Terms of Service

1. The Service

Wissenswerk is an organisational knowledge management and AI assistant platform. The Service enables you to:

• create and manage organisations for collaborative knowledge management,
• upload and process documents (PDF, DOCX/DOC, XLSX/CSV, PPTX, TXT, HTML, ODT, and common image formats such as JPG, PNG, GIF, and WEBP),
• create notes, interviews, and debriefs as knowledge sources,
• connect and sync external content sources (Google Drive and Confluence),
• process content into searchable knowledge segments with semantic embeddings,
• search across organisational knowledge using AI-powered retrieval,
• interact with an AI assistant ("Astra") for question-answering and content analysis,
• manage organisation members, roles, collections, and integrations,
• detect and resolve knowledge conflicts across sources, and
• conduct and record onboarding interviews.

The platform is delivered through a web-based interface served by the application server.

2. Eligibility and Account Registration

2.1 Eligibility

• The Service is intended for business and professional use by organisations.
• You must be authorised to act on behalf of yourself or the organisation you join.
• You must be of legal age to form a binding agreement in your jurisdiction.

2.2 Account creation

• Registration requires a username, an e-mail address, and a password.
• E-mail addresses are stored in lowercase and used as the primary login identifier.
• Passwords are hashed with bcrypt before storage; plaintext passwords are never retained.
• On the on-premise authentication path, the first registered user becomes the system owner.

2.3 Organisations

• You create or join organisations to collaborate with your team.
• Existing members may invite others to an organisation by e-mail invitation.

2.4 Account security responsibilities

• You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your credentials.
• The application uses JWT-based authentication with a 24-hour token expiry.
• Tokens are stored client-side in your browser's local storage.
• No multi-factor authentication (MFA/2FA) is currently implemented.
• You must notify the operator immediately of any unauthorised access to your account.

3. Acceptable Use

3.1 General conduct

You agree to use the Service only for lawful purposes and in compliance with these Terms. You shall not:

• upload, store, or share content that is illegal, infringing, defamatory, obscene, or otherwise objectionable under applicable law;
• attempt to gain unauthorised access to accounts, systems, or data belonging to other users or organisations;
• interfere with or disrupt the integrity or performance of the Service;
• reverse-engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Service software except where permitted by applicable law;
• use the Service or its AI features to generate content that violates applicable law, third-party rights, or ethical norms;
• use automated scripts, bots, or scrapers to access or extract data beyond the intended API and interface usage;
• circumvent or tamper with authentication, encryption, or access-control mechanisms; or
• misrepresent your identity or impersonate another user or entity.

3.2 Content standards

You are responsible for ensuring that all content you upload, create, or sync into Wissenswerk complies with applicable laws, including intellectual property, data protection, and confidentiality obligations. The operator does not pre-screen user-uploaded content.

3.3 Upload limits

• Avatar uploads: maximum 5 MB, image types only, resized to 200×200 px.
• Document uploads: maximum 10 MB per file.
• These limits may be adjusted by the operator in the deployment configuration.

4. Roles and Access Levels

4.1 Organisation roles

The application defines two roles scoped to each organisation:

• Admin — full management rights including member management, integration configuration, content deletion, and organisation settings.
• Employee — standard access to view and contribute content according to organisation-level visibility rules.

4.2 Admin capabilities

Admins can:

• invite and remove organisation members,
• manage external integrations (Google Drive, Confluence),
• create, edit, and delete knowledge sources, collections, and segments,
• configure organisation settings,
• access conflict detection and resolution features, and
• delete user accounts and their associated data.

4.3 System-level administration

A separate administration route exists for platform-level operations, including user management across organisations where applicable.

5. Plans, Pricing, and Payment

Wissenswerk is offered through the deployment options shown on our pricing page:

5.1 Cloud

€ 650 / month — final price, no VAT charged (the operator applies the small-business regulation under § 19 UStG). The fully managed Cloud plan includes:

• Wissenswerk hosting & infrastructure,
• all product features,
• automatic updates & maintenance,
• priority support & SLA,
• a 99.9% uptime guarantee,
• a monthly AI token allowance, and
• additional AI tokens billed on a pay-per-use basis.

