# Arcaeon Witness — Terms of Service Not legal advice — general terms for a paid service, plainly stated. Effective date: 19 August 2026 · Applies to: `https://witness.arcaeon.io` (the "Witness"), operated by Arcaeon, a sole proprietorship based in San Bernardino County, California ("Arcaeon," "we," "us"). If you want the mechanism explained, that's [/witness-practices](/witness-practices). This document is where those promises become terms. ## 1. Service description The Witness accepts a `(namespace, rows, chain)` triple — a hash-chain head from your own `arcaeon-ledger`-format log — commits it as a JSON file to a public GitHub repository (`dan8433-user/arcaeon-witness-pins`), and hands back the resulting commit as your receipt. Current pricing lives at `/.well-known/offers.json`, not here — that file is the one source of truth so price can't drift out of sync between two documents. As of this writing there's a free tier and a paid "Witnessed" tier billed through Stripe Checkout. **[PENDING-DANIEL]** The two paid Apify actors (Verified Snapshot, Public-Safety Hiring Alerts) are not yet covered by these terms. Apify's own marketplace seller terms may already govern actor purchases end-to-end — this needs a read of Apify's terms before deciding whether a separate Arcaeon clause here would be redundant or actively conflicting. Until that's resolved, actor purchases are governed by Apify's terms alone, not this document. ## 2. What the Witness does and does not do **What you are buying.** The Witness records the hash-chain head you send us in a public, timestamped, append-only store, and will tell anyone who asks whether a log matching that head has been silently rewritten since we saw it. That is the entire service. It is a mechanism, and every part of it is independently checkable — the pins are public, the code paths are documented, and we publish a standing challenge to break it. **What a receipt proves.** A Witness receipt is evidence that specific content existed in a specific state at a specific point in our observation sequence. It is tamper-EVIDENT, not tamper-proof: a rewrite between two pins is invisible by construction, and the gap between pins — not the existence of a witness — is the number that protects you. **What a receipt is not.** A receipt is not a judgment. It does not prove content is true, lawful, authorized, or complete; it does not prove who authored it; it does not prove anything about events we never observed. If you present a Witness receipt in a dispute, you are presenting **evidence, not adjudication** — a fact about record integrity for a human or court to weigh, never a verdict from us. We are the instrument, not the referee, and we decline the referee's chair in advance, in writing, here. **Your responsibility.** Decisions you or third parties make in reliance on a receipt are yours. We warrant the honest operation of the mechanism as described in our published practices; we do not warrant the outcomes of anything you build on it. If the mechanism itself fails to operate as described, our published practices page states what we owe you and how we disclose incidents — we hold ourselves to it publicly, which you can verify, because that is the whole point of us. ## 3. Payment, billing, and cancellation The Witnessed plan is $9/month, billed through Stripe Checkout, and renews automatically each month until cancelled. There's no self-serve cancel button yet — email hello@arcaeon.io and we'll cancel it, effective at the end of the current billing period. No refunds, beyond whatever your jurisdiction requires us to honor. This is a low-cost monthly plan: cancel any time and the charges stop there. Prepaid credit packs are LIVE and purchasable, and everything in this document applies to them. Corrected 19 August 2026: an earlier version of this sentence said they were not yet purchasable, which stopped being true when the payment links went live and left buyers of a real product outside the terms covering it. Specifically: - **A pack is a prepaid balance, not a subscription.** One payment buys a block of pins. There is no recurring charge and nothing to cancel. - **Credits do not expire.** If we ever intend to change that, it applies only to packs bought after the change, never retroactively to a balance already paid for. - **Refunds.** Unused credits are refundable within 30 days of purchase, pro rata on the unused portion, for any reason, by asking. We would rather return the money than argue about a five dollar pack. - **If we cannot deliver, you get the money back.** If fulfilment fails and we cannot mint your credits, that is a full refund, not a support ticket. - **Rate shaping is a real limit, not fine print.** Pins are shaped above roughly 100 an hour today. A large pack is a price, not a promise about throughput, and if that limit makes a pack useless to you the refund term above applies. - **Verification is never metered.** Checking a record is free forever, for anyone, with no account. Nothing you buy or fail to buy changes what verification does. ## 4. Warranty disclaimer > THE WITNESS AND ALL ARCAEON SOFTWARE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT > WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF > MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. This mirrors the warranty language already shipped with every free `arcaeon-*` PyPI package. The paid, hosted Witness carries the same disclaimer, not a weaker one — money changing hands is exactly when a customer is most likely to assume an implicit warranty exists, and none is made here. ## 5. Limitation of liability > TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, ARCAEON'S TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ANY CLAIM ARISING FROM > OR RELATING TO THE WITNESS WILL NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNT YOU PAID ARCAEON IN THE TWELVE (12) > MONTHS PRECEDING THE CLAIM. ARCAEON IS NOT LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR > PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS OR LOST DATA, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF > SUCH DAMAGES. Read this together with §2: our exposure here is deliberately bounded by never claiming the Witness does more than it does. Relying on a pin for exactly what §2 says it's good for is a stronger position, in any dispute, than relying on it for something §2 already told you it doesn't prove. ## 6. Dispute resolution Something's wrong? Email hello@arcaeon.io first — checked daily, per [/witness-practices](/witness-practices) §8. Give us 30 days to fix it before anything formal. If that doesn't resolve it: these terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute not resolved informally, or that isn't brought in small-claims court, will be brought in the state or federal courts located in San Bernardino County, California. ## 7. Changes to these terms We may update these terms. Changes are tracked in this site's public `CHANGELOG.md` and reflected in the version marker at the top of this page. Continuing to use the Witness after a change takes effect means you accept it. ## 8. Scope — what this document does not cover Data handling and retention: see [/privacy](/privacy). The Apify actors: see §1's open item above. Any IP or trademark claim to the "Arcaeon" or "Nora" names: not registered anywhere, out of scope for this document. --- Questions: hello@arcaeon.io.