Effective 26 August 2026.

1. Who this is between

These Terms are between you (or the organization you represent) and EL AI Intelligence, LLC, a Maryland limited liability company — “we”, “us”, “our”.

If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you confirm you have authority to bind it, and “you” means that company.

2. What this covers

These Terms apply to:

If you buy a paid plan, the Commercial License Agreement also applies. It covers license grant, plan enforcement, keys, term and renewal, and confidentiality in more detail than these Terms do. Where the two conflict on a paid plan, the Commercial License Agreement controls. These Terms govern everything else, including all use of the Free tier.

3. Accounts

You need an account to use the Console. When you create one:

• Give accurate information. We use your email address to reach you about your account, billing, and security. If it’s wrong, you won’t get those notices.
• You are responsible for your credentials. Keep your password and passkeys secure. Tell us promptly at Elai-intelligence@pm.me if you believe your account or an API key has been compromised.
• You must be old enough to enter a contract in your jurisdiction — at least 18, or the age of majority where you live.
• Everything done under your account is your responsibility, including actions by your organization’s members and by API keys you issue.

We may suspend or close accounts as described in §12.

4. The Guardrail Console

The Console is the one service we run for you. Registration is open and the Free tier requires no payment card.

Plan limits. Each plan has a monthly check volume and limits on API keys and members. Current limits are on the pricing page. Key and member limits are enforced by the Console; check volume is measured, and you are alerted at 80% and 100% of your plan’s allowance.

Beta. The Console is in beta. It changes frequently, features may be added, altered, or withdrawn, and it may have defects. Do not rely on it as your only record of anything you cannot afford to lose. The service is provided as described in §13 and §14.

Service levels. The published SLA figures (99.5% for Pro and Team, 99.9% for Enterprise) cover the hosted Console only. They say nothing about the engine, which runs on your own infrastructure and whose availability is yours to manage. There is no SLA on the Free tier or the demo endpoint.

Your data. What we store and why is set out in full on the Privacy page and in §15 of the Commercial License Agreement. In short: account, organization, member, and key metadata, plus the guardrail event records your engines report. We do not sell it, do not use it to train models, and do not read your event payloads except to operate the service, debug an issue you report, or comply with law.

5. The Guardrail engine and SDKs

The Guardrail engine is proprietary, closed-source software. It is licensed, not sold, and only under a separate written agreement — in practice the Commercial License Agreement, which takes effect when you purchase a plan. Nothing on this website or in these Terms grants you a license to the engine’s source.

The engine is self-hosted. It runs on your infrastructure and does not phone home: no license checks, no telemetry, no usage beacons. The only outbound calls it makes go to endpoints you configure.

The Guardrail CLI is distributed from downloads.ellmstack.dev — install it with curl -fsSL https://downloads.ellmstack.dev/install.sh | bash. It is part of the same proprietary software, and your right to use it comes with your Console account under these Terms and, on a paid plan, the Commercial License Agreement.

Guardrail is not a guarantee of security. This is the most important sentence on this page, so it gets its own paragraph. Guardrail enforces the policy you give it. It cannot know what you intended, it cannot protect against a policy that permits something dangerous, and it is one layer among the several a serious system needs. You are responsible for configuring policies appropriately for your environment, for keeping the software updated, and for the security of your own systems. Published benchmark and latency figures are measurements of specific test runs on specific hardware — they are not commitments about your workload.

6. Engram

Engram is source-available under the Functional Source License v1.1 (FSL-1.1-MIT). You can read it, run it, modify it, and build on it; what FSL restricts is using it to make a competing product. Four years after each release, that release converts to the MIT license automatically — an irrevocable grant written into the license itself, not a promise we could withdraw later.

The license file in the repository is the authoritative version — if it ever disagrees with this page, the repository wins.

Versions previously released under MIT stay under MIT. Engram’s early releases were published under the MIT license, and that grant cannot be withdrawn: if you obtained one of those versions, your rights to that version are permanent. The FSL applies to releases made under it going forward.

Engram is in beta — see §13. It is local-first, so your vault stays on your machine: back it up as you would any other local data. We cannot recover a vault for you, because we never hold it or its keys. Engram’s hosted sync relay at sync.ellmstack.dev carries only encrypted blobs — it never sees your plaintext, your vault, or your keys — and these Terms apply to that service.