5.2 On-Premises

Custom pricing. Deploy Wissenswerk on your own infrastructure. The On-Premises option includes:

• hosting on your own infrastructure,
• custom product variants,
• extended support,
• deployment assistance, and
• custom SLA terms.

5.3 Billing terms

• Cloud subscriptions are billed monthly at the price stated above. Because the operator applies the small-business regulation (§ 19 UStG), no value-added tax (VAT) is added.
• On-Premises and any extended or custom arrangements are governed by a separate written agreement between you and the operator.
• AI token usage beyond the included monthly allowance on the Cloud plan is billed according to actual consumption.
• Pricing and plan features may change. Material changes will be communicated with reasonable advance notice, and any change takes effect from the next billing period unless otherwise agreed.

6. Intellectual Property and Content Ownership

6.1 Your content

• You retain all rights to the content you upload, create, or sync into the Service.
• By using the Service, you grant the operator a limited, non-exclusive licence to process, store, index, embed, and display your content solely for the purpose of providing the Service.
• This licence covers the technical operations necessary for the Service, such as text extraction, OCR, embedding generation, AI summarisation, tagging, conflict detection, and retrieval-augmented search.
• This licence terminates when the relevant content is deleted from the Service.

6.2 AI-generated outputs

• The Service generates derived content — including summaries, tags, titles, image descriptions, search results, and chat responses — using third-party large language models (LLMs).
• AI-generated outputs are provided on an "as-is" basis without warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose.
• You are responsible for reviewing and validating AI-generated outputs before relying on them for decisions or further distribution.
• Ownership of AI-generated outputs is governed by applicable law and the terms of the underlying LLM provider.

6.3 Knowledge segments and embeddings

Uploaded and synced content is processed into knowledge segments and vector embeddings for semantic retrieval. These derived artefacts are used solely to enable Service features and are deleted when the source content is removed through normal application flows.

6.4 Service intellectual property

• The Service software, design, interface, and underlying technology are the property of the operator or its licensors.
• You receive no ownership interest in the Service itself through your use of it.

7. Third-Party Services and Integrations

The Service relies on and integrates with third-party services. Use of those services is additionally subject to their own terms.

7.1 DeutschlandGPT

• Used for LLM inference (chat, content conversion, tagging, summaries, image analysis) and embedding generation.
• Your content — including document text, chat messages, and retrieved knowledge context — may be sent to the DeutschlandGPT API for processing.
• Default models: gpt-4.1-mini (chat) and text-embedding-ada-002 (embeddings).
• DeutschlandGPT processes data within Germany. Use is subject to the DeutschlandGPT Terms of Use.

7.2 Google Drive

• You may connect your Google account to browse and sync Google Drive content.
• OAuth scopes requested: drive.readonly, userinfo.email.
• Subject to the Google APIs Terms of Service. You must have appropriate permissions to the content you choose to sync.

7.3 Atlassian Confluence

• You may connect your Atlassian account to browse and sync Confluence spaces and pages.
• OAuth scopes requested: read:page:confluence, read:space:confluence, read:attachment:confluence, read:content-details:confluence, read:me, offline_access.
• Subject to the Atlassian Cloud Terms of Service and Atlassian app access rules.

7.4 Your responsibility for third-party terms

You acknowledge that the operator does not control third-party services and is not responsible for their availability, accuracy, or data handling; that using integrations may cause your content to be transferred to and processed by third-party services; and that you are responsible for compliance with the third-party terms applicable to content you choose to sync.

8. Data, Privacy, and Security

8.1 Privacy Policy

Data collection, processing, storage, encryption, retention, and deletion practices are described in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms by reference.

8.2 Security measures

• Password hashing with bcrypt.
• Field-level AES-256-GCM encryption for sensitive database content.
• A per-organisation Data Encryption Key (DEK) model with a key hierarchy.
• Uploaded files and derived artefacts stored in EU-based cloud object storage; access is controlled by the application and delivered via short-lived, expiring access URLs.
• JWT-based authentication with a 24-hour expiry.
• Temporary file copies used during processing are cleaned up after use.

