Terms of Service

1. Scope and provider

These terms apply to every use of Nod: this website, the dashboard and the checks. Your contract partner (“we”) is:

[LEGAL NAME]
[STREET AND NUMBER]
[POSTCODE AND CITY]
Germany

Email: [CONTACT EMAIL]

Terms of your own apply only if we have agreed to them in text form.

2. For businesses and professional developers only

Nod is offered only to entrepreneurs within the meaning of § 14 of the German Civil Code (BGB): companies, freelancers and self-employed developers who use it for their commercial or independent professional work. It is not offered to consumers (§ 13 BGB).

By creating an account you confirm that you use Nod in that capacity. If you sign up for a company or another organisation, you confirm that you may act for it; “you” then means that organisation.

3. Account and contract

You need a GitHub account to sign in. The contract about using Nod free of charge is concluded when you sign in for the first time. A contract about a paid plan is concluded when you complete the order on the checkout page of our payment provider, Stripe.

An account is for one person or one organisation. Keep the GitHub account you sign in with secure, and tell us if someone else has used your account.

The language of the contract is English. The current version of these terms is always available on this page; we do not keep a separate copy of the contract for you.

4. What the service does

Nod is an automated check of an iOS app before it is submitted to App Review. A check has up to three parts:

• the store listing, read from App Store Connect with an API key you provide;
• the source code, read from the GitHub repository you choose;
• a live run, in which a simulator build you upload is installed in an iOS simulator and operated by an AI agent.

The result is a list of findings, each with a severity, the section of Apple's App Review Guidelines it refers to and a suggested fix, plus a readiness score that follows a fixed rule. The findings are produced by fixed rules and by an AI model. A part whose source you have not connected is skipped.

Which checks, how many apps and which additional features your plan includes is shown on the pricing page and under Billing in the dashboard at the time you order. Features marked there or in the dashboard as experimental or as not yet available are not part of what we owe.

5. What the service is not

• No guarantee of approval. Apple alone decides whether an app is approved. An app can be rejected although Nod found nothing, and approved although it found something. We do not promise any outcome of App Review, and no score or verdict in the dashboard is such a promise.
• Automated findings can be wrong. Findings can be mistaken or incomplete, and two checks of the same app can come to different results. Suggested fixes and prompts for coding tools are suggestions. Review them before you act on them; you remain responsible for your app, your code and your submission.
• Limited coverage. A check covers only the sources you connect. The live run happens in an iOS simulator, not on a physical device, and covers only the paths the agent reaches in the time it has.
• No legal advice. References to Apple's guidelines and remarks about privacy, consumer or other law are not legal advice.
• Not Apple. Nod is independent of Apple. The guideline text it works with is a copy of Apple's public page and can lag behind a change.
• No archive. Nod is not a place to store code, builds or keys. Keep your own copies of everything you connect or upload.

6. Your material and your permissions

“Material” means everything you connect, upload or enter: repositories, builds, App Store Connect keys and the data read with them, demo accounts and rejection messages.

Your rights. The material stays yours. You give us only the non-exclusive right, for the term of the contract, to store, copy, run and analyse it in order to provide the service to you. This includes passing parts of it to the service providers named in the Privacy Policy, in particular the provider of the AI model. We do not use your material to train AI models, we do not publish it and we do not pass it on for anyone else's purposes. You may use the results of your checks freely in your business.

What you confirm. Each time you connect or upload material you confirm that:

• you own the code and the builds or are authorised by their owner, for example your employer or client, to have them checked by a service like this one;
• you are allowed to create the App Store Connect API key and to use it for this purpose, under the rules of your team and your agreements with Apple;
• connecting the material does not breach a confidentiality obligation or anyone else's rights.

Read-only access. We use the App Store Connect key and the GitHub App only to read. You can end either access at any time: remove the key in the dashboard or revoke it at Apple, uninstall the GitHub App on GitHub, or delete the app in the dashboard.

Builds. A build you upload is executed in a simulator. It must not contain malware or code meant to attack, scan or explore our systems or anyone else's.

Test data. Use demo accounts and test data that do not belong to real people. Keep passwords, tokens and other secrets out of the material where you can. We leave out files that usually hold secrets before anything is sent to the AI model, but that filter can miss something.

7. Acceptable use

You may check your own apps and apps of your clients. You may not:

• check apps, code or accounts you are not authorised to have checked;
• use the live run to attack, scan or put load on other systems, or try to get out of the virtual machine or into our infrastructure;
• get around the limits of your plan, for example with several accounts;
• resell access to Nod itself, or let other organisations use your account;
• use the service by automated means other than the documented build upload, or in a way that overloads it;
• use Nod to work out how to hide an app's behaviour from App Review, or otherwise to deceive Apple;
• upload material that is unlawful.

If you breach this section we may stop running checks and suspend your account for as long as needed to avert harm. We will tell you why, unless the law forbids it.

