Terms of Service

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

VocalStack is operated by [company legal name], [registered address], registered under [company registration number and register] (“VocalStack”, “we”, “us”). You can reach us at support@vocalstack.com.

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) govern your use of the VocalStack website at vocalstack.com, the Dashboard at app.vocalstack.com, the VocalStack API, the official SDKs, the MCP server, the broadcast pages and every related service (together, the “Service”). By creating an account, ticking the acceptance box at checkout or using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

If you use the Service on behalf of a company or another organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it, and “you” means that organisation. Within the Dashboard an organisation has its own account and balance; its owners and administrators may buy credit and change billing settings, other members may only read them.

Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data and forms part of these Terms; section 12 explains when money is returned. Where the pricing page and these Terms differ, these Terms prevail.

If you are a consumer in the European Union, the United Kingdom or another place whose law gives you rights that cannot be waived by contract, nothing in these Terms limits those rights. Section 13 explains your right of withdrawal.

2. Your account

You need an account to use the Dashboard and the API. Sign-in is handled by WorkOS, our identity provider; you may be asked to verify your email address before you can start a transcription. Give us a working email address: billing notices, receipts, low-balance warnings and notices of changes to these Terms go there.

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. The Service is not directed at children.

You are responsible for everything done through your account, your API keys and your RTMP stream keys, whether or not you authorised it, until you tell us at support@vocalstack.com that they were compromised. Keep them secret; revoke a key the moment you suspect a leak. We store only a hash of each API key, so we cannot show it to you again.

One person may hold one free signup credit (section 6). Creating several accounts to collect the credit more than once, or to get around a limit of your plan, is a breach of these Terms and we may close those accounts and remove the credit.

3. The Service

The Service transcribes speech from your microphone, uploaded files, links, internet radio, HLS and RTMP streams; separates and names speakers; corrects the text as it is written; translates it into up to ten languages; produces titles and summaries; reads it aloud in stock voices or in voices cloned from a short recording; and lets you broadcast or share any transcription through a public link, a QR code or a password. The API, the SDKs and the MCP server do everything the Dashboard does.

Speech recognition is automatic. Accuracy depends on audio quality, accents, vocabulary and background noise, and no transcript, translation, summary or correction is guaranteed to be complete or correct. Check anything you rely on, especially for medical, legal, financial or safety purposes.

Each plan carries limits: concurrent transcriptions, transcriptions created per hour, the largest file, the longest live session, API requests per minute and how long content is kept. The current limits are on the pricing page and on your Billing page. We may change the features of the Service, add or retire features, and change the models that power it; a change that makes a paid feature materially worse is announced as described in section 11 or section 21.

Some features are labelled beta or preview. They may change or disappear without notice and are offered without any commitment to accuracy or availability.

4. Plans

• Pay as you go. No subscription. You add credit when you need it and it is spent at the plan's rates. One concurrent transcription, cold starts, 7 days of source audio and voice retention, 30 days of transcription retention.
• Premium. $50 a month, or $480 a year billed up front. The subscription grants $50 of credit every month (section 9), five concurrent transcriptions, mostly warm starts, longer limits, retention for the life of the account and email support.
• Enterprise. A plan agreed by contract, invoiced by us rather than paid at checkout, with custom rates, a dedicated engine pool, unlimited concurrent sessions, an account manager and a service level agreement. The contract prevails over these Terms where they differ.

We may add plans or change a plan's rates and limits. Section 11 explains the notice you get and when a change applies to you. An administrator may also place an account on a custom plan by agreement with you.

5. Credit and how we bill

Every account has a balance in US dollars. A transcription spends the balance for every second of audio it processes, at the rate of your plan for that kind of transcription, with no rounding up to a minute or an hour. At today's rate card a file costs $0.15 per hour of audio and a live transcription $0.50 per hour of audio; a 30-minute file therefore costs $0.075. Translations, summaries, speaker naming, voices, broadcasting and sharing never add to the bill.

Billable time is audio time: the length of a file, or the audio a live session receives. A live session that is paused holds an engine but is not billed. A live transcription is metered about once a minute while it runs and settled when it ends; a file is charged for its full length when the job finishes. The rate in force when a transcription starts applies to that whole transcription.

The balance is filled by the signup credit, your top-ups, a subscription's monthly credit, automatic top-ups and, by agreement, adjustments by us. Your Billing page shows every entry and every charge, newest first.

