Terms of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of the Archie desktop app, the Otian AI website, and the guided services we provide. Otian AI LLC ("Otian AI," "we," or "us") is a limited liability company organized in Texas. By using the app or our website, submitting our intake form, or booking a session with us, you agree to these Terms. If you don't agree, please don't use them.

The Archie App

Who can use Archie

You must be 18 or older to create an account or use Archie. That is what you confirm when you create an account, on this website and in the app. If you are under 18, please do not create one.

That covers anyone you share an agent with. Archie for Teams (called Archie for Business before version 0.3.7) lets you add people to an agent, and nobody you add may be under 18 either. An agent acts with your accounts and your AI provider balance, and what it does counts as done by you, which is set out under “What your agent does is your responsibility” below.

We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18, and our Privacy Policy says the same. If you think someone under 18 has an account with us, email [email protected] and we will close it and delete what we hold.

Where Archie is sold

Plans are on sale while Archie is in testing, in most of the world, but not in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, and we do not offer or market it to people in those places. This is a paperwork gap on our side rather than a decision about European customers, and we intend to close it. If you are in one of those countries, please do not buy a plan. A checkout our payment system can place in one of them is normally refused and refunded; if one slips through anyway, write to us and we will refund it in full whatever the date. Write to [email protected] if you would like to be told when this changes.

Sanctions are a separate matter, and they are not ours to waive. You may not use Archie, buy a plan, or take a guided session with us if you are in a country under comprehensive United States sanctions, or if you are named on one of the lists of people and companies that the United States government bars American businesses from dealing with. You may not pass Archie on to anyone in either position either. That is a rule we are bound by rather than one we chose, and unlike the paragraph above it we cannot make an exception to it. If a purchase goes through and we later find that it should not have, we will refund it in full and close the account, whatever the date.

Your license

Subject to these Terms, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to install and use Archie on computers you own or control, for as long as your plan is active or, on Personal, for as long as you use it free on an AI account of your own as described under “Archie for free on an AI account of your own”. The app is licensed, not sold. You may not resell it, redistribute it, or attempt to circumvent its license check. Anyone who bought the earlier one-time license holds that same license permanently instead, and nothing about the plan applies to them.

What you may not do with Archie

Most of this is what you would expect, and we would rather write it down than leave it resting on the word “misuse”. You may not:

• Break the law with Archie, or use it to harass, defraud, threaten, or impersonate anyone
• Send bulk mail or texts to people who did not ask to hear from you
• Connect an account you do not have the right to connect (the section below, “What you promise about the accounts you connect”, says what that means)
• Attack what we run: probing our servers or the marketplace for weaknesses, flooding them, or getting into an account that is not yours
• Publish an add-on that does something other than what it says it does, or that gathers information the person installing it would not expect

Two things belong beside that list. Finding a security problem and telling us is the opposite of the fourth item and is welcome: how to report one is published, along with the times we hold ourselves to. And Archie runs on your own computer, where your agent, its memory, your files and your keys sit, and we have no access to them. So this is not a list we could enforce by watching you, and we are not suggesting otherwise. It is the standard we hold you to, and what we can act on is what reaches us: our servers, the marketplace, our sessions with you, and anything somebody reports.

Your purchase, and what happens if we go away or get bought

Archie is offered as plans billed through Stripe: Personal is $30 a month or $299 a year; Business is $99 a month or $999 a year. The Personal option with AI included is described below. A plan renews automatically until you stop it, and you may stop or change it at any time, taking effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. What the plan added ends at that point. On Personal with an AI account of your own connected, Archie keeps opening at the free tier’s limit, described below; otherwise it stops opening your agents. Archie carries a 14-day money-back guarantee: if you request a refund within 14 days of first starting a plan, we will refund what you paid in full. After 14 days, payments already taken are non-refundable except where required by law. Anyone who bought the earlier one-time license keeps permanent access to the app under the terms they bought it on; this section does not apply to them.

