Termos de Serviço

Effective date: 2026-10-07. Last updated: 2026-10-19.

These Terms of Service (the Terms) are between CAMPOS ANIDO ERNESTO JOSE, a sole proprietor trading as erni.works, Plaza Ginza Shintomi Bldg. 501, 2-11-11 Shintomi, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0041, Japan (Ephemeral, we, us) and the person or organization that creates an account or uses the hosted service (you). They govern the hosted service at ephemer.al and app.ephemer.al, including the website, the dashboard, the API and the command-line tool when it is used with the hosted service (the Service). By creating an account, buying credits or using the Service, you accept these Terms.

Self-hosted software is different. Running Ephemeral in your own AWS account is governed by the separate Self-Hosted License Agreement, not by these Terms. How we handle personal data is described in the Privacy Policy.

1. The Service

Ephemeral runs AI agent tasks (runs) in disposable microVMs. You send a prompt, input, files and connections; the agent works in a fresh machine, every step is recorded, and the machine is destroyed when the run ends. The documentation at https://ephemer.al/docs describes how the Service behaves, including limits, budgets and the statuses a run can have. The documentation is part of these Terms to the extent it describes how the Service works.

2. Accounts and organizations

2.1 Eligibility. You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live, and able to form a binding contract. If you use the Service for an organization, you confirm that you have authority to bind it, and these Terms are then between us and that organization.

2.2 Registration. You must give accurate information, confirm your email address, and keep your credentials and API keys secret. You are responsible for everything done with your account, sessions and API keys. Tell us promptly through the support page if you believe they have been compromised.

2.3 Organizations. Credits, runs, connections, files, workflows, schedules and API keys belong to an organization. Owners and administrators can invite members, buy credits, set automatic top-ups and manage keys, according to the roles shown in the dashboard. The organization, and through it its owners, is responsible for the actions of its members and keys.

2.4 One account per person. Do not create accounts to avoid a suspension, a limit or a charge.

3. Acceptable use

You must not use the Service, and must not let anyone else use it, to:

(a) break the law, or infringe the rights of others, including intellectual property, privacy and confidentiality rights;

(b) attack, probe, scan or disrupt systems, networks or accounts you are not authorized to test, including denial-of-service, credential stuffing, exploitation of vulnerabilities, and attempts to smuggle data out of systems;

(c) send spam or unsolicited bulk messages, or run phishing, fraud, or impersonation;

(d) scrape or collect personal data about people without a lawful basis, or build profiles of individuals from web content;

(e) generate or distribute malware, or content that sexually exploits children, or that is otherwise illegal;

(f) evade the Service's limits, budgets or safety checks, or the rules of EphemeralBot published at https://ephemer.al/bot, including its request limits, its refusal of private or internal addresses, and the robots.txt rules that website owners address to it;

(g) interfere with the Service or its security, attempt to reach other customers' data, or reverse engineer the Service except as the law permits; or

(h) use the Service in a sanctioned country or for a sanctioned person, or in breach of export control law.

When a run uses web access, EphemeralBot makes the requests on your behalf. You are responsible for what you ask it to fetch and for complying with the terms of the sites you reach.

We may investigate suspected violations. Our staff can review records and logs for this purpose and for support, security and billing, as the Privacy Policy describes.

4. Your responsibility for agents, content and output

4.1 Your content. You keep your rights in the prompts, inputs, files, connection credentials and other content you provide, and in the output you receive (Your Content), as between you and us. You give us the limited right to host, process, transmit and record Your Content, and to send it to the model providers and other services you select or enable, so that we can provide the Service, keep it secure and meet legal obligations.

4.2 You decide what agents can do. An agent acts on the instructions, files, connections and permissions you give it. Runs can call APIs, send requests and use tools that change things in other systems, for example issuing a refund, sending a message or deleting a record. You are responsible for the connections you grant, the methods and domains you allow, the budgets and timeouts you set, and every action taken with them.

4.3 Cancelling does not undo. If an agent has already called an API that changed something, cancelling the run does not reverse it. The same applies to runs that fail, time out or are interrupted. We never retry a run automatically, so a side effect is not repeated, but we cannot undo one either.