Credit never expires. Credit is not refundable except as section 12 sets out or applicable consumer law requires. Credit has no cash value, cannot be transferred to another account and cannot be withdrawn.

All prices are in US dollars and exclude VAT, sales tax and similar taxes. Our merchant of record adds the tax that applies to you at checkout, based on your billing address.

6. Signup credit

When a personal account is created we add $5 of promotional credit so you can try the Service without a card. Organisation accounts do not receive it. The credit is granted once per person; see section 2 on duplicate accounts.

Promotional credit is spent like any other credit, never expires, and is never refundable, withdrawable or convertible to money. We may withhold or remove it where we reasonably believe an account was created to abuse the offer. Until an account has made a first payment it is subject to tighter abuse limits, such as fewer transcriptions per hour.

7. Top-ups and payments

You add credit by buying a top-up in one of the amounts offered on your Billing page, currently $10, $25 or $50. Payments are processed by Polar Software Inc. (“Polar”) acting as merchant of record: the sale is made by Polar, which collects the price and any applicable VAT or sales tax, issues the invoice or receipt, holds your payment details, and processes refunds, disputes and chargebacks. Polar's own terms and privacy policy apply to the payment itself.

VocalStack never receives or stores your card number or other payment credentials. A saved payment method is held by Polar and used only for the charges you have authorised: a subscription you have started and, if you turn it on, automatic top-up (section 8). You can update or remove your payment method and download your invoices in the customer portal linked from your Billing page.

Before a checkout you confirm that you accept these Terms and that you ask for the credit or subscription to be provided immediately, waiving the right of withdrawal (section 13). We record that consent with its date and time, a hashed form of your network address, the version of these Terms shown to you and, for an organisation, which member gave it.

Credit is added to your balance when Polar confirms the payment, usually within seconds of the checkout completing. The amount credited is the price of the top-up; tax collected by Polar is not credited. A checkout that is abandoned or fails charges nothing.

8. Automatic top-up

Automatic top-up (“auto top-up”) is an optional feature that keeps your balance from running out. It is off by default and is only available once your account has made at least one payment through the checkout, because the charge uses the payment method saved by Polar from that payment.

How you turn it on. On your Billing page you choose a threshold (currently $5, $10 or $25) and a top-up amount (currently $10, $25 or $50) from the options we offer, and you save the setting. By doing so you expressly authorise VocalStack to instruct Polar to charge your saved payment method for the chosen amount each time your balance falls to or below the chosen threshold, without any further action by you at the time of the charge (an “off-session” charge). We record your consent with the date and time, a hashed form of your network address, the version of these Terms in force and, for an organisation account, the member who gave it.

When a charge happens. Our billing process checks balances about once a minute. When it finds your balance at or below your threshold and auto top-up is on, it asks Polar to charge the chosen amount to your saved payment method. The charge is a purchase of VocalStack credit at the price you chose, plus any tax Polar must collect, and the credit is added to your balance as soon as Polar confirms the payment. Polar issues the receipt for every charge.

Limits. We make at most three automatic top-up attempts on one account in any calendar day (UTC). Each attempt carries a unique reference so the same top-up can never be charged twice, and an attempt whose outcome is unknown blocks every further attempt until Polar tells us whether it was paid. If we change the daily limit we will update these Terms and the Billing page.

Notice. Every successful automatic top-up triggers an email to your account's address stating the amount charged and your new balance, with a link to change or switch off auto top-up. A low-balance warning is also emailed when your balance first falls below $2.

Declined charges. If Polar reports that a charge was declined, we email you the reason in plain words. While your balance stays at or below the threshold a further attempt may be made, within the daily limit above. After three consecutive declined attempts auto top-up is switched off automatically and we tell you by email; it stays off until you turn it on again. A charge that your bank requires you to confirm in person cannot be completed automatically and counts as declined.

Changing or stopping it. You can change the threshold or amount, or switch auto top-up off, at any time on your Billing page; the change takes effect immediately for any charge not yet requested. You can also remove the saved payment method in Polar's customer portal, after which no automatic charge can be made. Switching auto top-up off does not affect credit already bought.

Refunds and disputes. Credit bought by an automatic top-up is treated like any other credit under section 12: it is not refundable except where the law requires or where we agree to a refund because the Service failed. If you dispute an automatic top-up with your bank or card issuer, or Polar reverses it, the amount is deducted from your balance; if that leaves the balance negative, your account is suspended until the matter is resolved (section 12).

