Terms of service

Language API is a machine translation interface operated by Baduno GmbH under langapi.xyz and api.langapi.xyz. The following clauses are the contract under which we make it available to you. Opening an account means you agree to them. A German version of these terms exists; where the two differ, the German text is decisive.

1. Who we are and who these terms bind

Baduno GmbH, Mainzer Landstraße 166, 60327 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, entered in the Handelsregister des Amtsgerichts Frankfurt am Main under HRB 111727, is the provider and is referred to below as "we". The person or organisation that opens the account is the customer, referred to as "you".

If you open the account for a company, association or other organisation, you warrant that you have the authority to enter into this contract on its behalf. You also need to be of full age and legally capable of contracting.

2. What the service is

2.1 Scope of the service

We translate text between the language pairs listed in our documentation, by machine, over an HTTP interface. Alongside the interface we offer a dashboard for managing API keys, glossaries, usage figures and invoices. All of this is delivered as a hosted service: nothing is installed on your systems, and no software or copy of it changes hands.

2.2 Changes to features

Individual features may be modified, extended or withdrawn over time. If such a change withdraws a feature you actually rely on, or materially narrows the service, we give you at least 30 days' advance notice by e-mail; you may then end the contract with effect from the day the change takes effect.

2.3 Limits of machine translation

Machine output can be wrong. It is no replacement for a professional human translator, and it is your responsibility to review a translation before you rely on it anywhere a mistake would matter — in legal, medical, financial or safety-relevant material in particular.

3. Registration, teams and API keys

Provide correct details at registration and keep them up to date. API keys are displayed once, when they are created; we store nothing but a hash of them, so a lost key cannot be recovered. Whatever happens under one of your keys is attributed to you. Should a key leak or go missing, revoke it in the dashboard at once.

Keys, quotas, rate limits and invoicing are always attached to a team, never to a single user account. Whoever owns the team answers for the conduct of every member they have added to it.

4. Fair use and prohibited conduct

The service may not be used to:

• break the law of the Federal Republic of Germany, of the European Union or of the

country in which you or your end users are located;

• translate material you are not entitled to process, or pass personal data through

the API without a legal basis for doing so;

• create or spread unlawful content — content that infringes intellectual property,

defames or harasses someone, or exploits children, among others;

• get around quotas, rate limits, the character count or any other technical

limitation;

• reverse engineer, rebuild or resell the underlying models, or feed the output

systematically into the training of a rival translation system;

• offer the service as a translation API of your own without a written reseller

agreement — embedding it in your own product, by contrast, is expressly allowed;

• scan, probe or load-test our infrastructure without our written permission;
• pass credentials to anyone outside your team.

Where we have good reason to suspect a breach of this clause, we may suspend the key or account concerned on the spot; we will tell you why. If the suspension proves to have been unjustified, the period affected is credited back to you.

5. Prices, plans and billing

5.1 The character as unit of charge

Everything you send is billed per character. A character is a single Unicode character of the submitted text — spaces, line breaks, punctuation and markup all count. Text passed in the context parameter is free of charge. The number of characters billed for a request is reported in the X-Characters-Billed response header and in the dashboard.

A request answered from our cache costs the same as a fresh translation: the result you receive is identical. A request that fails — because of a validation error, a rate limit or an engine failure — costs nothing, and any reservation made against your balance for it is released immediately.

5.2 Prepaid credit

Without a subscription you pay in advance: you buy credit, and every request draws it down per character at the rate shown on the pricing page for your currency.

Credit remains usable for twelve months counted from the day of the top-up. Thirty days before any part of your balance expires we remind you by e-mail. Credit that has expired is forfeited and not refunded. Credit carries no cash value, cannot be moved between accounts and cannot be converted back into money unless mandatory law requires a refund.

5.3 The free starting allowance

Once an account's e-mail address has been confirmed, the account is credited with 100,000 characters free of charge. This happens once per account, requires no payment method and cannot be transferred.

