Terms of use

§ 1 Scope and provider

Provider of the service is:

These terms apply to all contracts on the use of deckle studio between the provider and its users. The purchase of paid plans is concluded with Stripe’s reseller (§ 4). Conflicting terms of users do not apply. A consumer is any natural person who concludes a contract for purposes that are predominantly neither commercial nor self-employed (§ 13 BGB); an entrepreneur is any person acting in their commercial or self-employed professional capacity (§ 14 BGB).

§ 2 Service and beta phase

deckle studio lets you draw circuits, simulate them together with firmware on emulated microcontrollers, design circuit boards and export manufacturing data. Without an account you can open examples and shared projects and simulate them, without saving. Creating and editing circuits requires an account, also on the free plan; with an account you can store projects and parts on the server, build firmware on our servers and – depending on the plan – connect AI agents. The features of each plan follow from the plan overview at the time of the order.

The service is in a public beta. Features may change, be added or be removed, and errors are to be expected. There is no guaranteed availability; maintenance, further development and faults may interrupt the service. We will announce planned interruptions where reasonably possible. Your statutory rights in the case of paid plans remain unaffected (§ 9).

Please keep your own copies of important projects. Projects can be downloaded as files in the editor at any time.

§ 3 Account

Creating and editing requires an account. Registration requires a valid email address, which you confirm via the link we send you, and the minimum age of 16 years; minors need the consent of their legal guardians for paid plans. The contract on use of the free plan is concluded when the account is created.

Your details must be accurate. Keep your password and your API keys secret and inform us immediately if you suspect misuse. An account is personal and must not be passed on. Creating several accounts to circumvent the limits of a plan is not permitted.

§ 4 Plans, purchase and term

There is a free plan (Free) and paid plans. The current prices are shown on the plan page. The total price shown in the checkout, including any taxes, is binding; it may be shown in your local currency. A subscription keeps the price it was booked at.

Paid plans can only be booked once ordering has been enabled in the service. Until then the provisions on paid plans do not apply.

Paid plans are sold through Stripe Managed Payments. The seller (merchant of record) is the Stripe subsidiary Sold through Link, LLC (“Link”). You conclude the purchase contract for the subscription with Link under its terms (https://link.com/terms); Link charges the price, collects the payment, issues receipts and invoices, handles sales taxes and deals with refunds, withdrawals and payment questions. We provide the service; its use is governed by these terms.

After the purchase, the booked plan is activated for your account for as long as the subscription is active. Term, renewal and billing period (monthly or yearly) follow from the order. You can cancel at any time with effect from the end of the current billing period, in your Link account at https://link.com or by email to hello@deckle.io; we then arrange the cancellation with Link.

You can also cancel without signing in using the form at cancel contracts here; you receive a confirmation of receipt by email.

When a paid plan ends, your account continues on the free plan. Projects that are private at that time remain private and accessible to you, and nothing is published automatically; new projects and features follow the limits of the free plan.

We will only change the price of an ongoing subscription with your consent. We will inform you of a planned change at least six weeks before it takes effect. If you do not consent, the subscription ends at the end of the billing period in which the change would have taken effect.

§ 5 Free plan and public projects

On the free plan, all projects you store on the server are public. Anyone can open them read-only, also without an account; signed-in users can copy them into their own account; projects with at least one part are listed in the community gallery with name, description, number of parts, date of the last change and the display name of your account. Do not store confidential information, secrets or personal data of others in public projects.

The free plan is used for private and non-commercial purposes. Commercial use – use of the service in the course of a commercial or self-employed professional activity, for example developing products for sale or for clients – is permitted in plans that include it (currently Pro). Designs you create belong to you regardless of the plan.

§ 6 Your content and rights of use

You retain all rights to the content you create or upload (circuits, boards, source code, descriptions, parts). We do not acquire any ownership of it.

You grant us the simple, non-exclusive, free right, limited to the duration of storage, to store, reproduce and technically process your content (for example simulate, compile, convert and export it) to the extent required to provide the service. For public projects you additionally grant us the right to make them publicly accessible and to show them in the community gallery, and you grant other users the simple right to view them, copy them into their account and modify the copies for their own purposes within the service.

These rights end when you delete the project or make it private, except for copies that other users have made before. You warrant that you hold the necessary rights to your content, in particular to source code and libraries of third parties, and that it does not infringe the rights of others.

