The short version
- Soba is in private beta. It is offered as it is, it will change, and it is not yet the thing to put behind a contractual uptime promise.
- Every run executes on the end user's own machine, under their own login, for their own account. Pooling one account to serve strangers is not a grey area here: the system refuses it, and so does this agreement.
- You own what you build and what crosses us. We take the licence we need to carry it and nothing more, and we do not train on it.
- Our liability is capped at what you paid us in the last twelve months. Clause 13 is the one to read before you rely on us for something expensive.
This summary is not the agreement. Where it and a clause disagree, the clause governs.
1The agreement
These terms are between Soba ("Soba", "we", "us") and you — the person or company that creates an account ("you", "your"). By creating an account, calling the API, or installing the worker, you accept them. If you are accepting on behalf of a company, you are confirming you may bind it.
The privacy policy is part of this agreement. So is any written order form or plan description you signed up on; where one of those conflicts with this page, it wins for the account it covers.
If you do not accept these terms, do not use Soba. That is not rhetoric — there is no partial acceptance.
2What the service is
Soba routes a request from your application to compute your end user already owns — a Claude or ChatGPT plan, a local model, or a key — meters what it costs, and reports that usage so you can bill it at your price. It is made of a dashboard, an HTTP API, client libraries, and a worker your users install on their own machines.
It is a beta
Soba is in private beta. That means, concretely:
- Interfaces can change, and we will tell you before a breaking one lands.
- There is no service level agreement and no uptime commitment under these terms.
- A feature can be withdrawn. If it is one you depend on, we will say so before it goes.
- Data loss is unlikely and not impossible. Keep your own record of anything you cannot reconstruct.
The worker and the client libraries are provided under their own open-source licence; nothing here takes away a right that licence grants you.
3Your account
- You must be 16 or older, and able to enter a contract.
- Everything your API keys do is attributed to you. Keep them secret, rotate one you have exposed, and tell us at legal@soba.so if you believe your account has been reached by someone else.
- A key is shown once, at creation. We cannot recover it for you, which is deliberate.
- You are responsible for the people you invite into your workspace and for what they do with the role you gave them.
- Keep your contact address current. It is where service notices go, and a notice sent to a stale address still counts as given.
4Acceptable use
Do not use Soba to:
- break the law, infringe someone's rights, or help anyone else do either;
- pool, resell, share or otherwise make available an AI subscription or account across people who do not own it — see clause 5, which is where this one gets specific;
- work around a provider's rate limits, pricing, geographic restrictions or terms, including by misrepresenting whose account a run is spending;
- probe, scan or test the security of the service other than through a report to us, or try to reach a machine, workspace or record that is not yours;
- misreport a cost class, tamper with the meter, or otherwise represent spend as something it was not;
- send malware, run a denial-of-service, or use the service to attack anyone;
- scrape the service, benchmark it for publication without telling us, or rebuild it as a competing product from access we gave you;
- deceive your end users about what will run on their machine, what it may read, or who is paying for it.
You are responsible for what your application sends and for what its tools return. If a tool of yours hands a customer record to a model, that is your disclosure to have made, not ours.
5Provider terms, and the rule the whole product is arranged around
A run must never be routed to a machine owned by someone other than the user the run is attributed to.
A pairing token is bound, at the moment it is approved, to the one person who approved it — never to anything a machine claimed about itself. So the machine that answers and the person who is billed are the same person by construction.
You must not defeat that, and the design is intended to make defeating it hard rather than merely forbidden. In particular:
| Shape | Permitted |
|---|
| One operator's Claude Max account serving many users' runs | No. That is pooling, and it is a breach of this agreement. |
| A shared pool of pre-paired machines runs are handed out from | No. The machine is not the user's. |
| A user's own laptop, VPS or container serving their own runs | Yes. |
| A user's own API key, spent on their own runs | Yes. |
| Your own provider keys, serving your own users' runs in your app | Yes. That is an ordinary API customer using its own account. |
Which terms actually bind the run
A run is executed under the agreement between your end user and their provider. Those terms are the provider's to write, interpret and change. We cannot give you a compliance guarantee and this page is not legal advice. Read the providers' terms, and if the exposure matters to you, take your own advice or ask the provider directly.
The hosted ChatGPT channel
The optional channel that moves the credential instead of the compute ships no default OAuth client id. If you enable it, you supply a client id you are entitled to use, and you own that decision and its consequences.
Trademarks
Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and Ollama are the products of their respective owners. Soba is an independent tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them, and makes no claim on their behalf.
6Your end users
The people who use your app have a relationship with you, not with us. That has consequences on both sides:
- You are responsible for your own terms and privacy notice, and for telling your users plainly that connecting their machine will let your app run agent work on it, on their own plan.
- You must get whatever consent the law where they live requires, and you must honour their requests about their data — we act on your instruction for the records we hold for you.
- You must not present Soba as the counterparty to your users, or imply we endorse your application.
- We will not market to your end users, and we will not build a profile of them across the apps they connect to.
- If you need a data processing agreement, write to legal@soba.so and we will put one in place.
