Terms of Service

In force from 18 September 2026.

Nerchure Ltd, registered in England and Wales under company number 17168853, registered office 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, provides Nectenda: real-time collaborative editing for Obsidian, as a hosted service and as software you can run yourself.

These terms were written alongside the code, so their technical claims — what suspension does, why a restore does not restore readability, what a quota means — describe what the software actually does rather than what would be convenient to say. Where a claim here and the code disagree, the code is right and this document is a bug; tell us and we will fix it.

Contact: support@nectenda.com for anything about your account, your subscription, a refund or a complaint. We reply within three business days.

What we provide

The plugin is source-available under PolyForm Shield 1.0.0. You may read it, audit it, build it and compare the result. You may not use it to build a competing product. The licence text ships with it and governs it; nothing here changes that.

The hosted service stores and relays your encrypted data. The self-hosted licence entitles you to run the server yourself, within the seat and term limits your licence file states.

What you are responsible for

Your passphrase, your recovery key, and access to the email address or provider account you sign in with.

We cannot reset your passphrase. It is not merely that we choose not to: your encryption keys are derived from it, so there is no mechanism by which anyone — you, us, or somebody holding our database — could recover your data without it. The recovery key issued when you register is the only alternative path.

Signing in depends on your email address or your sign-in provider. On the hosted service you sign in by a code sent to your email, a passkey, or a Google, Apple or Microsoft account. If you lose access to all of those, you cannot sign in on a new device until you regain one of them; devices already signed in keep working, and nothing you stored is affected.

If you lose both, your data is unreadable permanently. This is a direct consequence of the encryption being real, and it is the trade the product makes on your behalf. Save your recovery key somewhere you will still have it.

You are responsible for the lawfulness of what you store, and for the people you share folders with.

Storage limits, and what we may do about them

Your plan states a storage quota. Attachments are refused once you are over it; text editing is never blocked. That asymmetry is deliberate — a quota should cost you a file upload, never a paragraph you were writing.

Where an account is very substantially over its quota, or where usage is degrading the service for others, we reserve the right to suspend it, including on paid plans. Suspension refuses new connections and uploads; you can still sign in, see why, and download what you have stored. It does not delete data, and it is reversible. We will contact you first except where the service is actively at risk.

We may suspend for unlawful use, for attempts to disrupt the service or other customers, or where a payment is reversed after the fact. We do not suspend for non-payment — see Payment below, which says what we do instead.

Backups, and the limit of what a restore gives you

We take backups of the hosted service. Restoring data does not restore readability. Keys are derived from user passwords, so a restored account is only as recoverable as its users' passwords and recovery keys. A backup protects against our failures, not against a forgotten password.

Backups are per-instance rather than per-customer. We do not offer restoration of an individual account to a point in time.

Availability

We do not offer an uptime guarantee. The hosted service is provided as-is while it is in early availability. Its current state is published at status.nectenda.com.

Signing in on a new device needs our sign-in service to be reachable; syncing does not. If the sign-in service is down, devices already signed in keep syncing.

Losing us does not cost you your notes. Obsidian is local-first and so are we: your notes remain plain files on your own disk whether or not this service exists. If we shut down, you keep everything you wrote.

The self-hosted licence

Not sold yet. The self-hosted licence does not exist today: there is nothing to buy, and the server image is not obtainable. This section states the terms it will be sold under when it is, so that anyone considering it can read them in advance. Nothing in it describes how anything behaves today, and it will be checked against the implementation before a licence is offered to anybody.

A licence file states a customer, a seat count and an expiry. It is verified offline; your server never contacts us to run, and our downtime is never your outage.

After expiry the server keeps working. It refuses new seats and new device slots; it does not block sync, existing users, or uploads by an existing seat. A lapsed invoice must never cost anyone their work.

Seat counts are self-enforced on your own hardware. We rely on you to honour them, and reserve the right to audit on reasonable notice.

Payment

Creem is the merchant of record. That means Creem — not Nerchure Ltd — is the seller on your receipt, and Creem is responsible for collecting and remitting any VAT, sales tax or GST due where you are. Your card details go to Creem and are never sent to us or stored by us; we receive a record that a payment happened, for whom, and for what.

Prices are stated in US dollars and shown before you confirm. Subscriptions renew until cancelled. You can manage your payment method, see your invoices and cancel at any time from Creem's billing portal, which is reachable from the plugin's settings and from every billing email we send you.

Renewals are not a surprise. A yearly plan gets an email before it renews, saying what you will be charged and when, with a link to cancel if you would rather not. A monthly plan does not, because a monthly charge announces itself.

A renewal is for the term it renews into. Once a yearly plan renews you have bought another year, which is why the reminder above comes first and why cancelling before the date takes nothing. The UK's new subscription-contract rules will add a fresh cancellation window after each renewal when they come into force in 2027; this section will change then, and we will say so.

