Ripple Effect — Terms of Service, version 1.0 (English) Effective 15 October 2026. Applies to ripplefx.app, docs.ripplefx.app, legal.ripplefx.app, demo.ripplefx.app and the hosted service reached by signing in.

These Terms carry a date where the other three documents do not, and the reason is in Article C3: this website has no versions to attach them to, and Part A is accepted by using it rather than by pressing anything.

These Terms govern this website and the hosted service. They do not govern the Ripple Effect application you install and run on your own machine, which is governed by the End-User Licence Agreement.

The application is free and works entirely offline. If you never create an account, the whole of Part B below never applies to you, and nothing in these Terms obliges you to create one.

Acceptance

The Operator is ConnectingTheDots, a trade name of William Karol Di Cioccio, sole trader, VAT no. IT02224180667, Italy (“the Operator”, “we”).

By using the website you accept Part A. By creating an account you accept Part B as well, by an explicit confirmation given at sign-up.

Part A — The website

A1. What the website offers

Information about Ripple Effect; public documentation; downloads of the application through official installers; a changelog and release notes; a blog; forms for a waiting list and a satisfaction survey, hosted by a third party; and, from the release that introduces it, the purchase of a subscription to the Service.

We may modify, suspend or discontinue any part of the website at any time.

A2. Acceptable use of the website

You agree to use the website lawfully. You may not use it for unlawful, fraudulent or harmful purposes; attempt to reach non-public areas of it or of our systems; scrape or mass-collect from it without our prior written consent; interfere with its operation or with connected networks; transmit malicious code through it; impersonate us or anybody else; or use it to send unsolicited communications.

A3. Intellectual property of the website

The content of the website — text, graphics, logos, icons, documentation, information architecture and markup — belongs to the Operator or its respective owners and is protected by Italian and European copyright law. Consulting and reproducing it for personal, non-commercial use is permitted; anything else needs our prior written consent.

The names and marks “Ripple Effect” and “ConnectingTheDots”, and the Ripple Effect mark, are the Operator’s.

A4. Feedback

If you send us feedback, a bug report or a feature request, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide and irrevocable licence to use, reproduce, modify and incorporate it into the software or the documentation, with no obligation of compensation. You warrant that you are entitled to send what you send. This Article covers suggestions about the product; it does not cover Your Content under Article B4.

A5. Availability of the website

We try to keep the website available and do not warrant that it will be. It may be unavailable for maintenance, for updates, or for reasons outside our control. We are not liable for loss arising from it being unavailable, including an inability to download an installer at a particular moment.

A6. External links

The website links to third-party services — GitHub, Polar, the form host, and others. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content, availability or practices. Their own terms apply to your use of them.

Part B — The hosted service

This Part applies only if you create an account.

B1. What the Service is

The Service is the set of features provided from our servers and reached by signing in: media storage for project assets, real-time collaboration on a project, team workspaces and their administration, and such other features as we offer from time to time. Which features are included in which plan is stated on the pricing page at the time you subscribe.

The Service is an addition to the application, never a condition of it. No feature that is free in the application on the date these Terms take effect will be moved behind an account or a subscription.

B2. Your account

You must be at least 16 years old, or the minimum age at which your country’s law permits you to consent to the processing of your personal data, whichever is higher.
An account belongs to one person. Credentials may not be shared, sold or transferred. A team gives each member their own account.
You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for what is done through your account. Tell us at support@ripplefx.app as soon as you believe it has been used without your authorisation.
The information you give us must be accurate, and you must keep it so.
You may delete your account at any time. Article B10 says exactly what is erased, what is not, and when.

B3. Workspaces and members

A workspace is the unit of collaboration. It has an owner — the account that created it or to which ownership has been transferred — and members invited by the owner or by an administrator.

The owner decides who is a member and what a member may do.
A member’s access ends when the owner ends it, immediately, including access to content the member contributed.
Between the account holders, rights in the content of a workspace are a matter for them, and we take no position on it. For the purposes of these Terms we treat the owner as the party entitled to give us instructions about that content, including instructions to export or delete it.
If the owner’s account is closed or its subscription lapses, the workspace follows Article B10. We may, on a reasonable request and where we can identify the parties, transfer ownership of a workspace to another member — but we are not obliged to arbitrate a dispute about who should have it.

