Terms of Service

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

FlintBeam is operated by CONNECT GLOBAL LIMITED, a company registered in England and Wales, number 16714288 ("we", "us"). These terms are the contract between you and us for the use of the FlintBeam website, console and API gateway (together, "the service"). By creating an account, ticking the box at registration, or sending a request through the gateway, you agree to them.

Three other pages form part of these terms and have the same force: the Model and Provider Terms, which say whose rules apply to a request, what is not allowed, and what happens to an account that ignores it; the Subscription Plan Terms, which say what a plan grants, when it refills and how it ends; and the Privacy Policy, which says what we record about you, who else receives it and for how long it is kept. Where a page is more specific than this one, the more specific page applies to its subject.

The service is built for businesses and professional developers. If you use it as a consumer — for yourself, outside a trade or profession — nothing in these terms takes away the rights the law gives you where you live, and where a term below would do so it does not apply to you. We say so again at the points where it matters.

2. What the service is

FlintBeam is an OpenAI-compatible API gateway. You fund an account, you create an API key, and requests to our endpoint are forwarded to the AI model provider behind the model you named and charged to your account at the price shown for that model. We hold the accounts with the providers; you hold an account with us.

We do not make any model offered here, and we do not hold ourselves out as making one. A model's abilities, its refusals, its mistakes and its tone are the model's, not a promise from us. Which models are on sale, at what price, and through which provider can change at any time: providers add, rename, re-price and withdraw models with little or no notice, and the catalogue follows them. A model appearing in the catalogue today is not a promise that it will be there tomorrow.

Some models are offered in two versions: an official version, served on the provider's own API at the provider's list price, and an Economy version of the same model, served from capacity we hold ourselves at a discount and limited in daily volume. The catalogue and the API documentation explain how they differ and how a request moves between them; the price you are quoted for a request is the price you pay, whichever version answers it.

3. Eligibility and accounts

• You must be at least 18 years old, or the age at which you can enter into a binding contract where you live, whichever is higher.
• If you open an account for a company or another organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it, and these terms bind it as well as you.
• One account belongs to one person or one organisation. Do not share sign-in credentials, and do not open several accounts to get around a limit, a price or a suspension.
• The details you give must be true and kept current. The email address on the account is how we reach you about your balance, your keys and your account; a notice sent there counts as given to you.
• You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, whether or not you authorised it, until you tell us the account has been compromised.

You may not use the service if you are in, or ordinarily resident in, a country or territory subject to comprehensive trade sanctions, or if you or anyone you act for is named on a sanctions list of the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States or the United Nations. The providers behind the models impose that on us, and we pass it on unchanged. You are responsible for complying with the export-control and sanctions rules that apply to you and to what you build.

4. API keys and security

• Your API keys are secrets. Keep them out of client-side code, public repositories, screenshots and chat logs. A request signed with your key is treated as your request, and it is charged to your account.
• If a key may have leaked, rotate or revoke it from the keys page. Revocation takes effect on the next request; a rotated key keeps working for a short grace period so that you can switch, then stops.
• Each key can carry its own limits — requests per minute, a spending ceiling, a list of models, a list of addresses it may be used from. Use them. One key per place you deploy is what makes any of them useful.
• We will never ask you for a key, a password or a recovery code by email or chat. Anyone who does is not us.
• Do not probe, scan, load-test or attempt to break into the service, the providers behind it, or other customers. Section 18 says how to report a vulnerability you have found on your own account.

5. Acceptable use

Do not use the service for anything unlawful, and do not use it to harm, deceive, harass or surveil anyone, to attack or overload any system, or to obtain access or money that is not yours. Beyond that, the usage policy of the provider behind the model you call applies to what you send and to what comes back: their rules travel with your request, a refusal from a provider is not something we can overturn, and where two policies disagree the stricter one applies.

The full list of what is not allowed, whose policies apply, and what happens to an account that ignores them — including what becomes of its balance — is in the Model and Provider Terms. That page governs the detail and forms part of these terms.

If you give others access to the service through something you built — a product, an integration, a resold key — you are responsible for their use as if it were your own, and you must hold them to at least these rules.