4.4 Output may be wrong. AI output can be inaccurate, incomplete, unsafe or offensive. Review the output and the actions of agents before relying on them, and do not use the Service as the sole basis for decisions with legal, medical, financial or safety consequences.

4.5 Secrets. A run definition keeps the prompt, input and inline file contents you send. Do not put secrets there; use a saved connection. You are responsible for the credentials you store with us and for rotating them if they are exposed.

4.6 Third-party services. Models are provided by third-party providers through our model gateway, and connections reach services run by others. Their terms and policies apply to your use of them, and we are not responsible for them.

5. Prepaid credits, billing and taxes

5.1 Credits. Runs are paid from prepaid credits, denominated in US dollars. Owners and administrators buy credits by card through our payment provider, Stripe, from $5 to $10,000 at a time. Credits are added to your organization's balance when Stripe confirms the payment, usually within seconds. Returning from the checkout page does not by itself add credits. Credits are a prepaid balance for using the Service. They are not money, are not interest-bearing, and cannot be transferred or exchanged for cash except as section 6 provides.

5.2 Budgets, reservations and settlement. Every run has a budget (a default applies if you set none, and the maximum is $100). When a run is created we reserve its whole budget from your available credits. While it runs, compute time, model calls and web requests are counted. When it ends we charge the final cost to your balance and release the rest of the reservation. Costs shown while a run is active are provisional and can be higher than the amount charged. If your available credits are too small to reserve the budget, the run is not started. Model calls and web requests that would exceed the budget are refused. Zero data retention runs cost 10% more, as the documentation describes.

5.3 Prices. Prices, rates and model prices are shown on https://ephemer.al/pricing, in the dashboard and in the documentation. We may change them for future use. A change does not affect a run already started or credits already bought. Model calls are charged at the price the provider reports for the call, and where a call cannot be priced exactly, the upper bound we authorized stays charged, as the documentation describes.

5.4 Automatic top-up. If you turn on automatic top-up you authorize us, through Stripe, to charge your saved card the top-up amount you chose whenever a run's charge leaves your balance below the threshold you chose, until you turn it off. Saving a card does not turn it on. Removing the selected card without choosing another default turns it off. A refund or a dispute turns it off.

5.5 Failed payments, refunds and disputes. Refunds and disputes (chargebacks) are deducted from your balance. If that leaves the balance negative, new runs are blocked until you add credits.

5.6 Taxes. Prices are stated in US dollars. No Japanese consumption tax is added to the prices shown: Ephemeral is exempt from consumption tax and is not registered as a qualified invoice issuer. You are responsible for any taxes, duties and withholdings that apply to your purchases, other than taxes on our net income, unless the checkout shows that tax is included. The ledger in the dashboard is an account history, not an invoice; Stripe provides a receipt for each payment.

6. Credit policy

6.1 Credits do not expire. Credits you have bought stay on your balance until they are used. They do not expire because of time.

6.2 Refund within 14 days. If you made a purchase of credits in the last 14 days, you may ask us, through the support page, to refund the credits from that purchase that you have not yet used. We refund the unused part to the original payment method. Credits already used or reserved for runs in progress are not refundable. You can make a refund request for a purchase only within the 14 days that follow it.

6.3 Otherwise no refunds. Except under section 6.2, credits and fees are not refundable, including credits left over from older purchases and credits charged for runs that produced output you did not want. This does not limit refunds that the law requires, and we will correct billing errors, for example a charge for a run that was not started, a duplicate payment, or an amount that does not match what the Service reports, by crediting or refunding the difference.

6.4 Closing an account. If we close your account without cause, or you close it within the period in section 6.2, we will treat the unused credits as section 6.2 provides. If we close your account because you breached these Terms, unused credits may be forfeited to the extent the law permits.

7. Data and retention

7.1 Records. We record the steps of each run so you can follow it and so we can bill it. Finished runs, with their events and output, are deleted 30 days after they end. A run is kept longer while its billing, callback delivery or microVM cleanup is still pending.

7.2 Zero data retention. If you turn on zero data retention for a run, we keep only its identifiers, status, timestamps, cost and usage figures and a generic error category. Events stream while the run works and are deleted a few minutes after it ends; the output is returned once and deleted after at most an hour. The prompt, input, file list and connection references are not kept. We send model calls for such runs only to providers that neither retain the data nor train on it, and refuse a model that has no such provider.

