Terms of service

These terms of service ("Terms") apply when you use Spectate: the dashboard at app.spectate.net, the API, status pages, checkers, the host agent and everything else we offer under the Spectate name. Please read them before you create an account. If you have a question, email hello@spectate.net.

1. Who we are

1.1. Spectate is a trade name of Fjordlane Holding B.V., a private limited company registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (KvK) under number 99322439, with its address at Guido Gezellestraat 43, 3351 CL Papendrecht, the Netherlands (not a visiting address). VAT number NL868932097B01. In these Terms, "Spectate", "we", "us" and "our" mean Fjordlane Holding B.V.

1.2. You can reach us by email at hello@spectate.net, and for support at help@spectate.net. More details are on our imprint.

2. Definitions

2.1. The following words have this meaning in these Terms:

• Account: the personal login of a user of the Service.
• Agreement: these Terms together with the Data processing agreement, the Acceptable use policy and any other written agreement between you and us about the Service.
• Customer, you: the company, organisation or professional that uses the Service, and that is the owner of a Team.
• Customer Data: all data that you, your users or your systems put into the Service, or that the Service collects for you. Examples are monitors and their settings, check results, host metrics, alerts, incidents, postmortems, on-call schedules, contact details of alert recipients, status pages and status page subscribers.
• Merchant of Record: Vatly B.V., the reseller that sells the Service to you and handles payment, invoicing and VAT (see article 7).
• Plan: the subscription you choose (for example Starter, Team or Business), with its features, limits and price, as shown on spectate.net/pricing and in the dashboard.
• Service: the Spectate monitoring, alerting, on-call, incident management and status page platform, including the dashboard, API, checkers, host agent, status pages, integrations, emails, documentation and support.
• Team: a workspace in the Service. All Customer Data belongs to a Team. A Team has one or more owners and members with a role (owner, manager, admin, member or billing).

3. When these Terms apply

3.1. These Terms apply to every use of the Service and to every offer we make. By creating an Account, starting a trial, accepting an invitation to a Team or using the Service in any other way, you accept these Terms.

3.2. The Service is for business use. You may only use it for your trade, business, craft or profession, or for an organisation such as a government body, school or non-profit. If you accept these Terms for an organisation, you confirm that you are allowed to bind that organisation.

3.3. If the law of your country gives you mandatory consumer rights despite article 3.2, those rights still apply. Nothing in these Terms limits them.

3.4. We do not accept your own general terms or purchase conditions, unless we have agreed to them in writing.

3.5. If a part of these Terms is invalid, the rest stays valid. We will then replace the invalid part with a valid rule that is as close as possible to what was meant.

3.6. If the documents of the Agreement contradict each other, this order applies: (1) a signed agreement between you and us, (2) the Data processing agreement, for the processing of personal data, (3) these Terms, (4) the Acceptable use policy.

4. Accounts and Teams

4.1. To use the Service you need an Account. You can sign up with an email address and password, or with GitHub, Google or Microsoft. You must give correct and complete information and keep it up to date. You must verify your email address before you can use the Service.

4.2. An Account is personal. Do not share logins. Each person who uses the Service should have their own Account and be invited to the Team.

4.3. You are responsible for everything that happens in your Team and under the Accounts of your users. Keep passwords and recovery codes safe, and use two-factor authentication. Tell us right away at security@spectate.net if you think someone has access to an Account or Team who should not have it.

4.4. The owners of a Team decide who has access and with which role. We act on instructions from the owners and admins of a Team. If there is a dispute about who controls a Team, we may ask for proof and may pause changes until it is clear.

4.5. We may refuse a sign-up without giving a reason, for example to prevent abuse. We do not accept disposable email addresses.

5. Trial

5.1. A new Team gets a free trial of 14 days with the features of the Team plan. You do not need to give payment details for the trial.

5.2. The trial does not include monthly SMS and voice credits. You can buy credit packs during the trial (see article 9).