7. The public demo endpoint

The demo endpoint takes no API key and no account, so a few things are true of it that are not true of the Console:

• It classifies only. It never executes anything you send it.
• It is rate limited to 5 requests per second per IP address.
• Because there is no key on the request, what you send is not attributed to any account — but it does land in the demo engine’s audit log. Treat it as a public endpoint and don’t paste anything sensitive into it.
• It is offered for evaluation. It has no SLA, and we may change, rate limit further, or withdraw it at any time.

Don’t use it as a production classification service, and don’t load test it — §8 applies.

8. Acceptable use

You may not, and may not permit anyone else to:

(a) use the services in violation of applicable law, including export-control and sanctions law;

(b) probe, scan, load test, or attempt to disrupt or gain unauthorized access to the hosted services or anyone else’s account;

(c) share, resell, publish, or embed API keys outside the entity that licensed them;

(d) reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source of the proprietary engine;

(e) use the services to build or operate malware, weapons, or other systems intended to cause harm — including by configuring Guardrail to allow operations you know to be dangerous;

(f) provide guardrail, firewall, or policy services to third parties using our software without a separate written distribution or OEM agreement;

(g) remove or alter license, trademark, or attribution notices;

(h) misrepresent Guardrail’s verdicts or our benchmark figures to your own customers.

9. Fees, billing, and cancellation

Payment is processed by Stripe. Checkout happens on Stripe’s pages — we never see or store your card number.

Renewal. Monthly plans renew automatically each month; annual plans run for 12 months and renew for successive 12-month terms. You may cancel with 30 days’ notice, effective at the end of the current period.

Taxes. Fees are exclusive of tax. You are responsible for any sales, use, VAT, or similar taxes.

Refunds. Except where the law requires otherwise, fees are non-refundable, including after cancellation midterm.

Failed payment. If a payment fails we will tell you. You have 30 days to fix it. After that your paid entitlements are suspended and your limits revert to the Free tier. Keys you already hold are not revoked by non-payment alone.

Price changes apply from your next renewal, with notice under §15.

10. Feedback

If you send us a bug report, feature request, or any other suggestion, we may use it without restriction, attribution, or compensation. We would much rather hear about a problem than not — please tell us — and this clause exists so that acting on your report is straightforward, not so we can take something from you. It does not give us any rights to your own software, data, or confidential information.

11. Intellectual property

We retain all right, title, and interest in the software, the hosted services, our trademarks, and this website, including all improvements and derivative works. These Terms grant a permission to use the services — they transfer no ownership.

Engram is the exception: it is source-available under the Functional Source License, and that license says what it says (§6).

12. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the services at any time and may close your account by writing to us.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you materially breach these Terms, if we are required to by law, or if your use threatens the security or stability of the service or another customer. Except where the breach is severe enough to require immediate action — a security threat, an illegal act, or non-payment past its grace period — we will give you notice and a reasonable chance to fix the problem first.

On termination your right to use the hosted services ends. Sections that by their nature should survive — §8, §10, §11, §13, §14, §16, §17, and §18 — survive.

13. Beta software

Some of what we offer is beta, and this section applies to all of it:

Guardrail as a product is in beta, and this section covers it. The engine is its most mature part — it is what we hold to the published benchmark figures, and §5 governs it — but that is a statement about maturity, not an exemption from this section.

What beta means here. Beta software is offered free or at reduced cost, before it is finished, so that you can evaluate it and tell us what is wrong with it. In exchange:

(a) It may contain defects, may change without notice, may lose or corrupt data, and may be discontinued. Features can be added, altered, or removed between releases.

(b) It carries no SLA, no uptime commitment, and no support commitment. The SLA figures in §4 apply to paid Console plans, not to beta features within them.

(c) Keep your own backups. Do not use beta software as the only copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. For Engram this is not a formality — the vault is local and we hold neither it nor its keys, so if you lose it, it is gone and we cannot help.

(d) Do not rely on beta software as your only safeguard in any situation where a failure would cause injury, significant financial loss, or a breach. This is worth stating plainly for a security product: a policy layer belongs among several controls, never as the only one. §5 says the same thing about Guardrail generally, and it applies with more force to anything in beta.

