Terms of Service

1. Who we are

These terms are between you and Tesseract Hosting, a sole trader business operating in the United Kingdom (“we”, “us”, “our”). You can reach us at [email protected] about anything, including anything on this page.

Where these terms refer to “the service”, they mean any product we operate, including lookout.host, together with its websites, dashboards, status pages and APIs.

2. About these terms

By creating an account or using the service, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the service.

Two other documents form part of your agreement with us, and you should read them alongside this one:

• our Privacy Policy, which explains what we do with personal data; and
• our Billing and Refunds policy, which explains charges, cancellation and refunds.

3. The service

lookout.host checks websites and endpoints you nominate, from a fleet of monitoring stations, and tells you when something looks wrong. Depending on your plan it also tracks TLS certificate expiry, measures response times from different parts of the world, and publishes status pages.

We may add, change or withdraw features. Where a change materially reduces what a paid plan gives you, we will tell you by email before it takes effect, and you may cancel and receive a pro-rata refund of any period you have paid for but will not receive.

4. Your account

You need an account to use the service. You must give accurate registration details and keep your login credentials to yourself. You are responsible for activity carried out through your account.

You must be at least 16 years old to hold an account. The service is built for people running websites, not for children.

Tell us promptly at [email protected] if you believe someone else has gained access to your account.

5. Acceptable use

This section matters more for a monitoring service than it does for most software, because the service makes requests to third-party systems on your instruction.

You may only monitor endpoints that you own, operate, or have permission from the operator to monitor. Pointing our stations at somebody else’s infrastructure without their agreement is not permitted, and we will act on credible reports that you have done so.

You also agree not to:

• use the service to generate load intended to degrade, overwhelm or test the resilience of any system, whether yours or anyone else’s — it is a monitoring tool, not a load generator;
• use it to probe, scan or map systems for vulnerabilities;
• configure checks at a frequency, payload size or concurrency designed to circumvent plan limits;
• break any law, infringe anyone’s rights, or send unlawful, abusive or deliberately misleading content through our alerting or status pages;
• attempt to gain unauthorised access to the service, other customers’ accounts, or our infrastructure;
• resell or redistribute the service as your own without a written agreement with us.

If you find a security problem in our service, please tell us at [email protected] before telling anyone else. We will not pursue you for good-faith research that respects other customers’ data and does not degrade the service.

6. Monitoring is a tool, not a guarantee

We want to be plain about this, because it is the single most likely source of disappointment.

The service observes your endpoints from the outside, at intervals, over the public internet. It can miss things. A check can pass in the gap between two real failures. A network path between one of our stations and your server can fail without your server being at fault. An alert can be delayed or lost by a third party we hand it to, such as an email provider or a chat platform.

So: we provide the monitoring service with reasonable care and skill, but we do not guarantee that every outage will be detected, or that every alert will arrive, or that it will arrive within a particular time. The service is one layer of defence and should not be the only one protecting anything critical.

7. Plans, prices and payment

Current plans and prices are shown on lookout.host and summarised on our home page. All prices are in pounds sterling.

Paid plans are billed monthly in advance and renew automatically until cancelled. Payment is taken by our payment processor, Stripe; we do not receive or store your full card details.

If a payment fails, we will retry and let you know. If it remains unpaid we may downgrade your account to the free plan or suspend paid features. We will not delete your monitoring history for non-payment without warning you first.

We may change prices. Existing subscribers will get at least 30 days’ notice by email before a price change affects them, and you are free to cancel before it does.

Full detail, including your statutory cancellation rights, is in our Billing and Refunds policy.

8. Cancelling

You can cancel a paid plan at any time from your account. Your monitors keep running until the end of the period you have already paid for, after which the account reverts to the free plan.

You can delete your account entirely at any time — see Delete your account.

We may terminate or suspend your account if you materially breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we discontinue the service. Except where you are in breach, we will give you reasonable notice and refund any period you have paid for but will not receive.

9. Availability

We aim to keep the service running continuously and we use it to watch itself. We do not currently offer a contractual uptime guarantee or service credits on any plan.

We will occasionally need to take parts of the service down for maintenance. Where that is planned, we will give notice where it is practical to do so.

10. Your data

You keep ownership of everything you put into the service: the endpoints you configure, your alert settings, your status page content and your monitoring history.

You grant us the limited permission we need to run the service for you — to store that data, to make requests to the endpoints you configure, and to display your status pages to whoever you make them available to.

How we handle personal data is set out in our Privacy Policy.

11. Our intellectual property

The service, its software, design and content belong to us or our licensors. Using the service does not transfer any of that to you. You may not copy, decompile or create derivative works from it, except where the law explicitly permits it regardless of what a contract says.

12. Our liability to you

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

If you are a consumer — using the service outside a business — we are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of us breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable. Your legal rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 apply in full and nothing here reduces them.

If you are a business, then to the extent the law allows:

• we exclude all implied terms, conditions and warranties;
• we are not liable for loss of profit, revenue, business, contracts, goodwill, anticipated savings, or for any indirect or consequential loss; and
• our total liability to you in any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in that period, or £100.

For the avoidance of doubt, and as explained in section 6, this includes loss arising from an outage that the service did not detect or did not alert you to.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects your rights, we will email account holders at least 30 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the new terms; if you would rather not, you can cancel and we will refund any period you have paid for but will not use.

The date at the top of this page always shows when it was last changed.

14. Complaints

If something has gone wrong, email [email protected] with the detail and we will look into it. We would much rather resolve a problem directly than have you raise a dispute with your bank — a chargeback takes weeks and tells us nothing about what actually went wrong.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom, you may also bring proceedings in your own jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident outside the United Kingdom, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer law in your country of residence.

16. General

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. If we do not enforce a right straight away, that is not a waiver of it. Nobody other than you and us has rights under these terms.

You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our agreement. We may transfer ours — for example if the business is incorporated as a limited company or sold — and we will tell you if that happens; it will not reduce your rights.

17. Contact

Questions about these terms: [email protected].