5.4 Subscription plans

A subscription plan is billed in advance for each billing period — a month or a year, as you choose — at the price shown for your currency when you subscribe. Every period includes the character volume stated for the plan; whatever remains of that volume at the end of the period is not carried forward.

Moving to a larger plan takes effect at once, with the rest of the current period billed proportionately. Moving to a smaller plan takes effect when the current period ends.

5.5 Overage and the overage cap

Characters beyond the included volume are counted per started block of 100,000 characters at the overage rate of your plan and collected as a separate payment when the billing period closes.

Each subscription carries an overage cap. You set it in the dashboard, and you may set it to unlimited. Once the cap is reached the API stops translating and answers with HTTP 402 until either the next period begins or you raise the cap. We send a warning e-mail when you reach 80 % and 100 % of the included volume.

The cap is a safety mechanism against a runaway integration — a control, not a promise: usage that was recorded before the cap took effect remains due.

5.6 Billing currency and price changes

Prices are published on the pricing page per currency; they are not converted at the daily exchange rate. Your billing currency is fixed with your first payment, because invoices, credit and price lists are all kept in it. To change it, write to [email protected].

We may change prices on at least 30 days' notice by e-mail. For subscriptions a new price applies from the next billing period; for credit it applies from the next top-up and never touches credit you have already bought. If you do not wish to accept a price change, you may terminate with effect from the day it applies.

6. Value added tax

All prices are net of value added tax and of any other transaction tax that we are obliged to charge.

If you are a business in the European Union and supply a VAT identification number that we can validate through the European Commission's VIES system, we invoice you under the reverse charge procedure and you account for the tax yourself. Without a valid number we apply the rate of your country of residence. Customers outside the European Union are invoiced without European VAT; any tax due in your own country is your affair.

Keep your country and tax details accurate. If wrong details lead to the wrong tax treatment, the shortfall is yours to bear.

7. Payment, late payment and consumer withdrawal

Our payment service provider collects payments by the method you choose. Invoices are issued electronically and can be downloaded from the dashboard.

If a payment fails, we retry it and let you know. An amount still outstanding 14 days after its due date entitles us to suspend the service until it has been paid; an amount still outstanding 30 days after its due date entitles us to terminate the contract. Default interest is charged at the statutory rate.

Consumers have a 14-day right of withdrawal under European law. If you ask us to start performing straight away — which is what happens as soon as the API answers your first request — you owe a proportionate amount for what has already been delivered, and the right of withdrawal ends once the service has been performed in full with your prior express consent.

8. Service levels and support

8.1 Commitments by plan

We aim for uninterrupted operation and publish measured availability and latency on our public status page.

8.2 How availability is measured

Availability is the share of one-minute intervals in a calendar month during which the API returned non-error responses to valid requests. Not counted against us are: maintenance windows announced at least 48 hours ahead; outages originating in your own systems, network or configuration; outages caused by events beyond our control under clause 12; and suspensions for non-payment or breach.

8.3 Service credits

If the Business commitment is missed in a calendar month, you may claim a credit against the base fee of the following month: 10 % where availability was below 99.9 % but not below 99.0 %; 25 % where it was below 99.0 % but not below 95.0 %; 50 % where it was below 95.0 %. Claims are made in writing to [email protected] no later than 30 days after the end of the month in question. Service credits are your only remedy for missed availability, and credits for any one month never exceed that month's base fee.

9. Content, confidentiality and data protection

The text you submit and the translations you receive stay yours. We assert no rights in either, and we do not train models on your content.

Our usage records hold no submitted text. Cached translations are stored under a hash of the input, and caching can be switched off for your team at any time.

Where the text you send contains personal data, we process it on your behalf; our data processing agreement governs that and is part of this contract.

Each side treats the other's confidential information as confidential and uses it for nothing beyond the performance of this contract.

