Draft pending legal review. Highlighted values in brackets are placeholders that AIS Trail will complete before these terms take effect.

Legal

Terms of service

Effective date: [Effective date]. Last updated 9 October 2026. Questions: hello@aistrail.com.

These terms are an agreement between you and [Company legal name] ("AIS Trail", "we", "us") about your use of AIS Trail. Read them together with our Privacy policy, which explains how we handle personal data.

1. About these terms

AIS Trail is operated by [Company legal name], registered under number [Company registration number], with its registered office at [Registered address] (VAT number [VAT number]). You can reach us at hello@aistrail.com.

These terms apply when you create an account, use an API key or otherwise use the Service. You accept them when you tick the box on the sign-up form. If you accept them for a company or other organisation, you confirm that you may bind it, and "you" means that organisation.

The Service is meant for businesses, developers and researchers acting in a professional capacity. You must be at least [Minimum age] years old to create an account. [Review: business customers only, or consumers too?]

In these terms:

Service means the AIS Trail API at https://api.aistrail.com, the dashboard at https://app.aistrail.com and the documentation at aistrail.com/docs.
Data means the AIS vessel data the Service delivers: positions, vessel details and related metadata.
Sources means the public authorities whose published AIS data we process, together with their licences, as listed on the Data sources page.

2. The Service

AIS Trail provides historical AIS vessel data through a REST API. We collect the AIS data the Sources publish, decode, normalise and deduplicate it, and serve it in one schema.
Coverage is limited to the waters covered by the Sources. The Data sources page and the public endpoint GET https://api.aistrail.com/v1/sources show the current Sources and the date range of each.
The most recent 24 hours of Data are not available on any current plan.
Real-time streaming (REST and WebSocket) is not part of any plan offered today. It is in early access and is provided only under a separate written agreement; contact hello@aistrail.com.
Features we label early access, beta or preview may change or be withdrawn at any time and come with no availability commitment.

3. Your account and API keys

You sign up with an email address and a password at app.aistrail.com/signup and must confirm your email address before you can create API keys. Give accurate information and keep your email address current: we send account and service notices there. To change it, write to hello@aistrail.com.
Keep your password and API keys confidential. A key is shown in full only once, when you create it; we store only a hash of it, so we cannot show it again or recover it. You are responsible for all activity under your account and keys, including activity by anyone you let use them.
Use keys from your own servers and applications. Do not put them in web pages, apps you distribute to others, public code repositories or URLs.
You can hold up to 5 active keys and revoke any of them in the dashboard; a revoked key stops working immediately. If you suspect that a key or your password has been exposed, revoke the key or change your password and tell us at hello@aistrail.com.

4. Plans, quotas and rate limits

Every account starts on the Free plan. The limits of each plan (requests per month, requests per second, history depth, area query size and rows per page) are published in the pricing section and the API reference, and apply as published when you make a request.
The monthly quota applies per account, across all of its keys, and resets at 00:00 UTC on the first day of each calendar month. Only successful (2xx) responses count, and each page of a paged result is a separate request. Per-second limits and the limit on concurrent requests apply per key.
When you reach a limit, the API answers with an error (HTTP 429) until the limit resets or you move to a higher plan. Requests beyond your plan's history depth or area size are refused.
You must not try to get around plan limits, for example by opening several accounts, spreading traffic over accounts or keys for that purpose, or rotating keys or IP addresses.

5. Fees and billing

The Free plan costs nothing and needs no payment card.
Paid plans are not sold through an online checkout today. To move to a paid plan, choose Request upgrade on the Plan page of your dashboard. We contact you by email to arrange billing and switch your account, and all of its active keys, to the new plan once payment is arranged. Your current plan stays active until then.
Prices are in euros (EUR) and exclude VAT and other taxes, which are added where they apply. Paid plans are billed in advance, monthly or yearly as you choose when you request the plan; yearly billing costs ten times the monthly price. The request quota still applies and resets each calendar month on yearly billing. [Payment terms: invoicing, due date, payment methods]
You can cancel a paid plan with effect from the end of the current billing period by writing to hello@aistrail.com; your account then returns to the Free plan. Fees already paid are not refunded unless the law or these terms require it. [Review: refund policy]
We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice by email. A new price applies from the first billing period that starts after the notice period; if you do not accept it, you can cancel before then.
If an invoice is still unpaid [Number of days] days after its due date, we may move your account to the Free plan or suspend it after telling you by email.

6. Data licence and attribution

The Data originates from the Sources, which publish it under their own licences. The Data sources page names each Source, its licence and the attribution text it requires.

Subject to these terms and the Source licences, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the Data you receive through the Service, including in your own products and services and for commercial purposes. The licence continues after your account ends for Data you obtained while it was active. [Review: licence after termination]

When you publish, display or pass on Data, or anything derived from it, you must:

keep the attribution text of every Source the Data came from. Track and area responses carry it in meta.attribution, CSV responses in the X-Attribution header, and /v1/sources lists all texts;
state that the Data was modified where a Source licence requires it (see What you need to do);
not suggest that any Source, or AIS Trail, endorses you, your product or your use of the Data;
comply with the other conditions of each Source licence.

Where these terms and a Source licence differ about the original source data, the Source licence prevails for that data. Nothing in these terms limits a right that a Source licence gives you in the original data, which you can also obtain from the Source directly.

