Terms of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of Observer ("the Service"), including the console, public and private status pages, the API, the CLI, the MCP server, hosted checks, and the Observer Agent. Observer is operated by a sole trader based in England, United Kingdom, trading as "Observer" ("the Company", "we", "us"). Our trading address is available on request: write to [email protected] and we will send it promptly.

By signing up for or using the Service, you agree to these Terms, the Privacy Policy, the Acceptable Use Policy, and, where applicable, the Data Processing Agreement. If you are entering into these Terms on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you have authority to bind that organisation, and "you" refers to both you and the organisation.

The Service is intended for business use. It is not designed or marketed for consumers as defined under the UK Consumer Rights Act 2015, and we do not knowingly provide the Service to consumers. By using it, you confirm that you are acting for the purposes of your trade, business, craft or profession. If you are nonetheless a consumer, nothing in these Terms affects the rights you have by law that cannot be excluded.

Summary in plain English

• You pay for the plan you choose. You can cancel at any time; a paid plan keeps working until the end of the period you have paid for, and then your organisation moves to the Free plan. We do not provide refunds.
• If your plan allows fewer items than you have, the extra items are paused after a grace period. They are never deleted because of a downgrade.
• You own everything you put into the Service. We use it only to provide the Service to you.
• You are responsible for what you monitor, what your Agents send us, what you publish on your status pages, and the messages we send to your subscribers on your behalf.
• We provide the Service "as is". Our liability is limited, and capped, to the extent English law allows.
• We contact the account owner before suspending or terminating an account where practical, except where the use is harming the Service or others, where the law requires otherwise, or where we suspect fraud or a security risk.
• These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and disputes go to the courts of England and Wales.

The detail is below. Read it.

1. Account terms

You must provide accurate and complete information when you sign up and keep it up to date. One login may only be used by one person; sharing logins is not permitted. You must not register an account on behalf of someone else without their authorisation, and you must not automate sign-up via bots, scripts, or other means.

You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding contract to create an account.

You are responsible for everything done through your account and organisation, and for the security of your account, including your password, your sign-in sessions, your sign-in provider account if you sign in with Google or Microsoft, and any API keys, Agent keys, or app authorisations you create. You must notify us at [email protected] without delay if you suspect any unauthorised access to your account. We may treat any instruction given through your account, by an admin of your organisation, or from the account owner's email address as authorised by you.

You must comply with all laws applicable to your use of the Service in your jurisdiction and in the jurisdictions of the systems you monitor.

2. API, CLI, MCP and connected apps

You may use the Service's API, CLI, MCP server, and outbound webhooks as documented, within the limits of your plan. You must not:

• abuse the API in a way that materially degrades performance for other customers,
• attempt to reverse-engineer the Service or its source code, except to the extent the law expressly allows it or the code is published under an open-source licence,
• attempt to circumvent the Service's rate limits, quota enforcement, or billing controls,
• use the API to scrape or mirror the Service for the purpose of building a competing product, or
• use the API in any way prohibited by the Acceptable Use Policy.

If you connect an app or AI agent to your organisation (for example through the MCP server or an API key), it acts with your authority. You are responsible for what it does, including any changes it makes to your configuration or status pages.

We may apply rate limits to any account and may revoke any API key or app authorisation without notice if we detect abuse or a security risk.

3. Plans, trials, payment, cancellation and downgrades

Plans and fees

The Service is offered on a Free plan and on paid plans, as described on our pricing page. Paid plans are billed in advance for each billing period and renew automatically until cancelled. Prices may change; for existing paid subscriptions, we will give advance notice by email before a price increase applies to your next renewal. New prices for new sign-ups may take effect immediately.

Subscriptions are managed through our billing provider, Clerk Billing, and payments are processed by Stripe (see the Subprocessors list). You authorise them to charge your chosen payment method for each billing period. All fees are exclusive of taxes, levies, or duties imposed by taxing authorities, and you are responsible for paying them. Where required by law, value added tax (VAT) will be added at the prevailing rate. You must pay all fees in full, without set-off, counterclaim, or deduction.

If a payment fails or is overdue, we may suspend paid features or move your organisation to the Free plan until payment is made.

