Terms of use

1. About these terms

These terms are an agreement between you and UTSL, the company that publishes the Tenon software and operates Tenon Cloud. They govern three things: your use of this website, your use of Tenon Cloud, and the way self-hosted copies of Tenon are licensed.

You accept these terms by using the website, by creating a Tenon Cloud account, or by installing and running Tenon on your own infrastructure. If you are accepting on behalf of a company, school, agency or public body, you confirm that you have the authority to bind it, and "you" in this document means that organization.

Tenon

The software: projects and work tracking, pages and documents, chat, the Brain AI assistant, insights, and the administration around them.

Tenon Cloud

The hosted version of Tenon that we run for you at https://app.thetenon.com. One customer account is one organization.

Self-hosted

A copy of Tenon that you install and run on infrastructure you control, under the Community, Pro or Enterprise edition terms in section 15.

Organization

A single tenant: one isolated workspace with its own members, projects, pages, chat and files.

Member

A person you invite into your organization who can sign in and use it.

Your content

Everything you and your members put into Tenon: projects, tickets, pages, canvases, messages, files, comments, custom fields and the data behind them.

Order of precedence. If you have signed a separate order form, master services agreement or data processing agreement with UTSL, that document governs wherever it conflicts with these terms. Otherwise these terms, together with the privacy policy, are the whole agreement between us.

2. This website

You may read, link to and quote this site freely, including in reviews, comparisons and research, as long as you attribute it. You may not misrepresent our content as your own, or present edited screenshots as unedited.

Automated access is allowed within reason. Search engines and AI crawlers are welcome, and we publish llms.txt and an RSS feed to make that easier. What we do not allow is scraping at a rate that degrades the site for other people, probing it for vulnerabilities without contacting us first, or copying the site wholesale to pass it off as another product.

Everything on this site is provided for information. We work hard to keep prices, feature lists and benchmarks accurate, but the site is not an offer, a warranty or a commitment to build anything. Where a page describes a feature as planned or in beta, treat it as neither promised nor dated.

Found a security problem in the site or the product? Email hello@thetenon.com before disclosing it publicly. We will not pursue legal action against anyone who reports a genuine vulnerability in good faith, stops at proof of concept, and does not access or alter other people's data.

3. The two ways to use Tenon

The product is the same in both cases. What differs is who runs the servers, who is responsible for what, and which sections of this document apply to you.

4. Your account and your organization

Eligibility

You must be at least 16 years old to hold a Tenon account. Tenon is a tool for work and is not designed, marketed or intended for children. If you run a school or university, adult staff and students aged 16 and over may use it under your organization's own policies and consent arrangements.

Who is responsible for what

• Your administrators control the organization. They can invite and remove members, change roles, read anything inside the organization, export it, and delete it. Choose them carefully. Anyone with an administrator role can act for the whole organization, and we will treat their instructions as yours.
• You are responsible for your members. That includes contractors, clients and guests you invite. If they breach these terms, that counts as your breach.
• You are responsible for credentials. Keep passwords and API keys secret, use single sign-on and multi-factor authentication where your plan offers them, and revoke sessions when someone leaves. Tell us at hello@thetenon.com as soon as you suspect an account has been compromised.
• We are responsible for running the service as described in section 10, and for handling your data as described in the privacy policy.

If your organization changes hands

The organization belongs to the legal entity that pays for it, not to the individual who happened to sign up. If there is a dispute about who controls an account, we will generally look to the billing contact and the verified email domain, and we may freeze changes until you resolve it between yourselves. We are not able to arbitrate ownership disputes.

5. Plans, billing and renewal

How pricing works

Current prices, plan limits and included features are published on the pricing page and form part of these terms. Paid plans are charged per active member, per month, billed either monthly or annually in advance. An active member is anyone who can sign in to your organization. Deactivated members are not billed.

Changes during a billing period

• Adding members is prorated for the remainder of the period and charged at your next invoice.
• Removing members frees a seat immediately. On annual plans the credit is applied to your renewal rather than refunded, unless the law where you are says otherwise.
• Upgrading takes effect immediately, prorated. Downgrading takes effect at the end of the current period, so you keep what you paid for.

Automatic renewal and how to stop it

Paid subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each term, monthly or annual, at the then current price for your plan, until you cancel. We disclose this before you enter payment details and confirm it in the receipt for every charge.

