Terms of Service

These Terms are a contract between you and Shagufta Shaheen ("we", "us"). You accept them when you create an account — we record which version you accepted and when. If you do not accept them, do not create an account.

1. The service

litscout retrieves and ranks scholarly artifacts against a research objective inferred from what you tell us. Results are pointers to third-party literature, provided for information. They may be incomplete, out of date, or wrong. Verify anything you rely on against the primary source. Nothing here is professional, medical, legal or financial advice.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract. If the age of majority where you live is higher than 18, you must have reached it. If you are using the service for an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it. We may suspend or close an account if we learn the holder does not meet this requirement.

3. Your account

• Keep your credentials secure; you are responsible for activity under your account.
• One person per account. Do not share logins.
• Tell us promptly at support@litscout.app if you believe your account has been compromised.

4. Acceptable use

Your use of litscout is governed by our Usage Policy, which forms part of these Terms. Breaching it breaches these Terms.

In summary, and without narrowing that document, you agree not to:

• abuse, overload, scrape, or attempt to disrupt the service;
• circumvent rate limits, quotas, security or access controls, or evade a suspension by opening another account;
• use the service unlawfully, or to infringe anyone's rights;
• upload malware, or content you have no right to upload;
• submit other people's personal data — including patient or client data — in queries or attachments;
• resell or redistribute the service, or bulk-extract its output as a substitute for it or to train a competing system;
• rely on results as the sole basis for a decision about a person's health, legal position, finances, employment or housing;
• present generated results as authoritative without verification.

5. Plans, pricing and automatic renewal

This is a recurring subscription. Pro costs US$6.00 per month, charged to your payment method on the day you subscribe and on the same day each month afterwards, automatically, until you cancel. There is no minimum term. You can cancel at any time from Settings → Manage billing; cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and you keep Pro access until then. You will receive a receipt for every charge.

• Who you are buying from. Subscriptions are sold and billed by Dodo Payments as merchant of record. Dodo is the seller for the transaction: it takes your payment, issues your invoice and receipt, and is responsible for any tax on the sale. Shagufta Shaheen provides the service itself under these Terms. Card details go to Dodo directly — we never receive or store a card number.
• What you get. The Free plan includes 3 searches per day and 40 per month. Pro includes 500 searches per month. These are the limits the software enforces; your remaining allowance is always visible in Settings.
• Taxes. Prices are shown in US dollars. Because Dodo is the merchant of record, it determines, collects and remits any GST, VAT or sales tax due in your location. The tax, if any, is shown before you confirm.
• Price changes. We will give you at least 30 days' notice before any price increase takes effect, sent to the email address on your account. The new price applies from your next renewal after the notice period. If you do not want it, cancel before then.
• Failed payments. If a charge fails, Dodo will retry it and contact you. If it keeps failing we may downgrade you to Free; your data is not deleted.

6. Refunds and your right to cancel

• Cancelling. You can cancel at any time. Cancellation stops the next renewal — you keep Pro until the end of the period you have already paid for. We do not refund or pro-rate the current period, and unused searches do not carry over.
• EU/UK consumers: 14-day withdrawal right. You have 14 days from subscribing to withdraw without giving a reason. At checkout you ask us to make the service available immediately and acknowledge that you lose this right once it has been supplied to you. If you withdraw before then, we deduct a proportionate amount for the part already supplied. To withdraw, email legal@litscout.app, use the contact form, or send us the form in Appendix 1 — you may use that form, but you do not have to.
• Charged in error. If you were billed after cancelling, or billed twice, write to us and we will arrange the refund with Dodo Payments.
• How refunds reach you. Because Dodo Payments is the merchant of record, refunds are issued by Dodo to the payment method you used. We decide whether a refund is due under this section; Dodo pays it.

7. Changes to the service

We will add, change and remove features as the product develops, and we may change the models and sources behind it. We do not promise that any particular feature will stay available.

If we reduce the limits stated for a paid plan in section 5, or remove a feature you are paying for, we will tell you at least 30 days beforehand and you may cancel and receive a refund of any prepaid period you have not used.