Trials

We may offer free trials of paid features, for example a one-off trial of the Starter plan that does not need a payment card. The length and scope of a trial are shown when you start it, and we may end or change trial offers at any time. When a trial ends without a paid subscription, your organisation returns to the Free plan and the downgrade rules below apply.

Cancellation and refunds

You can cancel a paid subscription at any time from your account settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period: you keep the features of your paid plan until then, you are not billed for any later period, and your organisation then moves to the Free plan. Fees already paid, for the current period or any earlier one, are not refundable, except where the law requires a refund.

Cancelling a subscription does not delete your organisation or its data. To have your data deleted, delete the organisation or your account (see section 12).

Downgrades and plan limits

If your organisation moves to a plan with lower limits (because you downgrade, cancel, a trial ends, or a payment fails), you cannot create new items beyond the new limits. Items over the limits (for example agents, metrics, status pages, or subscribers) stay active for a grace period, which is currently seven days, and we email the account owner before it ends. After the grace period, the items over the limits are paused: they stop running and sending, but they are not deleted. You can choose which items stay active, and paused items resume when you upgrade or bring your usage within the limits. Features that are not included in the new plan stop working when the plan changes. We are not liable for any loss caused by paused items or features that are no longer available on your plan.

Free plan

The Free plan is offered without time limit, but we may change its features and limits at any time.

4. Changes to the Service, beta features, and AI features

We may add, change, or remove features of the Service at any time. We may suspend or discontinue the Service in whole or in part. Where a change materially reduces the functionality available to paying customers, we will give advance notice by email.

Beta features. Features labelled beta, preview, early access, or similar are provided for evaluation. They may change or be withdrawn at any time, may be less reliable than the rest of the Service, and are provided without any commitment beyond what these Terms say about the Service generally.

AI features. AI assist uses a third-party AI model to suggest drafts of incident updates and postmortem fields and, where you turn it on, to translate published status messages. AI output can be wrong, incomplete, or inappropriate. You are responsible for reviewing a draft before you publish it, and for translated text shown on your status pages while translation is turned on. You can switch AI assist off for your organisation at any time. What is sent to the AI provider is described on the Subprocessors page.

5. Your data and your responsibilities

Ownership and our licence

You retain all right, title, and interest in the data you upload to, or generate through, the Service ("Customer Data"). You grant us a licence to host, copy, store, process, transmit, display, publish, distribute, export, adapt, format, and translate Customer Data, and to let our subprocessors do so, as needed to provide, secure, and support the Service for you and to exercise our rights under these Terms, and as described in the Privacy Policy and the Data Processing Agreement.

We may use aggregated information about how the Service is used, which does not identify you, your users, or any individual, to operate, secure, and improve the Service.

You can export Customer Data at any time using the export features and API available on your plan. If your plan does not include them, write to [email protected] and we will provide a reasonable export.

The data you send us

You are responsible for the data you, your users, your Agents, your connected apps, and your integrations send to the Service, and for having the right to send it. You must not send data that you do not have the right to share, special-category personal data, or secrets that should stay on your systems (use environment-variable references for credentials, as the Agent is designed to do). Where Customer Data includes personal data, the Data Processing Agreement applies.

The Observer Agent runs in your environment

The Observer Agent is software you deploy and operate within your own infrastructure. You are solely responsible for its installation, configuration, updates, security, the credentials and network access you give it, and the data it collects and sends. We are responsible only for handling the data the Agent transmits to Observer Cloud after you have configured it. The Agent is open-source software provided under its own licence (see section 6).

Monitoring targets and hosted checks

You configure the metrics, probes, queries, and monitoring targets the Service evaluates. If you use hosted checks, Observer-operated probers send requests to the targets you specify on your behalf. You warrant that you own, or are authorised to monitor, every target you configure. We do not verify that authorisation. You are responsible for ensuring that your monitoring complies with all applicable laws, including data protection law, computer misuse law, and any contractual restrictions on the targets. We may pause or remove a check that is the subject of an abuse complaint or that risks harm to the target, the Service, or others.

Status page content

You are solely responsible for everything published on your status pages and in your status communications, including incident and maintenance messages, postmortems, branding, custom CSS, links, AI-drafted text you publish, and translations shown while translation is turned on. Your content must be accurate to the best of your knowledge, lawful, and must not infringe anyone's rights. We do not pre-screen content, but we may remove or disable content, or suspend a page, if we reasonably believe it breaches these Terms, the Acceptable Use Policy, or the law.