You can cancel at any time, in the product, in the same number of clicks it took to subscribe. Go to Settings, then Billing, then Cancel plan. No phone call, no email to support, no retention queue. Cancellation stops the next renewal and your plan stays active until the end of the period you have already paid for. If you would rather cancel by email, write to hello@thetenon.com from the billing contact address and we will action it.

For annual subscriptions we send a renewal reminder by email to the billing contact at least 15 days before the renewal date, showing the amount and the date. Where local consumer law requires longer notice or a different reminder schedule, we follow that instead.

Price changes

We may change prices. Your price is fixed for the term you have already paid for. We give at least 30 days' notice by email before a change applies to your renewal, and you can cancel before it takes effect. We do not raise the price of an annual term mid-term.

Taxes, failed payments and refunds

• Prices exclude VAT, GST, sales tax and similar taxes, which are added where applicable. If you are exempt or need a tax identifier on the invoice, add it in Billing before you are charged.
• If a payment fails we retry and email you. If it is still unpaid after 14 days we may downgrade your organization to the Free plan. We do not delete your content for non-payment; we restrict access to paid features until the balance is settled.
• Fees are non-refundable except where the law requires a refund, where we have charged you in error, or where we fail to meet the uptime commitment in section 10 and a service credit is due. If you cancel an annual plan early, the unused portion is not refunded.
• Downgrading never deletes your data. Content that exceeds a Free plan limit becomes read-only or hidden rather than destroyed, and comes back when you upgrade or when you export it.

6. Free plan, trials and beta features

The Free plan is a plan, not a trial. It is free forever for up to five members, with no credit card and no expiry. We reserve the right to change what the Free plan includes, with 30 days' notice, and to suspend free organizations that are dormant for more than 12 months after warning the administrators by email.

Trials of paid plans run for the period stated when you start them, usually 14 days. At the end of a trial you are not charged automatically unless you have entered payment details and confirmed that you want the plan to start. If you do nothing, the organization drops to the Free plan.

Beta and preview features are labelled in the product. They are provided as is, may change or disappear, carry no uptime commitment, and are excluded from the service levels in section 10. Do not rely on a beta feature for anything you cannot afford to lose.

7. Acceptable use

These rules apply to Tenon Cloud, and the security and legality rules apply to self-hosted deployments too. You agree not to, and not to let your members:

• Use Tenon for anything unlawful, or to store or distribute content that is unlawful where you or your members are: child sexual abuse material, content that incites violence or terrorism, material that infringes someone else's copyright or trade secrets, or stolen personal data.
• Harass, threaten, impersonate or defame people, or use the chat and comment features to run coordinated abuse.
• Send bulk unsolicited email or messages through the service, or use it as a mailing platform.
• Attempt to access another organization's data, bypass tenant isolation, escalate privileges, or test the boundaries of either without written permission from us. Coordinated security testing is welcome; ask first at hello@thetenon.com.
• Upload malware, or use Tenon to distribute it, mine cryptocurrency, or proxy traffic.
• Place load on the service that is disproportionate to normal use, including automated calls to the API outside its published rate limits, or use Tenon primarily as a file store or content delivery network.
• Resell, sublicense or provide Tenon Cloud as a service to third parties. If you need to run Tenon for clients, that is what the self-hosted Enterprise edition is for.
• Reverse engineer the hosted service, or remove, obscure or alter any copyright, licence or attribution notice.
• Upload categories of data the service is not designed for without agreeing it with us first. Tenon Cloud is a general business workspace. It is not certified for protected health information under HIPAA, for cardholder data under PCI DSS, or for classified government material. If you handle those, self-host and apply your own controls.

If we believe content or behaviour in your organization breaches these rules, we will normally contact your administrators and give you a chance to fix it. Where there is a risk to other customers, to the service or to someone's safety, or where the law requires it, we may act first and explain afterwards. Section 14 covers suspension.

8. Your content, our software, and who owns what

Your content stays yours

You own your content. Using Tenon does not transfer any ownership to us. You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide licence to host, store, back up, transmit, display and reproduce your content only to the extent needed to operate the service for you, to keep it secure, and to support you when you ask. That licence ends when the content is deleted, subject to the backup windows in the privacy policy.

We do not use your content to train AI models, ours or anyone else's. We do not sell it, mine it for advertising, or share it with other customers. Our staff access it only when you ask for support or when we must to keep the service running, and that access is logged.

You are responsible for having the rights to the content you put in, and for it being lawful where your members are.