8. Plans and prices

There is a free plan and there are paid plans. What each includes and what it costs is shown on the pricing page and under Billing in the dashboard; the plan and price shown when you order apply to your contract.

Prices are in euro per month. [VAT NOTE] Stripe may offer to charge you in your local currency instead, at its exchange rate.

Allowances that are counted per month (for example a number of checks) are counted per calendar month and do not carry over. A check that fails or that you cancel is not counted.

9. Billing, renewal and cancellation

Billing. Paid plans are billed monthly in advance through Stripe, by the payment method you enter there. Invoices are available in the billing portal, which you reach from the Billing page of the dashboard.

Renewal. A paid plan runs for one month and renews automatically for one more month each time, until it is cancelled.

Cancellation. You can cancel at any time in the billing portal. The cancellation takes effect at the end of the month you have paid for. Until then you keep your plan; after that the account returns to the free plan. Your apps and results stay in the account, and the limits of the free plan apply to new apps and new checks.

No refunds for a period that has begun. We do not refund the fee for a month that has begun, and we do not pay out or carry over allowances you did not use. Rights the law gives you if we do not provide the service are not affected.

Changing plans. You can switch plans in the billing portal. The change takes effect immediately; the price difference for the rest of the month is settled pro rata on your next invoice.

Failed payments. If a payment fails, Stripe tries again for a limited time and you keep your plan meanwhile. If the payment still fails, the paid plan ends and the account returns to the free plan.

Price changes. We can change the price of a plan with effect from a later billing month. We tell you by email at least 30 days before the new price applies; if you do not agree, you can cancel before it does.

10. Availability and changes to the service

We work to keep Nod available, but we do not promise a particular availability. The service can be interrupted for maintenance, and it depends on others: Apple, GitHub, the provider of the AI model and our hosting providers. A check that cannot be completed is not counted against your plan.

We may develop the service further and change how checks work. If a change removes something essential from a paid plan, we tell you by email at least 30 days in advance, so that you can cancel before the change takes effect.

11. Liability

(1) We are liable without limit for intent and gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under the German Product Liability Act, and where we have given a guarantee or fraudulently concealed a defect.

(2) For slight negligence we are liable only if we breach an essential obligation, meaning an obligation that makes the proper performance of the contract possible in the first place and on whose fulfilment you may regularly rely. In that case our liability is limited to the damage that is typical for this kind of contract and was foreseeable when the contract was concluded.

(3) Beyond paragraphs 1 and 2 we are not liable for slight negligence. Liability regardless of fault for defects that already existed when the contract was concluded (§ 536a(1), first alternative, BGB) is excluded.

(4) Where you use Nod free of charge, we are liable only as described in paragraph 1.

(5) If data is lost, we are liable only for the effort it would take to restore it from the copies you are expected to keep (section 5).

(6) A rejection, a delay or any other decision by Apple is not damage caused by us merely because a check did not report its cause (sections 4 and 5).

(7) These limits also apply to the personal liability of people who work for us or on our behalf.

12. Claims by others

If someone else makes a claim against us because material you connected or uploaded infringes their rights, or because you had no right to connect it, you hold us harmless from that claim and from the reasonable cost of defending against it, unless you are not responsible for the infringement. We will tell you about such a claim without delay.

13. Confidentiality and data protection

We treat your material as confidential and look at it ourselves only where that is needed to run the service, to fix a fault or to answer a request from you.

How we process personal data is described in the Privacy Policy. Where your material contains personal data of other people, we process it on your behalf. If you need a data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR, write to [CONTACT EMAIL].

14. Term and termination

The contract runs for an indefinite time. You can stop using Nod at any time; for paid plans, section 9 applies. We can end a paid plan with 30 days' notice to the end of a billing month, and a free account with 30 days' notice.

Either side can terminate without notice for good cause. For us, good cause includes a serious or repeated breach of section 6 or 7.

You can delete your apps with their results in the dashboard at any time. When a paid plan has ended, or if you never had one, you can delete your account in the dashboard under “Account & GitHub”, or ask us to do it; it is then deleted with everything that belongs to it, except what the law requires us to keep.

15. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms for a good reason, for example when the law changes, when we add features or to close a gap. We tell you about a change by email at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you do not object within that time, the change counts as accepted; we will point this out in the notice. If you object, the contract continues on the previous terms and either side can end it with effect from the day the change would have applied.

We send notices to the email address stored with your account or your billing profile. Please make sure one is on file.

16. Governing law and place of jurisdiction

German law applies. The UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) does not apply.

If you are a merchant, a legal entity under public law or a special fund under public law, or if you have no general place of jurisdiction in Germany, the courts at our place of business have exclusive jurisdiction over all disputes arising from this contract. We may also bring a claim at your place of business.

If a provision of these terms is invalid, the rest remains in effect.