Archie checks your plan when it opens and can reach us. While your plan is active it runs without a daily limit. If your plan ends, Archie for Teams stops opening your agents, and so does Personal unless an AI account of your own is connected. What does not happen, in any case, is any loss of your information: your agent, its memory, your files, and your keys are stored on your own computer, we have no access to them, and we do not delete them. Start a plan again and everything is where you left it.

If Otian AI ceases operations, we will publish a final version of Archie that requires no license check, within 30 days of shutting down. We are making that a term of this agreement rather than a promise on a blog, because you should not have to trust us for it. What you would lose if we disappeared is updates, the marketplace, and support: the things a living company provides. You would not lose the agent you built or anything it holds; your installed copy runs for up to 60 days on the last license confirmation it fetched, and the final version this section obligates us to publish is what keeps it running after that.

If Otian AI is acquired, merged, or wound down, the privacy commitments in these Terms and in our Privacy Policy bind whoever succeeds us, and we will not complete a transaction that does not carry them. This is written here for the same reason as the paragraph above it: an acquirer is the most likely way a promise like ours quietly stops being true, so it should be a term you can hold us to rather than an intention you have to believe. Note also what is not ours to hand over in any case. Your agent, its memory, your files and your keys are on your own computer, so there is no store of your conversations for a buyer to acquire, because we never had one. On the free credits and on the plan with the AI included your requests do cross a server we operate, as described above, but crossing is not keeping: that server forwards them and records what was spent, never what was said, so there is nothing there either.

AI provider costs are yours, and paid directly

On every plan except the one with the AI included, Archie requires an account with an AI provider (for example Anthropic or OpenAI). You create, own, and fund that account yourself, and its cost is paid directly to that provider. It is not a fee we charge, collect, or mark up. Your use of that provider is governed by their terms, not ours. The plan with the AI included works the other way round and is described below: there is no provider account of yours, the AI runs on ours, and what you pay for it is inside the price of the plan. You are responsible for what your agent spends on your provider account.

Add-ons

Add-ons may be published by us or by third-party developers. We review every add-on before it is listed, but a review is not a warranty: add-ons are provided as-is, and we are not liable for the behavior of one you choose to install. Every add-on is included with Archie and licensed to you for your own use; you may not redistribute them. We may remove an add-on from the marketplace at any time, including one you have installed, if it turns out to be unsafe, broken, or in breach of these Terms.

What your agent does is your responsibility

Your agent acts using your accounts, your credentials, and your AI provider balance. Anything it does is treated as done by you, and you are responsible for it, including its accuracy, and including compliance with the terms of any third-party service it touches.

You should understand what it can currently do on its own, so we say it here rather than leave you to discover it. Archie can send email and text replies and can change a calendar you connect (including creating, changing, and deleting events), but never unprompted: no text goes out until you press Send on the exact draft, no email goes out until you send it or set a time for it, and your agent cannot set that time itself, and a calendar change is proposed first, can only be applied exactly as proposed, applies only after a later message from you (the AI is what reads that message as a go-ahead; changes proposed together are approved together), and can never be applied while you are away. Archie can place an order on a website only if you switch buying on, and then only at shops you choose, up to limits you set, and after you tap to approve that order; it never types a card you pay with, and the limit is checked against the price it reads on the page, so a shop that adds a charge at the last step can take an order over it; if you connect a payment service under a key that can move money, changes there are proposed to you the same way and run only after you approve them. AI models can be mistaken, or be misled by text they read, so review what your agent proposes before you approve it. Our Trust page describes what your agent can and cannot do, and we keep it current.

Our Guided Services

Otian AI also teaches and guides clients through setting up a personal AI agent on their own computer. These services generally include:

• A free 30-minute discovery call to discuss your goals and a rough scope and timeline
• Guided, hands-on sessions (typically over Zoom) where we help you configure and connect your agent
• Plain-language explanations along the way, so you understand what's being set up and why
• Support after your agent is set up: we answer questions about what we set up with you, at no extra charge and with no time limit. Further work is a separate thing, and we say so plainly rather than let it blur: a new phase, keeping a system running for you, or hardware that arrives later is scoped and priced with you first, on the same hourly rate, and never added to an invoice you did not agree to

We do not guarantee a specific number of sessions or a fixed completion date; the scope and pace depend on what you're building and how hands-on you want to be.