9. Premium subscription

A Premium subscription is bought through the Polar checkout and renews automatically: monthly subscriptions at $50 on the same day of each month, yearly subscriptions at $480 on the anniversary of the purchase, in each case charged to the payment method saved by Polar until you cancel. By subscribing you authorise these recurring charges. For a yearly subscription we email you at least 30 days before the renewal date with the price to be charged and how to cancel.

Monthly credit. On each monthly anniversary of the subscription, including on a yearly plan, $50 of credit is granted to your balance. Monthly credit is spent before any other credit on the account. Whatever part of a month's grant is unspent when the next grant arrives is removed; it does not roll over. Credit you bought as a top-up, and the signup credit, are never removed.

Cancelling. You can cancel on your Billing page at any time. The subscription, its features and its limits continue until the end of the period you have paid for, then the account returns to Pay as you go, any unspent monthly credit is removed, and section 14 explains what happens to content kept beyond the Pay as you go retention periods. You can undo a cancellation before the period ends. Subscription fees are not pro-rated or refunded for the unused part of a period, except where section 12 or applicable law requires.

Failed renewals. If a renewal charge fails, Polar retries it and emails you, and so do we. The subscription is marked past due and keeps its plan while Polar retries; if the payment does not succeed, the subscription ends and the account returns to Pay as you go.

Changing plan. Switching between monthly and yearly, or to another plan, is a new checkout; Polar prorates the difference. Only one subscription can be active on an account at a time.

10. When credit runs out

Pay as you go. A live transcription stops as soon as your balance reaches zero. The transcript written up to that point is kept and you can start again once you add credit. A file is refused before it starts when its length is known and its cost exceeds your balance; a queued file whose length becomes known later fails with the same message before any work is done, and nothing is charged.

Premium and Enterprise. So that an event is not cut off, a running transcription continues past zero up to a debt cap, $10 on Premium and the amount set in the contract on Enterprise. The minutes beyond zero are charged at the normal rate and the resulting negative balance is settled from the next credit that reaches the account, whether a monthly grant, a top-up or an automatic top-up. When the debt cap is reached the transcription stops.

Every plan. A new transcription needs a positive balance to start; when the cost of a file is known up front it must fit within the balance. We email you when your balance first falls below $2 and when a transcription is stopped for lack of credit.

11. Changes to rates and plans

We may change the rates, prices, included credit and limits of a plan by publishing a new version of it. New customers get the new version at once. For an existing customer the change is deferred:

• on Pay as you go, until 30 days after your most recent payment, and never earlier than 30 days after we tell you; every payment you make restarts that hold, so a customer who tops up regularly keeps their rates;
• on a subscription, until the end of your current billing period;
• on Enterprise, as the contract provides.

We email you when a change is published, with the date it will apply to you and both rate cards, and again when it applies. Your Billing page shows any pending change. This applies in both directions: a reduction reaches you on the same schedule. A transcription that is running when a change applies keeps the rate it started with. If you do not accept a change, stop using the Service before it applies; your balance remains available at the new rates.

12. Refunds, disputes and chargebacks

Prepaid credit. A top-up is added to your balance the moment Polar confirms the payment and can be used at once, so it is not refundable, spent or not. It never expires: unused credit waits for you.

Promotional credit. The $5 signup credit and any other credit granted without payment is never refundable, withdrawable or convertible to money, and a refund of a paid top-up never includes it.

Premium subscriptions. Fees are not pro-rated or refunded for the unused part of a period. Cancel at any time: Premium stays active until the period ends, and we email you 30 days before a yearly renewal.

Automatic top-ups. Credit bought by an automatic top-up is ordinary credit under the same rule. You can switch the feature off at any time on your Billing page (section 8).

EU and UK consumers. At checkout you ask for immediate delivery and give up the 14-day right of withdrawal; section 13 explains the waiver and what applies where it does not.

When we do refund. Where the law requires it; where the Service failed you, such as an outage or a transcription we could not produce (a charge for work you did not receive is voided and the credit returned); and for an accidental duplicate purchase reported promptly.

How refunds are processed. Refunds are made by Polar, our merchant of record, to the original payment method, with the tax Polar collected, typically within 5 to 10 business days.

Reversals and chargebacks. A refund, reversal or chargeback deducts the credit the payment bought. If that leaves the balance negative, the account is suspended, with transcriptions stopped and API keys refused, until you settle it or the dispute is decided in your favour. If you think a charge is wrong, write to us before disputing it with your bank: it is faster. We may pass on Polar's fee for an unfounded dispute, and repeated unfounded disputes are grounds for closing the account.