Communications sent on your behalf

When your status pages send emails, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or webhook messages, or update wallet passes, to your subscribers, we send them on your behalf and on your instructions. You are responsible for their content and for complying with the laws that apply to them, including electronic marketing and privacy laws. Subscriptions are opt-in and every message carries a way to unsubscribe; you must not remove or work around these. We may limit, delay, or stop sending to protect deliverability or to prevent abuse.

Status pages: responsibility for end users

If your status pages or reliability portals have subscribers, viewers, customer contacts, or other end users, they are your data subjects, not ours. You are the controller of their personal data. You are responsible for any notice or consent they need, and for handling their data protection requests. We act as your processor for that data, on the terms of the Data Processing Agreement.

Reports and signed evidence

SLA reports, evidence exports, signed statements, and signed history record the data you configured and that your Agents, hosted checks, and integrations reported. They show that a record has not been altered after it was signed. They are not an independent certification that your service met any commitment, and we do not verify the accuracy of the underlying data.

Detection accuracy depends on your configuration

The accuracy of incident detection, alerting, and status reporting depends on the metrics, thresholds, and configuration you provide, and on your Agents, network, and third-party services. We make no warranty that any specific outage, degradation, or condition will be detected or notified, nor that any detection will be free of false positives. You are responsible for defining what constitutes a meaningful signal for your service and for tuning thresholds accordingly.

Observational, not operational

Observer provides monitoring, alerting, and status communication. It is not part of your production infrastructure. You must not design your systems so that Observer's availability is required for your service or infrastructure to function, and we accept no liability for damage arising from architectures that depend on Observer for operational continuity.

Prohibited uses: safety-critical systems

You must not use the Service to monitor, control, or communicate about systems where failure of monitoring could result in death, serious personal injury, severe environmental damage, or critical infrastructure failure. The Service is not designed for safety-critical applications. Such use is a material breach of these Terms and grounds for immediate termination.

6. Our intellectual property and open-source components

The Service, including its software, documentation, design, brand, and the Observer name, is owned by the Company or its licensors. These Terms grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable licence to use the Service during your subscription, in line with these Terms. They do not grant you any other rights in the Service's intellectual property. Any configuration, integration, import, or custom work we do for you belongs to us, and you may use it only as part of the Service under these Terms.

Some components, including the Observer Agent, the CLI, and some libraries, are published under open-source licences. Your use of those components is governed by their licence, which prevails over these Terms for that component to the extent of any conflict. Nothing in these Terms limits the rights an open-source licence gives you.

If you provide feedback about the Service, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use that feedback for any purpose. We will not identify you publicly as the source of any feedback.

7. Third-party services

The Service lets you connect to, or rely on, services provided by others: sign-in providers (such as Google and Microsoft), notification and incident tools (such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, Jira, and others), wallets (such as Apple Wallet), your own identity provider, cloud and monitoring backends your Agents query, and the systems you monitor. Your use of a third-party service is governed by your agreement with its provider. We do not control and are not responsible for third-party services, their availability, their changes, or how they handle data you send to them. We may stop supporting a third-party service if its provider changes or withdraws it, or if continued support becomes impractical.

When you configure an integration, destination, webhook, or other recipient, you instruct us to send the relevant Customer Data to it. You warrant that doing so is lawful and does not breach anyone's rights, and that you have any agreement with the recipient that the law requires. We have no control over, and no responsibility for, what a recipient you choose does with that data.

8. Warranty disclaimer

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Company makes no warranties, representations or conditions of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied terms of satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. Without limiting the foregoing, the Company does not warrant that (i) the Service will meet your specific requirements, (ii) the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free, (iii) the results obtained from the Service, including alerts, status verdicts, reports, AI output, and translations, will be accurate or reliable, or (iv) any errors in the Service will be corrected. We do not offer service-level commitments or service credits. The Service, its reports, evidence exports, and our documentation are not legal, regulatory, audit, or compliance advice, and we do not warrant that using the Service will satisfy any regulatory obligation (including DORA or similar operational resilience rules) or any commitment you make to others. We do not warrant that the Service or the Observer Agent will work with any platform, version, or system other than those our documentation lists as supported; you are responsible for keeping your systems within those requirements. Any uptime, availability or performance figures we publish about the Service, including on our own status page, are for information only and are not commitments. A service level binds the Company only if it is set out in an order form signed by the Company. Service levels you offer your own customers, including any you measure, report or evidence using the Service, are your commitments and not ours.