Fees & Payment

The initial consultation is free. Guided sessions after that are billed at the rate quoted to you at the time (currently $250 per session, unless we've agreed to a different rate in writing). Invoices are due upon receipt unless we've agreed otherwise. We may pause future sessions if payment for prior sessions is outstanding. Guided sessions are payment for our time, and are non-refundable once delivered; the free discovery call is there so you can judge the fit before committing to any paid session. Consulting is quoted the same way, by the hour, in phases: we scope a phase with you, estimate the sessions it needs, and bill only the sessions actually delivered. That estimate is an estimate and not a fixed price, and the commitment we make instead is a trigger, in the same words the Consulting page uses: if a phase runs longer than we said, you hear it before another session is booked, never on an invoice afterwards. No session is booked, and no work beyond the scoped phase is started, without you agreeing to it first.

Separately, your agent runs on an AI provider's platform: Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini), Groq, xAI (Grok), DeepSeek, Mistral, or another provider of your own that speaks the OpenAI format. You choose which, you create and fund that account yourself, and that ongoing cost is paid directly to the provider. It is not a fee we charge or collect. The one exception is the plan with the AI included, described below, where a fixed amount of that usage is part of what you pay us.

Free Credits

A new copy of Archie comes with $2 of AI usage, paid for by us, so you can see an agent work before opening an account of your own. It lasts until that $2 is spent or until 14 days have passed, whichever comes first, and unspent credit does not survive the fourteenth day. Three further things are worth stating plainly. It is a fixed gift, not an allowance: when it ends, the app asks you to connect an AI account, and it never quietly tops itself up or continues at our expense. While you are using it, your requests and their replies pass through a server we operate on the way to Anthropic, which is how the spend is measured; what that server records is covered in our Privacy Policy. Your agent will not read your email while it is running on these credits, because your mail would cross that server and the people who wrote to you never agreed to that. And it is offered as a courtesy, so we may change the amount, or stop offering it, for new installs at any time. None of that affects an agent running on an AI account of your own.

Who gets them. The credits go to an account, once, and that account needs a confirmed email address. They are also limited per computer, to a small fixed number of grants, so once a computer has used its grants, further accounts signing in there will be told the credits have been claimed here rather than given a fresh set, and offered the 14-day trial on an AI account of their own instead. That is not a judgment about anyone; it is how a gift paid for out of our own pocket stays affordable to give away. We may also decline to hand out credits, or pause handing them out, at any time. If you are refused and you think that is wrong, tell us and we will sort it out.

The other way to try it. Eligible accounts can claim a 14-day trial using an AI account of their own, including when starter credits have already been claimed on that computer. Trials are limited per account and computer. Switching to your own key after a starter-credit grant does not reset the original trial deadline. From each agent’s next start, your key sends conversation content directly to your AI provider and enables email and text reading. When it ends, Personal carries on at the free tier’s limit on the same key, and a plan takes the limit off. Archie for Teams needs a plan.

Archie for free on an AI account of your own

On Personal, Archie is free on an AI account of your own. Connect a key from an AI company and the app opens: every skill, every routine, the mail watch. What free means is 20 jobs a day. A job is one piece of work: a reply to you, a routine running, or an email it reacts to. The count starts again at midnight on your computer’s clock, and routines and the mail watch stop at 15, so the last 5 of the day are always there for what you ask for yourself. A plan takes the limit off and runs up to ten agents.

The free tier is not offered on Archie for Teams, and it does not include Archie Mobile. What your AI company charges for those 20 jobs is between you and them, as described under “AI provider costs are yours, and paid directly”.

