Altretta Terms of Service

1. What Altretta is, and what you get for free

Altretta is a note-taking application for Windows, macOS and Linux. Your notes are ordinary Markdown files in a folder you choose on your own disk. There is no proprietary database and no container: if this company ceased to exist tomorrow, your notes would open in any text editor.

The application is free to download and free to use, permanently, with no account. Writing, organising, searching, linking, the graph, exports and every other feature that runs on your own machine are not gated behind a payment and will not become so for anyone using them today. Version history is included too; a paid plan keeps more of it for longer.

A paid plan unlocks the parts that need servers: keeping a vault in step across several of your own devices, publishing notes as a website we host, live connectors, and the encrypted team vault. Section 3 lists what each plan includes.

2. Licence

We grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use Altretta on any number of devices you control, for as long as these terms are in force.

You may not redistribute the application, sell access to it, remove or alter its notices, or attempt to circumvent the licence checks that determine which plan you are on. You may decompile or reverse-engineer it only to the extent that Estonian or EU law permits despite this restriction.

The application, its name and its design are ours. Your notes are yours; see section 8.

3. Plans and prices

All prices include VAT. The figure you see is the total you pay, wherever you are in the European Union; the VAT rate applied depends on your country and is shown on your invoice. If you give us a valid VAT number for a business in another EU member state, the reverse charge applies and the amount charged is the price without VAT.

Team storage is pooled: a team of four seats has one 80 GB allowance, and any member may use any part of it.

Annual billing is twelve months paid at once. It works out cheaper than twelve monthly payments — two months' worth over a year.

4. The free trial, and when the contract begins

You can start a 30-day trial of Pro without giving us a card. Nothing is charged during the trial, and if you do nothing when it ends, nothing is charged afterwards either: the plan returns to Free and your notes stay exactly where they are.

Starting the trial concludes this contract. That matters for one reason, and we would rather state it than have you discover it: your statutory 14-day right of withdrawal (section 5) begins on the day the trial starts, not on the day you are first charged. With a 30-day trial, the withdrawal period ends sixteen days before any money moves.

Before you start a trial we tell you what the subscription costs when it ends. That is not a formality — it is the condition on which the paragraph above depends.

5. Your right to withdraw

You have 14 days to withdraw from this contract, without giving any reason. The period runs from the day the contract is concluded, which is the day your trial starts.

You cannot lose this right by starting to use the service. What we sell is a digital service, and EU law does not permit the withdrawal right to be excluded for a subscription that is never fully performed. Some products in this category state otherwise. We do not.

How to withdraw. Use the Withdraw from contract control in your account. It is available throughout the period, takes two steps, and we send you a confirmation recording what you told us and the date and time we received it. You may instead tell us in any other clear statement. We send the model withdrawal form with the confirmation of your contract when the trial starts, and you are free to use it or not.

What you pay. When you start a trial you separately ask us to begin the service straight away. If you then withdraw, you pay an amount proportionate to the time you had the service, worked out on the total price of the contract. Because the withdrawal period ends before the first charge, in ordinary use this means you pay nothing.

Withdrawing is not the same as cancelling. Withdrawal unwinds the contract and returns money. Cancellation stops the next renewal and does not. Both controls are in your account and we keep them visibly apart, because taking the wrong one gives you the wrong outcome.

6. Renewal, cancellation and price changes

Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period, at the price then published, until you cancel.

You can cancel at any time from your account, in two steps. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. You keep the paid features until then, and we do not refund the remainder of a period you chose to pay for in advance, except where section 5 or the law requires it.

If we raise the price of a plan you are on, we will tell you at least 30 days before it applies to you, and the increase takes effect at your next renewal. You can cancel before then and the old price applies until your period ends.

7. Synchronisation

Sync copies an encrypted vault between your own devices through storage that you choose and control — a folder in Dropbox, OneDrive, a network drive or anything else that appears as a folder on your system.

