Terms of Service | The Art of CTO

Last Updated: September 11, 2026

1. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing and using The Art of CTO website, mobile application, interactive tools, API, Command Center, and related services (collectively, the "Platform"), you accept and agree to be bound by the terms and provisions of this agreement. If you do not agree to these terms, please do not use the Platform.

These Terms of Service apply to all users of the Platform, including visitors, registered users, and subscribers. Additional terms may apply to specific features and are incorporated by reference when you use those features.

2. Who You Are Contracting With

The Platform is operated by [TO CONFIRM: registered legal entity name], ABN [TO CONFIRM: Australian Business Number], of [TO CONFIRM: registered business address], Australia ("The Art of CTO," "we," "us," or "our"). References in these terms to The Art of CTO are references to that entity.

Notices and legal correspondence: legal@theartofcto.com
Privacy and data-protection matters: privacy@theartofcto.com
Security matters: security@theartofcto.com

We do not currently maintain an establishment in the European Union or the United Kingdom and have not appointed an Article 27 GDPR representative. Where we act as a processor of your personal data, the terms of our Data Processing Agreement apply.

3. Account Terms

To access certain features, you must create an account via our authentication provider (Auth0). By creating an account, you agree that:

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials
You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account
You will provide accurate and complete information when creating your account
You will maintain only one account per person
You will promptly notify us of any unauthorized use of your account

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate your account at our discretion if we believe you have violated these terms, engaged in fraudulent activity, or posed a security risk to the Platform.

4. Subscription and Billing

The Platform offers free and paid subscription tiers. By subscribing to a paid plan, you agree to the following:

Payment processing: All payments are processed by Stripe. We do not store your payment card details on our servers.
Auto-renewal: Paid subscriptions automatically renew at the end of each billing period unless cancelled before the renewal date.
Cancellation: You may cancel your subscription at any time from your billing page, which opens the Stripe customer portal. Cancellation stops the next renewal; you keep access until the end of the billing period you have already paid for.
Price changes: We may change subscription prices with 30 days' notice. Existing subscriptions will be charged the new price at the next renewal.
Taxes: Prices are shown exclusive of any applicable sales tax, GST or VAT unless stated otherwise at checkout. Where we are required to collect such tax, it is added at checkout and shown on your invoice.
Free tier limits: Free accounts are subject to usage limits (e.g., limited AI Assistant questions per month). These limits may change at our discretion.
Team and enterprise arrangements: Team and enterprise access is agreed separately in writing rather than sold self-serve. Where a signed order form or agreement covers your use of the Platform, its terms prevail over this section to the extent of any inconsistency.

4.1 Refunds

If you are not happy in your first 14 days on a paid plan, email support@theartofcto.com and we will refund that payment in full. After the first 14 days, a subscription runs to the end of the billing period you have paid for and we do not refund unused time — cancel any time from your billing page to stop the next renewal.

The 14-day period runs from the date of your first paid subscription payment. The refund is of that first payment only and is made to the original payment method, normally within 10 business days of our confirming it. Refunding your first payment ends your paid subscription immediately and your account reverts to the free tier. Full details, including how renewals, upgrades and downgrades are treated, are set out in our Refund Policy, which forms part of these terms. If the Refund Policy and this section ever differ, this section prevails.

4.2 Your statutory rights

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any right or remedy you have under law that cannot lawfully be excluded, restricted or modified. In particular:

Australia: Our goods and services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. Where the Australian Consumer Law applies to you, you are entitled to a replacement or refund for a major failure and to compensation for any other reasonably foreseeable loss or damage. The refund commitment in Section 4.1 is offered in addition to, and does not limit, those guarantees.
European Union and United Kingdom consumers: If you are a consumer resident in the EU or UK, you have a statutory right to withdraw from a contract for digital services within 14 days of entering it, without giving a reason. Where you ask us to begin supplying the service immediately during that period, you may be required to pay for the service actually supplied up to the point you withdraw. We do not charge for that portion: we honour the full refund described in Section 4.1, which is at least as favourable as the statutory withdrawal right.
Elsewhere: You retain the benefit of any mandatory consumer protection provisions of the law of the country in which you reside.

5. Use License

Permission is granted to access and use the Platform for personal and internal business purposes, subject to these terms. This is the grant of a license, not a transfer of title.

