Terms of service

These terms are a contract between you and Last Seen Up (“we”, “us”). By creating an account, signing in, or using the service in any way, you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

If you are agreeing on behalf of a company or other organisation, you confirm you have the authority to bind it, and “you” means that organisation.

“The service” means the hosted monitoring service at lastseenup.com, its API, and the Last Seen Up app for iOS. Our privacy policy and cookie policy form part of this agreement.

You must be at least 16, and old enough to enter a binding contract where you live.

Last Seen Up checks systems you tell it to check — websites, APIs, ports, hosts, DNS records, certificates and domain registrations — on a schedule you choose. It also accepts check-ins from your own scheduled jobs and raises an incident when one stops arriving. When it decides something is down it notifies you according to the escalation policy you configured.

Its behaviour is described on the home page and in the dashboard, and it is deliberately conservative. In particular, and by design:

• A single failed check does not open an incident. Monitors wait for a configurable number of consecutive failures.
• A degraded monitor — one that is answering, but slowly — never sends an alert. It appears in the dashboard and in the charts only.
• A monitor that changes state repeatedly is marked as flapping, and its notifications are collapsed rather than sent one per transition.
• A maintenance window suppresses alerts for its duration. The underlying record is still kept.
• Where the service cannot trust its own data, it opens nothing rather than guessing.

Each of these means an outage may be recorded without you being alerted to it, or alerted later than it began. That is the intended trade, and using the service means accepting it.

No service level agreement. There is no uptime commitment, no guaranteed detection time, no guaranteed notification time, and no service credits. If we offer an SLA in future it will be a separate written agreement.

Not for high-risk use. The service is not designed or certified for use where failure could lead to death, personal injury, or severe environmental or property damage — medical devices, life support, aircraft or vehicle control, nuclear facilities, emergency dispatch, or weapons systems. Do not use it for those purposes.

Delivery depends on other people. Push notifications depend on Apple, phone calls on our telephony provider and your carrier, emails on the receiving mail server, and webhooks on the endpoint you configured. A silenced phone, a Focus mode, a full mailbox, a revoked push permission or a misconfigured escalation policy will each stop an alert reaching you, and none of them are within our control.

• Give accurate registration information and keep your email address current. It is where account recovery and service notices go.
• You are responsible for everything done under your account, and for keeping your password, API tokens and heartbeat URLs secret. We strongly recommend turning on two-factor authentication or registering a passkey.
• Tell us at [email protected] as soon as you suspect unauthorised access.
• One account per person. Do not share credentials — add people to the team instead, where the audit trail reflects who actually did what.
• You may close your account at any time from Settings → Profile. Deletion is immediate and permanent, and takes your monitors, incidents and history with it. The one case we refuse is an account that still owns a team other people are in: deleting it would take their monitors and their access too, and your confirmation is not their consent. Remove everyone else from that team first, or write to [email protected] to have ownership transferred.

Teams, roles and being invited to one

An account can own a team and also belong to other people’s teams, and the two are not the same relationship. Within a team there are three roles — owner, admin and member — and a member sees only the monitors they have been given.

• Inviting somebody is a disclosure. An invitation goes to an email address you supply, names your team, and — once accepted — shows that person the monitors you grant them, including whatever your monitor names and configuration say. Invite people who are entitled to see it.
• The team owner controls the team’s data. Owners and admins can see the team’s monitors, incidents, escalation policies and delivery history, add and remove people, and change what a member may see. Joining a team means accepting that.
• What you brought with you stays yours. Accepting an invitation does not hand over your own team. Being removed from somebody else’s team ends your access to their monitors and nothing else.
• Billing follows the team. Each team is metered and billed on its own plan by its own owner. A monitor shared with you never counts against your plan, and never appears on your bill.

