These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of the SurfVault website at surf-vault.com (including the SurfVault store), the SurfVault web app at app.surf-vault.com, and the SurfVault mobile application (collectively, the “Service”), operated by SurfVault, LLC (“SurfVault”, “we”, “us”, or “our”). By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.
1. Eligibility
You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use the Service only with the involvement of a parent or guardian. You must be an adult, or have a parent or guardian’s permission, to buy a paid plan or a store order. By using the Service, you represent that you meet these requirements.
2. Your Account
You are responsible for the activity that happens under your account and for keeping your login credentials secure. You agree to provide accurate information and to keep it up to date. You may hold more than one account (for example, separate surfer and photographer accounts). Notify us promptly of any unauthorized use of your account.
3. Acceptable Use
You agree not to:
- Upload content you do not have the right to share, or that infringes anyone’s rights
- Upload unlawful, harmful, harassing, or abusive content
- Misrepresent your identity or tag people in a misleading way
- Attempt to access other users’ private content without permission
- Scrape, reverse-engineer, overload, or interfere with the Service
- Use the Service to send spam or for any unlawful purpose
- Remove, crop out, or get around a watermark, an access code, or other protection on someone’s content
- Download, copy, or share other users’ content beyond what they allowed
We have zero tolerance for objectionable content and abusive users. You can report content or block a user from within the app, and we review reports promptly. We may remove content or suspend accounts that violate these Terms.
4. Your Content
Your Content is yours. You own the photos, videos, and other content you upload (“Your Content”). Uploading it to SurfVault does not give us ownership of it, ever. You are responsible for Your Content, including having the necessary rights, permissions, and releases for anyone depicted in it.
The license you give us to run the Service. By uploading Your Content, you grant SurfVault a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, adapt (for example, to create watermarked previews, thumbnails, and other variants), display, and distribute Your Content only as needed to operate and provide the Service, including delivering it to the users and recipients you choose. We do not sell Your Content, and we do not license it to third parties.
Showcases on SurfVault. Content you publish publicly may appear, credited to you, anywhere SurfVault operates the Service, including feeds, search, maps, and profiles in the app, and showcases of community activity on surf-vault.com (for example, the homepage). This is part of operating the Service, not promotional use. To remove something, unpublish or delete it. Drafts and other unpublished content are never shown.
Promotional use outside SurfVault is opt-in and revocable. With your permission, we may feature Your Content in places we don’t run as part of the Service (such as social media posts, films and edits, ads, and print) to showcase the work of our community. We will credit you. You can withdraw that permission at any time by contacting us, and we will stop using Your Content in any new promotional material and remove it from anything we still control.
Photos of you. If you appear in content on SurfVault and want it removed, email support@surf-vault.com with a link to it. We’ll review the request and, where appropriate, remove the content or ask the person who posted it to.
When you leave, your content leaves with you.
When you delete Your Content, it first moves to your Trash, where only you can see it and you can restore it. It is permanently deleted when you empty your Trash, delete it from your Trash, or when the auto-delete time you choose passes (see our Privacy Policy). When Your Content is permanently deleted, or when you close your account, we permanently delete it. That means the original files and every derived copy (previews, thumbnails, and watermarked variants) are removed from our storage. We keep no archive copy and no internal copy for our own use. Deleted files can stay recoverable in our storage for up to 30 days, copies in our off-site disaster-recovery backup are removed automatically within 90 days, and database backups are kept for 14 days. If you close your account, this happens after a 30-day grace period during which you can change your mind. Direct messages you sent stay visible to the people you sent them to, shown as from “Deleted User”, so they don’t lose their side of the conversation; your support conversation with @surf_vault is deleted. Every license you granted us above ends. Full details are in our Privacy Policy.
There are three things we cannot undo, and we want to be upfront about all of them:
- Copies you shared with someone else on SurfVault. If you granted someone’s request or sent them a share link, and they saved those photos or videos to their own SurfVault account (their Library), or claimed the share link, those copies belong to their account. They stay with that person after you delete your account, but your name is no longer shown on them.
- Files another user already downloaded. If you shared or delivered photos to someone through the Service and they saved those files to their own device, those copies are on their device and outside our control. This is true of any platform that lets you deliver files to someone.
- Posts already published to third-party platforms. If, with your permission, we previously featured your work in a post on a service we do not control (for example, an Instagram post that others have since reshared), we can delete our own post but we cannot retract copies that others have made of it. Tell us and we will take down anything still within our control.
None of these is us keeping your work for ourselves. We do not use Your Content once you’re gone.
5. Photographers, Shapers, and Other Creators
If you deliver or showcase work through the Service, or sell work or services to people you meet here, you are solely responsible for your dealings with them, including pricing, delivery, custom orders, and any payments you arrange outside SurfVault. SurfVault is a platform that connects people; we are not a party to those transactions and do not guarantee any outcome or sale.
You are responsible for obtaining any model releases, location permissions, or other rights required for the content you upload and the services you offer.
6. Subscriptions
The Service offers a free plan and paid plans. Paid plans are billed through our payment provider, Chargebee, on the web app at app.surf-vault.com; the mobile app does not process payments. Prices are in U.S. dollars.
- Paid subscriptions renew automatically every month or every year, depending on the billing period you choose, at the price shown when you subscribe, until you cancel. The Verified plan is billed monthly. You can cancel anytime on the web app, in Settings → Billing & Plans.