5.3. At the end of the trial, monitoring pauses until you choose a Plan. We email you before the trial ends. Nothing is deleted when monitoring pauses.

5.4. If a Team has no paid Plan for 90 days after monitoring paused, we schedule the Team for deletion. We email the owners, and the Team is deleted 14 days later unless an owner subscribes or cancels the deletion before then. See article 18 for what deletion means.

5.5. We offer no free plan. We may end or change the trial offer at any time for new Teams.

6. Plans, limits and fair use

6.1. Your Plan decides which features you can use. You choose how many monitors and hosts you pay for, with the minimum of your Plan. The limits of each Plan (such as members, status pages, status page subscribers, the shortest check interval and included SMS and voice credits) are shown on our pricing page and in the dashboard.

6.2. When you reach a limit, you cannot add more until you raise your number of monitors or change Plan. If you lower your number of monitors below what you use, or move to a Plan with lower limits, we pause the newest resources above the limit when the change takes effect. Features your new Plan does not include may stop working for new items. Existing items may keep working as described in the dashboard.

6.3. Some features have no fixed limit and are offered under fair use, such as alert sources, incoming events, status page traffic, API use, emails and integrations. Fair use means use that fits a normal business using the feature for its intended purpose. If your use is much higher than that and puts the Service or other customers at risk, we will contact you first and look for a solution together, such as a different Plan or custom terms. If there is an urgent risk, we may limit the use right away (see article 17).

7. Buying through Vatly, our Merchant of Record

7.1. We sell the Service through Vatly B.V., a Dutch company and our online reseller and Merchant of Record. When you buy a Plan or credit pack, you buy it from Vatly. Vatly processes the payment, charges VAT or sales tax where it applies, issues the invoice and sends receipts and payment reminders. Payments are handled by Mollie on behalf of Vatly.

7.2. Vatly's own terms of sale apply to the purchase and payment. You accept them in the Vatly checkout. Questions about payments, invoices, VAT numbers and refunds go to Vatly, or to us at help@spectate.net and we pass them on.

7.3. We provide the Service. These Terms govern your use of the Service. Vatly's role as Merchant of Record does not change our obligations to you under the Agreement, and does not make Vatly responsible for the Service.

7.4. You manage your payment method, invoices, company name and VAT number in Vatly's customer portal, which you can open from the Billing page in the dashboard.

8. Prices, payment, changes and cancellation

8.1. Prices are in euros and exclude VAT, unless stated otherwise. Plans are billed monthly or yearly in advance, as you choose. A yearly Plan costs ten times the monthly price.

8.2. Your subscription renews automatically for the same period until you cancel it.

8.3. You can change your Plan, billing period or number of monitors in the dashboard:

• a change that makes your subscription more expensive applies right away. On a monthly Plan, the difference is added to your next invoice pro rata. On a yearly Plan, it is charged right away;
• a change that makes your subscription cheaper, and a switch between monthly and yearly billing, applies at your next renewal.

8.4. You can cancel at any time in the dashboard. Your Plan then runs until the end of the period you paid for, and does not renew. You can resume a cancelled subscription before that date.

8.5. We do not refund fees for a period that has started, unless the law requires it, or Vatly's terms of sale give you a refund.

8.6. When a subscription ends, for example because you cancelled it or a payment failed and Vatly could not collect it, your Team moves to no Plan and monitoring pauses. Article 5.4 then applies.

8.7. We may change our prices. For existing subscriptions, we tell you at least 30 days before a price change takes effect. The new price applies from your first renewal after that date. If you do not agree, you can cancel before the new price applies.

9. SMS and voice credits

9.1. SMS messages and phone calls cost credits, at the rates shown on our pricing page. We may change these rates with 30 days' notice.

9.2. Each paid Plan includes a monthly allowance of credits. The allowance resets every month, also on yearly Plans. Unused allowance does not roll over.

9.3. You can buy credit packs. Bought credits are used after the monthly allowance, and do not expire while your Team exists. They have no cash value, cannot be moved to another Team and are not refunded when your Team or subscription ends, unless the law requires it.