We do not host your synchronised notes and we cannot read them. Content is encrypted with XChaCha20-Poly1305 under a 32-byte key generated on your device. That key is wrapped with Argon2id using your passphrase and stored in a file inside your own sync folder — which means your cloud provider holds a passphrase-protected copy, and we hold nothing. Your recovery key is that key, written out for you once.

If you lose both the passphrase and the recovery key, the data cannot be recovered. Not by you and not by us. This is not a policy we could relax; there is nothing on our side to relax it with.

What the encryption does not hide, stated plainly: the number of files, their approximate sizes and their modification times are visible to whoever can see the storage folder. File names are not — they are replaced by keyed hashes — and file sizes are padded into 4 KiB and 64 KiB buckets so that a small edit does not reveal itself.

The Team vault is a different mechanism with a different limit: it encrypts file contents only. File names and folder structure remain in plain text, so someone with access to the encrypted store learns the shape of the vault and the titles of its notes. If that matters for your material, do not put it in a shared team vault.

8. Your notes, and hosted publishing

Your notes are yours. We claim no ownership of anything you write and no licence to it, except the narrow one in this section, and only for material you choose to publish.

If you publish notes as a website we host, you grant us the right to store, reproduce and serve exactly those notes, for exactly as long as the site exists, for the sole purpose of serving it to the people you share it with. Nothing else, and nothing that outlives the site.

When you publish, you become responsible for what you publish. You confirm that you have the right to make that material public, that it does not infringe anyone's rights and that it is lawful where it can be read. If your site collects nothing and tracks nobody, there is nothing further to do; if you add anything that does, the obligations to your readers under data protection law are yours, not ours.

Two limitations you should know before you publish:

- A published note that links to an unpublished one may disclose that note's title and folder path in the page's HTML, as a link that leads nowhere. If a note's location or name is itself sensitive, do not link to it from a page you publish. - You can take a published site off the web at any time, from within Altretta or from the customer portal. Doing so deletes the hosted copy, leaves the notes in your vault untouched, and keeps the address reserved to your account, so publishing again restores the site at the same URL. Taking a site down is not a paid feature and does not depend on your plan being current. If you close your account, published sites and the addresses that held them are released.

Anyone following a link to a site you have removed is told that the person who published it took it down. The notice names neither you nor what was published.

We may remove a published site, with notice to you where we can give it, if we are required to by law or a valid order, or if it is being used to distribute malware or material that is plainly unlawful. We do not otherwise review published sites.

9. Verification, and what it proves

Every published site carries a signature from us over the exact set of files it contains, and anyone can check it at the site's verification address without an account and without asking us.

What a passing check proves: the page being served is byte-for-byte what was published, and it was published by the account we say published it, at the time we say. If a single character changed after publication — by us, by anyone with access to our storage, or by an intermediary — the check fails.

What it does not prove: that anything on the page is true, accurate or written by a person, or that the account holder is who they say they are outside our own records. It is a statement about bytes, not about facts.

The same signing applies to your own version history inside the application, where each change is recorded as a signed entry. Removing a note records a signed entry saying it was removed, rather than erasing the earlier ones — that is what makes the history worth anything. Old entries are dropped only by the retention policy of your plan, and that retention is what a paid plan extends.

This is about the history inside your vault. It has nothing to do with the personal data we hold about you as a customer, which you can have erased at any time; see the Privacy Policy.

10. AI features

Altretta can answer questions about your own notes using an AI provider. Three things about that arrangement are worth stating in a contract, because they are unusual.

We have no AI model and we sell you no AI service. You bring an account with a provider you choose — or a model running on your own machine — and your own key. Your contract for that service is with them, on their terms and at their price. We are not a party to it and we do not resell it.

Your requests do not pass through us. The application talks to the endpoint you configured, directly. We do not see your question, the notes sent with it, or the answer, and we could not produce them if we were asked to. What that also means: what happens to that material afterwards is governed by your provider's terms, not by ours, and you should read them.

The application tells you where a request is going. It distinguishes between a model on the device you are using, one elsewhere on your network, and one on the internet, because a model on the machine next door is still a second machine. Configuring an endpoint is an instruction to send material there.