7. Acceptable use

You must not, and must not let others:

use the Data to identify, profile, monitor or track private persons, for example by linking vessel identifiers with owner, crew or passenger information, unless you have a legal basis and comply with data protection law and the Source licences. Some Source licences require prior permission from a data protection authority for such combinations;
use the Service or the Data for any unlawful purpose, including in breach of sanctions or export control rules;
share, sell or publish your API keys, or give anyone outside your organisation access to your account, except service providers working for you under your responsibility;
resell, rent or sublicense access to the Service, or redistribute the Data as delivered by the Service, in bulk or as a continuous feed, through a dataset, API or data service that competes with or substitutes for the Service. Showing Data inside your own product, and sharing reasonable extracts with your customers as part of it, is allowed. This does not limit any right a Source licence gives you in the original source data. [Review: scope of the redistribution restriction]
remove or change attribution, or misrepresent where the Data comes from;
circumvent or probe the limits, authentication or security of the Service, scan it for vulnerabilities without our written permission, or send traffic meant to overload it;
create accounts by automated means or scrape the dashboard;
copy, decompile or reverse engineer the software of the Service, except where the law allows it despite this restriction.

If you find a security problem, please report it to hello@aistrail.com.

8. Availability, support and changes

We work to keep the Service available, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free operation. No plan includes a service level agreement (SLA) or service credits. Maintenance and incidents can interrupt access. The public endpoint /v1/status reports the state of the Service.
Support is by email at hello@aistrail.com, on a best-effort basis.
The Data depends on the Sources. A Source may publish late, stop publishing, change its data or change its licence. We may then delay, change or remove the affected Data or Source, and coverage changes accordingly.
We may change or discontinue features and endpoints. For changes that break documented API behaviour, we give at least 30 days' notice by email, unless a faster change is needed for security, legal or Source licence reasons.

9. Personal data

We handle personal data about you as described in our Privacy policy.

AIS data can include identifiers that relate to a natural person, for example for small private vessels. When you process such Data for your own purposes, you do so as an independent controller and are responsible for complying with data protection law.

10. Intellectual property

The Service, its software, documentation and design, and the AIS Trail name and logo belong to [Company legal name] or its licensors. Apart from the licence in section 6, these terms give you no rights in them. We do not claim ownership of the original data published by the Sources.

If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without any obligation to you.

11. Disclaimers

AIS messages are transmitted by vessels themselves and received by shore stations. They can be missing, delayed, wrong or deliberately falsified. We remove duplicates, set values marked as not available to null and flag implausible positions, but we do not check the Data against other sources.
The Data is not suitable for navigation, collision avoidance, search and rescue or any other safety-of-life purpose, and must not be the only basis for decisions where an error could cause harm.
To the extent the law allows, the Service and the Data are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including accuracy, completeness, timeliness, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. [Legal review: disclaimers]

12. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, for wilful misconduct or gross negligence, or any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded by law.
Subject to that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or data, arising out of or in connection with these terms or the Service.
Subject to the first point, our total liability arising out of or in connection with these terms and the Service, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, is limited to the fees you paid us for the Service in the 12 months before the event that gave rise to the claim, or [Liability cap for accounts that paid no fees] if you paid no fees. [Legal review: liability cap]

13. Indemnity

You will indemnify [Company legal name] against claims by third parties, including the Sources, and against the resulting losses, fines and reasonable costs, to the extent they arise from your breach of section 6 or 7 or from your unlawful use of the Data. [Legal review: indemnity]

14. Suspension and termination

These terms apply from the moment you create your account until it is deleted.
You can stop using the Service at any time. You can delete your account on the Settings page of your dashboard: this revokes all of its keys immediately and removes your account. Cancel a paid plan first, as described in section 5; fees for periods before the deletion remain payable.
We may suspend or disable an account or key, without prior notice where that is reasonable, if it is used in breach of these terms, puts the security or stability of the Service at risk, has unpaid fees, or if the law or a Source requires it. Disabling an account ends its sessions and revokes its keys. We will tell you why, unless we are not allowed to.
We may end these terms for convenience with at least 30 days' notice by email; we then refund fees you prepaid for any period after the end date. [Review: termination for convenience]
Sections 5 (for amounts owed), 6 and 7 (for Data you keep), 10 to 13, 16 and 17 continue to apply after these terms end.

15. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms, for example when the Service, the Sources or the law change. We email you about material changes at least 30 days before they take effect and publish the new version on this page with its effective date. If you do not agree, you can cancel and delete your account before the change takes effect; if you keep using the Service after that date, the new terms apply. Changes required by law, and changes that only clarify the text or cover new features, can take effect when published.

16. Governing law and disputes

These terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them, are governed by the law of [Governing law]. The courts of [Competent courts] have exclusive jurisdiction. Before going to court, we will both try in good faith to settle the dispute by email for at least 30 days. If you are a consumer, this section does not take away protection you have under the mandatory law of the place where you live.

17. General

Entire agreement. These terms, the plan limits published on this site and any written agreement for a paid plan or early access are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service. If a written agreement differs from these terms, the written agreement prevails.
Transfer. You may not transfer your rights or obligations under these terms without our written consent. We may transfer ours to a company that takes over the Service, and will tell you by email.
Events beyond control. Neither of us is liable for a delay or failure caused by events beyond reasonable control, including outages of the Sources or of hosting or network providers. This does not apply to payment obligations.
Severability and waiver. If a provision is found invalid, the rest of these terms remains in force. Not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.
Notices. We send notices to the email address on your account; send yours to hello@aistrail.com.
Third parties. Nobody other than you and us has rights under these terms.
Language. These terms are written in English. If we provide a translation, the English version prevails.

18. Contact

[Company legal name]
[Registered address]
Company registration number: [Company registration number]
VAT number: [VAT number]
Email: hello@aistrail.com