9.4. When your credits run out, we stop sending SMS messages and phone calls until you have credits again. Alerts keep going to your other channels. We email you when your credits run low.

9.5. SMS and phone calls depend on telephone networks and carriers in many countries that we do not control. We cannot guarantee that every message or call arrives, or arrives on time. Always set up more than one channel for important alerts.

10. Acceptable use

10.1. You must use the Service in line with the law and our Acceptable use policy. In short: only monitor systems you own or are allowed to monitor, do not use the Service to attack, overload or scan systems, do not abuse SMS or phone calls, and do not publish illegal or misleading content on status pages.

10.2. You are responsible for the use of the Service by your users and by anyone you give access to, including through API keys, host tokens or alert source URLs.

10.3. You will not try to get around limits or security measures, test the security of the Service other than under our Responsible disclosure policy, or resell the Service without our written permission.

11. What the Service does, and what it does not do

11.1. We do our best to keep the Service available, secure and working as described, but we do not guarantee that it is always available or free of errors. We offer no service level agreement or service credits, unless we agreed on one in writing.

11.2. Spectate helps you notice problems and respond to them. It does not prevent outages and cannot replace your own operations. Checks run at intervals from a limited number of locations. Alerts travel through networks and third-party services, such as email providers, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Pushover, webhooks, SMS carriers and phone networks, that we do not control. An outage may therefore be detected late, or an alert may be delayed or not arrive. You remain responsible for your systems and for having more than one way to learn about problems.

11.3. We may carry out maintenance. We plan maintenance so it has as little impact as possible, and where we can, we announce maintenance that may affect you in advance on status.spectate.net. Urgent fixes may happen without notice.

11.4. We keep improving the Service. We may add, change or remove features. If we remove a feature that is a significant part of your Plan, we tell you at least 30 days in advance, and you may cancel. If we stop the Service as a whole, we tell you at least 90 days in advance and refund the part of a prepaid period after the end date.

11.5. We offer support by email at help@spectate.net and through the Support page in the dashboard, on working days. We do not promise fixed response times, unless agreed in writing.

12. Third-party services and integrations

12.1. You can connect the Service to services of other companies, such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Pushover, Intercom, Grafana, Sentry, Prometheus, GitHub, Google and Microsoft. When you connect such a service, you instruct us to exchange data with it. That service's own terms and privacy policy apply to your use of it.

12.2. We are not responsible for services of other companies, for changes they make, or for them becoming unavailable. If an integration keeps failing, we may disable it and tell you.

13. Your data

13.1. Customer Data is yours. You give us the right to store, copy, process and send Customer Data only as far as needed to provide, secure and support the Service, and only for the term of the Agreement and the time needed to delete it afterwards.

13.2. We do not sell Customer Data. We do not use it for advertising or to train artificial intelligence models.

13.3. When Customer Data contains personal data, we process it as your processor under the Data processing agreement. The Data processing agreement is part of the Agreement and applies automatically. For personal data we process for our own purposes, such as your Account and our billing records, see our Privacy policy.

13.4. You confirm that you are allowed to put Customer Data into the Service and to let us process it, and that it does not infringe the rights of others. This includes, for example, that you may add the phone numbers and email addresses of on-call people and alert recipients, and that you may email status page subscribers.

13.5. We keep Customer Data as described in our Privacy policy. Measurements become coarser and are deleted after a set time. If you need data for longer, export it in time.

13.6. We may use anonymous, aggregated information about the use of the Service, from which no customer or person can be identified, to run and improve the Service.

14. Status pages and published content

14.1. You decide what you publish on your status pages, in subscriber emails and in other public parts of the Service. You are responsible for that content.

14.2. If you use a custom domain for a status page, you must have the right to use that domain. You keep the DNS records correct. If the domain stops pointing at us, the page stops working on that domain.

