Terms of Service

1. Operator, scope and contracting parties

cluein.me is operated by Kristian Hoffmann, Karl-Kraut-Straße 15, 30177 Hannover, Germany (“we”, “us”). Contact: moin@kristianhoffmann.de. Further provider details are in the Imprint at cluein.me/legal/imprint.

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) apply to every contract for the use of cluein.me between us and the customer. The customer is the business on whose behalf an account and an organization (workspace) are created in cluein.me. The person who registers or books a plan confirms that they are authorised to act for that business.

Terms and conditions of the customer do not apply, even if we do not expressly object to them, unless we have agreed to them in text form.

2. Business customers only

cluein.me is offered exclusively to entrepreneurs within the meaning of § 14 BGB (Unternehmer): natural or legal persons or partnerships with legal capacity that conclude the contract in the exercise of their trade, business or independent profession — for example freelancers, agencies and companies. cluein.me is not offered to consumers within the meaning of § 13 BGB (Verbraucher).

When registering, the customer confirms that it is acting as an entrepreneur in the course of its trade or profession. We may ask for reasonable evidence of this, for example a VAT identification number or a business registration, and may refuse or terminate a contract for cause if the confirmation turns out to be untrue.

Because we contract with businesses only, the statutory right of withdrawal for distance contracts with consumers (§§ 312g, 355 BGB) does not apply. The refund described in section 10 is a voluntary commercial promise, not a statutory right.

3. Conclusion of the contract

The presentation of cluein.me and its plans on our website is not a binding offer; it is an invitation to the customer to register or to order a plan.

The contract for the Free plan is concluded when the customer completes the registration — confirming its business status and accepting these Terms — and confirms its e-mail address.

A paid plan is ordered from the settings of the organization. By completing the checkout, which is handled by our payment provider Stripe, the customer makes a binding offer to conclude a contract for the selected plan on these Terms. We accept the offer at the latest by activating the paid plan for the organization.

The contract language is English. Where a German legal term is given in brackets, that term is decisive for interpretation. The customer can view, save and print these Terms at any time at cluein.me/legal/terms.

4. The service

cluein.me is web-based software provided as a service (software as a service). It lets designers, freelancers and agencies collect project briefings, files, required information and approvals from their own clients through client portals, and export what has been collected — for example as a ZIP handoff containing the uploaded assets, structured data and a written brief. The software is provided over the internet only; no copy of the software is handed over.

The customer’s clients open a client portal through a portal link. Portal links expire and can be revoked by the customer; the customer’s clients do not need an account of their own and do not become parties to the contract with us.

The scope of the service depends on the plan booked. The limits and features of each plan — in particular the number of projects, clients and active portal links, the storage volume, and the availability of branding, reminder e-mails, the AI briefing quality score, white-label portals and custom templates — are those shown on the pricing page (cluein.me/pricing) at the time of the order. Limits are enforced automatically.

On plans that include it, the customer can use an optional briefing quality score. It is an automated assessment that can be wrong or incomplete and is intended as orientation only; it does not change a project’s status or send anything to the customer’s clients on its own. Organization owners can switch it off at any time. How briefing content is processed for this feature is described in the Privacy Policy.

Briefing templates, required-item checklists and fields for collecting legal information (such as imprint or privacy details for a client’s website) are tools for collecting information. We do not provide legal advice and do not check whether information provided by the customer or its clients is complete, correct or legally sufficient.

We may develop the service further and change features, provided that the core functions of a paid plan remain available for the paid billing period and the change is reasonable for the customer. If a change materially restricts the use of a paid plan, we will inform the customer in text form in advance, and the customer may terminate the affected subscription with effect from the date of the change.

5. Availability and the customer’s own copies

We operate cluein.me with the care customary in the trade on a server in Germany. We do not promise a particular level of availability, and no service level agreement applies unless one has been agreed separately in text form. Interruptions can occur, in particular for maintenance and security updates or because of circumstances outside our control, such as failures of networks or third-party providers. We aim to keep planned maintenance short.

The customer is responsible for keeping its own copies of data that matters to it. The data export in the settings (a ZIP file with the organization’s data and uploaded files) serves this purpose.

To use cluein.me the customer needs a current web browser and an internet connection, which the customer provides at its own cost.

6. Accounts, team members and portal links

The information given at registration must be accurate and kept up to date, in particular the e-mail address of the organization owner, to which we send notices under these Terms.

Access credentials must be kept confidential and protected against misuse. Two-factor authentication is available and recommended.

The customer may invite team members to its organization and decides which role each of them has; only the organization owner can delete the organization. The customer is responsible for the conduct of its team members as for its own and ensures that they comply with these Terms.

Anyone who has a portal link can open the portal of that project. The customer shares portal links only with the intended recipients and revokes links that are no longer needed or may have reached unauthorised persons.

The customer informs us without undue delay if it suspects that its account or a portal link is being misused.