6. Prices, balance and payments

• The service is prepaid. You add money to your account balance, and each request is charged to the balance on the tokens it actually used, at the price listed for that model when the request was made. Before a request is sent, an estimate of its cost is reserved; after the answer, the reservation is settled against actual use and the difference is released.
• Prices are per million tokens, separately for input and output, and are shown on each model's page and in the catalogue. Prices can change at any time. A change never applies to a request you have already made.
• Money on your balance does not expire.
• Topping up by card carries a processing fee, shown to you before you pay. It is what the payment processor and the card networks charge, added on top so that the amount you asked for lands on your balance in full. It is the only fee we add, and it is not refundable.
• Paying with cryptocurrency goes through a payment processor of ours. The amount credited is the amount the processor confirms, at the rate and after the confirmations the processor requires; we do not control either. Network fees are yours.
• Prices are exclusive of any tax that may apply where you are. Where we are required to charge tax we will show it; anything else owed on your side is yours to settle.
• If a payment is reversed after money was credited — a chargeback, a dispute, a refund forced by the processor — the balance is reduced by the amount reversed, may go below zero, and the account is suspended until the amount is settled. Reversing a payment after spending what it bought is treated as fraud under the Model and Provider Terms.
• A redeem code is a bearer instrument: whoever enters it first gets what it carries. A code may have an expiry date, and we may cancel a code that was obtained by fraud or reversed payment, along with what it granted.

7. Subscription plans

A plan grants a fixed amount of use of a fixed set of models over a fixed period, for a price paid once. What a plan covers, when its allowances refill, what happens when they run out, and how a period ends are in the Subscription Plan Terms. No plan renews itself.

8. Refunds and cancellation

The service is prepaid and consumed as it is used. Money that has been spent on requests is never refunded: the request was made, the provider charged us for it, and the answer was delivered.

Video is made as a job that runs for minutes rather than seconds, and the two providers behave differently once one has started. A Google job can be stopped, and stopping it releases the money held for it. An OpenAI job cannot be stopped by anyone, ourselves included: the provider offers no way to cancel a running generation and charges for it whether or not you are still waiting. So a clip you stop waiting for is still made, still charged, and still yours — it appears in your history when the provider finishes it. That is not a refusal to refund a loss. Nothing was lost: it was delivered late.

Money is held on your balance when a clip is asked for and taken when the clip is handed over, so you are not charged for something you have not been given. If the provider fails the job outright, the hold is released and the clip costs you nothing. If a job is still unfinished a day later, we stop waiting, release the hold, and you are not charged.

An unspent balance may be refunded on request. Whether we refund it, how much of it and by what method is at our discretion, and we may decline. Where we do refund, processing fees are not returned, refunds go to the payment method that funded the balance where that is possible and otherwise by a method we choose, and cryptocurrency top-ups are refunded to the balance or by a method we choose rather than to a wallet. An account under review is not refunded until the review ends; the Model and Provider Terms say how that works.

A plan is a fixed amount of use over a fixed period, and its price is set on that basis. Within the first 14 days after buying a plan we may, at our discretion, refund part of its price after deducting the share of the period that has elapsed and the value of the allowance already used; where the allowance has been largely or wholly consumed, the refund may be small or nothing at all. After 14 days a plan is not refundable and cannot be cancelled for a refund; it runs to the end of its period.

By funding your account or buying a plan you ask us to start supplying the service immediately, without waiting for any cancellation period to end, and you acknowledge that you will pay for what is supplied before you cancel.

If you bought as a consumer, you have a statutory right to cancel within 14 days of the purchase. Because the service starts at once at your request, you pay for what was supplied before you cancelled — money spent on requests and, for a plan, the share of the period that has elapsed and the value of the allowance used — and we refund the rest by the method you paid with. Nothing in this section limits any other right the law gives a consumer where they live.

To ask for a refund or to cancel, write to support@flintbeam.com from the address on the account.

9. Rate limits and fair use

Every key has a rate limit, and we may apply a limit across an account, a model or the whole service where a burst of traffic threatens the service for everyone else. Limits exist to keep the gateway answering, not to ration what you have paid for; a request refused by a limit costs nothing and can be retried after the time the response names. We may also refuse or throttle traffic that looks automated in a way the service is not built for — scraping, probing, or many accounts acting as one.

10. Your content and what the models produce

• What you send stays yours. We claim no rights over it beyond what is needed to pass it to the provider you chose and to return the answer, and we do not store it — the Privacy Policy explains exactly what is kept.
• As between you and us, what a model produces from your request is yours to use. The provider's own terms may add conditions to that, and they apply too. You are responsible for how you use what a model produces.
• Model output can be wrong, out of date, biased, or convincingly invented, and two runs of the same request can differ. Check it before relying on it, and do not use it as the sole basis for a legal, medical, financial, safety or other consequential decision. Where a decision affects a person's rights, keep a person in the loop.
• You must not present a model's output as human-written where the law or a platform's rules require you to say otherwise, and you must not use it to deceive anyone about who they are dealing with.
• The site itself — its name, its design, its text and its documentation — stays ours.

11. Feedback

Ideas, suggestions and bug reports you send us we may use without owing you anything for them. This is not us claiming your work; it is so that a suggestion in an email cannot later become a claim over a feature everyone uses.

