Terms of Use
In effect since September 9, 2026.
1. Acceptance
By using Lightfast, you agree to these terms. If you're using it on behalf of an organization, you're confirming you have the authority to bind that organization to them.
2. What the service is
Lightfast applies a visible watermark, destructive redaction, and an optional cryptographic signature to documents, and lets you verify or compare documents that carry this protection. All document processing — watermarking, redaction, signing, and verification — runs entirely in your browser or in the offline tools; we do not receive, process, or store the document itself, under any plan. That is a property of how the service is built rather than an undertaking about how we behave: there is no route on this server that could receive a document.
Paid plans additionally provide a hosted registry (a record of hashes and metadata about documents you've issued, not the documents), and, on the Team plan, shared access for up to 5 people.
3. Accounts
- You must provide a real, working email address and verify it before the account is usable.
- You're responsible for keeping your credentials (passkey, recovery codes, two-step verification device) secure, and for all activity under your account.
- Tell us promptly if you believe your account has been compromised.
- You must be legally capable of entering into this agreement to create an account.
4. Subscriptions and billing
- Paid plans (Pro, Team) are billed on a recurring basis through Paddle, our merchant of record. You buy from Paddle rather than from us: Paddle takes the payment, handles any applicable sales tax or VAT, and is the seller on your transaction.
- Cancelling stops the next payment. It does not refund the period you are already in. You can cancel at any time from your account's billing page. Your plan then stays active until the end of the period you have paid for, and we keep providing it in full for that time — you keep the service you bought rather than getting the money back.
- Removing seats from a Team plan works the same way. The lower price starts at your next renewal; the seats you have already paid for run to the end of the current period and are not refunded. Adding seats is charged immediately, prorated for the rest of the period.
- Two things sit above that policy, and neither is ours to waive. Consumers buying in the EU, EEA, Switzerland and the UK have a statutory right to withdraw within 14 days of the first payment on a subscription — 7 days in Brazil, Canada and South Korea, 5 in Singapore. Paddle's terms state that this right does not apply once you have begun using the product within that period. Separately, Paddle may issue a refund at its own discretion as the seller. Paddle's Refund Policy and Buyer Terms apply to your purchase alongside this document, and where they give you more than this section does, they win.
- That withdrawal right attaches to the first payment on a subscription, not to later renewals — except for annual subscriptions bought in the UK, which get a fresh 14 days at each renewal.
- The free tier requires no account and no payment method.
5. Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- Use the service for any unlawful purpose, or to protect or distribute content you don't have the right to.
- Attempt to interfere with, disable, or circumvent the security of the service or other users' accounts.
- Attempt to exceed the seat/usage boundaries of your plan through automated or abusive means.
- Reverse-engineer the service beyond what's necessary for interoperability and permitted by applicable law.
6. Ownership
You retain all rights to the documents you process — we never see them, so we never acquire any rights to them. The Lightfast software, website, and branding are our property or licensed to us, and these terms don't grant you any rights to them beyond using the service as intended.
7. What this service does and doesn't guarantee
This is the most important section — read it even if you skip the rest. The watermark, signature, and registry are designed to deter unauthorized sharing and make it traceable when it happens — they are not, and are not sold as, an access control or a guarantee that a document cannot be copied, leaked, or altered. Specifically:
- The signature proves a document was signed with a given key — it proves who issued it only if you've independently confirmed that key belongs to the issuer.
- The leak comparator identifies likely matches, not certain ones — it gives leads, not legal proof.
- A determined party can still crop, rephotograph, or otherwise degrade a protected document; the protection raises the cost of doing so and leaves evidence, it does not make it impossible.
Do not rely on this service as the sole safeguard for information whose disclosure would cause serious harm, or as evidence in a legal proceeding, without independent professional evaluation.
8. Disclaimers and limitation of liability
Read this alongside section 7, which describes what the protection does and does not do. That section is about the product; this one is about what happens if something goes wrong anyway.
The offline tools and the free tier are provided "as is," without warranties of any kind, to the maximum extent permitted by law. The protection itself runs on your own machine, which is why there is nothing for us to warrant about it: we do not receive, hold, or process the document, exactly as section 2 describes. That is a statement about the document, not about the account. The offline tools reach us in no way at all. On the free tier, if you use it without an account we hold nothing — and if you have one, including an account whose paid plan has lapsed back to the free tier, we hold what the privacy policy lists: your email address, the account record, and the log of security events on it.
The paid plans are not, because you are paying for something we undertake to keep available. For those we undertake to provide the hosted registry with reasonable care and skill. We do not promise that it will be uninterrupted or free of errors, and a broad "as is" for a service somebody has paid for would be neither credible nor enforceable.
Where we are liable, our total liability for all claims is limited to the greater of: the subscription fees paid for your plan in the twelve months before the claim, or USD 100. Those fees are paid to Paddle as merchant of record rather than to us (section 4), so the limit is measured by what the plan cost you, not by what reached us. The second figure is there because the first can be zero — on the free tier, or in a first month — and a limit of nothing is not a limit anyone should accept.
We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss: lost profits, lost business, lost or corrupted documents or data, or loss arising from treating a comparison or verification result as proof of something. Section 7 explains why a result of either kind is a lead and not a proof.
Some things sit outside that limit, and we do not try to exclude them: fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; death or personal injury caused by our negligence; gross negligence or wilful misconduct; our obligations under data protection law; and anything else that the law applying to you does not allow to be limited or excluded.
If you are a consumer, your statutory rights come first. Nothing in this section removes a right you hold under the law of the country you live in, and where that law conflicts with this section, that law wins — the same rule section 10 states for governing law. Your purchase is also a separate contract with Paddle as merchant of record, described in section 4.
9. Termination
You can delete your own account at any time from your account settings — this is immediate and irreversible. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these terms, with notice where reasonably possible.
10. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Panama, where the service is operated from, and a dispute arising out of them belongs to the competent courts of Panama City.
Two things sit above that, and neither is ours to waive. If the law of the country you live in gives you consumer rights that cannot be waived by agreement — including, in many places, the right to bring proceedings in your own courts — those rights continue to apply and prevail over this section wherever they conflict with it. And your purchase is a separate contract with Paddle as merchant of record: Paddle's own terms govern that sale, on the same footing described in section 4.
11. Changes to these terms
We'll update the date at the top of this page when this changes, and for material changes we'll make a reasonable effort to notify account holders directly.