7. Acceptable use

The customer shall not use cluein.me — and shall ensure that its team members and clients do not use it — to:

• upload or process content that is unlawful or infringes the rights of third parties, such as copyrights, trademarks or personality rights;
• upload malware or other harmful code, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to cluein.me, other customers’ data or our systems;
• circumvent plan limits, access controls, rate limits or other technical protections, or load-test or scan cluein.me without our prior consent;
• store passwords, access credentials or similar secrets — including those of its clients. cluein.me is not designed to hold them, and they must never be entered;
• process personal data that the customer is not authorised to process;
• send unsolicited messages to recipients who have no business relationship with the customer.

If there are concrete indications of a violation, we may block the content concerned or temporarily restrict access to the extent necessary, taking the customer’s legitimate interests into account. We will inform the customer, stating the reason. The right to terminate for cause remains unaffected.

The customer indemnifies us against claims of third parties arising from content stored by the customer, its team members or its clients in cluein.me, or from use of cluein.me in breach of this section, to the extent that the customer is responsible for the violation. This includes reasonable costs of legal defence.

8. Customer content and rights of use

Content that the customer, its team members or its clients enter or upload in cluein.me (“customer content”) remains the property of the customer or the respective rights holder. We acquire no rights to it beyond those set out in this section.

The customer grants us a non-exclusive, non-transferable right, limited to the term of the contract and the retention periods under section 12, to store, copy, process, transmit and display customer content solely to the extent necessary to provide cluein.me — including client portals, exports, the e-mails the customer triggers, the optional quality score, security measures and the correction of errors — and to have this done by the sub-processors named in the Data Processing Agreement. We use customer content for no other purpose.

The customer is responsible towards us for customer content, including content its clients upload through its portals, and ensures that it holds the rights required for the processing described above.

cluein.me itself — the software, its design, the templates we provide and our marks — remains ours. For the term of the contract we grant the customer a non-exclusive, non-transferable and non-sublicensable right to use cluein.me for its own business purposes, including making client portals available to its own clients. §§ 69d and 69e UrhG remain unaffected.

9. Fees, billing and renewal

The Free plan is free of charge within its limits.

Paid plans are subscriptions per organization, not per user. The price is the one shown on the pricing page and in the checkout at the time of the order. Subscriptions are billed in advance for each billing period; the billing period is monthly unless a different period is shown in the checkout. Discounts from promotion codes apply only as stated in the respective promotion.

We currently apply the small-business scheme under § 19 UStG (Kleinunternehmerregelung) and therefore charge no German VAT. If we become obliged to charge VAT, it will be added to the net price at the statutory rate; we will inform the customer in text form beforehand. Taxes that the customer owes under the law of its own country on the service (for example under a reverse-charge procedure) are borne by the customer.

Payments are processed by Stripe. Payment details are entered directly with Stripe and are not stored by us. The customer authorises the recurring charge for each billing period to the payment method it provides. Invoices, the payment method and the subscription can be managed in the settings under Billing (“Manage billing”, the Stripe billing portal).

The subscription renews automatically for a further billing period unless it is cancelled before the end of the current billing period (section 11). When the customer switches between paid plans, the new price applies from the time and on the terms shown during the change, including any pro-rata credit or charge calculated by Stripe.

If a payment fails, we notify the organization owner. The workspace remains usable for a grace period of 7 days. If the amount is still outstanding after that, we may restrict the workspace to read-only access until payment is made. Our statutory rights in the event of default remain unaffected.

We may change the prices of paid plans with effect from the start of a billing period. We will announce a price change in text form at least six weeks before it takes effect. The customer may cancel the subscription with effect from the date the change takes effect; we will point this out in the announcement.

The customer may only set off claims that are undisputed or have been finally established by a court. This restriction does not apply to counterclaims arising from the same contractual relationship, in particular claims because of defects.

10. Voluntary refund for the first payment

In addition to its statutory rights, an organization may request a refund of its first paid subscription charge if cluein.me does not meet its workflow needs. The request must reach us in text form (for example by e-mail to moin@kristianhoffmann.de) within 14 days of that charge. The refund covers that first charge only; the paid subscription ends when the refund is made.

11. Term and termination

The Free plan runs for an indefinite period. The customer can end it at any time by deleting its account in the settings or by notice in text form. We can end the Free plan with one month’s notice in text form.

A paid subscription runs for the billing period booked and renews as described in section 9. The customer can cancel it at any time in the settings under Billing (“Manage billing”) or by notice in text form to moin@kristianhoffmann.de. Unless a different effective date is shown when cancelling in the billing portal, the cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and the paid plan remains available until then. We can terminate a paid subscription with at least one month’s notice in text form, effective at the end of a billing period.

Deleting the user account in the settings ends the subscriptions of the organizations that are deleted with it with immediate effect; the same applies when the owner deletes an organization in the settings. Fees already paid are not refunded pro rata in that case; section 10 remains unaffected.

