Terms of Service

1. Introduction & acceptance

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between Sergejs Makarovs, a sole trader trading as "LicenseFort" ("LicenseFort", "we", "us"), and the person or business registering for or using the Service ("you", the "Customer").

By creating an account, or by accessing or using the Service in any way, you accept these Terms in full. If you are accepting on behalf of a company or other organisation, you confirm you have authority to bind that organisation, and "you" refers to that organisation.

You must be at least 18 years old, and have the legal capacity to enter a binding contract in your jurisdiction, to use the Service.

2. Definitions

• Service — the LicenseFort platform: the dashboard, the licence-validation API, the Protect Software wizard, the compile/build pipeline, and every related feature made available at licensefort.com.
• Customer — the developer or business with a LicenseFort account, using the Service to licence their own software.
• End User — a person or business who obtains a licence key from a Customer for the Customer's own Protected Software. An End User is not a LicenseFort Customer and has no account with LicenseFort.
• Protected Software — a Customer's application (including MetaTrader 4/5 Expert Advisors and indicators, and Windows applications) into which a licence-validation check has been inserted via the Service.
• Source Material — the source code, binaries, and any other files a Customer uploads to the Service for the purpose of creating Protected Software.
• Licence Key — a unique code generated through the Service that an End User's copy of Protected Software presents to the validation API to prove entitlement to run.
• Activation — a single device or account binding recorded against a Licence Key the first time it successfully validates from that device or account.
• Active Licence — a Licence Key whose status is "Active" (i.e. not revoked and not expired) at the time it is counted against a Plan's licence allowance. This is exactly the definition used to calculate usage against Plan Limits everywhere in the Service and on the pricing page — a revoked or expired Licence Key does not count.
• Plan Limits — the active-licence, product, and other numerical limits attached to a Customer's subscription plan, as published on the pricing page and reflected in the dashboard.

3. The Service

LicenseFort provides licensing infrastructure: a way for Customers to protect their own software with a licence-validation check, and to issue, monitor, and revoke Licence Keys for their own End Users.

LicenseFort is developer tooling. It is not a financial services provider, does not give financial, investment, or trading advice, is not a broker, and is not a signals service. LicenseFort makes no representation about the performance, profitability, or suitability of any Protected Software, including Protected Software used for trading. Any Protected Software that trades or analyses financial markets is the Customer's product, not LicenseFort's, and LicenseFort has no visibility into and no responsibility for its trading logic.

4. Accounts

• You must provide accurate registration information and keep it up to date.
• You are responsible for safeguarding your account credentials and for all activity under your account.
• Notify us immediately at support@licensefort.com if you suspect unauthorised access.
• One account per individual or business entity, unless we agree otherwise in writing.
• We may require additional verification (e.g. email confirmation) before certain account actions.

5. Plans, billing & payment

Paid plans are billed on the interval you select at checkout (monthly or annual) and renew automatically until cancelled. We'll give at least 30 days' notice, by email, before any price change takes effect on your next renewal.

Card and other non-crypto payments are processed by Paddle.com Market Ltd ("Paddle"), our payment provider and merchant of record. Paddle handles payment collection, fraud screening, and applicable sales tax/VAT for these transactions, and Paddle's own terms and privacy policy apply to them in addition to these Terms.

Crypto payments are processed by NowPayments, a separate third-party payment processor. Unlike Paddle, NowPayments is not a merchant of record — LicenseFort is the seller of record for crypto transactions and remains responsible for its own tax treatment of that revenue. Crypto payments are non-reversible once confirmed on-chain; see the Refund Policy for how refunds work on this path.

Tax treatment of LicenseFort's own income (as distinct from VAT/sales tax Paddle collects from customers as merchant of record) is governed by [[GOVERNING_LAW_AND_TAX_JURISDICTION]].

If a payment fails, we'll attempt to notify you and retry before any suspension — see §8 for the suspension and wind-down process, which applies to non-payment as much as to cancellation.

6. Plan limits & enforcement

Each plan has published limits (active licences, products, and others). If you reach a limit, you won't be able to create new Licence Keys or products beyond it until you free up room (e.g. by revoking unused keys) or upgrade.

