Terms of Service

Vale CMS is a browser-based editor for Vale configuration — .vale.ini, styles, rules, vocabularies, filters, dictionaries, and the rest of the tree. It reads and writes those files in repositories you connect, or in a local folder you pick, and it lints against the real engine rather than an approximation of it.

Vale itself is free, open-source software under the MIT licence, and nothing here governs your use of it. Vale CMS is a separate, proprietary product built on top of it.

You sign in with an emailed magic link, or through GitHub, Google, or GitLab. We never see a password. You're responsible for the security of whatever you sign in with — whoever controls that email account or that provider login controls your Vale CMS account.

One account is for one person. You must be at least 16 years old to use the service.

Anyone signed in can read: browse the sample project, open your own folders and zip files, and look at every rule and setting. Authoring is the paid part — typing in the editor, saving, syncing packages, and connecting a repository all require an active subscription.

Pro is billed per person and entitles the person who bought it. Team is billed per seat; the subscriber assigns and revokes seats, and each seat holder signs in with their own account. We may grant complimentary Team access to open-source projects, at our discretion and revocably.

• Trial. Both plans start with a 30-day free trial, with the same access a paying subscriber has. One trial per customer.
• Merchant of record. Payments are processed by Polar, who is the merchant of record for every transaction. Your purchase is with Polar: their buyer terms, refund policy, and tax handling apply, and they — not we — hold your payment details. We never see your card.
• Renewal and cancellation. Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel. Cancel any time from the billing portal; renewals stop and your access continues to the end of the period you've already paid for. We don't cut you off mid-period for cancelling.
• Refunds. We don't refund time you've already used — the trial exists so you can decide before paying anything. If a charge looks wrong, contact us or Polar before disputing it and we'll sort it out.
• Failed payment. If a payment fails, the subscription goes past due and access ends promptly — typically within minutes, not at the end of a grace period. Updating your payment method restores it just as quickly.
• Price changes. We may change prices. Existing subscribers get notice before a change takes effect on their own subscription.

You own everything you author. We claim no rights in it, we don't retain it, and we don't train anything on it. The engine processes files in memory per request and discards them.

Connecting GitHub or GitLab authorises us to act on your behalf, using your token, for the operations you start — reading files, committing, opening pull requests. We never write to your repository without an explicit action from you. Your token stays in your browser and is forwarded with the single request that needs it; the broker that receives it uses it and retains nothing. You can revoke our access at any time from your GitHub or GitLab settings.

Subscribers can connect an external AI client — Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, and others — to a hosted MCP server that exposes Vale's own tools against the real engine: linting, resolving a config, scaffolding and compiling a rule.

• Your client connects to us, not the other way round. We don't send your content to any AI provider. Whatever your assistant does with your content on its own side is governed by that provider's terms, not ours, and their bill is yours.
• Tokens act as you. Access is authenticated either with a token you mint or by approving a connection on the consent screen. Either way the credential carries your identity and your subscription. Keep it secret. If one leaks, rotating it invalidates every token issued to your account before the rotation — including ones you still wanted.
• Review before you ship. You're responsible for reviewing anything a model produces before it lands in your repository. The engine can confirm that a rule compiles and what it matches; it can't confirm that it says what you meant.

An in-editor assistant that ran on your own provider API key is switched off in this version. If you used it previously, that key is still in your browser's storage and has never been anywhere else; clearing site data removes it.

Don't use the service to break the law. Don't work around subscription checks or access controls, share a seat with more than one person, probe, scan, scrape, or overload the infrastructure, resell access, or use it to build a competing product.

We may suspend an account that does these things.

Vale CMS, including the hosted engine behind it, is proprietary and confidential software. Your subscription grants a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the hosted service. It grants no licence to the source code and no right to copy, modify, decompile, or reverse-engineer it. Third-party components keep their own licences.

The service is provided "as is" and "as available". We don't promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we don't promise it will catch any particular problem in your prose. Vale CMS is an authoring tool; it is not a substitute for review.

We may modify or discontinue features, and will give reasonable notice before removing a paid one. The reassuring part: your work lives in your own git repository, so an outage here never puts it out of reach.

Vale CMS depends on Supabase for sign-in, Polar for billing, GitHub and GitLab for repositories, and our own hosting providers for everything else. An outage or a policy change at any of them can break part of the product, and we're not on the hook for that.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, data, or goodwill. Where we are liable, our total liability arising out of or relating to these terms or the service will not exceed what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

Nothing here limits liability that can't be limited by law.

You can stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or terminate an account for breach of these terms or for non-payment. Either way your content is unaffected — it lives in your repositories, not with us.

We may revise these terms. The date at the top moves when we do, and material changes are announced in-product. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept it.

Questions about these terms: hello@vale.sh.