Terms of Service

These terms are the agreement between you and Pharos, LLC ("Pharos", "we", "us") covering your use of the Pharos service and the pharos.email website. They apply alongside the Acceptable Use Policy and the Privacy Policy, both of which form part of this agreement.

You accept these terms by creating an account or by using the service. If you are accepting them for a company, you confirm that you have authority to bind it, and "you" means that company.

1 · The agreement

Pharos is a transactional email gateway. It accepts messages over a REST API or an authenticated SMTP relay and delivers them to recipient mail servers on your behalf.

We may change these terms. When we do, we will post the updated version here with a new version number and date, and where a change materially reduces your rights we will email the address on your account before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not, cancel — cancellation is immediate and requires no notice.

Any summary of these terms shown elsewhere on the site is for convenience. This document governs.

2 · Eligibility

You must be 18 or the age of majority where you live, and legally able to enter into this agreement. The service is not directed at children.

You may not use Pharos if you are barred from receiving the service under applicable sanctions or export control law, including the laws of the United States.

3 · Your account

Give us accurate registration details and keep them current. The email address on your account is where we send billing notices, security notices and any notice this agreement requires, so keep it working and monitored.

You are responsible for your credentials and for everything sent using them. API keys are scoped per sending domain, shown once at creation and revocable individually — treat them as secrets. If you believe a key or your account has been used without your authorisation, tell us at security@pharos.email and revoke the key.

You may not resell access or share your account with a third party as a way of giving them their own sending capability. Sending on behalf of your own customers from domains you control is fine, and is what the service is for.

4 · Acceptable use

Your sending is governed by the Acceptable Use Policy. It is short, and it is worth reading before you send rather than after we email you about it.

Two consequences follow from the nature of the service and are worth stating here as well as there. Sending IPs are shared between Pharos customers, so one account's behaviour affects everyone else's delivery — which is why we enforce the AUP quickly rather than gradually. And you are responsible for having permission to email every recipient you send to, and for being able to show us that permission if a complaint arrives.

5 · Fees and billing

Plans are billed monthly in advance, in US dollars, by card through our payment processor. Prices are on the pricing page. Billing is monthly only — there is no annual plan, no annual discount and no minimum term.

Going over your plan's volume. On a paid plan, exceeding your monthly allowance moves the account to the next tier for that billing period, and we email you when it happens. The free plan does not do this: sending stops at the allowance, because there is no payment method on file to charge. The free plan also carries a daily cap in addition to its monthly allowance.

Changing plan. Plan changes take effect immediately and are prorated. There is no notice period in either direction.

Allowances do not roll over. Your allowance resets on your billing date. Volume you did not use is not carried forward and is not refunded.

You are responsible for any taxes on your purchase other than taxes on our income. If a payment fails we will retry it and email you; if it keeps failing we may suspend sending until it is resolved. We may change prices, and will give at least 30 days' notice by email before a change applies to your account.

6 · Cancellation and refunds

You can cancel at any time from your account. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing period you have paid for, and there is no exit call and no retention process.

Fees are not refundable. We do not refund the current month, partial months, or periods in which your account was active but unused. This is the trade for monthly billing with no commitment: you are never locked into more than the month you are in. Where a refund is required by law that law applies regardless of this section.

7 · Your content and data

The messages you send, the recipient data you send them to, and your templates remain yours. We claim no ownership of them. You grant us only the permission needed to run the service: to receive, process, transmit, store and log your messages for the purpose of delivering them and showing you what happened to them.

How that data is handled, and for how long, is described in the Privacy Policy. For most customers Pharos acts as a processor of the personal data contained in your messages, and you are the controller of it.

We own the service itself — the software, the interface, the documentation and the Pharos name and marks. Nothing here transfers any of it to you. You get a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service while this agreement is in effect.

If you send us feedback or suggestions we may use them without obligation to you. We are not asking you for confidential information, and you should not send us any in a support message.

8 · Availability and support

There is no contractual uptime SLA. We do not offer an availability guarantee with service credits attached, and we would rather say so than publish a number we have not committed to. Current operational status and rolling uptime are published at status.pharos.email, from the same monitoring we use ourselves.

We may modify, suspend or discontinue parts of the service. Where a change would break something you depend on — a removed API field, a changed webhook payload, a retired endpoint — we will give notice by email to the address on your account before it happens, except where a change is needed urgently for security or to stop abuse.

Support is by email on every plan, including the free one, at support@pharos.email. A person reads every message. We aim to reply within 24 hours on working days. That is a target we publish, not a contractual commitment.

9 · Warranties and liability

The service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We cannot guarantee inbox placement. No email provider can. Whether a message reaches an inbox is decided by the receiving mail system, using signals that include your own sending history and your recipients' behaviour. What we can do is described on the deliverability page, and what we do not claim is described there too.

Neither party is liable to the other for lost profits, lost revenue, or indirect, special, incidental, consequential or punitive damages, whatever the theory of liability and even if the party was told such damages were possible.

Each party's total liability arising out of this agreement is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim. This limit does not apply to your obligation to pay fees you owe, or to either party's liability for fraud, or for anything that cannot be limited by law.

You will indemnify us against third-party claims arising from your use of the service, your content, your breach of this agreement or the Acceptable Use Policy, and your violation of anyone else's rights. We will tell you about any such claim and let you control the defence, and you will not settle anything that imposes an obligation on us without our agreement.

10 · Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate an account for breach of this agreement or the Acceptable Use Policy. Where the breach is damaging delivery for other customers, or is unlawful, we will act immediately and explain afterwards. Otherwise we will contact you first.

On termination, your right to use the service ends and sending stops. You can export your data from your account before you cancel. After termination we retain data only as described in the Privacy Policy, and we are not obliged to keep it for you — export anything you need before you go.

Sections 7, 9, 10 and 11 survive termination, along with any other section that by its nature should.

11 · General

Governing law. This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. The courts of that state have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it, except that either party may seek injunctive relief wherever it needs to.

Notices. We give notice by email to the address on your account, and it counts as given the day it is sent. You give notice to us at legal@pharos.email.

Severability and waiver. If any part of this agreement is unenforceable, the rest stays in force and that part is applied as closely as the law allows to what it intended. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

Assignment. You may not transfer this agreement without our written agreement. We may transfer it as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of the business, on notice to you.

Entire agreement. This document, the Acceptable Use Policy and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the service, and replace anything said before.