Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of main-character.me — the public pages, the booking flow, and the client portal — and of the desktop application where it is provided to you. They are offered by mAInCharacter Advisory LLC ("we", "us").

Using the site means accepting these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use it.

Two other documents form part of the arrangement and should be read with this one: the privacy policy and the data-handling statement. The subprocessor list names every third party involved.

What is on offer here

Three different things, with different terms:

1. Published intelligence — the essays, models, calculators and reference material on the public pages. Free to read.
2. A booking flow — a way to request a call. Requesting one is not an engagement.
3. The client portal and the platform behind it — available to clients of the practice under a separate engagement agreement.

Where an engagement agreement and these terms disagree about the engagement, the engagement agreement wins. These terms govern the site and the platform.

The published material is not advice

The material on the public pages is general commentary about careers and professional strategy. It is published for a broad readership and knows nothing about you.

It is not legal, financial, investment, tax, medical, or employment advice, and it is not a substitute for professional counsel about your own situation. The calculators and models are illustrations built on stated assumptions; they are not forecasts, and no outcome shown in one is promised. Decisions you take after reading are yours.

Advisory work under an engagement is a different thing, governed by its own agreement.

Rights in the material

The licensing position is the practice's existing one and is unchanged by this document:

• Public intelligence on this site is licensed CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 — attribution required, non-commercial, no derivatives.
• Advisory materials and frameworks remain All Rights Reserved under the Private Covenant. The Rights & Use page states the position in full and governs where it is more specific than this section.

Nothing here grants you rights in our name, marks, or design system.

Rights in your own material

Your material stays yours. Documents you upload, and the transcripts of your own sessions, belong to you. We hold them in order to do the work, on the terms in the privacy policy and only for as long as that document says.

You grant us the permission needed to run the service on your material — storing it, de-identifying it, indexing it so it can be found, and preparing work product from it. That permission exists to deliver the engagement and for nothing else. We do not use your material to train models, ours or anyone else's, and we do not sell it.

Recording and AI processing additionally require your consent, captured against a versioned document in your portal and withdrawable at any time. Use of anonymised material to improve the practice is a separate, optional consent; declining it changes nothing about your engagement.

Booking

Requesting a call reserves a slot; it does not create an engagement and neither of us owes the other anything until one is agreed. We may decline or reschedule a booking. You can reschedule or cancel through the link in your confirmation.

Give us a real name and a real email address — the confirmation, the calendar invitation, and the reschedule link all go there, and a booking we cannot confirm is a slot nobody uses.

Accounts

Portal accounts are issued by us; you cannot open one yourself. Keep your credentials to yourself, use the account only as the person it was issued to, and tell us promptly if you think someone else has got into it. We may suspend an account we believe is compromised or is being used against these terms.

Acceptable use

Do not:

• try to reach material that is not yours, or probe the platform's access controls;
• automate the booking form, defeat its abuse challenge, or work around its rate limits;
• scrape the site at a rate that degrades it for other readers, or use the published material outside the licence above — including to train a machine learning model, which the no-derivatives licence does not permit;
• upload malware, or material you have no right to give us;
• upload a third party's confidential information without the right to do so. If a document belongs to your employer, it is on you to be sure you may share it.

We may rate-limit, suspend, or refuse service to anyone doing these things.

The desktop application

Where the desktop application is provided to you, it is licensed for use in connection with your engagement and not sublicensed, resold, or redistributed. It records and transcribes on your own machine, and its configuration — including whether any cloud provider is used for suggestions or search — is described in the data-handling statement and the subprocessor list.

If you use the application to record another person, obtaining their agreement to be recorded is your responsibility, and the law where you are may require it. The platform's own consent flow records agreement between us; it does not substitute for the consent of everyone in the room.

Availability

We try to keep the service up and do not promise that it will be. Parts of it degrade deliberately rather than fail: with no mail provider configured, for instance, a booking still completes and its confirmation page carries the same details. Maintenance, provider outages, and changes to features happen.

The site is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, to the fullest extent the law allows.

Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, or lost data, arising out of your use of the site or the published material.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for fraud, for wilful misconduct, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Liability for the paid engagement itself is governed by the engagement agreement, not by this page.

Ending it

You can stop using the site at any time, and you can ask us to close your account and delete your material — see the privacy policy. We may suspend or end access for a breach of these terms, and we may retire features or pages.

The sections on rights, liability, and governing law survive the end of your use.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State in which mAInCharacter Advisory LLC is organised, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and by applicable federal law of the United States. Nothing here removes a consumer protection you have where you live that cannot be waived by agreement.

Changes

Changing these terms means editing a file in a repository: a commit, a review, and a new version number and effective date at the top of this page. There is no content management system behind these pages and no administrative screen that can alter them.

Continuing to use the site after a new version takes effect means accepting it. Where a change materially affects something you consented to, the consent flow asks again rather than assuming — publishing a new consent document drops every prior agreement back to pending until the person agrees to the new text.

Contact

hello@main-character.me.