Terms of service

These terms are between you and the operator of Kithe (kithe.day), referred to here as “we” and “us”. They apply the moment you use any part of the site, including the free check on the try page, whether or not you have an account.

If you are using Kithe for an organisation, you confirm you are allowed to accept these terms on its behalf.

Kithe fetches pages from a website you nominate, over the public web, the way a browser would. It runs a set of accessibility checks over the markup it receives and returns a list of findings, each naming the page, the element and a suggested change. On paid plans it also asks a language model to draft wording for the things a rule cannot settle, such as whether alt text actually describes the picture.

• It is not a certificate. Nothing Kithe produces certifies that a site is accessible or conformant, and we will never issue a document that claims to.
• It is not legal advice. Findings are engineering observations. Whether your site meets AODA, the ACA, the European Accessibility Act, Section 508, WCAG at any level, or any other obligation, is a legal question about you and your site. Ask a lawyer, not a scanner.
• It is not complete. Automated checking reaches only part of what makes a site usable. A scan with no findings is not a site with no barriers, and we say so on the home page rather than burying it here.
• It does not change your site. Kithe has no login to your content system, no write access and no mechanism to edit anything. Every fix is made by you.

You may scan a site you own, a site you are responsible for maintaining, or a site whose owner has asked you to. That is the whole permitted list.

You must not use Kithe to:

• scan a site you have no relationship with, at volume or repeatedly, in a way that costs its owner bandwidth or attention;
• reach anything that is not a public web page — internal hosts, private addresses, cloud metadata endpoints, or anything behind a login. Kithe refuses these at the network layer, and attempting to get round that guard is a breach of these terms as well as a waste of your time;
• use the scanner as a proxy, a crawler for some other purpose, or a way to make requests you would rather not make from your own address;
• work round the rate limits, whether by rotating addresses, scripting the free check, or creating multiple accounts to multiply a quota.

Kithe identifies itself honestly in every request it makes, as KitheBot, and obeys robots.txt. We will not add a switch to turn either of those off.

Without an account you get three checks a day, of up to three pages each. With an account, your plan sets how many pages a scan reads and how many scans a month you get. On top of that, we limit how often any single site can be scanned, by anyone, so that Kithe does not become a nuisance to a server whose owner never agreed to any of this.

These limits are stated on the pricing page. We may lower them temporarily if the service is under strain, and we will say so rather than quietly failing.

You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping your password to yourself. Tell us promptly if you think somebody else has it.

You can delete your account at any time, from your account page. Deleting it removes your profile, your sites, your scans and your findings, including any report you have shared. We do not keep a shadow copy.

Payment is not switched on. No card is taken anywhere on this site today, and the paid plans cannot be bought. When that changes, this clause will be rewritten before the first charge, not after it.

Discounts for charities, non-profits and new companies are described on the pricing page. They are applied by asking us rather than with a code, and the terms of any discount are those in force when it is agreed.

When billing starts, a plan can be paid yearly or month to month, at the rates shown on the pricing page. You can cancel at any time; cancelling stops the next charge rather than refunding the current period.

Data is held in the United States. What is stored:

• Your account. Email address and an authentication record, held by Supabase Auth. We never see your password.
• Your sites and scans. The addresses you asked us to check, when we checked them, and the findings we returned. Rows are protected by row-level security so one account cannot read another’s.
• A cache of recent scans, so that two people checking the same page in quick succession do not both cost that site a visit.
• A rate-limit counter. Your IP address is not stored. It is turned into a short irreversible value first, which is enough to count requests and not enough to identify anybody.

There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixel and no third-party script anywhere on this site. The privacy policy sets all of this out properly, the cookie policy lists the two cookies that do exist, and the subprocessors page names every company that touches any of it.

Email us to get a copy of your data or to have it deleted, and we will do it. We do not sell it, and there is nobody to sell it to.

On paid plans, some suggestions — alt text, link wording, plainer phrasing — are drafted by a language model. Those drafts are suggestions and nothing else. They can be wrong, and occasionally they will be confidently wrong.

You decide whether to use them. Once you publish a draft on your site it is your content, and you are responsible for it. Kithe never applies one to your site, because Kithe cannot write to your site at all.

Kithe is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be available at any particular moment, that a scan will always finish, or that a site you point it at will let us in — plenty of servers refuse robots, and that is their right.

We may change or withdraw features. If we withdraw something you are paying for, you will be told before it happens.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profit or goodwill, or for any claim arising from a barrier on your site that Kithe did not find. Automated checking is a floor, not a ceiling, and clause 03 says so plainly.

Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. On a free plan, that amount is nothing, which is an honest description of the arrangement rather than a trick.

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

You can stop using Kithe whenever you like. We may suspend an account that is breaking clause 04, and we will say which part and why rather than sending a form letter.

We update this page as the product changes, and the date at the top is the date of the current version. Where a change materially affects account holders, we take reasonable steps to let them know.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Alberta and the federal laws of Canada that apply in it, and the courts of Alberta have jurisdiction.

Write to [email protected] about anything on this page. A real person reads it.