1acceptance
These terms are an agreement between you and Substrat Innovations Inc. of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada ("substrat", "we"). By using this website, the public demo, a sandbox, or any preview of our hosted services, you accept them. If you are acting for a company, you confirm you can bind it. Production use under a signed customer agreement (including a data-processing addendum) is governed by that agreement where it conflicts with these terms.
2the service today
substrat is in active development: the kernel build is underway and we are onboarding a small group of design partners ahead of a closed beta. Everything offered today — the demo, sandboxes, preview APIs — is pre-release software. It is offered without uptime commitments or SLAs, features may change or be withdrawn, and sandboxes are temporary by design. We say this plainly because our product's whole premise is a record you can trust; that starts with not overstating what exists.
3eligibility
You must be at least the age of majority in your jurisdiction and using the service for business purposes. The demo and sandbox programs are currently offered in Canada and the United States; other regions are waitlist-only for now.
4demo & sandbox terms
- Public demo data is synthetic. The demo company is fictional; nothing in it is real customer data, and we never present it as a real reference.
- Sandboxes are temporary. 30-day lifetime unless extended on request; on expiry the tenant is destroyed (a 7-day recovery copy is kept for regeneration requests, then deleted).
- Real-import sandboxes are gated. Connecting your QuickBooks Online or Xero requires an accepted design-partner application. During evaluation, imports are read-only — substrat does not write to your accounting system; any future sync-out of summarized entries happens only with your explicit authorization. Tokens are revoked on deprovision.
- Sandboxes are evaluation environments. They are not your system of record. Do not run your production books on a sandbox.
5your data
Your data is yours. You retain all rights to data you import or create in a tenant. You can export it, and you can have it deleted, at any time (the per-tenant isolation model makes both clean single-tenant operations). We do not sell or share your data, and we do not train AI models on it — inference is bring-your-own-key and model-agnostic by architecture. How we collect and handle personal information is in the privacy policy.
Write-once by design: inside a ledger tenant, history is corrected, never silently edited — that immutability is the product. Deleting a tenant deletes the whole tenant; editing history inside a live ledger is deliberately impossible.
6acceptable use
Don't abuse the service. Specifically, you agree not to:
- probe, breach, or test the security or tenant isolation of the hosted service without written permission;
- circumvent rate limits, access controls, or the read-only constraints of public surfaces;
- use the service to store or process data you have no right to, or upload malicious code;
- misrepresent demo output as attested financial statements or as audited fact;
- resell or white-label the hosted preview without an agreement with us.
Anonymous public surfaces (like the demo) are rate-limited per IP/token; we may throttle or block abusive traffic.
7open core
The substrat kernel is open source, licensed under the license in its repository — these terms do not restrict rights that license grants you, and nothing here limits your use of the open-source code under its own terms. These terms govern the hosted services: the multi-tenant infrastructure, hosted APIs, demo, and sandboxes.
8intellectual property
The substrat name, wordmark, site content, and hosted service are ours. Feedback you give us about the product may be used to improve it without obligation — that's what the design-partner program is for — but feedback never includes rights to your data (section 5), and we won't quote you publicly without your approval.
9not professional advice
substrat is software. Nothing produced by the service — postings, reports, agent output, demo answers — is accounting, tax, audit, or legal advice, and no professional-client relationship is created by using it. Judgments about your books belong to you and your professional advisors.
10disclaimers
THE WEBSITE, DEMO, SANDBOXES, AND PREVIEW SERVICES ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE HAS BUGS; DO NOT RELY ON IT AS YOUR SYSTEM OF RECORD.
11liability
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES, OR LOST PROFITS, REVENUE, OR DATA, ARISING FROM THE PREVIEW SERVICES; AND OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ANY CLAIM ARISING FROM THEM IS LIMITED TO THE GREATER OF CAD $100 AND THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US FOR THE SERVICE GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM IN THE 12 MONTHS BEFORE IT AROSE. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law.
12termination
You can stop using the service and request deletion at any time (privacy policy, deletion). We may suspend or terminate preview access for breach of these terms or abuse of the service; where practical we'll give you the chance to export first.
13governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of British Columbia, Canada, and applicable Canadian federal law, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules; the courts of British Columbia have exclusive jurisdiction. If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest stands.
14changes & contact
We'll post changes here with a new effective date and version; material changes affecting active sandbox or design-partner participants are notified by email. Questions: hello@thesubstrat.com.