans and their prices are on our Pricing page. What you will pay, and how often, is shown on Stripe's checkout page before you are charged. Payments are processed by Stripe; your card is entered with Stripe and never reaches us. Sales tax is added where it applies.

Trials. Most plans begin with a fourteen-day trial. You give a card when it starts, and nothing is charged until the trial ends. Cancel before then and you are never charged. An account has one full trial. The Semester Pass and the Secure Works plans have no trial.

Renewal. A monthly or yearly plan renews automatically at the end of each period, at the price then in effect, until you cancel. We will email you at least thirty days before a price rise reaches you, and you may cancel before it does. The Semester Pass is paid once, lasts four months and does not renew.

Seats. Studio is sold by the seat, three or more, one of them yours. Client seats on a shop are bought by the shop. You pay for the seats you set, whether or not each is in use.

Referral codes. A code from an editor you worked with takes its stated discount off the first year of an Author plan, once, and does not combine with another discount.

Failed payments. If a payment fails, everything keeps working for fourteen days while Stripe tries again and you update your card. After that, the account becomes read-only until the plan is paid or replaced.

4. Student plans and eligibility

Student plans are for people enrolled at a school, college or university. An address at a .edu domain is verified when you first sign in. Any other school address can be reviewed: name your school on the Plans page and we will decide. Student plans are the full product, not a lesser one, with less file storage. If we learn that an account on a student plan is not a student's, we may move it to another plan at the next renewal, after telling you.

Speech & Debate comes with the Student + Speech & Debate plan, and with Scholar and the professional plans.

5. Campus licenses

A school may buy a campus license under a separate written agreement, which governs if it conflicts with these terms. Under a license, accounts at the school's email domains, up to the seats it bought, have the full product while the license runs and their own plan does not. Seats go in the order each account first signs in during the term, and a seat once given is kept for the term. The school sees counts only: seats in use, accounts waiting for a seat, instructors, and sign-ins by month. It never sees anyone's projects.

Instructor accounts are free. Ask for one, and we will set it up once we have confirmed that you teach. An instructor sees what our privacy policy describes and nothing more. Students' work is theirs: no instructor, school or license gives anyone access to a student's projects or record of work unless the student hands it over.

6. Your content

It is yours. You keep every right in what you write and upload. You give us only the permission we need to run the service for you: to store your work, to keep it in step between your devices, to show it to the people you choose, to deliver it where you send it, and to back it up. That permission ends when you delete the work or your account, except that backups keep it until they age out, as our privacy policy describes.

What you upload. You confirm you have the right to upload and share what you put in Leyden & Beam. Files are checked as they arrive; we may refuse a file that is not what it says it is.

Projects you share. People you invite see the project as their role allows: readers read, editors comment and suggest, co-authors write. A share link shows what you chose to whoever has its address; deleting the link ends that.

Projects that belong to a shop. Projects made in an editor's or a publication's shop belong to the shop, not to the person who wrote them. If you leave a shop, its projects stay with it. If the shop's owner deletes their account, the shop's projects pass first to its managing editor.

Secure Works. A sealed project can be read only with its keys, held on its members' devices, in the printed recovery key, and by the escrow you chose. We cannot read it, and we cannot recover it for you. Keep the recovery key and the escrow as the application directs.

7. Our no-AI commitment

There is no artificial intelligence in Leyden & Beam. This is a term of this agreement, not a marketing line:

• the application does not generate, rewrite, suggest, summarize or transcribe your writing;
• nothing you write is sent to a language model or any other model;
• nothing you write is used to train a model, by us or by anyone we allow;
• nothing you write is sold or licensed to anyone.

The suggestions in the application are made by the people you invite. If we ever broke this commitment, you could end your plan at once and we would refund what remains of it.

8. Acceptable use

You may not use Leyden & Beam to:

• break the law, or infringe anyone's copyright, privacy or other rights;
• harass, threaten, deceive or impersonate anyone, including through comments, invitations or share links;
• present a record of work as showing something it does not, or alter one to mislead an instructor, an editor or anyone else;
• try to reach another person's account or projects, probe or test the service's security without our written permission, or work around its limits;
• overload the service, or read it by automated means other than the application itself;
• resell the service, or share an account or a seat.

We may suspend an account that is being used this way, or that threatens the service or other people. We will tell you why as soon as we reasonably can, and restore access when the problem is resolved.

9. Availability and changes to the service

We work to keep the service available, and the application is built to keep working on your device when the server cannot be reached. We do not promise uninterrupted service, and give notice of planned maintenance where we reasonably can.

We improve and change the service. If we remove a feature your plan includes, or change the service in a way that materially disadvantages you, we will email you at least thirty days ahead, and you may cancel and receive a refund of the unused part of any period you paid for in advance.

10. Cancellation and refunds

Canceling. You can cancel at any time from Your account, which opens Stripe's billing page. Canceling stops the next renewal; the plan runs to the end of the period you paid for.

Refunds. We do not refund partial periods, except where the law requires it, where these terms say so, or where we failed to provide the service. If a charge was a mistake, write to us and we will put it right.

When a plan ends. Everything keeps working for fourteen days. After that the account reads and exports, and does not write; your work stays, and the full archive exports everything at any time. The contents of attachments are deleted 120 days after the plan ends, with emails at thirty days and seven days before. Choosing a plan again restores writing.

Closing your account. You can delete your account from Your account. It is erased thirty days later, and you can take the request back until then. Our privacy policy says what is erased and what is kept.

If we end the service. If we ever stop offering Leyden & Beam, we will give at least sixty days' notice by email, refund the unused part of any period paid in advance, and keep the full archive export working until the end.

11. Disclaimers

Leyden & Beam is a tool for your writing. It does not guarantee a grade, an acceptance, a publication or a verdict. Citations are formatted to the style you choose, and you should check them against your instructor's or publisher's requirements. A record of work shows how a piece was built; whether a school or anyone else accepts it is theirs to decide. The legal review in The Press & Journalists' tools records your lawyer's review; it is not legal advice, and we are not your lawyers.

To the extent the law allows, the service is provided as it is and as available, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. Keep your own copies of work that matters to you: the full archive export and automatic backups to a folder exist for that.

12. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential losses, or for lost profits, revenue or data. Our total liability arising from these terms or the service, in any twelve months, is limited to the greater of what you paid us in those twelve months and fifty US dollars.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the United States, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Disputes will be heard in the state or federal courts located in Virginia, and you and we agree to their jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, this does not take away any protection the law of the state where you live gives you and that cannot be waived.

Before bringing a claim, please write to us: most problems are put right by a message.

14. Changes to these terms

When these terms change, the date at the top changes with them. If a change affects you materially, we will email account holders at least thirty days before it takes effect; if you do not accept it, you may cancel before then and receive a refund of the unused part of any period paid in advance. Using the service after a change takes effect means you accept it.

15. Contact us

Leyden & Beam
contact@leydenbeam.com