Under this license you may not:

Modify, copy, or redistribute our content, tools, or software without permission
Use the materials for any public display or commercial redistribution
Attempt to reverse engineer any software contained on the Platform
Remove any copyright or other proprietary notations from the materials
Transfer the materials to another person or "mirror" the materials on any other server
Use automated tools to scrape, crawl, or bulk-download content without prior written permission

6. Newsletter and Communications

By subscribing to our newsletter or enabling push notifications, you:

Consent to receiving periodic emails containing insights, frameworks, and updates
Consent to receiving push notifications if you opt in via your browser or mobile device
Consent to receiving weekly briefing emails if enabled in your preferences
Acknowledge that your email address and optional information (name) will be stored securely with Brevo, our email service provider
Agree to our Privacy Policy
Understand that we will never sell or share your email address with third parties for marketing purposes

Unsubscribe

You may unsubscribe from communications at any time by:

Clicking the "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of any newsletter email
Disabling push notifications in your browser or device settings
Updating your preferences in your account dashboard
Contacting us at unsubscribe@theartofcto.com

Upon unsubscribing, we will remove your email address from our mailing list within 48 hours. You may continue to receive emails that were already in queue before your unsubscribe request was processed.

7. AI-Generated Content Disclaimer

Portions of the content on this Platform are generated or assisted by artificial intelligence systems, including but not limited to:

Published articles and daily syncs: Generated by our automated content pipeline (PosterBot, DailySync) and reviewed by editors before publication. While we strive for accuracy, AI-generated content may contain errors or omissions.
AI Assistant responses: Provided for informational and educational purposes only. Responses are not professional, legal, financial, or technical advice, and should not be relied upon as such.
Foundry AI features: AI-generated strategic recommendations, business plans, and analyses are suggestive tools to inform your decision-making, not prescriptive guidance.
1:1 Assistant AI suggestions: AI-suggested meeting topics and insights are provided as a starting point and should be adapted to your specific context.

Third-party AI processing: AI features route through Cloudflare AI Gateway to OpenAI (GPT-4o and successor models) for the AI Assistant, Foundry AI, 1:1 AI suggestions, and content generation. Cloudflare Workers AI is additionally used for a second-opinion rewrite pass on generated content. We do not use your inputs to train third-party models. See our Privacy Policy and Sub-processor list for details on how third-party providers handle your data.

Third-party analytics: If you grant analytics consent, usage events and session replays are processed by Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, and PostHog. Session replay runs only on public, unauthenticated pages, and input contents are masked. All three start with capturing disabled by default and are activated only after you accept analytics cookies; you can withdraw consent at any time via the cookie-preferences control. See our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy for retention periods and your opt-out controls.

Sensitive data warning: Do not submit confidential, proprietary, or sensitive personal information (such as trade secrets, passwords, financial account details, or personal health information) to AI-powered features. While we take reasonable measures to protect your data, AI features involve third-party processing and are not designed for handling sensitive information.

You acknowledge that AI-generated content may be inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated, and you use it at your own risk. We do not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of AI-generated content.

8. Interactive Tools Disclaimer

The Platform offers 60+ interactive tools for technology leaders, including tools related to compliance (SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, NIS2, CCPA, EU AI Act, WCAG, DORA), engineering metrics, financial planning, architecture, and team management.

These tools are provided for educational and informational purposes only. They are not substitutes for professional advice. Specifically:

Compliance tools are educational checklists and assessment aids — they do not constitute certification, legal compliance verification, or professional audit services
Financial tools (cloud cost estimator, engineering ROI, etc.) provide estimates based on your inputs and should not be relied upon for financial decisions without independent verification
Architecture and engineering tools provide frameworks and guidance, not definitive solutions for your specific technical environment
Team and organizational tools offer general guidance that may not apply to your specific jurisdiction or circumstances

You are solely responsible for validating any outputs from our tools against your specific requirements and consulting qualified professionals where appropriate.

