Terms, usage & security policy

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you (or the organisation you represent) and Zenith Flow Innovations, a company with offices in Palo Alto, California, operator of the HexStellar service ("HexStellar", "we", "us"). By creating an account, installing the client, or sending a single request to the API, you accept these Terms in full.

If you are accepting on behalf of an organisation, you represent that you have the authority to bind it, and "you" means that organisation.

The service comprises the hosted HexStellar engine and API, the command-line client, the web panel, the documentation, and every artefact we make available to you (together, the "Service").

You submit a problem described as structured data. The Service returns an answer accompanied by a quality label and a receipt. Access is licensed, metered in compute units, and bound to an API key issued to your account.

Every answer is labelled. A result marked as a certified optimum has been proven by exhausting the relevant space. Any other result is a hypothesis to be verified, however strong it appears. HexStellar replaces search; it does not replace proof.

You are solely responsible for deciding whether an answer is fit for your purpose and for verifying any result you rely on. The Service is not a substitute for professional judgement and must not be used as the sole basis for any decision affecting safety of life, health, legal rights, or critical infrastructure.

The method by which an answer is produced is proprietary, confidential, and is not disclosed. No provision of these Terms, and no use of the Service, conveys any right to that method.

You must provide accurate registration details and keep them current. One account per person or organisation; accounts may not be shared, resold, or transferred.

You must verify your email address before the Service will perform work for you. Verification protects the free tier for genuine users and is a condition of access, not a formality.

API keys are credentials. You are responsible for keeping them secret and for all activity conducted with them, including compute consumed by a key you exposed. Revoke a compromised key immediately from the panel; revocation is instant and permanent.

We may suspend or terminate an account, without notice and without refund, where we reasonably believe it is being used in breach of these Terms.

This section is not boilerplate. Read it before you point any tool at the Service.

You must NOT conduct, attempt, or commission any security test, penetration test, vulnerability scan, fuzzing campaign, load or stress test, denial-of-service test, red-team exercise, or any other adversarial probing of the Service, its API, its infrastructure, or any system we operate. This prohibition applies whether or not you believe your activity is benign, non-destructive, academic, or "just checking".

You must NOT attempt to bypass, disable, degrade, or measure the limits of any authentication, authorisation, metering, quota, rate-limit, admission-control, or abuse-prevention mechanism, nor probe the Service to infer its capacity, architecture, or internal behaviour.

We operate no bug-bounty programme and issue no authorisation, express or implied, for any form of security testing. There is no safe harbour here. Any such activity is unauthorised access.

CONSEQUENCES. Where we detect activity of this kind we will, at our sole discretion and without prior notice: suspend or permanently terminate the account and every associated key; block the originating networks; retain the full request record; forfeit any unused balance; and pursue all remedies available to us.

REPORTING TO AUTHORITIES. We monitor the Service continuously and log every request, including source address, network metadata, client fingerprint, account identity, timestamps, and payloads. Where activity appears to constitute unauthorised access, interference with a computer system, or another criminal offence, we will preserve that evidence and refer it, together with your identifying information, to the competent law-enforcement and regulatory authorities in the relevant jurisdictions, and cooperate fully with any resulting investigation or proceeding. Conduct of this kind may constitute an offence under, among others, the United States Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030), Brazilian Law No. 12.737/2012 and Article 154-A of the Brazilian Penal Code, the United Kingdom Computer Misuse Act 1990, and equivalent legislation elsewhere.

NO LIABILITY ON OUR PART. We accept no responsibility whatsoever for any consequence of your prohibited testing, including any loss, corruption, or exposure of your own data, any disruption to your systems, any cost you incur, or any legal consequence you face. You indemnify us in full against any claim, loss, damage, cost, or expense (including legal fees) arising from such activity.

You must not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code, algorithms, internal methods, data structures, models, or architecture of the Service, nor permit or assist any third party to do so.

You must not probe, benchmark, profile, time, differentially analyse, or otherwise study the Service with the purpose or effect of inferring how it works, nor publish any benchmark or measurement of the Service without our prior written consent.

You must not use the Service, its outputs, or any observation of it to develop, train, assist, or improve a competing product or service, nor to train any machine-learning model.

You must not resell, sublicense, rent, lease, or provide the Service to any third party, nor operate it as a service bureau, proxy, or intermediary.