The Plan With the AI Included

Personal is also offered with the AI included, at $59 a month or $599 a year. That plan carries $25 of AI usage each month, on one model we choose (Claude Sonnet at the time of writing). It does not roll over, it cannot be cashed out or transferred, and when it is used the agent pauses until the next paid month or until you connect an AI account of your own, whichever comes first. We may change the model or the amount for future months with notice on this page. Usage on this plan passes through a server we operate on the way to the AI company, which is how it is measured. Email and text reading are disabled on included usage. Email access on our funded usage awaits Google’s review; text reading requires your own AI key. With your key, conversation content goes directly to your AI provider from each agent’s next start. What our server records is covered in our Privacy Policy. Moving to the plain plan, or canceling, ends the included usage at the end of the period you have paid for. The 14-day money-back guarantee applies to this plan as to the other.

Your Responsibilities

To build your agent, you'll need to:

• Provide accurate information about what you'd like help with
• Review and explicitly approve any account connection, integration, or automated action before it's set up or enabled
• Maintain your own accounts, subscriptions, devices, and internet access
• Review anything your agent drafts for you before you act on it; it can be wrong, and it is your name on whatever you send
• Decide, knowingly, which accounts to connect (see "What your agent does is your responsibility" above)

You're responsible for how you use your agent once it's set up, including the accuracy of anything it produces and compliance with the terms of any third-party accounts and services it connects to.

What you promise about the accounts you connect

Connecting an account to your agent tells us three things, and we rely on all three.

• That it is yours, or that you have permission. A work mailbox, a shared calendar, a company’s payment account: if it is not simply yours, whoever it belongs to has to be fine with an agent reading it.
• That you are allowed to let software read it. Some employers have rules about this, and some professions carry duties that go further. Those are yours to know, and we have no way to see them.
• That the people in it would not be surprised. Your inbox holds other people’s words, written to you. This one is not a legal test and we will not be enforcing it. It is here because we applied it to ourselves in Free Credits above, where your agent will not read your mail on our credits because the people who wrote to you never agreed to that.

If one of the three turns out not to be true, the consequences land on you rather than on us, and the section below, “If someone else brings a claim because of what you did”, is the part that says so.

Third-Party Services

Our services rely on and integrate with third-party platforms (AI providers, email and calendar services, and similar tools) that we don't own or control. We aren't responsible for outages, changes, pricing, or data practices of those third parties. Your use of them is governed by their own terms and privacy policies.

No Professional Advice; No Guaranteed Outcomes

We help you configure and use AI tools; we don't provide legal, financial, medical, or other professional advice, and nothing your agent produces should be treated as such without your own independent judgment or a qualified professional's review. While many clients see significant time savings, we can't guarantee specific results, since outcomes depend on how the agent is used and factors outside our control.

Intellectual Property

Our website content, materials, and training explanations are owned by Otian AI and may not be copied or redistributed without our permission. Configuration work, automations, and documentation we build specifically for you are yours to use and modify going forward.

Confidentiality

We treat information you share with us during sessions as confidential and use it only to provide our services to you. See our Privacy Policy for details on how we handle your information.

Security, and What We Owe You If We Are Breached

If personal information we hold about you is exposed, we will tell you within 72 hours of establishing that it happened, by email to the address on your account, saying what was taken, when, what we have done, and what you should do. We make that a term of this agreement rather than a promise on a page, for the same reason as the clause about ceasing operations above: you should not have to trust us for it. The full wording, and how long each kind of record is kept, are in the Privacy Policy.

If you have found a security problem, how to report it and what we do next is published, including the times we hold ourselves to. If your organization requires a data processing agreement naming it, send us yours and we will review and sign it.

Disclaimer of Warranties

In plain words: we do not promise that Archie will be free of faults, or that it will suit a particular purpose you have in mind. What we do promise sits elsewhere in this agreement and is specific rather than general: the 14-day refund, the 72-hour notice if we are breached, and the final version we will publish if we ever shut down.

Limitation of Liability

In plain words: if something goes wrong, what you can recover from us is capped at what you paid us over the last year. That is the ordinary shape of a software contract, and we would rather show you where the line is than let you find it after something has happened.

If someone else brings a claim because of what you did

If a third party brings a claim against us because of how you used Archie or our services, you will cover us for it, including what it reasonably costs us to defend it. In plain words, we should not be the ones answering for an email your agent sent under your name, a mailbox you connected without the right to, or a law you broke with it.