14.3. Anyone can report content they think is illegal to abuse@spectate.net. We review reports with care and without undue delay. If content is illegal or breaks the Acceptable use policy, we may remove it or make it unavailable. We tell you what we did and why, and how you can object, unless the law does not allow us to tell you.

15. Intellectual property

15.1. The Service, our software, designs, documentation, logos and the Spectate name belong to us or our licensors.

15.2. We give you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service for your own business during the term of the Agreement, within the limits of your Plan. The host agent and other software we give you may be used only with the Service, unless its own licence says otherwise.

15.3. You may not copy, change, reverse engineer or decompile the Service, except as far as the law allows this and it cannot be excluded.

15.4. If you send us feedback or ideas, we may use them freely and without paying you. You do not have to send us feedback.

15.5. You allow us to mention your company name and logo as a customer, for example on our website. You can withdraw this at any time by emailing hello@spectate.net.

16. Confidentiality

16.1. You and we keep confidential information of the other party secret, and use it only for the Agreement. Information is confidential if it is marked as such, or if it is clear from its nature that it is confidential. Customer Data is always confidential.

16.2. This does not apply to information that is public without a breach of this article, that the receiving party already had or developed itself, or that it received lawfully from someone else. A party may disclose confidential information if the law or a court or authority requires it. If allowed, it tells the other party first.

16.3. Our staff and contractors who may access Customer Data are bound to confidentiality, and their access is logged.

16.4. This article continues to apply after the Agreement ends.

17. Suspension

17.1. We may suspend the Service for a Team or Account, fully or partly, if:

• you break the Agreement, including the Acceptable use policy, and do not fix it within a reasonable time after we asked you to. If the breach is serious, for example an attack on others, SMS fraud or phishing, we do not have to ask first;
• your use puts the security, integrity or availability of the Service, other customers or third parties at risk;
• we must do so by law or by order of a court or authority; or
• there is a strong reason to believe the Account or Team is used for fraud.

17.2. We keep a suspension as short and as limited as possible, and lift it once the reason is gone. We tell you about the suspension and the reason, unless that is not possible or the law does not allow it.

17.3. A suspension does not end your payment obligations, unless the suspension was our fault.

18. Term, termination and deletion

18.1. The Agreement starts when you accept these Terms and runs until it is ended as described here.

18.2. You can end the Agreement at any time by cancelling your subscription (article 8.4) and deleting your Teams, or by emailing us. Ending it does not give a refund for the current period, except as described in article 8.5.

18.3. We can end the Agreement with 30 days' notice by email. If we do this without a reason that is your fault, we refund the part of a prepaid period after the end date.

18.4. Each party may end the Agreement right away by written notice if the other party seriously breaks the Agreement and does not fix it within 14 days after a written notice that describes the breach, or if the other party goes bankrupt, is granted suspension of payments or stops its business. We may also end it right away in the cases of article 17.1 where the breach is serious.

18.5. Deleting a Team. An owner can delete a Team in the dashboard. Monitoring then pauses, the subscription is cancelled at the end of its period, and for 7 days an owner can still restore the Team. After that we permanently delete the Team and its Customer Data from our active systems.

18.6. Teams without a Plan. A Team without a paid Plan is deleted as described in article 5.4.

18.7. Your data before deletion. Before a Team is deleted, you can export the data the dashboard offers. If you need an export of other Customer Data, ask us at help@spectate.net before the deletion date.

18.8. Backups. Deleted data may remain in our backups until they expire, within 14 days. We do not use those copies, except to recover from a disaster. If we ever restore a backup, we delete the data again.

18.9. Your Account. Deleting a Team does not delete your Account. To delete your Account, remove yourself from your Teams and email privacy@spectate.net, or use the option in the dashboard if available.

18.10. Articles that by their nature should continue after the Agreement ends, such as confidentiality, liability, intellectual property, applicable law and disputes, continue to apply.

