Terms of Service

Last updated: 2026-08-30

Governing law: Delaware law, subject to mandatory consumer-law rights.

Service operator: Kotoba Labs Inc (the "Operator", "we", "us"). Sales contact: Ryo Awai. Kotoba Labs Inc is the sole seller and operator of the Service. Service: kotobase.net, a content-addressed Knowledge Graph Backend-as-a-Service (the "Service").

1. Acceptance

By creating an account, authenticating, calling the API, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms of Service (these "Terms") and to the Privacy Policy. If you use the Service on behalf of an organization, you represent that you are authorized to bind that organization, and "you" includes that organization. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

2. Service description

The Service is a managed, tenant-scoped knowledge-graph platform built on the kotoba content-addressed distributed Datalog engine (CID / Prolly Tree / AT Protocol). It provides, subject to your tier:

• creation of tenant-scoped knowledge graphs;
• knowledge-graph ingest via API and MCP;
• read query surfaces including Datomic/Datalog (q, pull, datoms, asOf, history) and SPARQL/Cypher-style graph queries over the Datom head;
• Datom write (transact, with) bound to your own tenant namespace;
• durable pinning of graph commits as content-addressed objects, including optional off-site archival as IPLD CARs on object storage; and
• standard IPFS pinning and retrieval interfaces (/ipfs/*, /ipns/*).

The Service is offered under five public rungs — Free (hosted secure storage), Starter, Professional, Business Critical, and Enterprise — which differ in included capacity, how you start, and who bears operational responsibility. Internal billing identifiers (p2p, hosted-starter, secure-managed, business-critical, enterprise) are unchanged for existing clients. Section 6 sets out the plans, Section 7 the service levels and warranties that follow from them, and Section 8 the limitation of liability. docs/PLANS.md records the per-plan commitments in full and forms part of these Terms by reference. docs/SERVICE-LEVELS.md records the Operator's internal operational objectives for the shared endpoint and is not itself a customer SLA. Features, routes, quotas, and interfaces may change.

3. Accounts and DID authentication

• Identity model. The Service is tenant-scoped and keyed on a tenant decentralized identifier ("tenant DID"). You authenticate either (a) with a bearer token (JWT) issued by the Operator's authentication service, which the Service resolves to your tenant DID, or (b) self-sovereignly with a signed capability object ("CACAO"). Write operations to the Datom plane require a CACAO whose issuer equals your tenant DID.
• Namespace binding. The Service binds each write to your own tenant namespace (kotobase/db/<tenant_did>/<db_name>). A client-supplied target cannot override this binding; you can only write to graphs you own, except for explicitly allowlisted operator identities.
• Credential security. You are responsible for safeguarding your private keys, CACAO signing material, and bearer tokens, and for all activity under your tenant DID. You must notify us promptly of any suspected compromise.
• Eligibility. You must be at least 18 years of age, capable of forming a binding contract, and not barred from receiving the Service under applicable law.

4. Acceptable use

You must not:

• upload, store, or transmit content that is unlawful, infringing, or that you lack the rights to process;
• attempt to bypass authentication, tenant isolation, quotas, or the tenant-lock mechanism, or access another tenant's data;
• interfere with, overload, or disrupt the Service, its edge, or the backend graph pods;
• submit secrets, third-party credentials, or sensitive personal data into fields, logs, or public metadata contrary to the documented data-handling boundary (docs/DATA-HANDLING.md); or
• use the Service to store content that must be rendered permanently irretrievable, given the content-addressed nature described in Section 6 and Section 7.

We may suspend or throttle usage that threatens the integrity, security, or availability of the Service.

5. Customer data and intellectual property ownership

• Your content. As between you and us, you retain all rights, title, and interest in the graph data, facts, relationships, pins, and payloads you ingest or store ("Customer Data"). You grant us a limited license to host, process, transmit, replicate, content-address, pin, and archive Customer Data solely to provide and operate the Service.
• Content-addressing notice. Customer Data is stored as content-addressed objects (CIDs). Identical content produces identical CIDs, and content may be replicated to IPFS peers, gateways, caches, or off-site CAR archives. See Section 7 for the consequences for deletion.
• Our IP. We and our licensors retain all rights in the Service, the Worker control plane, the kotoba engine, documentation, and related software. The kotoba submodule remains under its own upstream Apache-2.0 license; nothing here grants you rights in third-party or upstream components beyond their own licenses.
• Feedback. You grant us a perpetual, royalty-free license to use feedback you provide to improve the Service.