Our software stays ours

Tenon, this website, the documentation, the designs and the name and tenon-joint mark are owned by UTSL and protected by copyright and trademark law. Nothing in these terms gives you rights in them beyond the right to use the service or the licence in section 15. Other product names mentioned on this site belong to their owners and appear for comparison only; no endorsement or affiliation is implied.

Feedback

If you send us ideas, feature requests or bug reports, we may use them without obligation, payment or confidentiality. This does not give us any rights in your content, only in the suggestion itself.

Using your name

We will not use your company name, logo or a quotation from you in our marketing without your written agreement. If you do agree, you can withdraw that permission at any time and we will remove it from the site at the next deploy.

9. Brain, AI providers and other third-party services

Brain is the AI assistant inside Tenon. It is important that you understand how it works before you rely on it.

• We do not operate an AI model. Tenon connects to a provider that you choose and configure, using your own account and key. Nothing goes to an AI provider until you connect one.
• What is sent. When someone asks Brain a question, the prompt and the workspace context needed to answer it are sent to that provider. The provider's terms and privacy policy govern what happens next, not ours. Review them before you connect one, particularly the retention and training clauses.
• You remain responsible for the output. AI output can be wrong, incomplete or confidently misleading. Do not treat a Brain answer, a generated status report or an executive summary as legal, financial, medical or professional advice, and check anything that matters before acting on it.
• Transparency. Tenon labels AI generated and AI assisted output in the interface so that the people reading it know where it came from. Do not strip those labels when you share the output onwards, and remember that if you republish AI generated material outside Tenon, the disclosure obligations that apply to you, such as those under the EU AI Act, are yours to meet.
• Self-hosted AI. On the Enterprise edition you can point Brain at a model running inside your own network, in which case no prompt leaves your infrastructure at all.

Tenon also connects to other services you choose, such as identity providers for single sign-on, and to services we use to run Tenon Cloud, which are listed as sub-processors in the privacy policy. We are not responsible for third-party services we do not control, and their outages are excluded from the uptime commitment.

10. Service levels, support and maintenance

Uptime

We aim to keep Tenon Cloud available at all times. On the Business plan we commit to 99.9% availability per calendar month, measured as the percentage of one-minute intervals in which the application responded successfully, excluding the exclusions below. If we miss it, you can claim service credits against your next invoice by emailing hello@thetenon.com within 30 days of the end of the affected month.

Service credits are the sole remedy for missed availability. Excluded from the measurement are: scheduled maintenance announced at least 48 hours in advance, emergency security patching, outages caused by your configuration or your own integrations, failures at an AI or identity provider you selected, beta features, and events outside our reasonable control as described in section 21.

Free and Team plans are provided without an uptime commitment. We publish incidents and post-incident notes for everyone regardless of plan.

Support

Support covers the product. It does not cover your own infrastructure, your Supabase project, your identity provider or your AI provider, though we will help you work out where a problem sits.

Maintenance and changes

We release improvements continuously. We may change, add or remove features. If we remove or materially degrade a feature you are actively using on a paid plan, we will give at least 30 days' notice by email and in the product, and if the change makes the service substantially less useful to you, you may cancel and receive a prorated refund of the unused term.

We keep the REST API and webhook payloads stable within a version. Breaking API changes get a new version and at least 90 days of overlap before the old one is retired.

11. Exporting your data and switching away

We would rather earn your renewal than trap you into it. These commitments apply to every plan, including Free.

• Export at any time. An administrator can export the organization's content from Settings, in open formats: structured data as JSON and CSV, pages as Markdown, files as the originals you uploaded. No ticket, no waiting period, no fee.
• No exit fees and no egress charges. We do not charge you to leave or to take your data with you.
• Switching help. If you tell us you are moving to another provider or to your own infrastructure, we will begin the switch within a reasonable period and no later than two months after your request, and we will keep the service running during an agreed transition period of up to 30 days, extended if that is genuinely not enough time to move the volume of data involved. During the transition you keep full access to export.
• Moving to self-hosted. An export from Tenon Cloud imports directly into a self-hosted deployment. Ask us and we will walk you through it.
• After you leave. Deletion follows the retention schedule in the privacy policy: content removed within 30 days of your request, backups expiring within a further 30 days.

These commitments reflect the switching rights that customers in the European Union have under Chapter VI of the EU Data Act. We apply them to every customer, wherever you are, because the alternative is a worse product.

12. Confidentiality

Each of us may learn things about the other that are not public: your content and your plans on our side, our pricing, roadmap, security architecture and non-public documentation on yours. Each of us agrees to use the other's confidential information only to perform this agreement, to protect it with at least the care we use for our own, and not to disclose it except to staff and advisers who need it and are under equivalent obligations.