12. Availability, changes and beta features

We route around provider failures where we can, but we do not promise a particular uptime, latency or throughput, and we do not promise that any model, price or feature will remain available. Providers withdraw and change models with no notice to us; when a model disappears from the catalogue, that is usually why. We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of the service, and we will give reasonable notice of a change that materially reduces what you can do with it, unless a provider, the law or a security matter leaves us no time.

Anything marked as preview, beta or experimental is exactly that: it may behave badly, change, or be withdrawn without notice, and it is not something to build a business on without a fallback.

13. Suspension and termination

We may suspend an account, at once and without prior notice, where it breaches these terms or the Model and Provider Terms, where it is being used to attack the service or anyone else, where a payment has been reversed and not settled, or where the law or a provider requires it. Suspension stops every key on the account immediately. What happens to the balance of a suspended account, and the review that decides it, are in the Model and Provider Terms.

We may close an account that has been suspended after a review, or that has been inactive with a zero balance for a long time, giving notice to the address on the account.

You can close your account yourself at any time from the account page. Closing it revokes your keys immediately, ends your sessions, removes your password, your name and your second factor, and releases your email address. Your billing records are kept, because they are accounting records we are required to hold; the Privacy Policy says what stays and for how long. An unspent balance on a closed account is dealt with under section 8.

14. Indemnity

If someone brings a claim against us because of what you did with the service — the content you sent, something you built on it, the way you used what a model produced, or a rule you broke — you will defend us against that claim and cover the losses, costs and reasonable legal fees it causes us. We will tell you about the claim promptly and let you run its defence, provided you do not settle it in a way that admits fault on our part without our consent. This section does not apply to a consumer using the service for themselves.

15. Disclaimers

The service is provided as it is and as it is available. To the extent the law allows, we make no promise, express or implied, about its fitness for a particular purpose, its merchantability, its accuracy, or its uninterrupted or error-free operation, and no promise at all about what a model outputs. We are not liable for what a model produces, for decisions taken on the strength of it, or for a provider being slow, unavailable, or changing what it offers.

16. Limitation of liability

We are not liable to you for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost business or goodwill, or for any indirect or consequential loss, however it arises.

Our total liability to you for everything arising out of or in connection with the service and these terms, whether in contract, tort, breach of statutory duty or otherwise, is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and, for a consumer, any liability that consumer law does not allow us to limit.

17. Events beyond our control

We are not in breach of these terms for a failure or delay caused by something beyond our reasonable control — a provider outage, a network or hosting failure, an attack on the service, a change in law, or an act of a government. If such an event goes on long enough that the service is no longer worth having, either of us may end the contract by written notice; any unspent balance, and the share of a plan's price attributable to the rest of its period, are then returned by the method you paid with.

18. Security research

If you find a vulnerability, tell us at support@flintbeam.com and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before you tell anyone else. Testing on your own account, without touching anyone else's data and without degrading the service, is welcome. Testing on somebody else's account, on the infrastructure behind ours, or on a provider is not, and the rules on attacking the service still apply.

19. Confidentiality and publicity

We will not name you as a customer, or use your name or logo, without your written permission. Non-public information either of us learns about the other while using or providing the service is to be kept confidential and used only for that purpose, unless the law requires disclosure or the information is already public through no fault of the receiving side.

20. General

• We may transfer these terms, and your account with them, to whoever takes over the business, and we will tell you if that happens. You may not transfer your account to anyone else without asking us first.
• Notices to you go to the email address on your account; notices to us go to the support address below. A notice by email counts as received the day it is sent, unless it bounces.
• If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, that part is read as narrowly as is needed to make it enforceable, and the rest still stands.
• Not enforcing a term once does not mean we have given it up.
• These terms, the Model and Provider Terms, the Subscription Plan Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the service and replace anything said or written before them.
• Nobody who is not a party to these terms can enforce them.
• Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, agency or employment between us.

21. Changes to these terms

These terms may change, most often because a provider changes its rules or because the service gains something new. The date at the top says when they last did. Continuing to use the service after a change means the new version applies. If a change materially reduces your rights or increases your obligations, we will tell you by email at least 14 days before it takes effect, and you may close your account before then if you do not accept it.

22. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over disputes about them. If you are a consumer, you keep the right to bring proceedings, and to rely on the mandatory consumer laws, of the country where you live. Before starting proceedings, write to us and give us a reasonable chance to put things right; most problems are quicker to fix directly.

23. Contact

CONNECT GLOBAL LIMITED, registered in England and Wales, number 16714288. Questions about these terms, refunds, your account or anything else go to support@flintbeam.com.