Exceeding a Plan Limit does not immediately disable existing End User Activations. Licence Keys and Activations that already exist keep working; the limit only gates the creation of new ones. LicenseFort does not retroactively revoke a Customer's existing Licence Keys for being over a limit.

7. Source Material — custody, use and retention

You retain all intellectual property rights in your Source Material. You grant LicenseFort a limited, non-exclusive licence to store, process, and modify (specifically: to insert the licence-validation check and compile the result) your Source Material, solely for the purpose of providing the Service to you.

LicenseFort will not, and will not permit any third party to:

• use your Source Material for any purpose other than providing the Service to you;
• disclose your Source Material to any other person or Customer;
• use your Source Material to train machine-learning or AI models of any kind;
• create derivative works from your Source Material beyond the licence-check injection described above; or
• use your Source Material, or anything learned from it, to develop a competing product.

Retention: as of the effective date of this document, uploaded Source Material and compiled output are retained for as long as your account exists and are not automatically deleted on any fixed schedule. You can request deletion of a specific build or of all Source Material at any time by emailing support@licensefort.com, and everything is deleted on account closure except where we're required to retain records by law. This is the honest current state, not an aspiration — if we introduce automatic time-based deletion later, this section will be updated and the change will be reflected in the changelog below.

Source Material is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest. Confidentiality obligations in this section survive termination of your account.

If we become aware of a security breach affecting your Source Material, we will notify you without undue delay and in any event within 72 hours of becoming aware, describing what happened and what we're doing about it.

8. Service availability, revocation and continuity

We target high availability but do not guarantee a specific uptime percentage or offer a service-level agreement with financial remedies, unless we've agreed one with you separately in writing.

Outage behaviour. Protected Software validates a Licence Key by calling LicenseFort's validation API at runtime. If that call cannot reach LicenseFort — for any reason, including a LicenseFort outage — Protected Software currently fails closed: validation is treated as failed and the software does not run. There is presently no offline validation cache and no grace period. We are telling you this plainly, not softening it, because it is the single most consequential technical fact in this document if your Protected Software is used for anything time-sensitive, including live trading. See the disclaimers in §14 and the liability limitation in §15, which are drafted with this specific behaviour in mind.

Customer-initiated revocation. You can revoke your own Licence Keys at any time from the dashboard. You are solely responsible for the consequences of revoking a key, including any impact on the End User holding it.

Suspension for non-payment. If a renewal payment fails, we'll notify you and give you a reasonable opportunity to update your payment method before suspending new Licence Key/Activation creation. We commit to a wind-down, not an instant cut-off: Licence Keys and Activations that existed before suspension continue validating normally for at least 30 days after suspension or cancellation, even though new ones can't be created during that window. We will not immediately disable an entire End User base over a single failed card charge.

Suspension for Acceptable Use breach (§10). We may suspend or terminate your account faster than the non-payment process above where we reasonably believe you've breached §10 or §11, particularly where continuing to provide the Service would expose LicenseFort or others to legal or security risk. We'll tell you why, where we're legally able to.

If LicenseFort ceases to operate. Should LicenseFort discontinue the Service entirely, we commit to giving Customers at least 60 days' advance notice by email, and to making available an offline validation mechanism or permanent-unlock capability for existing Licence Keys before the Service is switched off, so Customers and their End Users are not left with software that suddenly stops validating with no recourse.

Data export on termination. For 30 days after your account closes, you can request an export of your Customer, product, and Licence Key data by emailing support@licensefort.com. After that window, the data is deleted per §7 and the Privacy Policy.

9. End Users — no third-party beneficiary

End Users are your customers, not LicenseFort's. No contract exists between LicenseFort and any End User, and nothing in these Terms creates rights enforceable by an End User against LicenseFort (no third-party beneficiary rights of any kind).

You are solely responsible for your own agreement with your End Users, including disclosing to them that licence validation is performed by a third-party service (LicenseFort) and that doing so transmits a device identifier, and — where you've enabled account binding — an account identifier, to that service.