7Your content, and ours
Yours
You own your application, your prompts, your tool schemas, your tool results, the outputs you receive, and anything you upload. You grant us the licence we need to run the service — to receive, transmit, process and display that material for the purpose of serving your requests, and for no other purpose. That licence ends when the material does.
We do not train models on your prompts, completions or tool results, and we do not retain them. They pass through in flight; what is written down is set out in the privacy policy.
Ours
Soba, the dashboard, the API, the documentation and the brand remain ours. These terms grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service while this agreement is in force, and nothing else. Open-source components keep their own licences.
Feedback
If you tell us how to make the product better, we may act on it freely and without owing you anything. We will not identify you as the source without asking.
Saying you use us
Neither of us may use the other's name or logo publicly without written permission. Ask; the answer is usually yes.
8Fees
- Fees are those on the pricing page or in your order form, billed monthly in advance for the plan fee and in arrears for usage above the allowance it includes.
- Payment is by card through Stripe. You authorise us to charge the method on file for amounts due.
- Fees exclude VAT and other taxes, which are added where they apply. If you are required to withhold tax, the amount we receive must be the amount invoiced.
- Payments are non-refundable except where the law says otherwise, including for a partial month after cancellation.
- An unpaid invoice may be chased, and the account suspended, after we have told you and given you 14 days to fix it.
- We can change prices with 30 days' notice by email. The change takes effect at your next renewal; if you do not want it, cancel before then.
- Usage is metered from our records. If you think the meter is wrong, tell us within 30 days of the invoice and we will check it properly.
What your end users pay you is between you and them. We do not set it, collect it, or take a cut of it.
9Availability and support
We try hard to keep the service up and we do not promise a number. Maintenance happens; where it is planned and disruptive we will give notice. Support during the beta is by email, best effort, and usually quick.
Your end users' machines are not ours. A run cannot be served if the machine that owns the credential is offline, and that is a property of the design rather than an outage.
10Suspension and ending it
You can close your account at any time, from the dashboard or by writing to us. Access continues to the end of the period you have paid for.
We may suspend or limit an account immediately where it is necessary to stop harm — a security incident, a breach of clause 4 or clause 5, a legal demand, or non-payment after notice. We will tell you why, and we will restore access as soon as the cause is gone.
Either of us may end this agreement for a material breach the other has not fixed within 30 days of being told about it. We may also end the beta, or your participation in it, on 30 days' notice.
When it ends: your access stops, unpaid fees fall due, and we keep your records for the periods in the privacy policy. You can export your data up to 30 days after the end. Clauses 7, 13, 14 and 16 survive.
11Confidentiality
Each of us may learn things about the other that are obviously not public — unreleased features, roadmap, pricing offered privately, security details. Use them only for this relationship, protect them as you would your own, and do not pass them on. The duty ends when the information becomes public through no fault of the receiver, and it does not prevent a disclosure the law compels.
Because this is a private beta, treat the product and its documentation as confidential until it is publicly launched.
12Warranties
Each of us warrants that it can enter this agreement and will comply with the laws that apply to it, including data protection, sanctions and export control.
Beyond that, and to the fullest extent the law allows, the service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind — merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, uninterrupted operation, or that any output is accurate, complete, lawful or suitable for a decision you are about to make.
Model output is generated. Check it before you act on it, and do not place it where a wrong answer is expensive without a human in front of it.
Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and if you are a consumer, your statutory rights are untouched.
13Liability
To the fullest extent the law allows:
- Neither of us is liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for lost profits, revenue, goodwill, or data, however caused.
- Our total liability for all claims in any twelve-month period is capped at the total fees you paid us in the twelve months before the first claim arose, or USD 100 if that is greater.
- We are not liable for what a model produced, for what a provider did or stopped doing, for an end user's machine, or for the terms a provider applies to your end user's account.
These limits do not apply to fraud, to death or personal injury caused by negligence, to your obligation to pay fees, or to anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. The cap is part of the price: it is what makes a product at this price possible, and we have been explicit about it rather than burying it.
14Indemnity
You will defend and indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your application, your content, your use of the service in breach of clause 4 or clause 5, or a dispute between you and one of your end users. We will tell you promptly about any such claim, let you control the defence of it, and help you at your expense.
15Changes
We may change these terms. The date at the top changes with them, and for a material change we will email account holders at least 14 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use Soba after that is acceptance. If you do not accept, close the account before the date and we will refund any prepaid fee for the unused period — which is the one refund this agreement does promise.
16Everything else
- Entire agreement. This page, the privacy policy and any order form are the whole of it, and replace anything said beforehand.
- No waiver. Not enforcing a clause once does not give it up.
- Severability. If a clause is unenforceable, it is narrowed only as far as it must be and the rest stands.
- Assignment. You may not assign this agreement without our written consent. We may assign it to a successor in a merger or sale of the business.
- No third-party rights. Nobody other than you and us can enforce these terms.
- Notices. Ours go to your account's email address; yours go to legal@soba.so.
- Force majeure. Neither of us is in breach for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our control, provided we say so and work to fix it.
- Disputes. Come to us first, at legal@soba.so. Nearly everything is settled that way and in far less time.