8. Termination and suspension

• By you. Cancel your subscription or delete your account at any time from Settings. Deleting your account cancels any subscription first, then erases your data.
• By us, for cause. We may suspend or terminate your account immediately if you materially breach section 4 or the Usage Policy, if we are required to by law, or if your use threatens the security or availability of the service. We will tell you what you did and when, unless we are prohibited from telling you.
• If you think we got it wrong. Reply to the notice or write to support@litscout.app and a person will review the decision. Tell us anything we may have missed. If we were wrong we will restore your account and, if you were paying, credit the time you lost.
• By us, otherwise. We may discontinue the service or your account on 30 days' notice, and will refund any prepaid period you do not receive.
• Dormant free accounts. If a free account is not signed in to for two years we may close it. We will email you at least 30 days beforehand, with a link to export your data, and again shortly before we close it. Paid accounts are never closed for inactivity.
• After termination. Export your data first — it is deleted according to the Privacy Policy's retention schedule. Sections 11 through 17 survive.

9. Intellectual property

• Scholarly metadata and paper content belong to their sources and rights-holders. We surface it; we do not own it, and your use of it is subject to the rights-holder's terms.
• The litscout software, interface, ranking system and documentation are ours.
• You keep ownership of the queries, notes and files you submit. You grant us a licence to process them solely to operate the service for you, for as long as we hold them. That licence does not let us train models on your content — see the Privacy Policy, section 7.
• You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the service, except where that restriction is prohibited by law, and you may not use its output — including ranked results, relevance scores and explanations — to build, train or evaluate a competing retrieval or ranking system.

10. Third-party content and links

Results link to material published by other people — journals, repositories, publishers, and for deep research, pages found on the open web. We do not control that material, we do not endorse it by returning it, and we make no representation about its accuracy, legality or availability. Your use of it is at your own risk and is governed by whatever terms the publisher or site imposes, including any paywall or licence.

If a result links to something that should not be there, tell us at support@litscout.app and we will look at it.

11. Copyright complaints

If you believe material accessible through the service infringes your copyright, send a notice to legal@litscout.app including: your contact details; identification of the work; identification of the material and where it is; a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised; a statement that the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorised to act; and your signature. We remove or disable access to material that is the subject of a valid notice, and terminate repeat infringers. You may submit a counter-notice with the equivalent information.

12. No warranty

The service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, completeness and non-infringement. We do not warrant that results are complete, correct, or that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free. We offer no service-level commitment on any plan.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

13. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill, arising from your use of the service. Our total aggregate liability for all claims in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in that period and US$50.

14. Indemnity

If you are using the service other than as a consumer, you will indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your breach of section 4, your infringement of a third party's rights, or personal data you submitted that you had no right to submit.

15. Export control and sanctions

You confirm you are not located in, and not ordinarily resident in, a country subject to comprehensive trade sanctions, and that you are not on any restricted party list. You will not use the service in breach of export control or sanctions law.

16. Changes to these Terms

We may change these Terms. For a material change we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email and ask you to accept the new version when you next sign in — for a paid recurring service, continued use is not a fair way to establish agreement. If you do not accept, you may cancel and we will refund any prepaid period you do not receive. Non-material changes take effect when we post them, and the version number above will change.

17. General

• Governing law. the laws of India. If you are a consumer, you keep the protection of the mandatory law of your country of residence, and nothing here deprives you of it.
• Supplemental terms. Some features may carry their own additional terms, shown to you before you use them. Where those conflict with these Terms, they govern for that feature only.
• Our name and logo. You may say you use litscout. You may not use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse, sponsor or are affiliated with you or your work, without asking us first.
• Payment processing. Subscriptions are sold and processed by Dodo Payments as merchant of record (section 5). We are not liable for errors caused by Dodo or by your bank or card issuer, though we will help you resolve them.
• Jurisdiction. the courts at Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India. Consumers may also bring proceedings in the courts of their own country of residence.
• Dispute resolution. Please write to us first at legal@litscout.app — most things are resolved that way.
• Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable, or struck; the rest stands.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a provision once does not waive it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to a successor in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, on notice to you.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control, for as long as they last.
• Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the service, and replace anything said before.

18. Contact

Shagufta Shaheen, Mango, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand 831012, India
legal@litscout.app

Appendix 1 — Model withdrawal form

Complete and return this form only if you wish to withdraw from your subscription under section 6. You do not have to use it — an email saying you withdraw is equally valid.