7.3 Other data. Account, billing, support, security and audit records are kept as the Privacy Policy describes. Backups of our database are kept for 30 days.

7.4 Personal data. We handle personal data as described in the Privacy Policy. If Your Content includes personal data about other people, you are responsible for having a lawful basis to send it to the Service, and for informing those people where the law requires it.

7.5 Deletion. You can ask us through the support page to delete your account. We delete or de-identify account data, except what we must keep to meet legal, tax, accounting, security or dispute obligations, which the Privacy Policy describes.

8. Service changes and availability

We may change, add or remove features, models, limits and prices, and we may stop offering parts of the Service. We will give reasonable notice of a change that materially harms paid use where we can. The Service is provided without a service level agreement, and we do not promise any level of availability, uptime or response time unless we agree to one in writing. We do releases without taking the Service down, but maintenance, outages and incidents can still happen. A public status page shows the service's state.

9. Suspension and termination

9.1 By you. You can stop using the Service at any time. Section 6 governs credits left on your balance.

9.2 By us. Our staff can suspend or close accounts, organizations, API keys, connections or runs, immediately and without notice where the circumstances require, if we reasonably believe that you breached these Terms (including section 3), that the Service or other people are at risk, that a payment is disputed or unpaid, that the law requires it, or that the account was used to avoid an earlier suspension. Where reasonable we will tell you why and give you a chance to respond, and we will handle credits as section 6.4 states.

9.3 Effect. When your access ends, your right to use the Service ends. Sections that by their nature should continue, including sections 4, 5 (for amounts owed), 6, 7.4, 10, 11, 12 and 13, continue.

10. Disclaimers

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE". TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, EPHEMERAL DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE OR ERROR-FREE, OR THAT OUTPUT OR ACTIONS OF AGENTS WILL BE ACCURATE, SAFE OR USEFUL. MODEL AND THIRD-PARTY SERVICES ARE PROVIDED BY OTHERS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY FROM US.

11. Limitation of liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW: (a) EPHEMERAL IS NOT LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, REVENUE, GOODWILL OR DATA, OR FOR THE ACTIONS OF AGENTS ON SYSTEMS YOU CONNECT, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THEIR POSSIBILITY; AND (b) OUR TOTAL LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE AND THESE TERMS IS LIMITED TO THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US FOR THE SERVICE IN THE THREE (3) MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE LIABILITY.

These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be limited under applicable law, including liability for our willful misconduct or gross negligence, or for death or personal injury caused by our negligence. If you use the Service as a consumer under Japanese law, nothing in these Terms limits liability or rights that the Consumer Contract Act or other mandatory law gives you, and a limit in these Terms applies to a consumer only to the extent the law allows.

12. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms by publishing a new version on this page with a new effective date. For a change that materially affects you, we will notify you by email to your account address or in the dashboard at least thirty (30) days before it applies, except where a change is needed sooner for legal or security reasons. If you keep using the Service after a change applies, you accept it. If you do not accept it, stop using the Service before it applies and, within the period in section 6.2, you may request a refund as that section provides.

13. Governing law and disputes

These Terms and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or the Service are governed by the laws of Japan, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The Tokyo District Court has exclusive jurisdiction of the first instance over any such dispute or claim, and each party submits to that jurisdiction, except where mandatory law gives a consumer the right to bring a claim in another court.

14. General

14.1 Contact. Contact us through the support page at https://ephemer.al/support when you are signed in. Legal notices to you may be sent by email to your account address or shown in the dashboard.

14.2 Entire agreement. These Terms, with the documentation, the Privacy Policy and any order or pricing shown at checkout, are the entire agreement about the Service. A separate written agreement between you and us that expressly covers the Service prevails where they conflict.

14.3 Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or to a successor to our business.

14.4 Severability and waiver. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest continues, and the provision is enforced to the extent allowed. A failure to enforce a right is not a waiver of it.

14.5 Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control, except for payment obligations.

14.6 Language. These Terms are provided in English. Any translation is for convenience, and the English version governs.