How to ask. Email support@vocalstack.com from your account's address with the receipt number and the reason.

13. Right of withdrawal (EU and UK consumers)

If you are a consumer in the European Union or the United Kingdom you have, by law, the right to withdraw from a distance contract within 14 days without giving a reason. For digital content and digital services that right is lost once performance has begun with your express prior consent and your acknowledgement that you lose the right.

Credit is available for use the moment it is added to your balance, and a subscription's features and first monthly credit are provided immediately. For that reason the checkout asks you to tick two boxes before you pay. The first reads “I accept the Terms.” The second reads:

“I ask for the credit to be available immediately and understand I lose the 14-day right of withdrawal.”

By ticking the second box you expressly request immediate performance and acknowledge that you lose your right of withdrawal for that purchase. The consequence is that the top-up or subscription cannot be cancelled under the 14-day rule and is refundable only as described in section 12. The same consent, recorded when you turn auto top-up on, covers each automatic top-up, since each one is credit you asked to be made available immediately.

Where the law of your country does not allow this waiver, or where you did not give it, you may withdraw within 14 days of the purchase by writing to support@vocalstack.com; we will refund the price less the value of any credit already spent, through Polar, within 14 days of your notice.

14. Your content and how long we keep it

You keep every right you have in the audio you provide and in the transcripts, translations, summaries, voices and exports made from it (“your content”). You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide licence to store, process, transmit and display your content as needed to provide the Service to you and to the people you share it with, to keep the Service secure and to meet our legal obligations. We do not use your content to train our own or anyone else's models, and we do not sell it.

You are responsible for your content and must have the rights and permissions needed to upload it and have it processed, including the consent of the people recorded (section 15).

Retention by plan

On Pay as you go a transcription older than 30 days is moved to your archive, where its share links stop working and you can restore it for 30 more days; after that it is permanently deleted together with its audio and exports. Source audio and voices past their retention period are deleted outright; the transcript made from the audio stays until its own period ends. Anything you delete yourself is purged on the same 30-day schedule.

After a downgrade. When a subscription ends and the account returns to Pay as you go, content older than the Pay as you go periods is kept for a further 30 days. We email you when the downgrade happens, 7 days before and 1 day before the deadline. Subscribing again before the deadline keeps everything.

Account deletion. You can delete your account from the Dashboard at any time. Deletion permanently removes your transcriptions, broadcasts, recordings, voices, API keys and media, and asks our identity provider to delete your sign-in. Any remaining balance, paid or promotional, is forfeited on deletion and is not refunded. Billing records are kept for 7 years for accounting, with the link to your identity removed; see the Privacy Policy.

Exports. You can export any transcription at any time as SRT, PDF, Excel or JSON, with corrections and translations, and download its audio. We recommend exporting anything you need before a retention period or a downgrade deadline.

15. Acceptable use

Recording others. Recording a conversation, a meeting, a call or an event without the consent of the people in it is illegal in many places. You are solely responsible for obtaining every consent and giving every notice the law requires wherever you and the recorded people are, before you transcribe, translate, broadcast or share their speech. VocalStack is a tool; it does not obtain consent for you.

Voice cloning. You may clone a voice only with the explicit consent of the person whose voice it is, for the purpose they agreed to. A voice sample is biometric data; the Dashboard records that the permission stands and lets you withdraw it, which deletes the voice. You must not clone the voice of a person who has not agreed, of a public figure, or of anyone for the purpose of deceiving others.

Illegal and harmful content. You must not use the Service to process, produce, store or distribute content that is unlawful, that infringes someone's rights, that is defamatory or that sexually exploits children, or to produce material intended to deceive, defraud, harass or incite violence. We may remove such content and report it where the law requires.

Security and fair use. You must not probe, attack or overload the Service, circumvent its limits or metering, share one account among many people where the plan does not allow it, resell the Service without our agreement, or scrape or copy it to build a competing one. Automated use is welcome within the API limits of your plan; a volume that threatens the Service for others may be throttled, and we will tell you when we do.

Broadcasts. A broadcast link makes a transcription and, where you choose, its audio available to anyone who has the link or the password. You are responsible for what you make public and for telling your audience how you use their data, as explained in our Privacy Policy.