This does not apply to information that is public through no fault of the recipient, was already known without an obligation of confidence, or is independently developed. If either of us is legally compelled to disclose the other's confidential information, we will give notice where the law allows, so the other can object.

13. Privacy and data protection

The privacy policy explains what we collect, why, where it is stored and what rights you have. It forms part of these terms.

For Tenon Cloud, where your content contains personal data, you are the controller and UTSL is your processor. Our data processing agreement, which includes the European Commission's standard contractual clauses and a current list of sub-processors, is available to every customer on request and is signed as standard for Business customers. Email hello@thetenon.com and we will send it.

You are responsible for having a lawful basis for the personal data you put into Tenon, for telling the people it concerns, and for responding to their requests. We will help you do that: export, deletion and access tooling is built into the product, and we will assist with anything the tooling does not cover.

We give you advance notice of new sub-processors and will not add one you reasonably object to without offering you a way out. We notify you without undue delay, and within 72 hours of becoming aware, of any personal data breach affecting your organization.

For self-hosted Tenon, none of this applies to us, because we hold no data of yours. You are the controller and the processor, and the compliance obligations are entirely yours.

14. Suspension and termination

Ending it yourself

You can cancel a paid plan at any time from Billing, and delete your organization entirely from Settings. Deleting the organization removes every member's access immediately and starts the deletion schedule in the privacy policy. Export first: after deletion we cannot get it back for you.

When we can suspend or terminate

We may suspend an organization, or a single member's access, if:

• there is a material breach of section 7 and it is not fixed within 14 days of us asking, or immediately where the breach is serious enough to put other customers, the service or a person at risk;
• an account has been compromised and suspension is the fastest way to limit the damage;
• fees are more than 30 days overdue after a reminder; or
• the law or a binding order requires it.

We will tell you why, and what needs to change, unless the law forbids it. We will restore access as soon as the cause is resolved. Suspension does not pause your fees unless the cause was our error.

Either of us may terminate the agreement on 30 days' written notice, or immediately if the other commits a material breach that cannot be fixed, or becomes insolvent. If we terminate for our own convenience rather than for your breach, we refund the unused portion of what you have paid.

What happens afterwards

On termination your right to use Tenon Cloud ends and any unpaid fees for the term fall due. We keep your content available for export for 30 days after termination unless you told us to delete it sooner, then delete it on the schedule in the privacy policy. Sections covering content ownership, confidentiality, disclaimers, liability, governing law and these post-termination duties survive.

15. Self-hosted licensing

Self-hosted Tenon is licensed software, not a service. You run it, so you own the uptime, the backups, the patching and the compliance. What follows is a summary of the licence that ships with the software; that licence, and any order form you have signed, are the binding text.

Licence keys. Pro and Enterprise features are unlocked by a key tied to your deployment and term. Do not share, resell or circumvent a key, and do not modify the software to bypass edition limits. The key check runs locally; it does not send us your data.

What you may do. Install and run as many copies as your edition permits, on any infrastructure you like, including air-gapped. Configure, theme and integrate it. Take backups and copies for disaster recovery. Modify it for your own internal use, at your own risk and without support for the modified parts.

What you may not do. Redistribute or resell the software itself, offer it to third parties as a hosted service outside the Enterprise edition's terms, remove copyright or licence notices, or publish benchmark results designed to mislead.

Third-party components. Tenon includes open-source components, including Supabase, React and Tiptap, each under its own licence. The full list is in the notices file shipped with the software. Those licences govern those components, and nothing here restricts a right you have under them.

Your responsibilities. Securing the host, the database and the network. Applying updates, particularly security releases. Backups and restore testing. Any legal or regulatory obligation attached to the data you or your tenants put in. See the documentation for the hardening guide and the security page for how tenant isolation works.

Warranty and support. Community edition is provided as is, without warranty and without support beyond community channels and release notes. Pro and Enterprise include the support described in section 10. We publish security fixes for the current release and the one before it.

16. Warranties and disclaimers

We warrant that we will provide Tenon Cloud with reasonable skill and care, substantially as described in the documentation, and that we will not materially reduce its security during your term.

Beyond that, and to the fullest extent the law allows, the service, the website and the software are provided as is and as available, without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error free, that defects will be corrected, or that it will meet a requirement you have not told us about.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited by law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or your statutory rights as a consumer where those apply.