Three limits on that, so it is not the blank check this clause usually is. It covers what comes from your side of the line: how you used Archie, what your agent did, the accounts you connected, what you put into it, and your breach of these Terms. It does not cover a claim that came from something we did, including a fault in Archie itself or a failure on our part. And if we expect you to cover a claim, we will tell you promptly, let you take over defending it if you would rather, and not settle it without asking you first.

Termination

Either party may end an engagement at any time by notifying the other. You remain responsible for fees for sessions already delivered. We may decline to provide further sessions to anyone who misuses our services or fails to pay outstanding invoices.

Your license to the app can end the same way. If you break these Terms, and in particular the list under “What you may not do with Archie”, we may end your license and close your account. We will normally write to you first and give you a chance to put it right. We will skip that step only where waiting would let real harm happen, such as an attack on our servers or an add-on built to deceive the people installing it.

What ending a license does not do is take anything of yours. As set out above, your agent, its memory, your files and your keys are on your own computer, we have no access to them, and we do not delete them. If we close your account you keep every bit of that, and we will refund the unused part of what you have paid, unless what you were doing was using Archie to harm someone.

If you think we have got one of these wrong, write to [email protected] and we will look at it again. We would rather reverse a decision than defend one.

Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles.

The standard clauses, and what each one does

Every contract ends with a block of clauses that are much the same everywhere and that almost nobody reads. We would rather say what each one is for, because a clause you did not read is not really something you agreed to.

If we hand the business on. We may transfer this agreement to whoever takes over the company, and you may not transfer yours without asking us. That is the usual arrangement with one thing added that is not usual: the transfer is subject to the paragraph above about being acquired, so a buyer takes these Terms with the privacy commitments still in them, or there is nothing for them to take.

If one part of this does not hold. If a court decides that some part of these Terms cannot be enforced, that part comes out and the rest of the agreement stands. We do not get to argue that the whole thing falls with it.

This page is the agreement. These Terms and our Privacy Policy are the whole of what is between us, and they replace anything said earlier in an email, on a call, or elsewhere on this site. Two exceptions, both in your favor: anyone who bought the earlier one-time license holds the terms they bought it on, and anything we have put in writing to you specifically, such as a rate we agreed or the scope of a phase of work, still counts.

What outlives the agreement. Some of this has to keep working after you stop using Archie, or it was never worth anything. Three things in particular: what we owe you if we are breached, what we will publish if we cease operations, and the limits on liability above.

How we reach each other. We write to the email address on your account, so keep it current: a notice sent there counts as given, and both the breach notice and the notice of changes below depend on it. You write to us at [email protected], and anything you need in writing can go there.

If we let something slide. Not enforcing part of this once does not mean we have given it up. Equally, a favor we do you once is a favor and not a new term.

Things neither of us controls. Neither of us is in breach for a delay caused by something genuinely outside our control, such as a provider outage, a network failure, or a natural disaster. This is not a clause we will stretch. It does not cover a bill we forgot to pay or a server we failed to keep running, and it never excuses the refund window or the breach notice.

Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms as the product and our services change. Most updates are small: a clearer sentence, a new provider named, a section moved.

For a change that materially affects you, you get 30 days’ notice by email before it takes effect, to the address on your account, saying what changed and why. That covers a price increase, a right of yours narrowed, a new limit on what you may do, and anything touching how we handle your information. We will also ask you to accept the new Terms the next time you sign in, so that agreeing to them is something you did rather than something you failed to notice. If you would rather not accept them, stop your plan before the change takes effect and we will refund the unused part of the period you have already paid for.

Smaller updates, the ones that change neither what you get nor what you owe, take effect when we publish them. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page is the record either way, and the app keeps the version you agreed to, with the date, as our Privacy Policy describes.

We are putting this in the agreement rather than leaving it as a promise on a page we control, for the same reason as the clauses about being breached and about ceasing operations: a commitment you can hold us to is worth more than one you have to believe.

Contact Us

Questions about these Terms? Email us at [email protected].