19. Liability

19.1. Our total liability for any damage arising from or related to the Agreement, whether for breach of contract, tort or any other reason, is limited to the direct damage you suffer, up to the amount you paid (excluding VAT) for the Service in the 12 months before the event that caused the damage. If several events cause the same damage, they count as one event.

19.2. Direct damage means only:

• reasonable costs to find out the cause and size of the damage, as far as it concerns damage covered by these Terms;
• reasonable costs to make our performance meet the Agreement, unless the breach cannot be blamed on us; and
• reasonable costs to prevent or limit damage, as far as you show that these costs led to less direct damage.

19.3. We are not liable for indirect damage. This includes consequential damage, lost profit, lost savings, lost revenue, reduced goodwill, damage from business interruption, damage from a missed, late or wrong alert, damage from claims of your customers, and loss or corruption of data. Spectate is a tool to help you detect and handle incidents. It does not take over your responsibility for your own systems.

19.4. We are not liable for damage caused by services of third parties that you choose to connect (article 12), by carriers and networks outside our control, or by your own use of the Service against the Agreement.

19.5. The limits in this article do not apply if the damage is caused by intent or deliberate recklessness of our management, or if the law does not allow the limit.

19.6. Our liability for a failure to perform the Agreement only arises if you give us written notice of default without delay, with a reasonable period to fix the failure, and we still fail after that period. The notice must describe the failure in enough detail for us to respond.

19.7. You must report any damage to us in writing as soon as possible, and in any case within 12 months after you found it or could reasonably have found it. After that, your claim lapses.

19.8. You are liable for damage caused by a breach of the Agreement by you or your users. You indemnify us against claims of third parties that result from your Customer Data, your status page content or your use of the Service against the Agreement or the law, including claims from operators of systems you monitored without permission.

20. Force majeure

20.1. Neither party is liable for a failure caused by force majeure. Force majeure includes circumstances outside our reasonable control, such as failures of internet, power or telecommunications networks, failures of hosting providers, carriers and other suppliers, large-scale cyber attacks such as DDoS attacks that we could not reasonably prevent, government measures, fire, flooding, war, strikes and epidemics.

20.2. If force majeure lasts longer than 60 days, each party may end the Agreement in writing. What was already delivered is paid for, and nothing else is owed.

21. Changes to these Terms

21.1. We may change these Terms, the Data processing agreement and the Acceptable use policy. We tell you about changes that matter by email or in the dashboard at least 30 days before they take effect. The date at the top of each document shows when it last changed.

21.2. If you do not agree with a change, you can end the Agreement before the change takes effect. We then refund the part of a prepaid period after that date. If you keep using the Service after the change takes effect, you accept the new version.

21.3. Changes that are needed because of a change in the law, or that only benefit you, may take effect sooner.

22. Applicable law and disputes

22.1. Dutch law applies to the Agreement and to all disputes arising from it. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG, Vienna Sales Convention 1980) does not apply.

22.2. If you have a complaint, please contact us first at hello@spectate.net. We will try to solve it together.

22.3. If we cannot solve a dispute together within 30 days, it will be decided exclusively by the competent court of the District Court of Rotterdam (Rechtbank Rotterdam), the Netherlands, unless mandatory law says otherwise. Our address in Papendrecht falls within this district.

23. Other provisions

23.1. "In writing" includes email.

23.2. We may use subcontractors and suppliers to provide the Service. A list of the subprocessors that may process personal data is on our Subprocessors page.

23.3. You may only transfer your rights and obligations under the Agreement to someone else with our written permission. We may transfer the Agreement to a company that takes over all or part of our business. We will tell you if this happens, and you may then end the Agreement.

23.4. If we do not enforce a right right away, we do not give up that right.

23.5. Our records, such as logs of the Service, count as evidence, unless you show they are wrong.

23.6. These Terms are written in English. If we publish a translation and it differs from the English version, the English version applies.

24. Contact

Fjordlane Holding B.V. (Spectate)
Guido Gezellestraat 43
3351 CL Papendrecht
The Netherlands