Where a workspace contains personal data about people other than the account holders, the owner is the controller of that data and we are its processor. A data-processing agreement is available on request from legal@ripplefx.app.

B4. Your Content

Your Content is yours. Everything you or your workspace’s members upload to, create in or synchronise through the Service — projects, passages, boards, media, scripts and exports — remains yours, and we acquire no ownership of it.

To run the Service we need permission to handle it, and that permission is limited to exactly that: you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, encode, index and display Your Content solely to the extent necessary to provide the Service to you and to the members of your workspace, to keep backups, and to comply with law. The licence ends when the content is deleted, except for backup copies until they expire in the ordinary course.

We do not:

claim any ownership of Your Content;
use Your Content to train machine-learning models, ours or anybody else’s;
sell, licence or disclose Your Content to third parties, except to the sub-processors listed at legal.ripplefx.app/subprocessors acting on our instructions, or where the law compels us;
read Your Content, except where it is strictly necessary to operate the Service, to investigate a reported breach of these Terms, or to respond to a support request you have made.

You are responsible for Your Content: you warrant that you hold the rights to it and that it does not infringe a third party’s rights or applicable law.

B5. Acceptable use of the Service

You may not use the Service to store, transmit or produce content that is unlawful; that infringes intellectual-property or privacy rights; that constitutes child sexual abuse material; that harasses or threatens; or that contains malicious code. You may not use the Service to attack or degrade our infrastructure or anybody else’s, to circumvent quotas or access controls, or to resell the Service as your own without a written agreement.

We may remove content and suspend access where we are required to by law or where we reasonably believe this Article has been breached, and we will tell you why unless the law prevents us.

B6. Storage, quotas and fair use

Plans carry storage and transfer allowances stated at the time of purchase. We may apply reasonable technical limits — file sizes, request rates, the number of concurrent collaborators — and will document them.

If you exceed an allowance we will tell you and give you a reasonable period to reduce your usage or move to a larger plan. We will not delete Your Content for exceeding an allowance without notice and a reasonable period to act; we may decline further uploads in the meantime.

B7. Purchases, prices and withdrawal

Merchant of Record. Subscriptions are sold by Polar, acting as Merchant of Record. Polar collects payment, handles VAT and other applicable taxes, and issues receipts. Polar’s own terms apply to the payment transaction, and Polar is an independent controller of the billing data you give it — see the Privacy Notice.

Prices are shown at the time of purchase. We may change them; a change does not affect a subscription period already paid for, and we will give notice before it applies to a renewal.

Renewal. A subscription renews for the same period unless cancelled before the end of the current one. Cancelling stops the next renewal; it does not shorten the period you have already paid for.

Right of withdrawal. A consumer resident in the European Union has fourteen (14) days from purchase to withdraw, under Legislative Decree 206/2005 and Directive 2011/83/EU. Because the Service is supplied immediately, you will be asked at checkout to consent expressly to that and to acknowledge that you lose the right of withdrawal once supply has begun. If you do not give that consent, supply begins after the fourteen days. A consumer resident outside the European Union keeps any mandatory withdrawal or cancellation rights their own law gives them.

B8. Availability, maintenance and backups

We aim to keep the Service available and offer no service-level agreement with these Terms. Availability commitments, if any, are made in a separate written agreement.

The Service may be unavailable for planned maintenance, for which we will give notice where we reasonably can, and for unplanned reasons, for which we cannot.

We take backups for our own operational purposes, and you should not rely on them as yours. The application works on ordinary files on your own machine and supports version control; keeping your own copy of your work is both possible and expected.

B9. Suspension, downgrade and termination

Non-payment. If a payment fails we will tell you and give you a reasonable period to fix it. After that we may downgrade the account to the free tier or suspend access to paid features. A downgrade is not a deletion: your content stays, subject to the free tier’s allowances, and Article B6 applies to anything over them.