9. File Uploads

Certain features (such as CTO Office inquiries) allow you to upload files. By uploading files, you agree that:

You are solely responsible for the content of any files you upload
Accepted file types include PDF, Word, Excel, images, and text files up to 50 MB per file
All uploaded files are automatically scanned for malware using ClamAV. Files that fail the scan will be rejected.
We reserve the right to reject or delete any uploaded file at our discretion
Uploaded files are stored in Cloudflare R2 and retained until the associated inquiry is closed, plus 90 days
We accept no liability for the content of uploaded files or any consequences arising from them

10. Invitations

The Platform lets you invite others to join using a personal invite link. By sending invitations, you agree that:

You will only invite individuals you personally know and who have consented to receiving an invitation
You will not use invite links for unsolicited mass outreach, spam, or misleading promotions
Invitations carry no monetary value and earn no account credit, discount, refund or free subscription time; we record who signed up through your link and show you that history, and nothing further is owed to you
We reserve the right to suspend invite links and invitation privileges if we detect abuse, fraud, or self-invitations
We may modify or discontinue invitations at any time with reasonable notice

If we introduce a reward scheme in future, its terms will be published here before it operates, and nothing in this section creates an entitlement to one in the meantime.

11. User-Generated Content and Data Ownership

You retain full ownership of all content and data you create within the Platform, including but not limited to:

Command Center entities, relationships, assessments, incidents, and activity logs
Foundry business plans, lean canvases, and strategic planning data
SplitCause causal graphs, hypotheses, evidence, and snapshots
1:1 Assistant meeting notes, action items, and team member data
Bookmarks, notes, tags, and learning path progress
SEO Command Center tracked keywords, rank snapshots, and LLM visibility history

By creating content on the Platform, you grant us a limited, non-exclusive license to store, process, display, and transmit your content solely for the purpose of operating and providing the Platform to you. This license terminates when you delete your content or close your account.

Your right to export: You may request an export of your data at any time by contacting us at privacy@theartofcto.com.

Our intellectual property: The Art of CTO retains all intellectual property rights in the Platform itself, including site content, tools, software, design, AI models, and underlying technology. Nothing in these terms transfers ownership of our intellectual property to you.

12. Content and Intellectual Property

All content published on The Art of CTO, including but not limited to text, graphics, logos, images, audio (daily sync recordings), and software, is the property of The Art of CTO or its content suppliers and is protected by international copyright laws. Some content is AI-generated and reviewed by editors (see Section 6).

13. Disclaimer of Warranties

This section applies only to the extent permitted by law. Nothing in it excludes, restricts or modifies any consumer guarantee, warranty, condition or right that cannot be excluded, restricted or modified under the Australian Consumer Law or under any other law applicable to you. See Section 4.2.

Subject to that, the Platform and all materials are provided on an ‘as is’ and ‘as available’ basis. The Art of CTO makes no warranties, expressed or implied, and hereby disclaims and negates all other warranties including, without limitation, implied warranties or conditions of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement of intellectual property or other violation of rights.

Without limiting the foregoing:

AI-generated content (articles, briefings, assistant responses, strategic recommendations) may contain errors, hallucinations, or outdated information
Interactive tools and assessments provide educational guidance and are not professional, legal, financial, or compliance advice
Compliance tools do not certify, verify, or guarantee compliance with any regulatory framework
We do not guarantee the availability, accuracy, completeness, or reliability of any information or feature on the Platform

14. Limitations of Liability

This section applies only to the extent permitted by law. Where the Australian Consumer Law applies and we fail to meet a consumer guarantee, our liability for that failure is limited (where the law allows us to limit it, and other than for goods or services of a kind ordinarily acquired for personal, domestic or household use) to resupplying the services or paying the cost of having them resupplied. We do not exclude liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Subject to the paragraph above, in no event shall The Art of CTO or its suppliers be liable for any damages (including, without limitation, damages for loss of data or profit, or due to business interruption) arising out of the use or inability to use the Platform, even if The Art of CTO or an authorized representative has been notified orally or in writing of the possibility of such damage. This includes, but is not limited to, damages arising from:

Reliance on AI-generated content, tool outputs, or compliance assessments
Loss of user-created data (Command Center, Foundry, SplitCause, 1:1 data)
Service interruptions or unavailability
Unauthorized access to your account

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total aggregate liability to you arising out of or in connection with these terms and your use of the Platform, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), statute or otherwise, is limited to the total amount you paid us for the Platform in the twelve months immediately before the event giving rise to the liability. If you have paid us nothing in that period, our aggregate liability is limited to AUD 100.

