Terms of service

1. Information only: not for navigation

Voydar is an information service. Do not use it for navigation, collision avoidance or safety of life at sea.

• Ship positions come from AIS broadcasts picked up by receivers. They can be delayed, incomplete, wrong or deliberately falsified, and coverage varies by region. A position shown on Voydar may be old; the page says when it was received.
• Destinations and arrival times entered by ships' crews are shown as the crew typed them and are not verified.
• Estimates, such as arrival times, distances, congestion and other derived figures, are Voydar's calculations and are labelled as estimates. They can be wrong.
• Sanctions, inspection, ownership and other records are copied from their original publishers and can be out of date. Before any legal, compliance, commercial or financial decision, check the official source, which we link wherever we can.

2. The Service

Anyone can look up ships, ports and companies on Voydar for free and without an account. An account lets you save things and receive alerts; paid plans add limits, history, tools, the Terminal and machine access as described on the pricing page. We add, change and sometimes remove features. We will not remove a feature you have paid for during your current billing period without a fair replacement or a pro-rata refund.

3. Your account

• You must be at least 16 years old to create an account.
• Give us an email address you control, and keep your sign-in secure. You are responsible for activity on your account.
• One person per personal account. Personal plans and the free trial are for individuals; each person may use the free trial once.
• Tell us promptly at privacy@seadar.io if you think your account has been compromised.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the Service to break the law, including sanctions and export-control laws, or to help anyone else do so;
• use the Service to stalk, harass or harm any person, or to track a private individual without a lawful reason;
• scrape, crawl or download the Service by automated means except as allowed by our robots.txt file and, for data, through the API within its published limits;
• bulk-copy, resell, sublicense or redistribute Voydar data, except as allowed by your plan, the API terms below, or the open licence shown next to a specific fact;
• get around plan limits, rate limits, access controls or security measures, create accounts automatically, or share one account among several people;
• interfere with the Service, probe it for vulnerabilities without our written permission, or upload malware;
• misrepresent Voydar data or estimates as official, or remove the source, licence or attribution shown with it.

We may limit, suspend or close access that breaks these rules. If you find a security issue, please report it to privacy@seadar.io.

5. Data, sources and licences

Voydar combines data from many public and licensed sources, each with its own terms. We show the source of each fact and, where a source requires it, its licence and attribution. When you reuse a fact, follow the licence shown with it (for example, text under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence must keep its attribution and licence).

The Voydar website, software, design, and our own compilations and derived data are owned by The Schoeller Group LLC. Unless your plan or a written agreement says otherwise, you may use the Service and its data for your own personal or internal purposes, and you may quote or link to individual Voydar pages with attribution to Voydar.

6. API terms

These terms apply to the Voydar API and machine-readable endpoints (for example /api/v1/…), in addition to the rest of these terms.

• Keys and limits. Use only your own API key where one is issued, keep it secret, and stay within your plan's credits and rate limits. We may throttle or block traffic that endangers the Service.
• Rights travel with the data. API responses carry source, licence and attribution fields and list anything withheld. You must keep attribution where a licence requires it and must not use withheld or restricted data.
• Commercial use. Free and Plus are for personal and evaluation use. Pro allows internal business use: using the data in your own work, decisions, reports and internal tools. Building the data into a product, app or service that others use (redistribution) requires an API, Team or Enterprise plan. Every use is always subject to the licence of each source, shown with the data.
• No caching to rebuild the dataset. You may cache responses to run your application, but not to build a copy of Voydar's data for redistribution.
• Preview. API endpoints marked "preview" may change or be withdrawn without notice and have no uptime commitment.
• Revocation. We may suspend or revoke keys used in breach of these terms.

7. Embeds, feeds and open datasets

Voydar offers free ways to reuse its public pages elsewhere. They come with one condition: attribution.

• Embeds. You may place Voydar widgets (the /embed/… pages, with or without our embed.js resize script) on any website or app, free, including commercial ones. Do not hide, cover, crop or alter the "Data: Voydar" credit or remove the link back to Voydar, and do not frame our other pages. We may change a widget's design, cache it, or stop serving it to a site that breaks these terms or loads it abusively.
• Feeds. You may read and display our Atom feeds (/feeds/…) in feed readers, apps and websites, with a link back to the entry's Voydar page. Poll no more often than every 15 minutes.
• Open datasets. The files on the open data page are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Credit "Voydar (seadar.io)" and the upstream sources listed with each file, and say if you changed the data. This licence covers those files only, not the rest of Voydar.
• Everything else stays under these terms. Embeds and feeds show facts that carry their own sources and licences; the "Rights travel with the data" rule above applies to them too.