Breach. We may suspend or terminate an account for a breach of these Terms — after notice and a chance to cure where the breach can be cured, and immediately where it cannot or where continuing would be unlawful or harmful.

On any suspension, downgrade or termination by us, Your Content becomes read-only and exportable for thirty (30) days, in a form the application can open, and we will not delete it during that window except where the law requires it or where the content itself is the breach. After that window, Article B10 applies.

B10. Deleting your account

You may delete your account at any time, from the application or by writing to support@ripplefx.app. You do not have to give a reason and we will not ask you for one.

B10.1 The thirty days

Unless you choose otherwise, deletion is reversible for thirty (30) days. In that window:

the account is closed — nobody can sign in to it, and it stops appearing to anyone you shared a workspace with;
you can restore it, by signing in with the same credentials, and everything comes back as it was;
you can export all of Your Content, in a form the application can open;
nothing is deleted, and nothing is billed.

The window exists because account deletion is the one action in this service that cannot be undone, and people click it by accident, in anger, and on the wrong account.

B10.2 Deleting immediately instead

The deletion screen offers a checkbox to skip the thirty days. Tick it and erasure begins at once, there is no restore, and we cannot recover anything afterwards — so export first if you want a copy.

One honest limit, and it applies to both routes. “Immediately” means from our live systems. Backups are written on a cycle and are not rewritten to remove individual records; they expire and are destroyed on their own schedule, within a maximum of one hundred and eighty (180) days. Until then a copy of your data exists in a backup that nobody reads and that is restored only if a disaster requires it. Anybody who tells you a backup can be surgically erased on request is describing a system they do not run.

B10.3 What is erased

Everything we hold that identifies you or belongs to you:

your account — e-mail address, credentials, settings, sessions;
workspaces you own, and all their content, media and history;
your membership of every workspace, and the invitations behind it;
collaboration and presence records;
support correspondence, unless a dispute is open between us.

B10.4 What is not, and why

Two things survive, and both are deliberately small.

Content in a workspace you did not own. If you contributed to somebody else’s workspace, what you contributed stays with that workspace — deleting your account cannot reach into another person’s project and take pieces out of it, any more than leaving a job deletes the documents you wrote there. Your identity is dissociated from it: your name and address are removed and your contributions are attributed to a deleted account. If you want something you wrote removed from a workspace you do not own, ask its owner; if you believe it is there unlawfully, write to legal@ripplefx.app and we will deal with it.

A minimal record that an account accepted these Terms — which document, which version, and when, with a one-way hash of the account’s e-mail address in place of the address itself — kept for as long as a claim under them could be brought, and used for nothing else. It cannot be used to contact you or to rebuild any part of your account, and it can be matched to you only by someone who already knows your address. It is kept under Article 17(3)(e) GDPR, which allows retention for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims, and it exists so that neither of us has to rely on memory about what was agreed. Anything the law obliges us to keep for tax or accounting is kept too, for the period the law names and no longer.

B10.5 Workspaces you own, and the people in them

If you delete an account that owns a workspace with other members in it, we tell them before anything is erased and give them the same thirty days to export their work — that period runs from our notice, not from your request, so choosing immediate deletion under B10.2 does not cut it short for them.

You may instead transfer the workspace to another member before deleting, and we will help where we can identify the parties. We will not arbitrate a dispute about who should have it.

B11. Third-party services inside the Service

Some features work by sending data to a third party. Where that is so:

it happens only on an action you take, never in the background;
the provider is named before you use the feature, and in the sub-processors list;
what you send is not used to train the provider’s models, and we will not offer a feature from a provider that does not contractually agree to that;
the provider’s own terms apply to its service, and output you receive is subject to them;
as between you and us, any output produced from Your Content through such a feature is yours, on the same terms as Article B4.

This Article is written before any such feature exists. When one ships, the sub-processors list is where it is named, and a material change to this Article follows Article C3.

Part C — Common terms

C1. Privacy

Personal data is processed in accordance with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR) and applicable law. The Privacy Notice is the full account of what is processed, on what basis and for how long, and it forms part of these Terms.

The website uses technical cookies necessary for its operation. Anything else that sets a cookie asks first, and the Privacy Notice says what and why.

