Terms of Service

Who you are contracting with

Askance is a service provided by Advancer Limited, a company incorporated in New Zealand ("Advancer", "we", "us"). "Askance" is our brand and the name of the service; Advancer Limited is the party you contract with, invoice, and pay.

By creating an account, connecting Askance to an AI agent, or answering a Question through Askance, you agree to these Terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you have authority to bind it, and "you" means that organisation.

These Terms are governed by New Zealand law, and the New Zealand courts have non-exclusive jurisdiction.

What the service does

Askance lets an AI agent, or a person, raise a Question that cannot be answered from the material at hand, route it to a person who has the relevant knowledge, and receive an Answer. Questions, Answers, Directions and Corrections are kept as a searchable record within the project they belong to.

Askance does not block your work while a Question is outstanding. Our agent instructions ask the AI to continue with other work rather than wait. We cannot guarantee that behaviour: it depends on the AI client you use, which we do not control, and some Questions may in practice be the only thing standing between the agent and its next step.

We do not guarantee that a Question will be answered, that any Answer is correct, or that it will arrive within any particular time. Answers are provided by people, on their own judgement.

Your content, and who owns an Answer

You own the content you put into Askance: Question text, context, attachments, Directions, Corrections, and project material. We claim no ownership of it.

You grant us the licence we need to run the service — to store, transmit, index, search and display your content to the people you have given access to that project, and to make backups. Nothing wider than that.

We do not train models on your content. We do not use your Questions, Answers or attachments to train, fine-tune or evaluate any machine-learning model, and we do not permit our suppliers to. If we ever want to, we will ask you first and it will be opt-in.

Answers are licensed to the project, permanently. When a person answers a Question, they grant the project that Question belongs to a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to keep, search, display and rely on that Answer. This matters: the expert who answered may be a contractor, may change employer, or may lose access to the project later. The value of Askance is a record that survives all three. An expert who leaves cannot withdraw the Answers they have already given. [review]

The expert keeps ownership of their own Answer text and may reuse their own knowledge freely elsewhere. What they cannot do is require its removal from the record of a project it was given to.

The permanent record, and deletion

Askance is deliberately a record, not a chat. Questions and Answers are retained for the life of the project so that the same question does not have to be asked twice, and so that a search returns what was decided and why.

Deleting a project deletes its Questions, Answers, attachments and history. That cannot be undone, and it removes content other members of that project may still be relying on.

You can export a project's record at any time while your account is active. On account closure we will keep your data for 30 days so that an accidental closure can be reversed, and then delete it, except where we must keep records for tax or legal reasons.

Accounts, members and experts

You are responsible for what happens under your account, including anything done by service accounts or API keys you create. Keep credentials secret; we show them once and cannot recover them.

You may invite as many members and experts to a project as you like. We do not charge per person, on any plan.

People you invite are subject to these Terms when they use Askance. If you invite someone at another organisation, you are responsible for having the right to share with them whatever the Questions in that project contain.

Plans, billing and how usage is measured

Askance has a free tier and paid plans. Paid plans are billed through Stripe, in US dollars.

What we count. The billed unit is an answered Question — a Question that received an Answer during the billing period. Questions that are asked but never answered are not counted, and searching the record is unlimited and free on every plan, including the free tier. Plans also carry a limit on the number of projects active in a month.

Annual and monthly. Plans may be paid annually or monthly. The annual rate is the lower one; paying monthly costs approximately 20% more for the same plan.

Going over. If you exceed your plan's limits we will tell you, and there is a grace period before anything changes. When limits are enforced, we decline *new* Questions — we never lock your record, never stop your experts answering Questions already asked, and never disable search.

GST. Advancer Limited is registered for New Zealand GST. If you are in New Zealand, 15% GST is added to the prices shown. If you are outside New Zealand, our supply to you is a zero-rated export of services and no New Zealand GST applies. Prices displayed are exclusive of GST and of any tax in your own country, which is your responsibility.

You can see your current usage in the app at any time. If you think a charge is wrong, tell us within 30 days and we will resolve it against that usage record.

AI-generated answers

We may in future offer Answers generated by an AI system rather than a person. If we do: they will be clearly labelled as such wherever they appear, they will be optional, and they carry no warranty of accuracy whatsoever. Treat them as a suggestion to confirm, not as an answer from a qualified person.

Where an AI-generated Answer is used, the supplier providing that capability will be listed as a sub-processor in our Data Processing Addendum before any of your content reaches it.

Availability, and what we do not promise

We aim to keep Askance available and will tell you about planned maintenance where we reasonably can. We do not currently offer a contractual uptime commitment. If you need one, talk to us.

Except as set out here, the service is provided "as is". We do not warrant that Answers are accurate, that the service is uninterrupted, or that it is fit for any particular purpose.

Liability

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including, for New Zealand consumers, rights under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 and the Fair Trading Act 1986, which cannot be contracted out of.

Where you acquire Askance for the purposes of a business, you agree that the Consumer Guarantees Act does not apply, as permitted by section 43 of that Act.

Subject to the above, our total liability to you in any 12-month period is limited to the amount you paid us for Askance in that period, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, or loss of data beyond our obligation to maintain backups. [review]

You are responsible for deciding whether to act on an Answer. Askance routes questions and keeps a record; it does not provide professional advice.

Suspension and termination

You can stop using Askance and close your account at any time. See the Refund and Cancellation Policy for what happens to money already paid.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, that is not paid, or where we are required to by law. Except in serious cases we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right, and we will give you a reasonable opportunity to export your record.

Changes to these Terms

We may change these Terms. If a change materially reduces your rights, we will give at least 30 days' notice by email to the account owner before it takes effect, and you may close your account before then without penalty.

Questions about these Terms: legal@askance.app.