You must not automate account creation, evade rate limits or quotas through multiple accounts or addresses, use disposable or fraudulent identities, or otherwise abuse the free tier.

You must not submit unlawful content, infringe any third party's rights, or use the Service in violation of any applicable export-control or sanctions law.

You must not remove, obscure, or alter any proprietary notice, receipt, quality label, or attribution produced by the Service.

The Service is licensed, never sold. All right, title, and interest in and to the HexStellar engine, its algorithms, its source code in every form, the client, the documentation, the receipts, the trade marks, and all related intellectual property are and remain the exclusive property of Zenith Flow Innovations and its licensors.

The engine's methods are trade secrets, protected as such under the United States Defend Trade Secrets Act, the Uniform Trade Secrets Act as enacted in California, Brazilian Law No. 9.279/1996, and equivalent law elsewhere. They are also the subject of granted and pending patent applications. Nothing in these Terms grants you any licence, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise, to any of it.

Your licence is strictly limited to: installing the client, submitting your own problems, and using the answers returned to you for your own internal business or research purposes. Every right not expressly granted is reserved.

YOUR DATA REMAINS YOURS. We claim no ownership of the problems you submit or the use you make of the answers. You grant us only the limited licence necessary to process a request, bill it, secure the Service, and comply with law.

FEEDBACK. If you send us suggestions or feedback, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use it without obligation or attribution.

ENFORCEMENT. We will enforce these rights vigorously, including by injunctive relief, and you agree that a breach of this section or of section 4 would cause irreparable harm for which damages alone would be an inadequate remedy.

Every request is priced by command, problem size, and requested effort, and is debited atomically from your balance. A request that delivers no answer is refunded; you are never charged for a result you did not receive.

The Service enforces rate limits, per-account compute budgets, concurrency ceilings, and a queue-admission budget. When a ceiling is reached the Service responds with a clean, retryable status and a Retry-After indication. You must honour it. Deliberately ignoring backpressure, or engineering around it, is a breach of section 4.

Expensive work may be queued and answered asynchronously with a job identifier to poll. Free-tier balances are granted at our discretion and may be adjusted or withdrawn.

We process the data necessary to operate, bill, secure, and improve the Service: account details, request metadata (including source address, client and device information, timing, size, and outcome), and problem payloads.

DO NOT submit personal data, health data, payment-card data, credentials, or other sensitive information inside a problem payload. A problem should be numbers and structure, not people. You are responsible for any such data you choose to send, and for having a lawful basis to send it.

We monitor the Service continuously for abuse, fraud, and unauthorised access. Logs are retained for as long as needed to bill, debug, defend the Service, and satisfy legal obligations.

We disclose data to third parties only as needed to run the Service, or where required by law or by the process described in section 4.

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free, that any result will be optimal, correct, or suitable for your purpose, or that any defect will be corrected. A result labelled as a hypothesis is exactly that.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, NOR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, GOODWILL, OR BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY, HOWEVER CAUSED AND UNDER ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY.

OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE SHALL NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNTS YOU ACTUALLY PAID US FOR THE SERVICE IN THE THREE MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM.

These limitations apply even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose, and they do not exclude liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Zenith Flow Innovations, its officers, employees, and agents from and against any claim, demand, proceeding, loss, damage, cost, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or relating to: your use of the Service; your breach of these Terms; any data you submit; any decision you take on the basis of a result; and any activity prohibited by section 4 or section 5.

You may stop using the Service at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access immediately for breach of these Terms, for suspected abuse, or where required by law, without refund.

On termination your licence ends, your keys stop working, and you must cease using and delete all copies of the client. Sections 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, and 14 survive termination.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

The state and federal courts located in Santa Clara County, California have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms, and you consent to that jurisdiction and venue. Nothing prevents either party from seeking injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect its intellectual property or confidential information.

These Terms, together with any order form and the documentation referenced in them, are the entire agreement between the parties and supersede all prior understandings.

We may amend these Terms; material changes will be announced to the email address on your account and take effect on the date stated. Continuing to use the Service after that date is acceptance.

If any provision is held unenforceable, it is severed and the remainder stays in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

Neither party is liable for a failure to perform caused by an event beyond its reasonable control.