8.3 Operator responsibilities

• HTTPS/TLS termination for browser-to-server traffic.
• Database backups, object storage configuration, infrastructure security, and log management.
• Secure configuration of environment variables, including API keys and encryption secrets.
• Appropriate access controls on the object storage infrastructure.

9. Availability and Service Levels

• The Cloud plan includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee and priority support with an SLA, as described in Section 5.
• Except for the commitments stated for the Cloud plan or in a separately agreed SLA, the Service is provided on an "as available" basis without a guarantee of uninterrupted, error-free, or continuous availability.
• Planned maintenance, updates, or infrastructure changes may cause temporary service interruptions.
• On-Premises customers may agree custom SLA terms as part of their separate agreement.
• The operator may modify, update, or discontinue features of the Service. Material changes that affect your rights or data will be communicated with reasonable advance notice.

10. Disclaimers and Limitation of Liability

10.1 "As is" disclaimer

Except as expressly stated in these Terms or a separate agreement, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including but not limited to implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, completeness, and non-infringement.

10.2 AI output disclaimer

AI-generated content (summaries, tags, titles, descriptions, chat responses, conflict analysis) is produced by third-party language models and may be inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading. The operator does not warrant the correctness, reliability, or suitability of any AI-generated output. You must independently verify AI outputs before relying on them for business, legal, medical, financial, or other consequential decisions.

10.3 Integration disclaimer

Third-party integrations (Google Drive, Confluence, DeutschlandGPT) are provided by their respective operators. The operator is not responsible for downtime, data loss, or policy changes by third-party providers. Sync operations depend on third-party API availability and correct user permissions.

10.4 Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the operator shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including loss of profits, data, business opportunities, or goodwill, arising out of or related to the use of or inability to use the Service, regardless of the theory of liability.

The total aggregate liability of the operator for all claims arising out of or related to these Terms or the Service shall not exceed the amount paid by you or your organisation to the operator in the twelve (12) months preceding the event giving rise to liability, or €100, whichever is greater.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for fraud, gross negligence, death or personal injury caused by the operator's negligence, or any other liability that cannot be excluded or limited by applicable law.

11. Termination and Suspension

11.1 Termination by you

• You may stop using the Service at any time.
• Organisation admins may remove members from their organisation.
• Self-service full account deletion is not currently implemented; you may contact the operator to request account deletion.

11.2 Termination by the operator

• The operator may suspend or terminate access at any time for breach of these Terms, misuse, or other legitimate operational reasons.
• The operator may terminate organisation accounts for non-payment, extended inactivity, or violation of these Terms.

11.3 Effect of termination

• Upon termination, your right to access the Service ceases.
• Admin-initiated user deletion removes the user record, associated organisation memberships, and chat data.
• Content contributed to organisations may persist within the organisation unless separately deleted by an admin.
• Disconnecting an integration deletes the integration record and all synced knowledge content associated with that integration.

11.4 Survival

Sections relating to intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law survive termination of these Terms.

12. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the operator and its affiliates, officers, employees, and agents from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to:

• your breach of these Terms,
• your violation of any applicable law or third-party right,
• content you upload, create, or sync into the Service, or
• your misuse of the Service or AI-generated outputs.

13. Changes to These Terms

• The operator may modify these Terms at any time.
• Material changes will be communicated with reasonable advance notice through the Service interface or by e-mail.
• Continued use of the Service after the effective date of changes constitutes acceptance of the modified Terms.
• If you do not agree with the modified Terms, you should discontinue use of the Service.

14. Governing Law and Final Provisions

14.1 Governing law and jurisdiction

These Terms are governed by the law of the jurisdiction in which the operator is established, and the courts competent for the operator's registered seat have jurisdiction, except where mandatory consumer-protection law provides otherwise. The operator's legal entity and contact details are set out in our Impressum.

14.2 Severability

If any provision of these Terms is found to be unenforceable or invalid, that provision shall be limited or eliminated to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions shall remain in full force and effect.

14.3 Entire agreement

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any separate agreements (such as On-Premises or custom SLA arrangements), constitute the entire agreement between you and the operator regarding use of the Service.

14.4 Contact

Questions about these Terms can be directed to the operator via our contact page.