Terms of Service
The short version
- Your notes are yours. We claim no ownership of and no licence to your content. We do not read it, train on it, or use it for anything. Section 4.
- The app is free and shows no ads. The only thing for sale is the optional Clarity Atlas Cloud subscription — $6.99/month, 14-day free trial, up to five devices. Section 7.
- Software has bugs, and this will too. Keep your own backups — the whole design makes that easy, and Section 5 asks you to.
- Optional AI features send your note text to the provider you chose, on your API keys or through Clarity Atlas Cloud. Those providers have their own terms. Section 6.
- If you subscribe to Clarity Atlas Cloud, Google Play handles billing and refunds; cancelling never deletes anything on your devices. Section 7.
- We disclaim warranties and cap our liability, as software is normally licensed. Sections 10 and 11. Read them — they are the parts that limit what you can recover from us.
- Nevada law governs, and disputes go to Nevada courts. Section 15.
1. Agreeing to these terms
These Terms are a contract between you and Clarity Atlas LLC. By downloading, installing, or using Clarity Atlas, or by using this website, you agree to them. If you don't agree, don't use the app — and if you've already installed it, uninstalling is enough to walk away. Your notes are plain files, so nothing of yours is held hostage by that decision.
If you are using Clarity Atlas on behalf of an organization, you are agreeing on that organization's behalf and confirming you may do so.
You must be at least 13 years old to use Clarity Atlas. It is not directed at children under 13.
2. What Clarity Atlas is
Clarity Atlas is a local-first note-taking application. It stores your notes as plain Markdown text files with YAML frontmatter, on your own device. Optional features can send note content to AI providers you choose, and optional sync can copy your notes to storage you choose. Every feature that sends your notes anywhere is off until you turn it on.
Open testing. The Android app is currently distributed through Google Play's open testing track. It is complete and intended for daily use, and your notes remain plain files on your own device throughout — but it is early software, and you may encounter defects. This does not change your rights below: the subscription's 14-day free trial, cancellation, and refund terms apply exactly as written, and you can export your entire vault at any time. We welcome reports of anything that does not work as described, at [email protected].
The app needs no account to work. Out of the box, installed and used on its own, it contacts no servers of ours at all. The Windows app does check GitHub for a newer version, on by default and switchable off in Settings; that request carries no note content and is described in full in Section 4.6 of the Privacy Policy.
3. Your licence to use the software
We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use Clarity Atlas on devices you own or control, for any lawful purpose, personal or commercial. That's the whole permission you need to use it as intended.
You may not: sell, rent, sublicense, or redistribute the app itself; remove or alter its notices; reverse-engineer it to build a competing product; or attempt to defeat the licence, entitlement, or usage-metering mechanisms in Clarity Atlas Cloud. Nothing here restricts what you may do with your own notes, including reading, copying, exporting, or moving them anywhere you like.
We keep all rights in the software, the Clarity Atlas name, and the logo. This licence transfers no intellectual property to you.
4. Your content stays yours
This is the part most software agreements use to take a broad licence over whatever you create. We do not.
- You own your notes. We claim no ownership interest in them.
- We take no licence to your content — not to host it, display it, adapt it, publish it, or create derivative works from it. We have no need for one, because we are not a hosting service.
- We do not use your notes to train AI models, ours or anyone else's, and we do not sell or share them.
- You are responsible for what you store. Don't use Clarity Atlas to hold content that is illegal for you to possess.
The one narrow exception, and it is technical rather than legal: if you subscribe to Clarity Atlas Cloud, we necessarily store and transmit the encrypted copy of your vault in order to sync it to your devices. That copy is ciphertext your device produced with a passphrase we never receive. We cannot read it, and we still claim no rights in it. See the Privacy Policy, Section 4.3.
5. Your responsibilities
- Keep your own backups. This matters more than any other line in these Terms. Storage fails, devices are lost, and all software has bugs. Your vault is designed to be trivially copyable precisely so that backing it up is easy — use sync to storage you control, copy the folder, or export it. We are not a backup service and cannot recover data for you.