6. Plans, fees, and billing (Stripe)

6.1 The plans

• Free — hosted secure storage, no availability SLA. The Operator hosts the graph as encrypted multi-tenant storage. You are not asked to run a peer. Availability is still "as is" and "as available": no availability commitment, no service credits, no incident-response obligation, no recovery objective, and no support obligation. That allocation is a basis on which Free is offered at no fee. (Internal plan id: p2p.)
• Starter — Operator-hosted rung for individuals and engineers. Public price is $25/month, the Supabase Pro band. The live self-serve Stripe checkout charges ¥3,750 per month (tax included). STRIPE_PRICE_STANDARD is ¥2,980 (≈$20) and is not charged against Starter. The Aura Professional 1 GB company band ($65) is a separate sales quote.
• Professional — Operator responsibility, live checkout. The Operator operates, monitors, patches, and recovers the Service and is accountable for it on the terms of Section 7.2, including the availability commitment and service credits. Internal plan id: secure-managed. This is the higher-capacity paid self-serve SKU; Starter is also self-serve. Public list is $132/month; Stripe currently charges the live JPY Price of ¥19,800.
• Business Critical — quoted HA rung. The public price is $292/month (Aura Business Critical 2 GB yen equivalent at ¥150/$). 99.95% availability and 24x7 support attach only to a contracted deployment that clears the multi-region write and on-call gates, and not to the shared endpoint.
• Enterprise — responsibility by agreement. The Enterprise plan is entered by signed agreement. That agreement governs the availability commitment, service credits, support response, dedicated infrastructure, data residency, key custody, audit rights, retention and deletion, and any data processing addendum or business associate agreement. The Enterprise availability commitment and multi-region recovery objectives attach only to the dedicated deployment provisioned under the agreement, and not to the shared endpoint. There is no self-serve purchase path for the Enterprise plan.
• Compliance status (no misrepresentation). The Operator's SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001, and ISMAP programs are in preparation; as of the "Last updated" date no such report or certificate has been issued. The Operator does not represent that it holds any of them, and will make a report available under a non-disclosure agreement once issued. docs/PLANS.md records the current status of each framework.
• Prices. The prices and plan limits in force are those published at https://kotobase.net/pricing. As of 2026-08-18 that page lists Free at no fee ($0), Starter at $25 per month (live self-serve checkout charging ¥3,750, individuals / engineers), Professional at $132 per month (live self-serve checkout, still charged in JPY as ¥19,800), Business Critical at $292 per month (sales-quoted), and Enterprise as a custom contract. The Aura Professional 1 GB company band ($65) is quoted by sales and is not Starter. An owner-ratified Developer figure of ¥2,980 per month is not a live checkout SKU. Legacy tier identifiers (free, starter, standard, pro, regulated) continue to resolve to the plan that superseded them for existing subscriptions and API clients.
• Payment processor. Paid subscriptions are processed through Stripe. Checkout sessions are created via the Service; your card and payment details are collected and processed by Stripe under Stripe's terms and privacy policy. We do not store full payment card numbers.
• Billing cycle. Starter and Professional are recurring monthly subscriptions with no fixed term and with automatic renewal. Subscription entitlements are provisioned and renewed based on signature-verified Stripe webhook events keyed to your tenant DID.
• Taxes. The live Starter price of ¥3,750 and Professional price of ¥19,800 per month are tax-inclusive (owner decision, 2026-08-17). The Japanese statutory disclosure at /legal/tokushoho states the same figure.
• Cancellation and downgrade. You may request cancellation at any time. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period. There is no cancellation fee. On cancellation, paid entitlements downgrade to the Free plan at period end. On downgrade to Free the Operator's availability, support, and recovery obligations end, and the Free allocation of responsibility in Section 6.1 applies from that point. Started periods are not prorated. Statutory rights, duplicate or erroneous charges, and failure to provision a paid service that was purchased remain exceptions.