§ 7 Acceptable use

The build service, the simulation servers and the interfaces are shared resources. In particular, it is not permitted to:

• use the build or simulation servers for purposes other than developing firmware and circuits, for example cryptocurrency mining or general-purpose computing
• attempt to break out of the build containers, to access other users’ data or to probe, attack or overload our systems
• circumvent quotas, rate limits or plan limits, for example with several accounts or automated requests
• access the service automatically other than through the documented API and MCP interface with your own API key, or systematically read out the gallery
• develop or distribute malware or other software intended to harm others
• store or publish illegal content or content that infringes the rights of third parties
• resell or pass on access to the service to third parties

In the event of a violation we may stop individual jobs, remove public content, temporarily block access or, after a warning, terminate the contract. A warning is not required if continuing the contract is unreasonable for us, for example in the case of attacks on our systems. We take your legitimate interests into account.

§ 8 Simulation results and manufacturing data

Simulations are based on models that simplify the real behaviour of components. Results may differ from the behaviour of a real circuit. They do not replace engineering verification, measurements on prototypes, design reviews or tests and approvals required by law (for example electrical safety, EMC, CE marking). The service is not intended for designing safety-critical applications without such independent verification.

Before ordering circuit boards or assemblies, check exported files (Gerber, drill, BOM, placement and KiCad data) yourself, for example with the design rule check of the manufacturer. Using them for manufacturing is your responsibility; our liability is governed by § 10.

The part library contains footprint and symbol data from the KiCad libraries (© the KiCad library contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0 with the KiCad library exception, https://www.kicad.org/libraries/license/). The data itself remains under this licence; your designs and the manufacturing files generated from them are not bound by the share-alike condition. Links to datasheets lead to offers of third parties, for whose content we are not responsible.

§ 9 Paid plans: performance and warranty

Claims under the purchase contract (for example warranty, refunds, payment) are directed against Link in accordance with its terms and the law; Link may involve us in product questions. During a paid subscription we provide the features of the booked plan. If we take a feature out of a plan or lower a limit, this only applies to new subscriptions; ongoing subscriptions keep the booked scope, and features we add to the plan apply to them as well. We may change the service in accordance with § 327r BGB for a valid reason, such as adaptation to new technical developments, security or legal requirements, without additional cost to you; if a change impairs your access or use more than insignificantly, we will inform you in good time and you may end the subscription free of charge.

§ 10 Liability

We are liable without limitation for intent and gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under the Product Liability Act and to the extent we have given a guarantee.

In the case of slight negligence we are only liable for the breach of an essential contractual obligation (cardinal obligation), i.e. an obligation whose fulfilment makes the proper performance of the contract possible in the first place and on whose fulfilment you may regularly rely. In this case liability is limited to the foreseeable damage typical for this type of contract. Otherwise liability for slight negligence is excluded.

For the free plan, which we provide free of charge, we are liable – apart from the cases in the first paragraph – only for intent and gross negligence.

For the loss of data we are liable, within the above limits, only for the effort that would have been required to restore it from regular backups of your own. These limitations also apply in favour of our vicarious agents.

§ 11 Termination of the account

You can end the use of the service at any time by deleting your account in the account settings or by email to hello@deckle.io. If you have a running paid subscription, cancel it beforehand (§ 4). We can terminate the free plan with two weeks’ notice. The right of both parties to terminate for good cause remains unaffected.

When the account ends, we delete your projects, parts and API keys, unless statutory retention duties prevent this. Download projects you want to keep beforehand.

§ 12 Changes to these terms

We may change these terms for the future, for example when the service is developed further or the legal situation changes. For existing contracts, changes only take effect with your consent; we will send you the changes by email at least six weeks in advance. If you do not consent to a change, we may terminate the free plan with two weeks’ notice; paid subscriptions continue under the previous terms until the end of the current term.

§ 13 Right of withdrawal

When buying a paid plan, consumers have a right of withdrawal against the seller Link; see withdrawal and refunds. The free plan is free of charge and can be ended at any time.

§ 14 Final provisions

The law of the Federal Republic of Germany applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. For consumers this choice of law applies only insofar as it does not deprive them of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of the state in which they have their habitual residence.

If you are a merchant, a legal entity under public law or a special fund under public law, the place of jurisdiction for all disputes is Essen. Mandatory places of jurisdiction remain unaffected.

Should individual provisions be invalid, the remaining provisions remain effective; the statutory provisions apply in place of the invalid ones (§ 306 BGB). Information on consumer dispute resolution can be found in the legal notice.