- Protect your own credentials. API keys and storage credentials you enter are stored on your device and used only to reach the services they belong to. If they leak from your device, the resulting charges from those providers are yours.
- Remember your encryption passphrase. If you set one and lose it, encrypted copies are unrecoverable — by you and by us. That is the point of the design, and it is not a defect.
- Use it lawfully. Don't use Clarity Atlas to break the law, infringe anyone's rights, or attack our services or anyone else's.
- Don't abuse the shared services. The support chat on this website and the Clarity Atlas Cloud relay are rate-limited. Don't attempt to circumvent those limits, resell access, or use the relay as a general-purpose AI proxy.
6. AI features and third-party providers
AI features are optional and off by default. When you turn one on, note content leaves your device and goes to the provider that performs the work:
- Anthropic — organizing, titling, and question answering
- Voyage AI — search embeddings
- Deepgram — voice transcription
If you supply your own API keys, your relationship is directly with those providers: their terms and privacy policies govern, they bill you, and we are not a party to it. We don't mark up or resell their pricing on that path.
If you use Clarity Atlas Cloud, requests pass through our relay on our keys, and we meter request counts for billing and abuse limits. We still don't store the content of those requests.
AI output is not reliable by default. It can be wrong, incomplete, or misleading. Do not rely on it for medical, legal, financial, or other consequential decisions without checking the underlying notes — which is why every answer cites its sources. Filing decisions the AI makes are logged and reversible for the same reason.
Notes you mark local-only are never sent to any AI provider.
7. Money: the app, purchases, and Clarity Atlas Cloud
7.1 What costs money
The app is free and carries no advertising. The only thing for sale is the optional Clarity Atlas Cloud subscription, described below. Everything the app does on your own device — capture, search, browsing, editing, export — is free and always will be, and it works with no account.
You can also run the AI and sync features for free using your own API keys and your own storage bucket. In that case you pay your providers directly and we are not involved.
7.2 Pricing and what the subscription includes
Clarity Atlas Cloud is $6.99 per month, including a 14-day free trial, and a single subscription covers up to five devices. It bundles AI and encrypted sync with no setup and no API keys of your own. Prices may change; the price shown to you at the moment of purchase is the price that applies, and we will not change the price of an active subscription without notice through the store.
The subscription has stated limits, sized so that ordinary heavy personal use never meets them: 10 GB of encrypted sync storage, and monthly fair-use ceilings on AI — about 2 million tokens of AI reading and 400,000 of AI answering, 5 million tokens of search indexing, and two hours of voice transcription, resetting on the 1st of each month. Hitting a ceiling never locks you out of your notes: everything on your device keeps working, and you can switch to your own API keys in Settings at any time, which have no ceilings from us. If we ever lower these limits for existing subscribers, we will give notice first.
7.3 Billing, trials, and cancellation
Purchases are processed by Google Play, with RevenueCat as our billing intermediary. We never receive your card details. Because billing runs through Google Play, a subscription is started on an Android device and then extended to your computer by linking it in Settings. There is currently no way to subscribe from the Windows app alone — you would need an Android device to start the subscription; we are working on a direct purchase path.
The free trial converts to a paid subscription at the end of the trial unless you cancel before it ends. A subscription then renews automatically until you cancel. You cancel through Google Play's own subscription settings, not through us, and cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid period.
7.4 Refunds
Purchases made through the app store are refunded under that store's policy, and the store — not us — decides those requests. If a store refund isn't available and you believe you've been charged unfairly, email [email protected] and we'll look at it in good faith. Where a law in your jurisdiction gives you a statutory refund or cancellation right, that right applies and nothing here limits it.
7.5 What happens when a subscription ends
Cancelling never deletes anything on your devices. The app keeps working, your notes stay where they are, and you can switch to your own API keys and your own storage bucket in Settings. The encrypted copy we hold is kept for 30 days so you can resubscribe without losing it, then deleted automatically. You can ask us to delete it sooner.
If you stop paying, features that depend on our servers stop. Nothing that runs on your own device stops.