15. Prohibited Uses

You may not use the Platform or its services:

In any way that violates any applicable local, national, or international law
To transmit any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising or promotional material
To impersonate or attempt to impersonate The Art of CTO, our employees, another user, or any other person or entity
To engage in any automated use of the system (bots, scrapers, etc.) without prior written permission
To circumvent rate limits, access controls, or other security measures
To share account credentials with others or maintain multiple accounts for a single person
To use AI features (AI Assistant, Foundry, 1:1 AI suggestions) to generate harmful, misleading, illegal, or abusive content
To attempt to extract, reconstruct, or reverse-engineer training data, AI models, or proprietary algorithms
To use the Platform to compete with The Art of CTO by systematically copying content or functionality

16. Mobile Application Terms

If you access the Platform via our mobile application, the following additional terms apply:

The mobile application is subject to the applicable app store terms (Apple App Store, Google Play Store)
We do not guarantee that the mobile application will be available on all devices or operating system versions
The mobile application may require periodic updates. Failure to install updates may result in reduced functionality or security.
Push notifications are optional and can be disabled at any time through your device settings

17. API and Service Availability

We strive to maintain high availability of the Platform, but we do not offer a formal Service Level Agreement (SLA). We reserve the right to:

Perform planned maintenance, which may result in temporary service interruptions
Modify, suspend, or discontinue any feature or service at any time, with reasonable notice where practicable
Impose or modify rate limits on API usage and Platform features
Prioritize service availability based on subscription tier

18. Data Protection and Processing

How we handle personal data is described in our Privacy Policy and our Cookie Policy.

Where you use the Platform to record personal data about other people — for example team members in the 1:1 Assistant, contacts in the Command Center, or personal data contained in files you upload — you are the controller of that data and we act as your processor. Our Data Processing Agreement sets out the Article 28 GDPR terms that apply to that processing, and is incorporated into these terms by reference. It takes effect automatically when you use the Platform to process personal data for which you are the controller; no signature is required, although we will execute a countersigned copy on request to privacy@theartofcto.com.

The third parties we engage to process personal data on your behalf are listed on our Sub-processor page. We give at least 30 days' notice before a new sub-processor begins processing customer data, and you may object during that period as described in the Data Processing Agreement.

You are responsible for having a lawful basis for the personal data you put into the Platform, for providing any notices and obtaining any consents your own privacy law requires, and for not submitting special-category data, health data, payment card numbers, or government identifiers to the Platform or its AI features.

19. Changes to Terms

We reserve the right to modify these terms at any time. We will notify users of any material changes by updating the "Last Updated" date and, where appropriate, via email notification.

Your continued use of the Platform after any modifications indicates your acceptance of the new terms.

20. Severability

If any provision of these Terms of Service is held to be invalid, illegal, or unenforceable by a court of competent jurisdiction, the remaining provisions shall continue in full force and effect. The invalid or unenforceable provision shall be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it valid and enforceable.

21. Governing Law and Disputes

These Terms of Service are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of [TO CONFIRM: State or Territory of the operating entity], Australia, and the Commonwealth of Australia, without regard to conflict of law provisions. You and we submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of [TO CONFIRM: State or Territory of the operating entity], Australia, and of the courts competent to hear appeals from them.

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply to these terms.

Before litigating. If a dispute arises, please email legal@theartofcto.com with a description of the issue and the outcome you want. We will respond within 10 business days and try in good faith to resolve it. Neither party needs to wait before seeking urgent injunctive relief.

Consumers. If you are a consumer, nothing in this clause deprives you of the protection of the mandatory laws of the country in which you reside, or of the right to bring proceedings in the courts of that country where the law gives you that right. Consumers in the European Union may also use the European Commission's Online Dispute Resolution platform. Australian consumers retain all rights under the Australian Consumer Law and may complain to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission or their State or Territory consumer protection agency.

22. Entire Agreement

These Terms of Service, together with our Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Refund Policy, Data Processing Agreement and Sub-processor list, constitute the entire agreement between you and The Art of CTO regarding your use of the Platform. These terms supersede any prior agreements or understandings, whether written or oral, relating to the subject matter herein.

23. Contact Us

If you have any questions about these Terms of Service, please contact us at:

Legal inquiries: legal@theartofcto.com
General contact: theartofcto.com/contact