C2. No warranty, and limitation of liability

THE WEBSITE AND THE SERVICE ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, uninterrupted availability or non-infringement.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Operator is not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential or punitive damages arising from the use of or inability to use the website or the Service.

The Operator’s aggregate liability to you, on any basis, is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid the Operator or its Merchant of Record in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, and (b) €100.00.

Excluded from that limitation, and governed by law: the Operator’s wilful misconduct or gross negligence, personal injury, and any other liability that cannot be limited by law. Nothing here limits the Operator’s liability to a consumer beyond what mandatory consumer-protection law permits.

C3. Changes to these Terms

These Terms are versioned major.minor.

A minor version changes the wording without changing the terms. It is published and takes effect immediately.
A major version changes the terms. It is published with an effective date at least thirty (30) days in the future; accountholders are notified by e-mail, and everyone else by a notice on the website and in the application.

If you do not accept a major version, you may stop using the Service before it takes effect and, if you had prepaid for a period extending beyond that date, you are entitled to a pro-rata refund of the unused part. Continuing to use the Service after a major version takes effect is acceptance of it.

Why these Terms carry a date when the licence does not. The End-User Licence Agreement attaches to a version of the application: it takes effect when that application asks you to accept it, so it needs no calendar. These Terms govern a website and a hosted service, which have no versions to attach to and which you accept by using them. A date is the only anchor available, and so a date is what they use. Nothing about that date is a deadline for anything we release.

A version that is not yet in force may be corrected. Before its effective date, and before anybody has accepted it, a published version binds nobody and is evidence of nothing — so a mistake in it is corrected where it stands rather than by issuing a version to fix a comma. From its effective date the text at its permanent address never changes again, and any change is a new version under this article. This is not a right to amend terms already in force: the version you accepted stays exactly as you read it, at its own address.

Every version that has ever been in force stays published at its own permanent address. This one is at https://legal.ripplefx.app/v/terms-1.0/.

C4. Consumer protection

For a consumer, mandatory consumer-protection provisions prevail in any event. For consumers resident in the European Union, the Italian Consumer Code (Legislative Decree 206/2005) and EU law apply, including the mandatory forum of the consumer’s place of residence and the nullity of unfair terms. For consumers resident outside the European Union, the mandatory rules of their country of residence continue to apply where they are more protective.

EU consumers may also use the European Commission’s online dispute-resolution platform, though we would much rather you wrote to us first.

C5. Governing law and jurisdiction

These Terms are governed by Italian law, excluding its conflict-of-law rules.

For disputes with a business or a professional, the courts of L’Aquila, Italy, have exclusive jurisdiction, subject to the specific approval in Article C7. For a consumer, the mandatory forum of their place of residence applies.

C6. Final provisions

Assignment. The Operator may assign these Terms to a limited company which it owns or controls, without your consent, on notice to you. You may not assign them without ours.

Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Notice and — for the application — the End-User Licence Agreement are the entire agreement between us.

Severability. If any provision is held invalid, the rest stands.

Waiver. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

Language. This English version is the operative version.

Contact. legal@ripplefx.app for these Terms; support@ripplefx.app for help.

C7. Specific approval of terms (Italian Civil Code arts. 1341–1342)

Pursuant to and for the purposes of articles 1341 and 1342 of the Italian Civil Code, a user who is not a consumer specifically approves the following clauses, by a separate and explicit confirmation given at sign-up:

Article A5 — Availability of the website
Article B5 — Acceptable use, and removal of content
Article B6 — Quotas and fair use
Article B8 — No service-level agreement; backups disclaimed
Article B9 — Suspension, downgrade and termination
Article B10 — Deletion, and what is retained after it
Article C2 — No warranty, and limitation of liability
Article C3 — The right to amend these Terms
Article C5 — Exclusive jurisdiction of L’Aquila
Article C6 — Assignment

This specific approval does not apply to a consumer, in respect of whom unfair terms remain governed by mandatory consumer-protection law.

ConnectingTheDots — William Karol Di Cioccio — VAT IT02224180667 — ripplefx.app