(e) You accept these risks knowingly when you use beta software. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we have no liability arising from beta software — including lost or corrupted data, downtime, missed detections, or a beta feature being changed or withdrawn.

Nothing in this section extends beyond what §16 already permits, and the carve-outs in §16(c) apply here too: no disclaimer in these Terms covers fraud, gross negligence, wilful misconduct, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or any liability that cannot be excluded under the law that applies to you. Where you have consumer rights that cannot be waived, this section does not waive them.

If a beta feature is doing something wrong, tell us — that is the entire point of shipping it in beta, and §10 covers what happens to what you send.

14. Disclaimers

THE SERVICES AND SOFTWARE ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, SECURITY, OR ACCURACY. NO ORAL OR WRITTEN STATEMENT BY US CREATES A WARRANTY.

We do not warrant that the services will be uninterrupted, timely, or error-free, or that any defect will be corrected. As stated in §5, Guardrail is a policy enforcement tool and not a guarantee of security.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may amend these Terms. For material changes we will give 30 days’ notice to the email address on your account, or by a prominent notice on this site if you have no account. Amendments are not retroactive. If you don’t accept a change, stop using the services before it takes effect; if you are on a paid plan you may terminate at the end of your current term without penalty. Continuing to use the services after the notice period means you accept the change.

The effective date at the top of this page always reflects the current version.

16. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW:

(a) OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS, THE SOFTWARE, OR THE SERVICES — WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT, NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, OR OTHERWISE — SHALL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (i) THE FEES YOU PAID US IN THE 12 MONTHS PRECEDING THE CLAIM, OR (ii) ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS (US$100).

(b) WE SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, LOST DATA, LOST REVENUE, COST OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS, OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, REGARDLESS OF THE THEORY OF LIABILITY AND EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY.

(c) NOTHING IN THESE TERMS LIMITS LIABILITY FOR FRAUD, GROSS NEGLIGENCE, WILFUL MISCONDUCT, DEATH OR PERSONAL INJURY CAUSED BY NEGLIGENCE, OR ANY OTHER LIABILITY THAT CANNOT BE LIMITED OR EXCLUDED UNDER APPLICABLE LAW. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, and in those places the exclusions above apply only to the extent permitted.

(d) The parties agree that the fees reflect this allocation of risk and that these limitations are an essential basis of the bargain.

17. Indemnification

You will indemnify, defend, and hold harmless EL AI Intelligence, LLC and its members, officers, employees, and agents from claims, damages, liabilities, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of: your use or misuse of the services, including your policy configuration and any security incident in your environment; your breach of these Terms; your violation of law; or a claim that materials you supplied infringe a third party’s rights.

We will notify you promptly of any such claim and may participate in its defense at our own expense. You may not settle a claim that admits fault on our part without our written consent.

18. Governing law and disputes

Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Maryland, without regard to conflict-of-law principles. The UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

Talk to us first. Before filing any action, give us written notice of the dispute at Elai-intelligence@pm.me. Both sides will try in good faith to resolve it informally for 30 days. Most things are fixable by email.

Venue. Any litigation shall be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Maryland, and both parties consent to personal jurisdiction there.

Class action and jury waiver. To the maximum extent permitted by law, each party waives any right to a jury trial and agrees that claims will be brought only in an individual capacity, not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, or representative proceeding.

If you are a consumer resident in a jurisdiction whose law gives you rights that cannot be waived by contract — including mandatory local venue or consumer-protection rights — nothing in this section removes them.

19. General

Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy page, and — for paid plans — the Commercial License Agreement and the pricing in effect at purchase, are the entire agreement between us on this subject.

Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stands, and that provision is narrowed to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable.

No waiver. Not enforcing a provision once doesn’t waive it.

Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to a successor in connection with a sale of substantially all of our relevant assets.

Relationship. We are independent contractors. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, or employment relationship.

Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control, provided it gives prompt notice and works to resume performance.

Notices. Notices to you go to the email address on your account. Notices to us go to Elai-intelligence@pm.me.

Questions

Something here unclear, or you think it’s wrong? Write to Elai-intelligence@pm.me or use the contact form. We would rather explain a clause than have you agree to something you don’t understand.

Related: Privacy · Support · Commercial License Terms (request a copy)