The right of either party to terminate for cause (§ 314 BGB) remains unaffected. Cause for us exists in particular if the customer seriously or repeatedly breaches section 7 despite a warning, if the confirmation of business status under section 2 is untrue, or if the customer is in default with payments amounting to at least two monthly fees.

Notices of termination require text form (for example e-mail).

12. Data export and deletion

Organization owners and admins can download a data export at any time in the settings — a ZIP file with the organization’s data and uploaded files.

When a paid subscription ends, the organization is moved to the Free plan and its workspace becomes read-only for 30 days. During these 30 days the data export remains available. The organization is then deleted and is no longer accessible. 90 days after the subscription ended, the organization’s data, including uploaded files, is permanently deleted.

If the owner deletes the organization in the settings, it is no longer accessible from that moment, the data export is no longer available, and its data is permanently deleted after 90 days. Organizations that a user holds alone are deleted together with that user’s account. The customer should therefore download the data export before deleting.

Data that we are required by law to retain, such as invoice records, is kept for the statutory retention period and used only for that purpose. Further details are in the Privacy Policy.

13. Confidentiality

Both parties keep confidential all information of the other party that is marked as confidential or is recognisably confidential, and use it only for the purposes of this contract. We treat customer content as confidential. This obligation continues for three years after the end of the contract, and for customer content for as long as we hold it.

The obligation does not apply to information that is or becomes publicly known without breach of this section, that the receiving party already held or developed independently, or that must be disclosed by law or by order of a court or authority. Disclosure to advisers bound by professional secrecy and to sub-processors bound to confidentiality is permitted.

14. Data protection

The Privacy Policy at cluein.me/legal/privacy describes how we process personal data when operating our website, accounts and billing, which providers we use and where data is stored.

Where the customer stores personal data of its clients, their staff or its own team members in cluein.me, we process that data on the customer’s behalf as processor under Art. 28 GDPR. The Data Processing Agreement at cluein.me/legal/dpa applies to this processing and forms part of the contract; it also lists the sub-processors. On request by e-mail to moin@kristianhoffmann.de we send a countersigned copy.

As controller for that data, the customer is responsible for the lawfulness of the processing, including informing its clients and choosing whether to use the optional quality score.

15. Defects

For paid plans the statutory provisions on defects under the law of rental contracts (Mietrecht) apply, with the following modification: strict liability for defects that already existed when the contract was concluded (§ 536a(1), first alternative, BGB) is excluded. Liability for defects we are responsible for remains subject to section 16.

The customer reports defects to us in text form without undue delay, with a description that allows us to reproduce them.

16. Liability

We are liable without limitation for intent and gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under the Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz), within the scope of a guarantee we have given, and where we have fraudulently concealed a defect.

For slight negligence we are liable only for the breach of an essential contractual obligation (Kardinalpflicht) — an obligation whose fulfilment makes the proper performance of the contract possible in the first place and on whose fulfilment the customer regularly relies. In that case our liability is limited to the damage that was foreseeable and typical for this type of contract when the contract was concluded. Otherwise, liability for slight negligence is excluded.

In the case of the preceding paragraph, liability for the loss of data is limited to the effort that would have been needed to restore the data if the customer had kept copies appropriate to the risk, for example by using the data export.

These limitations also apply to the personal liability of our employees, representatives and vicarious agents. Liability under mandatory statutory provisions remains unaffected, and the statutory burden of proof is not changed.

17. Changes to these Terms

We may amend these Terms with effect for the future if there is a valid reason — in particular a change in the law or in case law, new security requirements, new features, or a change of service providers — and the amendment does not shift the balance between the main obligations of the parties to the customer’s disadvantage. Price changes are governed by section 9. Changes to the main obligations themselves require the customer’s express consent.

We will send the amended Terms, with the changes highlighted, to the e-mail address of the organization owner at least six weeks before they take effect. The customer may object in text form until the date they take effect. If the customer does not object in time, the amended Terms are deemed accepted; we will point out this consequence, the objection period and the right to terminate in the notice.

If the customer objects, the contract continues on the previous Terms. In that case either party may terminate the contract with effect from the date on which the amendment would have taken effect.

18. Final provisions

The law of the Federal Republic of Germany applies, excluding the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG).

If the customer is a merchant (Kaufmann), a legal entity under public law or a special fund under public law, or has no general place of jurisdiction in Germany, the exclusive place of jurisdiction for all disputes arising from or in connection with this contract is Hannover, Germany. We may also bring proceedings at the customer’s general place of jurisdiction. Statutory exclusive places of jurisdiction remain unaffected.

We may send notices under this contract to the e-mail address of the organization owner. The customer may transfer rights and obligations under this contract to third parties only with our consent in text form; § 354a HGB remains unaffected.

If individual provisions of these Terms are or become invalid, the remaining provisions remain valid. Instead of the invalid provision, the statutory provisions apply (§ 306(2) BGB).