9. Limitation of liability

What we are not liable for

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Company is not liable to you, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty, or otherwise, for any:

1. loss of profits, revenue, income, business, contracts, opportunity, use, production, anticipated savings, or goodwill, in each case whether direct or indirect;
2. loss or corruption of data, databases, or software, or the cost of restoring them, whether direct or indirect;
3. losses caused by the Service being unavailable, by a failure to detect, alert on, or report any condition, or by a notification not being delivered;
4. losses caused by third-party services, by your Agents or configuration, or by content you publish;
5. cost of procuring substitute goods or services; or
6. indirect, consequential, special, or punitive loss,

in each case even if the Company was advised that such loss was possible. The Company is also not liable for any failure or delay to the extent it is caused by your act or omission, your breach of these Terms, or your systems, networks, or third-party providers. Each of these exclusions is separate and applies independently of the others.

Cap on our liability

Subject to the paragraph below, the Company's total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with these Terms, the Service, the Data Processing Agreement, and any related agreement, however arising and across all claims, is limited to the greater of (i) the total fees paid and payable by you to the Company for the Service in the twelve (12) months immediately before the event giving rise to the first claim, and (ii) one hundred pounds sterling (£100). Where you use the Service on the Free plan, during a trial, or through beta features, the Company's total aggregate liability in connection with that use is limited to one hundred pounds sterling (£100). These limits apply to all claims together, not to each claim, and are not increased by the number of claims or claimants.

Allocation of risk

The Service observes and reports on systems; it does not run them. You are responsible for deciding whether the Service is suitable for your needs, for keeping your own independent means of detecting and responding to incidents, and for insuring against losses that an outage, a missed alert, or an inaccurate status could cause you or your customers. The fees for the Service are set on the basis of the exclusions and limits in this section, which you agree are reasonable.

What nothing in these Terms limits

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for: (a) death or personal injury caused by negligence; (b) fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; (c) any other liability that cannot be excluded or limited under the laws of England and Wales. Nothing in these Terms limits your obligation to pay fees due.

Time limit for claims

To the maximum extent permitted by law, any claim arising out of or in connection with these Terms, the Service, or any related agreement must be brought within one (1) year after the claimant became aware, or ought reasonably to have become aware, of the facts giving rise to it, or it is barred.

10. Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the Company, its operator(s), agents, and contractors against any and all claims, damages, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to: (a) your breach of these Terms, the Acceptable Use Policy, the Data Processing Agreement, or any applicable law; (b) Customer Data, your monitoring configuration, your status page content, or your use of the Service infringing or allegedly infringing the rights of any third party; (c) claims brought by end users of any status page, reliability portal, or status communication you create (including subscribers, viewers, customer contacts, or other recipients of communications sent through the Service on your behalf); (d) your monitoring of any system, including through hosted checks, without proper authorisation; (e) the operation of your Agents and connected apps; or (f) your negligence or wilful misconduct. The Company will give you prompt notice of any such claim. You will control the defence and any settlement, but no settlement that requires an admission or payment by the Company may be made without the Company's prior written consent, and the Company may take part in the defence with its own counsel at its own cost.

11. Suspension

We may suspend all or part of your access to the Service, or any status page, check, Agent, key, or integration, with immediate effect if we reasonably believe that: (a) you have breached these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) fees are overdue; (c) your use poses a security risk, may harm the Service, other customers, or third parties, or may expose us to liability; (d) suspension is required by law or by a competent authority; or (e) your account is connected to fraud or to a sanctioned person or territory. Where it is practical and lawful to do so, we will contact the account owner before suspending, and we will lift a suspension once the reason for it has been resolved.

12. Termination

By you. You may stop using the Service at any time. You can delete your organisation from its settings, and your user account from your account settings.

By us. We may terminate your account or organisation with immediate effect for material breach of these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, for repeated breaches, or where the law requires it, and for any other reason on reasonable written notice. Where practical, we will contact the account owner before taking action, except where the use is harming the Service or other customers, where the law requires otherwise, or where we have a reasonable basis to suspect fraud or a security risk.