16. API, SDKs and MCP server

The VocalStack API at api.vocalstack.com, the official TypeScript and Python SDKs, the MCP server for AI assistants and the developer documentation at app.vocalstack.com/developers are part of the Service. Usage through them is billed to your balance at the same rates as the Dashboard and counts toward the same limits. No separate paid plan is needed.

API keys are created and revoked in the Dashboard, carry the scopes you give them and are rate limited per minute by your plan. Anything done with a key is done by you. Build your integrations so that a key can be rotated without downtime. We may suspend a key that is being abused and will tell you when we do.

We version the public API and announce breaking changes in the changelog in the documentation before they take effect. The SDKs are provided under the licence in their repository. Software we make available for you to run (SDKs, examples) is provided as is.

17. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service at any time and delete your account from the Dashboard (section 14). Cancelling a subscription does not delete the account.

We may suspend or terminate your access, or part of it, if you materially breach these Terms, if a payment is refunded, reversed or disputed leaving a negative balance, if we are required to by law, or if your use threatens the security or operation of the Service or other customers. Where it is reasonable we tell you first and give you a chance to fix the problem; where it is not, we tell you afterwards. A suspended account keeps its content for the retention periods of its plan, and its balance, until the account is closed.

If we close your account for a reason other than your breach, we refund your unspent paid credit through Polar. If we close it for breach, the balance is forfeited to the extent the law allows. We may also stop offering the Service altogether with at least 30 days' notice, in which case unspent paid credit is refunded.

18. Availability and support

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. We do not guarantee that it will be uninterrupted, error-free or available at any particular time, that cold starts will take a particular length of time, or that any transcript will be accurate. Live transcriptions can be affected by your connection, your source and events outside our control. Only an Enterprise contract with a service level agreement gives you an uptime commitment and the remedies that go with it.

We may take the Service down for maintenance, preferably announced and at quiet hours. A transcription interrupted by a failure on our side is charged only for the audio actually processed; write to support@vocalstack.com if you think a charge is wrong.

Documentation is available to everyone. Email support at support@vocalstack.com is available on every plan; Premium and Enterprise customers are answered first and Enterprise customers have an account manager.

19. Intellectual property

The Service, including its software, models, design, documentation, trademarks and the VocalStack name and logo, belongs to VocalStack or its licensors and is protected by intellectual property law. These Terms give you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service as they allow; nothing else is granted. You may not copy, modify, reverse engineer or create derivative works of the Service except as the law permits.

Feedback you give us about the Service may be used freely without obligation to you.

20. Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, VocalStack's total liability to you arising out of or in connection with the Service or these Terms, whether in contract, tort, breach of statutory duty or otherwise, is limited to the amounts you paid us for the Service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim. Promotional credit is not an amount paid.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or data, for the content of any transcript, translation or summary, for your failure to obtain consent from recorded people, or for the acts of third parties including the networks and platforms you take sources from.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything that cannot be excluded or limited under the law that applies to you. If you are a consumer, you keep every right your national law grants you, and these limits apply only to the extent that law allows.

You will indemnify us against claims by third parties arising from your content, from recordings made without consent, from voices cloned without consent or from your breach of these Terms.

21. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. For changes that reduce your rights or add obligations we give at least 30 days' notice by email to your account address and by a notice in the Dashboard before they take effect; changes required by law or that only clarify the text may take effect sooner. If you do not accept a change, stop using the Service before it takes effect and, if you have a subscription, cancel it; where a change materially harms you as a subscriber, you may end the subscription at the change date and we refund the unused part of the current period through Polar.

Every version of these Terms carries a “Last updated” date. Each checkout and each auto top-up consent records the version in force at the time; your acceptance of a later version is given by your continued use after it takes effect.

22. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of [governing law jurisdiction], and the courts of [courts of venue] have exclusive jurisdiction over disputes arising from them, except that if you are a consumer you also benefit from any mandatory provisions of the law of the country in which you live and may bring proceedings in its courts.

If you are a consumer in the European Union, you may also use the European Commission's online dispute resolution platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. We are not obliged to take part in alternative dispute resolution procedures before a consumer arbitration body unless the law requires it.

If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest remains in force. Our failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it. These Terms, with the Privacy Policy and any Enterprise contract, are the whole agreement between us about the Service. You may not assign them without our consent; we may assign them to a successor of the business with notice to you.

23. Contact

[company legal name], [registered address]. Support and billing questions: support@vocalstack.com. Privacy questions: support@vocalstack.com.