Answers are generated from your notes and cite them. Software of this kind can still be wrong, and the answer is not advice — professional, legal, financial or otherwise. Check anything that matters against the source it names.

11. Plugins and connectors

Altretta runs third-party plugins in a restricted sandbox with no network access unless you grant it, per host, and it can expose a read-only connection to your vault for AI tools you run yourself.

Both are permissions you give, and what happens next is yours. A plugin you install is somebody else's software: we do not write it, review it line by line, or warrant it. We publish a revocation list the application checks, and we will add a plugin to it if we learn it is malicious — that is a safeguard, not a guarantee, and it is not a substitute for deciding whether to trust something before you install it.

The local connection is off unless you turn it on, read-only unless you change it, bound to your own machine, and reachable only with a token you create and can revoke. You can exclude folders from it. A tool you hand a token to can read what the policy allows, so give one to software you would let read those notes over your shoulder.

12. Storage limits

Published storage is metered because it is the only place we hold your bytes: 5 GB on Pro, 20 GB per seat on Team, pooled.

If a publication would take you over your allowance, that publication is refused and everything already published stays online. Your readers are not affected by an accounting question between you and us. Re-publishing an existing site replaces its contents rather than adding to your total.

There is also a limit on how quickly new site names can be claimed — twenty in any 24 hours, across an account or a team. Re-publishing sites you already have is never counted.

13. Availability

We aim to keep the paid services running and we do not promise a percentage. Sync and publishing depend on our servers; everything local does not, and a service interruption never prevents you from opening, reading, editing or exporting your notes.

We may change how the paid services work. If we withdraw a feature you are paying for, we will tell you at least 60 days in advance and refund the unused part of any period you have paid for.

14. Suspension and termination

You may stop using Altretta at any time. Closing your Apilium account ends this contract; the consequences of closure, including what is erased and what we are required to keep, are set out in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or end your paid plan if payment fails and is not resolved after we have told you, or for a serious breach of these terms or the Apilium terms. Where a breach can be put right, we will tell you what it is and give you 14 days to fix it before we act, unless waiting would cause real harm — an active attack, plainly unlawful content, or a legal order.

When a paid plan ends, your notes stay on your disk. Sync stops and published sites stop being served — a reader is told the site is temporarily unavailable, and nothing about your account — and the version history kept on paid plans reverts to the Free allowance. Nothing local is deleted, disabled or held hostage, and renewing brings a site back.

15. If something is wrong with the service

If Altretta or a paid service does not do what we describe, you have the remedies EU and Estonian consumer law give you — repair, replacement, a price reduction, or ending the contract, as the case allows. Nothing in these terms limits those remedies, and neither the liability section here nor the one in the Apilium terms applies to them.

Tell us at [email protected]. We would rather fix it.

16. Liability

Our liability to you is limited as set out in the Apilium Terms of Service, which caps it at the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event and excludes indirect loss.

That limit does not apply to death or personal injury caused by our negligence, to fraud, to your statutory rights as a consumer, or to anything else that Estonian or EU law does not permit us to limit.

Your notes live on your own disk and remain readable without us, so we are not the custodian of your data. Keep your own backups all the same: a synchronised vault is not a backup, because it copies your mistakes as faithfully as your work.

17. Governing law and disputes

Estonian law governs this contract. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the country where you live.

If we cannot resolve a complaint between us, you can refer it to the Estonian Consumer Disputes Committee, or use the European Commission's online dispute resolution platform. You can also bring proceedings in the courts of the country where you live.

18. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. If a change materially affects your rights or what you pay, we will tell you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and it will apply from your next renewal. If you do not accept it, cancel before then and the current terms apply until your period ends.

Corrections that do not change any obligation — a broken link, a typo, a clearer sentence saying the same thing — take effect when published.

19. Contact

[email protected] for anything about the product, your account or a subscription. [email protected] for legal notices. [email protected] for data protection.

Apilium Technologies OÜ · Narva mnt 5, 10117 Tallinn, Estonia · Registry code 17409213