8. Paid plans, renewal and cancellation

• Prices. Prices are shown on the pricing page in US dollars. Taxes may be added where required.
• Automatic renewal. Monthly and yearly plans renew automatically at the end of each period and are charged to your payment method until you cancel. Where the law requires it, we remind you before a yearly plan renews.
• Cancelling. You can cancel at any time from your account (through Stripe's customer portal) or by emailing privacy@seadar.io. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and you keep your plan until then.
• Price changes. We will tell you at least 30 days before a price change applies to your subscription. The new price applies from your next renewal; you can cancel before then.
• Free trial. Accounts that have never had one can start a 14-day Pro trial once. No payment method is needed; if you don't add one, the trial ends and your account returns to its previous plan without any charge.
• Changing plans. When you move to a lower plan, the lower plan's limits apply from the change. We don't delete what you saved because of a downgrade, but items over the new limits may be paused (for example, follows over the limit stop sending alerts).
• Failed payments. If a payment fails, we and Stripe retry for a short period; if it still fails, your account returns to the Free plan.

9. Refunds

If you are not happy with a new paid subscription, email privacy@seadar.io within 14 days of your first payment for it and we will refund that payment in full. Otherwise, payments are non-refundable and we don't give refunds or credits for partial periods, except where the law requires it or as stated under The Service above. Nothing in these terms limits your statutory rights as a consumer, including any right to withdraw from a contract in the EEA or the UK.

10. Purchases through Apple or Google

If you buy a subscription through the Apple App Store or Google Play (where offered), the store is the seller of record: its terms govern payment, automatic renewal, cancellation and refunds. Manage or cancel the subscription in your App Store or Google Play account settings, at least 24 hours before it renews; deleting the app does not cancel it. Refunds for these purchases are requested from Apple or Google, and we cannot issue them. These terms, not the store's, govern your use of the Service itself; Apple and Google are not responsible for the Service or its content.

11. Organisation and Enterprise plans

Team, API and Enterprise plans are bought by an organisation. An order form or invoice agreed with us may add to these terms; where it conflicts with them, the order form wins.

12. What you put into Voydar

You keep ownership of what you save (follows, watchlists, notes and settings). You give us permission to store and process it only to provide the Service to you.

If you feed data to Voydar from an AIS or ADS-B receiver (a Beacon station), you grant The Schoeller Group LLC a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence, which we may sublicense, to use, store, combine, publish and distribute that data as part of the Service and our data products. You remain free to share the same data with anyone else. You confirm you are allowed to receive and share what you send, and you must not send data you received from another network under terms that forbid it.

If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without any obligation to you.

13. Private AIS feeds

If your plan includes private feeds, you can connect your own AIS receiver, or a fleet AIS feed you are licensed to use, as a private feed. For that data:

• It stays yours. Sending it to Voydar gives us no rights to it beyond what we need to run the feed for you. The contributor licence in "What you put into Voydar" does not apply to a private feed.
• We process it only for you. We store it and show it to you: on your map in the Terminal and through your own API key. We check it for errors the same way as other AIS data.
• It is never public. We do not publish, sell, share or license it, and we do not use it in public pages, maps, statistics, datasets, the public API or our own vessel records.
• We delete it. Positions are kept for your plan's history depth (at most 90 days) and then deleted automatically. Deleting the feed, or your account, deletes its data.
• Licensed feeds. If you connect a feed someone else licenses to you, you confirm that your licence allows a service provider to store it and show it to you, and you name the licensor. A licensed feed can never be made public.
• Switching. You can switch your own receiver between private and public (contributing to the Beacon network) at any time. A switch applies only to data received from that moment on.

14. Other websites and services

Voydar links to official sources, news publishers and other websites that we don't control. Their content and terms are their own responsibility.

15. Disclaimer

To the fullest extent the law allows, the Service and all data, estimates and content are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We don't promise that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that any ship's position or information will be available.

16. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows: The Schoeller Group LLC will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or business opportunities, arising from your use of or inability to use the Service, including any decision made on the basis of Voydar data or estimates; and our total liability for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for the Service in the 12 months before the claim arose and US$100.

Some jurisdictions don't allow some of these exclusions or limits. In that case they apply only as far as the law allows, and nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law, such as liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

17. Indemnity

If you use the Service for business purposes, you agree to defend and indemnify The Schoeller Group LLC against claims, losses and costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your breach of these terms or your misuse of the Service or its data.

18. Suspension and termination

You can stop using the Service and delete your account at any time (see the privacy policy). We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, puts the Service or other people at risk, or is required to be closed by law. Where reasonable, we will tell you first and give you a chance to fix the problem. If we close a paid account without cause, we will refund the unused part of your current period. Sections that by their nature should survive (such as data licences, disclaimers, limitation of liability and governing law) survive termination.

19. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of [STATE TO BE CHOSEN BY THE SCHOELLER GROUP LLC], United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and disputes will be resolved in the state or federal courts located in that state, unless the law of your country gives you the right to bring a claim in your local courts. If you are a consumer in the EEA or the UK, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live.

Before filing a claim, please email privacy@seadar.io so we can try to resolve it informally within 30 days.

20. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will change the "Last updated" date above and, for changes that materially affect your rights or a paid plan, tell account holders by email or in the product at least 14 days before they take effect. Continuing to use the Service after that means you accept the new terms; if you don't agree, you can cancel and stop using it.

21. General

These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service. If a court finds part of them unenforceable, the rest still applies. Not enforcing a term is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent; we may transfer ours to a successor of the Service, who will be bound by them.

22. Contact

The Schoeller Group LLC, operator of Voydar. Email: privacy@seadar.io.