Terms of service

1. About these terms

These terms are an agreement between you and Scale Initiative LTD, trading as TickToad ("we", "us"), a company registered in England and Wales (number 17005340) at 86-90 Paul Street, London, England, EC2A 4NE. They cover your use of ticktoad.com and the game servers we run for you. By creating an account you accept them, along with our privacy policy and refund policy. Questions go to support@ticktoad.com.

2. Your account

• You must be at least 13 to have an account, and at least 18, or have a parent's permission, to pay.
• Use your own email address, keep your password safe, and tell us if you think someone else has used it.
• You're responsible for what happens on your account and on servers you own, including what the people you invite to them do.

3. The service

We run game servers on cloud machines on your instructions. A server is created when it starts and deleted when it stops, and its world is saved in between. Starting takes time, which depends on the game, the world and whether our providers have capacity. We're not affiliated with any game publisher: you and your players need your own copies of the game, and you must follow the game's own terms. We may add, change or remove features, and will tell you before removing one you pay for.

4. Credit and billing

• You prepay credit in US dollars by card through Stripe, by hand or with automatic top-ups. Turning on automatic top-ups lets us charge your saved card for the amount you chose whenever your credit falls below your threshold, until you turn them off or remove the card.
• A running server spends credit at the hourly price shown for its game, size and region, charged in 5-minute steps from the moment we start creating it, with a one-hour minimum each time it starts. The price is fixed when the server starts.
• No server costs more than its monthly cap in a calendar month (UTC). Once a server reaches its cap, it runs free until the month ends.
• Starting a server needs at least an hour's credit. If your credit runs out, we save the world and stop the server.
• Credit can only be spent on TickToad. It isn't money: it earns no interest and can't be transferred, and it can only be paid back as our refund policy describes. It doesn't expire while your account is open.
• Prices include any VAT or sales tax we have to charge. We may change prices; changes apply to servers started after the change, and we'll email you before raising the price of a server you already have.

5. Refunds and cancelling

You can get back unused credit within 14 days of a top-up, as our refund policy explains. By starting a server, you ask us to begin providing the service straight away, so credit already spent on server time isn't refundable. You can stop using TickToad and delete your account at any time.

6. Fair use

You must not use TickToad to:

• break the law, or host, share or link to illegal content;
• run anything other than the game, such as mining cryptocurrency, proxies, VPNs, or sending spam or attacks;
• attack, probe or overload TickToad, our providers or anyone else, or try to get around billing or limits;
• upload worlds or files you don't have the right to use, or that contain malware;
• harass anyone, or impersonate us or someone else.

If you do, we may stop your servers or suspend your account, and we may report illegal activity to the authorities.

7. Your worlds and content

Your worlds, saves, settings and other content stay yours. You give us permission to store, copy and process them only as needed to run TickToad for you. We keep each server's 10 most recent saves plus any you lock, and delete a server's saves when you delete the server or your account. We take care with your saves, but no storage is perfect: download copies of worlds that matter to you.

8. Availability

We work to keep TickToad running, but we can't promise it will always be available or that a server will always start: our providers may be out of capacity, we may need maintenance, and game updates can change how servers behave. If a server fails because of a fault on our side, tell us and we'll give back the credit for the time affected.

9. Suspension and closing accounts

We may suspend or close your account if you break these terms, if a payment is disputed or fraudulent, or if the law requires it. Where we can, we'll tell you why and give you a chance to put things right. If we close your account without you having broken these terms, or stop offering TickToad, we'll give you at least 30 days' notice where possible, time to download your worlds, and a refund of your remaining credit.

10. Our responsibility to you

If we break these terms, we're responsible for loss you suffer that was a foreseeable result. We're not responsible for loss that wasn't foreseeable, or for business losses: TickToad is for personal use. Except where the law doesn't allow a limit, our total responsibility to you is limited to what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim. Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law doesn't let us limit, and nothing affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

11. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change matters, we'll email you at least 14 days before it takes effect. If you don't agree, you can stop using TickToad and ask for a refund of your unused credit before the change applies.

12. Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and its courts can hear disputes. If you live in Scotland, Northern Ireland or another country, you can also bring a claim in your local courts and keep the consumer protections of where you live. Please contact us first; most problems are quicker to fix by email.