10. Intellectual property and trademarks

The service, the website, the documentation and the software behind them belong to us. You receive a right to use the service for the duration of the contract and nothing more.

The one exception is the sample code in our documentation: copy it, adapt it and use it in your own projects freely, without attribution.

You may say publicly that you use Language API. Any further use of our name or marks requires our written consent.

11. Warranties and liability

11.1 Warranties

We provide the service with reasonable skill and care. Beyond that, and as far as the law allows, it is provided as it is: we do not warrant that translations are accurate, complete or suitable for a particular purpose, nor that the service runs without interruption or error. Statutory consumer rights are not affected by this clause.

11.2 Liability

Our liability is unlimited for injury to life, body or health caused by our negligence, for fraud and fraudulent misrepresentation, and wherever the law does not permit liability to be excluded or limited. It is also unlimited for intent and gross negligence.

For ordinary negligence we are liable only where we breach an obligation whose fulfilment is essential to the proper performance of the contract and on which you are entitled to rely, and then only for the foreseeable loss typical of a contract of this kind.

Subject to the two paragraphs above, our aggregate liability in any twelve-month period is capped at whichever is higher: the amount you paid us in the twelve months preceding the event that gave rise to the claim, or the equivalent of one hundred euro in your billing currency.

We are not liable for lost profit, lost business, damage to goodwill, indirect or consequential loss, or for any loss that results from relying on machine output without reviewing it.

12. Force majeure

Neither side is liable for a failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control — war, civil unrest, natural disaster, epidemic, industrial action, failure of public telecommunications networks, failure of a sub-processor brought about by such events, and acts of public authorities among them. The side affected informs the other without delay. If such an event lasts longer than 30 days, either side may terminate.

13. Duration and termination

The contract runs for the billing period you chose and renews automatically for a period of the same length unless it is terminated.

You may terminate in the dashboard at any time, with effect from the end of the current billing period. Pay-as-you-go accounts can be closed whenever you like; credit not used up is not refunded unless clause 5.2 or mandatory law says otherwise.

We may terminate without cause on 30 days' notice, in which case we refund the unused part of any base fee paid in advance. Either side may terminate with immediate effect if the other commits a material breach and fails to cure it within 14 days of being asked to in writing.

For 90 days after the end of the contract your data stays available for export; afterwards it is deleted. Invoices and accounting records are kept for as long as tax law requires.

14. Amendments to these terms

We may amend these terms on at least 30 days' notice sent by e-mail to the address on your account. If you do not accept an amendment you may terminate with effect from the day it takes effect; using the service beyond that day counts as acceptance. Amendments imposed by law take effect on whatever date the law prescribes.

15. Transfer of the contract

You may transfer this contract to someone else only with our written consent, which we will not withhold unreasonably. We may transfer it to a legal successor in the course of a merger, restructuring or sale of the business; we will notify you if we do.

16. Applicable law, jurisdiction and severability

This contract is subject to the law of the Federal Republic of Germany. Its conflict-of-laws rules and the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods do not apply.

If you are a merchant, a legal person under public law or a special fund under public law, the courts of Frankfurt am Main have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, nothing in this clause takes away the protection of the mandatory rules of the country where you habitually live, and you may also sue in the courts of that country.

Should any clause be invalid, the rest of the contract stands; the invalid clause is replaced by one that comes as close as possible to its commercial intent.

17. Definitions

• Service — the translation API together with the dashboard and the

documentation.

• Character — one Unicode character of the submitted text, spaces, line breaks,

punctuation and markup included.

• Plan — the tariff chosen in the dashboard, as described on the pricing page.
• Credit — balance bought in advance and consumed under pay as you go.
• Included volume — the number of characters covered by a subscription plan's

base fee in one billing period.

• Overage — usage in excess of the included volume.
• Billing period — a month or a year, as selected when subscribing.

18. Contact

Baduno GmbH, Mainzer Landstraße 166, 60327 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Legal notices go to [email protected]; everything else to [email protected].