17. Indemnities

We will defend you against a third-party claim that Tenon Cloud, used as we intended, infringes that party's copyright, trademark or patent, and we will pay the damages and costs finally awarded. If such a claim looks likely, we may modify the service, obtain a licence, or terminate the affected subscription and refund the unused term. This does not cover claims arising from your content, from combining Tenon with something we did not supply, from a modified copy, or from continued use after we asked you to stop.

You will defend us against third-party claims arising from your content, from your use of the service in breach of section 7, or from your failure to meet a data protection obligation that is yours.

In both directions the indemnity is conditional on prompt notice, reasonable cooperation, and the indemnifying party controlling the defence. Neither of us may settle in a way that imposes an obligation on the other without consent.

18. Limitation of liability

Subject to section 16 and to the indemnities in section 17, and to the fullest extent permitted by law:

• Neither of us is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, anticipated savings, or loss or corruption of data to the extent it results from the other's failure to keep its own backups.
• Tenon Cloud. Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the service in any 12-month period is capped at the fees you paid us for that service in the 12 months before the event that gave rise to the claim.
• Free plans and beta features. Where you paid nothing, our total aggregate liability is capped at 100 US dollars.
• Self-hosted. Liability for the Community edition is excluded to the fullest extent the law allows, as with any software provided free of charge. Liability for Pro and Enterprise is capped at the licence fees paid in the preceding 12 months, or as set out in your order form.

These limits reflect the price of the service. Without them the price would be higher. They apply whether the claim is in contract, tort, negligence, statute or otherwise, and even if we were told the loss was possible.

Keep your own backups. We back up Tenon Cloud and test restores, but no provider's backups replace your own export. Section 11 explains how to take one whenever you like.

19. Changes to these terms

We will need to update this document as the product and the law change. When we do:

• Minor changes, such as clarified wording, corrected links or a new sub-processor, take effect when we publish them and the date at the top changes.
• Material changes, meaning anything that meaningfully reduces your rights or increases your obligations, are announced by email to administrators and in the product at least 30 days before they take effect.
• If you do not accept a material change, cancel before it takes effect and we will refund the unused portion of your term. Continuing to use the service after the effective date means you accept the new version.
• Changes never apply retroactively to a dispute that already exists.

The current version and its effective date are shown at the top of this page. Ask us at hello@thetenon.com if you need a copy of the version that applied on a particular date.

20. Governing law and disputes

We would always rather sort a problem out by talking. Before starting formal proceedings, email hello@thetenon.com with the detail of the dispute and give us 30 days to put it right. We will do the same for you.

These terms are governed by the laws of the country in which UTSL is established, and disputes that cannot be resolved as above are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of that country. If you need the governing law and venue stated specifically in writing before you sign, email hello@thetenon.com and we will confirm them in your order form.

If you are a consumer rather than a business, this clause does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, or of your right to bring proceedings there.

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply. Either of us may seek an injunction in any court with jurisdiction to protect intellectual property or confidential information without first completing the process above.

21. General terms

• Assignment. You may not assign this agreement without our written consent, except to a successor of your whole business. We may assign it to a group company or to an acquirer of the Tenon business, and will tell you if we do.
• Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our reasonable control, including natural disaster, war, civil unrest, a nationwide network or power failure, or a government order. This does not excuse a failure to pay.
• No waiver. If either of us does not enforce a right straight away, that does not waive it.
• Severability. If a clause is found unenforceable, it is narrowed to the minimum extent needed and the rest of the agreement continues.
• No partnership. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, employment or agency relationship between us.
• Third parties. Nobody other than you and UTSL has a right to enforce these terms.
• Notices. We send notices to the email addresses of your administrators and your billing contact, so keep them current. You send notices to hello@thetenon.com. Notices by email are treated as received the next business day.
• Export and sanctions. You confirm that you are not located in, and will not use Tenon on behalf of anyone in, a country or entity subject to comprehensive trade sanctions that would make our providing the service unlawful.
• Entire agreement. These terms, the privacy policy, the pricing page and any signed order form or data processing agreement are the whole agreement between us and replace anything said before.
• Language. The English version of these terms governs. Any translation is provided for convenience.

22. How to contact us

Questions about these terms, a copy of the data processing agreement, an invoice, or anything else legal:

• General and contractual: hello@thetenon.com
• Privacy and data protection: hello@thetenon.com
• Security reports: hello@thetenon.com
• Everything else: the contact page