8. Advertising
Clarity Atlas shows no ads, and the app contains no advertising software. An earlier plan for a free-tier banner was dropped before launch, and the advertising library that plan had added was removed from the Android app entirely — it is not merely switched off. The build also does not hold the advertising-ID permission, so no advertising identifier can be read.
We have no current plans to introduce advertising. If that ever changed, we would say so here and in the Privacy Policy, and name the advertising partner, before a single ad ran.
9. Changes, availability, and discontinuation
We may change, add, or remove features. We may suspend or discontinue Clarity Atlas Cloud, the support chat, or this website. We'll give reasonable notice of a discontinuation that affects a paid service, and refund any prepaid period we don't deliver.
If we shut down entirely, your notes are unaffected: they are plain Markdown files on your own device, and they keep opening in any text editor with or without us. That is the point of building it this way, and it is the closest thing to a guarantee we can offer.
We don't promise any particular uptime for the optional server-backed features. They are provided on a reasonable-efforts basis.
10. Disclaimer of warranties
Clarity Atlas is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express, implied, or statutory, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.
We do not warrant that the app will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of harmful components; that AI output will be accurate or suitable for any purpose; that sync will always complete; or that any defect will be corrected. Software of this kind contains defects, and you should expect them.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is the case, the exclusions above apply only to the extent permitted, and you may have additional rights.
11. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law:
- We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, or loss of goodwill, arising out of or relating to your use of Clarity Atlas — even if we were advised such damages were possible.
- We are not liable for lost, corrupted, or unrecoverable data, including notes, attachments, or the contents of any storage you configured, and including data lost to a defect in the app. Keeping your own backups is your responsibility under Section 5.
- We are not liable for charges you incur from AI providers or storage providers, whether from ordinary use, misconfiguration, or credentials leaking from your device.
- Our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to Clarity Atlas is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you actually paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or (b) US$50. If you have paid us nothing — which is the case for everyone who uses the free app without a Clarity Atlas Cloud subscription — that cap is US$50.
Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or any liability under consumer-protection law that cannot be waived.
12. Indemnification
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Clarity Atlas LLC and its members from claims, damages, and reasonable legal costs arising from your unlawful use of the app, your breach of these Terms, or content you store that infringes someone else's rights. This does not apply to claims arising from our own wrongdoing.
13. Termination
You may stop using Clarity Atlas at any time — uninstall it, and take your files with you. We may suspend or terminate your access to the server-backed features (Clarity Atlas Cloud, the support chat) if you materially breach these Terms, abuse the shared services, or use them unlawfully. Where the circumstances allow it, we'll tell you first and give you a chance to fix it.
Terminating your access to our services never reaches into your device. We have no mechanism to delete your local notes and would not use one if we had it.
Sections 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, and 15 survive termination.
14. Changes to these terms
We may update these Terms. When we do, we'll change the effective date at the top and post the new version at this URL. If a change is material and affects a paid subscription, we'll give notice before it takes effect — in the app's release notes and, once we have a way to reach subscribers, by email. Continuing to use Clarity Atlas after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms. If you don't accept them, stop using the app; your notes remain yours and readable either way.
15. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Nevada, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. You and we agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in Washoe County, Nevada for any dispute that isn't resolved informally, and each of us waives any objection to that venue.
If you're a consumer resident in a jurisdiction whose law gives you the right to bring proceedings locally, or applies mandatory consumer-protection rules regardless of this section, that right and those rules are unaffected.
Talk to us first. Before starting any formal proceeding, please email [email protected] describing the problem, and give us 30 days to try to resolve it. Almost everything is fixable that way, and we would rather fix it.
16. General
- Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about Clarity Atlas.
- Severability. If any provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in force and the unenforceable part is limited to the minimum extent necessary.
- No waiver. If we don't enforce a provision, we haven't waived it.
- Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to a successor in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, on notice to you.
- App store terms. Where you obtained the app through an app store, that store's terms also apply to your use of it, and the store is not responsible for Clarity Atlas.
- Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by events outside our reasonable control.
17. Contact
Clarity Atlas LLC
Reno, Nevada, USA
Email: [email protected]