Terms of service

FlockStack is a newsletter app: you write issues, send them to your subscribers and publish them on the web, from the dashboard, the REST API or an MCP server that AI assistants can use. FlockStack Cloud is the hosted version, run by KMF Ventures LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company ("we", "us") at flockstack.io and eu.flockstack.io. These terms are between you and us. By signing in or using FlockStack Cloud you agree to them and to the privacy policy.

Open source. FlockStack's code is licensed under the AGPL-3.0, and anyone can run it on their own server. That licence covers the code. These terms cover the hosted service we run, which is a separate thing: running your own copy needs none of this, and using ours doesn't change your rights under the licence.

You sign in with a code we email you, with a passkey, or with Google. Use an inbox you control. We allow one account for each inbox, and we don't accept throwaway inboxes. You must be at least 16.

You are responsible for what happens in your account, including what is done with your API keys and the apps you connect to it. Keep keys secret, and revoke any that leaked. Tell us at hello@flockstack.io if you think someone else got in.

When you sign up, you choose where your data is stored: the United States or the European Union. An account lives in one region. We don't move accounts between regions. The regions page lists what is stored where.

A plan sets how many emails you can send in a month and how many active subscribers you can have. Prices are in US dollars, billed monthly or yearly (a yearly plan costs 10 months, not 12), and shown on the pricing section of the home page. You pay through our billing provider, Polar. Your card details go to them, not to us. Every email you send counts toward the month: issues, tests, welcome emails and confirmation emails. If you reach the limit, sending stops with a message and an upgrade link. Nothing is billed on top of your plan. Polar is the merchant of record for FlockStack plans and handles sales tax and VAT on them. If you sell through your own Stripe account, you are responsible for the tax on what you sell.

Cancelling a monthly plan. Cancel any time from the billing page, which opens the billing portal. The subscription ends when you cancel, and you keep access through the end of the period you already paid for. We don't refund the current month.

Yearly plans. Ask for a refund within 30 days of buying and we refund the unused part of the year, pro rata, through the billing provider. Write to hello@flockstack.io. Outside those 30 days, cancelling a yearly plan works like a monthly one: you keep access to the end of the year you paid for, with no refund.

If a payment fails, the provider tries the card again, and your plan keeps working in the meantime. If it still fails, the plan ends like a cancelled one. A cancelled account keeps its data: sending, signups and the website stop, and everything comes back when you subscribe again. You can export, or delete the account, at any time.

Price changes. We email you at least 90 days before a price increase takes effect for your plan, so you can cancel or export first.

FlockStack shares its sending reputation across every account, so these rules protect all of us.

• Email people who asked. Everyone on your list must have agreed to get your emails. Confirmed opt-in is on by default for new newsletters, and importing a list means saying that these people agreed to receive your emails. No bought, rented or scraped lists.
• Be honest. Say who you are: use your own name or your newsletter's, a real reply address and a real postal address, which every email prints. Don't mislead people about who sends the email or what it is. Don't remove or hide the unsubscribe link, which FlockStack adds to every email, and don't email people who unsubscribed.
• Nothing illegal. No scams, phishing or malware, no content that sexually exploits children, no threats or harassment, no content that infringes someone else's rights, and nothing else the law forbids where you or your readers are.
• Don't work around the service. Don't get past limits or blocks, probe other accounts, overload the service or use the API or an AI assistant to do any of the above.
• Follow the law that applies to your emails (for example CAN-SPAM, the GDPR and ePrivacy, CASL). You are responsible for it, see below.

Mailbox providers judge every sender by how many emails bounce and how many readers mark them as spam. FlockStack watches both, and acts on its own at these levels (out of emails sent, with a minimum number so one complaint never stops anything):

• A campaign pauses past 2% hard bounces (at least 5) or 0.08% complaints (at least 2). You are emailed, and you can resume it.
• The account is blocked past 5% hard bounces (at least 10) or 0.3% complaints (at least 3), measured on a campaign, on the first slice of a first send, or over the last 7 days. It is also blocked when an email reaches a spam trap, when Gmail's spam rate for your account reaches 0.3%, when our email provider stops your sending, and when we block it ourselves.

Contacts you have never emailed go out in steps: a first slice, a check of its bounces and complaints 3 hours later, then the rest. Large sends are spread over hours while an account builds a sending history.

What a block does. Nothing is sent from the account, welcome and confirmation emails included. Imports, new contacts, signups on your website and most changes are off, except stopping things (pausing, unscheduling, revoking keys and apps) and billing. The tracked links in your past emails stop redirecting and show a page saying the link is disabled. Unsubscribe links keep working, and so does your export.

We always tell you why. The reason is shown on your dashboard and in the email we send when your account is blocked, and when we block an account by hand we write the reason ourselves. Nothing lifts a block on its own: write to us at hello@flockstack.io and we review it. If the block is right, we say what has to change.

Your newsletters, issues, images, lists and settings are yours. You give us the right to store, process, send and display them as needed to run the service for you, and nothing more. We don't use them for advertising and we don't sell them.

If you turn on comments on your newsletter's website, they are your site's: you decide what stays, and whatever you hold, hide or remove has a reason its author reads.

You are the controller of your subscribers' personal data, and FlockStack is your processor: we handle it on your behalf and on your instructions, which are what you do in the product. You are responsible for having a lawful basis to email them, for telling them what you do with their data, and for answering their requests. The sub-processors page lists the services we use to do that and explains how to ask for a data processing agreement.

If you sell digital products or paid subscriptions, your readers pay your own Stripe account, connected to FlockStack through Stripe Connect. FlockStack takes 0% of what you sell: we set no application fee. Stripe's own processing fees apply and come off your sales. You are the seller: you are responsible for what you sell, for refunds and disputes, for taxes on your sales, and for following Stripe's terms. A refund or a chargeback stops the buyer's download link on its own.

You can export everything, free, at any time: contacts as CSV, every issue as Markdown and HTML, your images, your suppression list and a manifest. It works even if your account is blocked, paused or has no plan. The download links last 7 days.

You can delete your account from the account page. If you pay for a plan, cancel it first, and finish or unschedule any campaign that is sending. The account stops at once, you can restore it by signing in within 30 days, and after that its data is deleted for good. The privacy policy says what is deleted and what is kept.

We can suspend or end an account that breaks these terms, and we say why. Blocks work as described above. Your export stays available while the account exists.

FlockStack Cloud is provided as it is. We work to keep it running, but we don't promise it will always be available or free of errors, and we can't promise that an email reaches an inbox: that depends on mailbox providers.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or lost-profit damages, and our total liability to you for anything connected to the service is limited to the lesser of (a) the fees you paid to KMF Ventures LLC for the service in the 12 months before the event that gave rise to the claim, and (b) the total fees you have paid to KMF Ventures LLC for the service since you first subscribed. Nothing in these terms limits liability that the law doesn't allow to be limited, or takes away rights you have under mandatory law where you live.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States, and the courts there have jurisdiction over disputes about them, subject to any mandatory rights you have where you live.

We may change these terms. We email account owners at least 30 days before a change to the terms of service or to the privacy policy takes effect. Price increases for your plan always get 90 days' notice, as described above. If you don't agree with a change, cancel and export before it takes effect.

KMF Ventures LLC, hello@flockstack.io.