What happens to your data. You should export any data you want to keep before you delete your organisation or account. When an organisation is deleted, or after we terminate it, its Customer Data is removed from active systems and deleted from backups within 90 days, unless the law requires us to keep it. Until it is deleted from active systems, you may ask us for an export and we will make reasonable efforts to provide one. See the Privacy Policy and the Data Processing Agreement for full retention details.

Accrued rights. Suspension or termination does not affect any rights or remedies that have accrued to the Company, and any unpaid fees for the period up to termination become due immediately.

What survives. Sections that by their nature should survive termination, including sections 5 (as to your responsibilities), 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, and 15, survive it.

13. Export controls and sanctions

You must comply with all export control and sanctions laws that apply to your use of the Service, including those of the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United States. You confirm that neither you nor any user of your account is located in, or is a resident or national of, a country or territory subject to comprehensive sanctions, or is a person (or owned or controlled by a person) designated on a sanctions list. You must not use the Service, or let anyone else use it, in breach of those laws. We may suspend or terminate an account immediately, without liability, to comply with them.

14. General

Force majeure

The Company is not liable for any failure or delay in performance arising from causes beyond its reasonable control, including acts of God, war, terrorism, civil unrest, governmental action, labour disputes, internet or telecommunications failure, cyberattack, outage of any subprocessor or upstream provider (including hosting, CDN, authentication, billing, email, or AI providers), failure of utility services, fire, flood, explosion, epidemic, change in law, malicious software, or any other cause beyond its reasonable control. The Company's performance is suspended for the duration of the event and resumes when reasonably practicable.

Technical reality

Connections between your browser or the Observer Agent and the Service are encrypted in transit. Operating the Service involves transmission over networks we do not control, and data sent to destinations you configure (for example webhook URLs, integrations, or endpoints using plain http://) is protected only as well as that destination and its connection allow, which is outside our control.

Notices

We may give you notices by email to the account owner's address, or through the console. Notices take effect when sent. You may give us notices by email to [email protected]. Keep the account owner's email address current.

Assignment and subcontracting

You may not assign or transfer these Terms or your rights under them without the Company's prior written consent. The Company may assign or transfer these Terms without your consent to a successor entity following a change of legal form (for example, on incorporation as a limited company), an acquisition, or a reorganisation, to an affiliate, or to a buyer of all or a substantial part of its business or assets, provided the successor agrees to be bound by these Terms. The Company may use subcontractors and subprocessors to provide the Service and remains responsible for them as these Terms and the Data Processing Agreement describe.

No third-party rights

No one other than you and the Company has any right to enforce these Terms, and the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 does not apply, except that the Company's operator(s), agents, and contractors may rely on section 10.

Waiver, severability and entire agreement

A failure or delay in exercising a right is not a waiver of it. A waiver is effective only if given in writing, and applies only to the specific instance it covers. In these Terms, "including" and similar words mean including without limitation. If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid or unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable, and the remaining provisions remain in effect. These Terms, together with the documents referenced in them, are the entire agreement between you and the Company about the Service and supersede any prior agreement on the same subject. Terms in any purchase order or similar document of yours do not apply. You confirm that in entering into these Terms you have not relied on any statement, representation, assurance or warranty (whether made innocently or negligently) that is not set out in these Terms, and that you will have no remedy for any such statement. Nothing in this paragraph limits liability for fraudulent misrepresentation.

Relationship

The parties are independent contractors. Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, or employment relationship.

15. Governing law and disputes

These Terms, and any dispute or claim (including non-contractual disputes or claims) arising out of or in connection with them or their subject matter, are governed by the laws of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

If you have a complaint about the Service, please contact [email protected] first. We will respond as quickly as we reasonably can.

16. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be notified by email to the account owner before they take effect, except where a change is required by law or for security reasons, in which case it may take effect immediately. If you do not agree to a change, you may stop using the Service and delete your organisation before the change takes effect. Continued use of the Service after the effective date of an updated version constitutes acceptance of it.

The current version is always available at https://use.observer/policies/terms.

Contact

For questions about these Terms, write to [email protected]. For security disclosure, write to [email protected]. Our trading address is available on request: write to [email protected] and we will send it promptly.