Changing plan. You can move an organisation to a larger plan at any time, and it takes effect immediately. You can move it to a smaller one at any time, and that takes effect at the end of the term you have already paid for, so nothing is owed either way.

If a smaller plan no longer fits. Where an organisation has more members, or more stored, than the plan it moves to allows, we do not remove anyone and we do not delete anything. What changes is only what happens next: no new members can join, no new attachments can be uploaded, and the next device to connect beyond the allowance is refused. Everyone already there keeps working, and everything already stored can still be downloaded.

Cancelling. Your organisation keeps its plan until the end of the term you paid for and then moves to the free plan. Text keeps syncing on the free plan, and attachments you have already uploaded can still be downloaded.

If a payment fails. Creem will retry according to its own schedule. If it finally fails, we will tell you inside the plugin and give you 14 days, during which nothing changes. At the end of those 14 days the organisation moves to the free plan, exactly as if you had cancelled. We do not suspend you and we do not delete anything.

Closing an organisation. An owner can close one. Billing ends and it stops syncing, and we keep what it held for 30 days, during which you can reopen it or download your attachments. After 30 days we delete it from the live service. Copies in our routine backups are overwritten as those backups rotate, which takes up to a further 56 days.

None of this touches your notes. They are plain files in your own vault, on your own disk, and they stay there whatever happens to a subscription.

Refunds, and your right to cancel

If you are a consumer in the UK or the EU, you have 14 days to cancel, and starting your subscription straight away does not take that away. A Nectenda subscription is a service, and under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 a consumer only loses the right to cancel a service once it has been fully performed. A subscription that is still running has not been. Some software is sold as "digital content", where agreeing to immediate access does end the right — that is not what this is, and we are not going to claim it is.

What you get back is the part you have not used. Because you asked us to start immediately, you pay for the period from when you bought it to when you tell us you are cancelling, in proportion to the whole term, and we refund the rest. That is what regulation 36 provides and it is what we do.

Worked, because "in proportion" is easier to read as an arithmetic than as a sentence. Cancel a $5 monthly plan on day 7 and you have used seven thirty-first s of it: you pay about $1.13 and we return about $3.87. Cancel a $48 yearly plan on day 7 and you pay about $0.92 and we return about $47.08.

How to cancel. Any of these, and none of them needs a reason:

• the Manage subscription button in the plugin's settings;
• the billing portal, linked from every billing email we send you;
• an email to support@nectenda.com saying you are cancelling. It does not have to be in any particular form — "I am cancelling my Nectenda subscription", your name, and the date is enough.

We will confirm within three business days and refund within 14 days of being told, to the card that paid.

After 14 days, a subscription runs to the end of the term you paid for and then stops. We do not refund part-used terms beyond the cancellation period. Nothing is deleted when it ends.

Buying is you asking us to start now. Checkout asks you to confirm that, and your confirmation email repeats it, because the law requires an express request before a service begins inside the cancellation period and requires us to confirm that we have it.

If you are buying for a business — which Team and Small Business plans generally are — you are not a "consumer" in law and none of the statutory rights in this section apply to you. A business subscription runs for the term bought and is not refundable mid-term. You can still cancel renewal at any time.

Who you have rights against. Creem is the merchant of record and the seller on your receipt, and we are the ones running the service. Rather than ask you to work out which of us owes you what, we will honour everything in this section ourselves, whichever way that question is answered.

Refunds are issued through Creem and go back to the card that paid, within 14 days of us agreeing one. Allow a few working days beyond that for your bank.

Cancelling is a button, not a request. You signed up online and you can leave online — from the plugin's settings or from Creem's billing portal, without emailing anybody, without a retention call, and without a notice period.

Complaints. Write to support@nectenda.com. We reply within three business days and will tell you plainly what we can and cannot do. If we cannot resolve it between us and you bought as a consumer, you may be able to use an alternative dispute resolution scheme or your local consumer authority; for EU consumers the European Commission's ODR platform exists for this.

Liability

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — death or personal injury caused by our negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or, for consumers, your statutory rights.

Subject to that: our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of business, or loss of goodwill.

We are not liable for the loss of your notes, and it is worth saying why rather than only that. Your notes live in your own vault on your own disk, and that copy is the real one throughout. The service carries changes between your devices; it is not a backup, and it cannot be one — everything we hold is encrypted with keys we do not have, so we could not reconstruct your work even if you asked us to. Keep your own backups.

We cannot recover your account if you lose your passphrase. Not "will not" — cannot. We never receive it, nor any hash or verifier of it, so there is nothing here to reset it against. The recovery key you were shown when you signed up is the only way back. This is the deliberate cost of a service that cannot read what it carries.

If you are a consumer, nothing in these terms affects your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 to services carried out with reasonable care and skill.

Governing law

England and Wales.

Changes

If these terms change materially we will say so by email before the change takes effect. Continuing to use the service afterwards accepts the new terms.