You indemnify LicenseFort against claims brought by your End Users arising from your own use of revocation, expiry, or Licence Key policy (see §16).

10. Acceptable use

By using the Service, you warrant that:

• you own, or are properly licensed to use and protect, all Source Material you upload;
• you will not upload malware, spyware, credential-stealing code, or anything designed to harm a system or its user;
• you will not use the Service for any unlawful purpose;
• you will not attempt to circumvent, reverse-engineer, probe, or attack the Service or its validation infrastructure;
• you will not resell the Service, white-labelled or otherwise, as a competing licensing product without our prior written agreement; and
• you will not scrape, or use automated means to access, the Service beyond the documented API.

11. Sanctions & export control

You warrant that you are not located in, incorporated in, or acting on behalf of any person or entity located in or organised under the laws of, a country or territory subject to comprehensive sanctions, and that you are not a person designated on any applicable sanctions or denied-party list. This applies whether you pay by card or by crypto.

12. LicenseFort IP

LicenseFort owns all rights in the Service itself — the platform, the website, the LicenseFort brand, the injected licence-check code (independent of your Source Material it's inserted into), and the compilation tooling. We grant you a licence to use and distribute the compiled Protected Software that results from using the Service. You may not copy the design, code, or content of the LicenseFort website or dashboard.

13. Third-party platforms & trademark disclaimer

LicenseFort is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by MetaQuotes Software Corp. MetaTrader, MT4, and MT5 are trademarks of their respective owners. If you distribute Protected Software through a marketplace such as the MQL5 Market, you remain solely responsible for complying with that marketplace's own terms.

14. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", to the fullest extent permitted by law, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

LicenseFort specifically disclaims liability for trading losses, missed trades, financial losses, or any loss arising from Protected Software failing to run, failing to validate, or being incorrectly revoked — including where that failure results from the outage behaviour described in §8.

No software-protection method is unbreakable. LicenseFort raises the cost and difficulty of piracy; it does not, and does not claim to, eliminate it entirely.

15. Limitation of liability

LicenseFort operates as a sole trader. There is no separate corporate entity and no limited liability — this section, together with §14, is the primary protection standing between a claim and Sergejs Makarovs's personal assets, and has been flagged as the highest priority item for legal review.

• To the maximum extent permitted by law, LicenseFort's total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service will not exceed the greater of (a) the fees you paid LicenseFort in the 12 months before the claim arose, or (b) [[LIABILITY_CAP_FLOOR_AMOUNT]].
• LicenseFort is not liable for any indirect, consequential, special, or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, loss of trading opportunity, or loss of data.
• Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited under [[GOVERNING_LAW_AND_TAX_JURISDICTION]], including (where applicable) liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, or fraudulent misrepresentation.

16. Indemnity

You indemnify and hold LicenseFort harmless from claims, damages, and reasonable costs arising from: your Source Material; your relationship with your End Users; your distribution of Protected Software; and your breach of these Terms.

17. Term, termination & suspension

These Terms apply for as long as you have an account. Either party may terminate at any time; you can close your account from the dashboard or by emailing us. Sections that by their nature should survive termination do — including confidentiality (§7), IP (§12), liability (§14–15), indemnity (§16), and governing law (§19).

18. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. For material changes, we'll notify you by email at least 14 days before they take effect and require re-acceptance on your next login. Continued use after a change takes effect constitutes acceptance. Every version is recorded in the changelog below.

19. Governing law & disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of [[GOVERNING_LAW_AND_TAX_JURISDICTION]], without regard to conflict-of-law principles. Before starting formal proceedings, both parties agree to first try to resolve any dispute informally by emailing support@licensefort.com. Formal proceedings, if needed, are brought in the courts of [[GOVERNING_LAW_AND_TAX_JURISDICTION]].

20. Miscellaneous

• These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and Refund Policy, are the entire agreement between us on this subject.
• If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect.
• A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them as part of a business transfer.
• Neither party is liable for delay caused by events outside its reasonable control.
• Legal notices: support@licensefort.com. Registered address: 71-75 Shelton St, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom.

Changelog