TideWork — Terms of Service
Effective: 1 August 2026 Provider: Amelia Mowers ("we", "us"), operator of TideWork at tidework.io.
By creating an account or using TideWork, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the service.
1. What TideWork is
TideWork is a collaborative workspace — tables, boards, and documents — built on the Matrix protocol. Content you create is end-to-end encrypted on your device before it reaches our servers.
This is the single most important thing to understand about the service, because it determines what we can and cannot do for you. See section 5.
2. Your account
You must be able to form a binding contract to use TideWork. You are responsible for what happens under your account, including keeping your credentials, recovery key, and devices secure.
An account is for one person. Pricing is per person, so each collaborator needs their own account — you may not share one set of credentials between people. One person may hold as many accounts as they like.
3. Subscriptions, trials, and billing
- New accounts get a 14-day free trial. No payment method is required to start.
- After the trial, continued use requires an active subscription at the price shown at tidework.io at the time you subscribe.
- Subscriptions renew monthly until cancelled. Payment is processed by Stripe; we do not store your card details.
- Cancel any time through Manage subscription in the app, which opens Stripe's billing portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid period; you keep access until then.
- We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice before the change applies to your renewal. Continuing to use the service after that is acceptance of the new price.
- Refunds are not automatic. If something has gone wrong, contact tideworksupport@proton.me and we will deal with it in good faith. Statutory rights that apply where you live are unaffected by this paragraph.
What happens if you stop paying
If a trial ends or a subscription lapses without payment, we lock the account: you cannot sign in or write, but your data is preserved and unlocking it restores everything. We do not delete data on lapse.
An account that has never had a paid subscription and has been locked for more than 60 days past its trial may be deleted, along with its data. Accounts that have paid at any point are not deleted this way.
4. Acceptable use
You may not use TideWork to:
- break the law, or infringe anyone's rights;
- store or distribute material that is unlawful where you or we operate;
- attack, overload, or probe the service or other users (deliberate abuse of the homeserver, its federation partners, or other tenants);
- resell the hosted service as your own without a separate agreement.
Because the service is end-to-end encrypted, we cannot proactively inspect content — enforcement is necessarily reactive, based on reports, billing signals, and abuse patterns visible without decryption. We may suspend or terminate an account we reasonably believe is being used in breach of this section.
5. Encryption, keys, and data loss — read this
Your content is encrypted on your device. We do not hold the keys and cannot decrypt your workspaces. That is the product's central promise, and it has a direct consequence:
If you lose access to your keys, your data is permanently unrecoverable — by you and by us. We cannot reset it, restore it, or recover it, because there is nothing we hold that could.
Concretely:
- Your recovery key (and any passkey you enrol to unlock it) is the only route back into your encrypted history on a new device. Store it somewhere safe and durable.
- If you lose every enrolled device and your recovery key, the encrypted history is gone. Your account may still exist; its contents will not be readable.
- Resetting your account's encryption starts you from an empty history. Older content stays encrypted under keys nobody has.
We keep server-side backups of the encrypted data so that our failures — hardware, corruption, operator error — do not lose it. Those backups are ciphertext and do not help if you have lost your keys.
We are not responsible for data loss. Without limiting section 7, we are not liable for loss of, or inability to access, content caused by: loss of your recovery key or devices; your own deletion or overwriting of data; a resetting of your encryption; conflicts arising from concurrent edits; or third-party services and networks outside our control. Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose — the app exports your workspaces as CSV archives, and the CLI can do the same.
6. Availability and changes
We aim to keep TideWork available and to give notice of disruptive changes, but the service is provided without any uptime guarantee or service-level commitment. We may modify, suspend, or discontinue features. If we discontinue the hosted service entirely, we will give reasonable notice and a window in which to export your data.
TideWork's source is published under Apache-2.0, so a discontinued hosted service does not have to mean a discontinued workspace: you can run it yourself.
7. Disclaimers and limitation of liability
The service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure against every possible attack.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability arising out of or relating to the service — in contract, tort, or otherwise — is limited to the amounts you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, goodwill, or data.
Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions; where that is the case, the above applies to the maximum extent permitted, and nothing here excludes liability for fraud, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.
8. Ending the agreement
You may stop at any time: cancel the subscription through Manage subscription, and delete the account from Account settings when you want the account itself gone. Deleting an account is irreversible and cancels any active subscription.
We may suspend or terminate an account for breach of section 4, for non-payment (subject to section 3), or if required by law. Where practical we will give notice and an opportunity to export.
9. Your content
You keep all rights in what you create. We claim no ownership.
You grant us only the narrow permission needed to run the service — to store, transmit, and back up the encrypted form of your content, and to process the account metadata described in the Privacy Policy. We cannot grant ourselves more than that even if we wanted to: the plaintext is not available to us.
10. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. For material changes we will give notice before they take effect — in the app, by email, or both. Continuing to use the service after that is acceptance. The current version is always published at tidework.io.
11. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington, USA, and the courts of the State of Washington, USA have exclusive jurisdiction, except where mandatory consumer-protection law in your country of residence gives you the right to bring proceedings locally.