- You can upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time. A change of plan takes effect immediately. When you upgrade, we charge the prorated difference right away. When you downgrade, the prorated difference is credited toward your future invoices rather than refunded. A cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing period you have already paid for.
- Subscription payments are generally non-refundable, but we review refund requests case by case. Email support@surf-vault.com with your handle and the reason. Nothing here limits refunds required by law.
- Deleting your account cancels your paid plan. It stops renewing right away and ends at the end of your current billing period or when your account is permanently deleted, whichever comes first. Time left on the plan is not refunded automatically; you can still ask for a refund as described above. If you cancel the deletion before your billing period ends, a plan you had not cancelled yourself renews again as before.
- If you downgrade or cancel, your content is not deleted, but you may be unable to upload more until you are within your plan’s storage limit.
If we change the price of your plan, we will tell you before the change applies to your next renewal, so you can cancel first if you prefer. We may change plan features with reasonable notice.
SurfVault does not process payments between users. Payment details that photographers, shapers, and brands show on their profiles, and payment links or payment requests sent in messages, point to services outside SurfVault. We never hold or move that money, take no cut, are not a party to those payments, and cannot refund or reverse them. See Section 5.
7. Store Purchases
Merchandise in the SurfVault store is sold by SurfVault, LLC. Checkout and payment are handled by Shopify, and each item is printed to order by our production partner. This section applies to store purchases instead of Section 6.
- Prices and tax. Prices are in U.S. dollars. Any applicable sales tax and shipping charges are shown at checkout before you pay.
- Shipping. We ship within the United States only. Items are made after you order, so please allow two to three weeks for delivery. Delivery times are estimates, not guarantees.
- Returns. Because every item is made for you, we cannot accept returns or exchanges for size or a change of mind. Please check the size guide on the product page before ordering.
- Damaged, misprinted, or wrong items. Email support@surf-vault.com within 30 days, with your order number, and we will replace the item or refund it.
- Availability. We may cancel and refund an order we cannot fulfil, for example if an item is unavailable or a price was listed in error.
The shipping and refund policies shown at checkout also apply to your order. Nothing in this section limits rights you have under consumer protection law.
8. Intellectual Property
The Service itself (including the SurfVault name, logo, software, design, and content we create) is owned by SurfVault and protected by intellectual property laws. These Terms do not grant you any right to use our trademarks or branding without our prior written permission.
9. Copyright Complaints
We respect the rights of photographers and other creators. If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, email support@surf-vault.com with:
- A description of the copyrighted work you believe has been infringed
- The link (URL) to the content on the Service, or enough detail for us to find it
- Your name, address, telephone number, and email address
- A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law
- A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or are authorized to act on the owner’s behalf
- Your physical or electronic signature
We will review the notice and remove or disable access to content where appropriate. If your content was removed and you believe that was a mistake, you can send us a counter-notice at the same address with your contact details, identification of the removed content and where it appeared, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe it was removed by mistake, your consent to the jurisdiction of federal court for your address, and your signature. We terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of repeat infringers.
10. Third-Party Services
The Service relies on and links to third-party services (such as Auth0, AWS, Chargebee, Shopify, Apple, Google, and YouTube). Your use of those services may be subject to their own terms. We are not responsible for third-party services or content.
Films on SurfVault are YouTube videos, shown using YouTube API Services and YouTube’s embedded player. By using the film features of the Service, you agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service.
If you downloaded our app from the Apple App Store, these Terms are between you and SurfVault, not Apple. Apple is not responsible for the app or its support, and Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms. You must also follow the App Store’s usage rules.
11. Termination
You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time. Closing your account schedules it for permanent deletion after 30 days, and you can sign back in during that time to cancel; see our Privacy Policy for what is deleted and what is kept. We may suspend or terminate your access if you violate these Terms, if required by law, or to protect the Service or its users. If we close your account, we may delete Your Content, and we will tell you unless the law or safety prevents it.
The licenses you grant us in Section 4 end when you delete Your Content or close your account; they do not survive termination, except as needed to keep showing messages you sent to the people who received them. Sections that by their nature should survive (disclaimers, limitations of liability, and indemnification) will survive.
12. Disclaimers
The Service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose, availability, or that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free. You use the Service at your own risk. SurfVault is not a backup service. Keep your own copies of files you can’t afford to lose.
13. Limitation of Liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, SurfVault and its officers, employees, and partners will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, photos, profits, or goodwill, arising out of or related to your use of the Service. Our total liability for any claim relating to the Service will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or USD $100.
14. Indemnification
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless SurfVault from any claims, damages, or expenses arising out of Your Content, your use of the Service, or your violation of these Terms or the rights of others.
15. Governing Law
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any disputes will be resolved in the state or federal courts located in Pinellas County, Florida, unless applicable law requires otherwise. If you live outside the United States, you also keep any rights your local consumer laws give you.
We may provide translations of these Terms and our Privacy Policy. If a translation conflicts with the English version, the English version governs, except where your local law requires otherwise.
16. Changes to These Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. When we make material changes, we will notify you through the Service and update the effective date above. Your continued use of the Service after a change means you accept the updated Terms.
17. Contact Us
Questions about these Terms? Contact us at:
Email: support@surf-vault.com
Mail: SurfVault, LLC, 7901 4th St N, Ste 300, St. Petersburg, FL 33702
Website: https://www.surf-vault.com