7. Service levels, warranties, and disclaimers

7.1 Free plan — no warranty, no service level

On the Free plan the Service is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, to the maximum extent permitted by law. We do not warrant uninterrupted or error-free operation, and there is no committed uptime, RTO, RPO, multi-region availability, support response, or uptime credit on this plan.

7.2 Professional plan — availability commitment and service credits

• Availability commitment. We will make the Service available to your tenant at least 99.9% of each calendar month, excluding scheduled maintenance announced in advance, force majeure, failures of your own systems or network, suspension permitted under Section 4 or 9, and unavailability caused by your content or configuration.
• Service credits. If we miss that commitment in a calendar month, on your written request within 30 days of the end of that month we will credit:

• Exclusive remedy. Service credits are your sole and exclusive remedy for a missed availability commitment.
• Support. We will acknowledge incidents you report by email within one business day (JST business hours).
• Recovery. We maintain a recovery objective of no loss of committed transactions and restoration of logical service within 10 minutes, verified by the recovery drills recorded in docs/RECOVERY.md. Storage-level loss of the underlying object store is outside the scope of the current drill.
• Except as set out in this Section 7.2, the disclaimers in Section 7.1 apply to the Professional plan as well.

7.3 Enterprise plan

The Enterprise availability commitment (99.999% per calendar month), service credits of up to 100% of the monthly fee, 24x7 support with a 15-minute P1 acknowledgement, multi-region recovery objectives, data residency, key custody, audit rights, and compliance deliverables are set out in the signed enterprise agreement and apply to the dedicated deployment provisioned under it. They do not apply to the shared endpoint, and no statement in this repository or on the Service's public pages creates them absent that signed agreement.

7.4 Applies to every plan

• No guaranteed erasure. Because Customer Data is content-addressed and may be replicated across IPFS peers, gateways, caches, and off-site archives, we do not warrant cryptographic erasure or that deleted content becomes permanently unretrievable. Deletion marks metadata as deleted; see Section 8 and the Privacy Policy.
• The Service is not offered as a regulated (financial, medical, governmental) compliance product on the Free or Professional plans. Regulated use requires an Enterprise agreement with explicit controls.
• We do not represent that we hold a SOC 2, ISO/IEC 27001, or ISMAP report or certificate; those programs are in preparation as stated in Section 6.1.

8. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law:

• neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data, or goodwill;
• on the Free plan, which is provided at no fee and on the express allocation of operational responsibility in Section 6.1, the Operator's aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service is limited to the minimum amount permitted by applicable law;
• on Starter, Professional, and Business Critical, the Operator's aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service will not exceed the fees you paid to us in the 12 months preceding the claim; and
• on the Enterprise plan, the limitation in the signed enterprise agreement applies and prevails over this Section.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited under applicable mandatory law (including Japanese Consumer Contract Act protections where they apply).

9. Term and termination

• These Terms apply while you use the Service.
• You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time.
• We may suspend or terminate access for material breach, non-payment, legal requirement, or risk to the Service, with notice where practicable.
• On termination we may delete tenant metadata subject to the deletion and retention limits described in Section 7 and the Privacy Policy. Content-addressed bytes already replicated may persist.
• Sections that by their nature should survive (ownership, disclaimers, limitation of liability, governing law) survive termination.

10. Governing law and dispute resolution

• These Terms are governed by the laws of Delaware, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.
• The parties submit to the state and federal courts located in Delaware, unless mandatory consumer-protection law requires another governing law or forum.
• Nothing in this Section deprives a consumer of protections that cannot be derogated from under the mandatory law of their place of residence.

11. Changes

We may update these Terms. Material changes will ordinarily be notified by email or in-service display at least 30 days in advance, except that we may shorten that period where required for security, legal compliance, or to prevent harm. The "Last updated" date will be updated. Continued use after changes take effect constitutes acceptance.

12. Contact

Email: support@kotobase.net. Sales contact: Ryo Awai. Operator: Kotoba Labs Inc.