You must not use the service to:

• Load-test, stress-test, degrade, disrupt or overwhelm any system, whether or not you own it.
• Probe, scan or enumerate systems you do not have permission to test, or evade any rate limit, access control or block placed on you by a target.
• Send traffic that is illegal, infringing, or in breach of another provider’s terms.
• Circumvent our rate limits, quotas or account separation, or attempt to reach another team’s data.
• Resell or white-label the hosted service as your own without a written agreement with us.
• Interfere with the service’s operation, including through automated account creation or unreasonable request volumes.

We may apply rate limits and reasonable use limits, and may adjust them. We may investigate suspected abuse and may pause or remove a monitor that is causing harm — where it is safe and lawful to do so, we will tell you first.

Good-faith security research on the service itself is welcome. Report findings to [email protected] rather than demonstrating them against other people’s accounts.

Everything you put into the service — monitor settings, escalation policies, names, tags, and the results those checks produce — stays yours. We claim no ownership of it.

You grant us only the licence needed to run the service for you: to store your configuration, make the checks it describes, generate and keep results, and send the notifications it calls for. Nothing broader, and nothing that survives your account.

Credentials you give us

Some monitors need a credential to work — basic auth, an authorisation header, a signed webhook URL. You confirm you are entitled to supply each one, and you accept that it is stored in a form the service can read, because a check that cannot read a credential cannot use it. Use the least-privileged credential that will do the job. The privacy policy sets this out in full.

Third-party data

If you add someone else’s phone number, email address or device to an escalation policy, you confirm you have their permission and that you have told them what it is for.

Retention

Individual check results are kept for 30 days and hourly summaries for as long as the monitor exists. Export anything you need to keep beyond that. Deleting a monitor or an account deletes its history and we cannot restore it.

There is a free tier and one paid plan. The free tier is not a trial and does not expire. Every capability is on it — the checks, the alerting, escalation policies, Live Activities, the widgets and the watchOS app. What a subscription buys is capacity, and nothing else:

• Free. Up to 3 monitors, and one person on the team.
• Pro. Up to 50 monitors, and 10 people on the team. Sold monthly or yearly.

The price is the one shown to you at the point of purchase, in the currency shown there. Prices exclude tax unless stated; you are responsible for any tax other than tax on our income. The limits that actually govern your account are the ones shown in Settings → Billing.

Two ways to buy, and only ever one of them

Pro can be bought on lastseenup.com, where our payment processor handles the card, or as an auto-renewing subscription through the App Store from the iOS app. An account is billed through one of the two and never both: if you already subscribe on the web, the app shows the subscription as managed there and offers nothing to buy.

Which one you used decides who you deal with afterwards, and that is not a formality:

• Bought on the web. Manage, change or cancel it in Settings → Billing. Refund requests come to us, at [email protected].
• Bought in the app. Apple is the merchant. Manage or cancel it in Settings on your iPhone, under your name, then Subscriptions. We cannot cancel it for you, and cancelling anything on our side would leave Apple still billing you. Refunds are Apple’s to give, through their “Report a Problem” page, and are subject to Apple’s policies rather than ours.

Renewal

A subscription renews automatically at the end of each period, at the then-current price, until it is cancelled. Cancelling stops the next renewal — it does not shorten the period you have already paid for, and Pro continues until that period ends. Where a free trial is offered, it becomes a paid period unless you cancel before it ends. App Store subscriptions must be cancelled at least 24 hours before the period ends, which is Apple’s rule rather than ours.

If a renewal payment fails we do not cut you off that day. The plan continues for 60 days while the payment is retried — long enough to cover Apple’s full retry schedule — because the alternative is somebody’s production going unwatched over an expired card.

What happens when a plan ends

Dropping to the free tier deletes nothing. If you were over the free limits you keep every monitor you had and everyone already on the team; you simply cannot create another monitor or add another person until you are back under the limit or subscribe again. We will not delete your monitoring because a card expired — that is the thing you were paying us to protect.

Price changes

We may change prices. For an existing subscription we will give at least 30 days’ notice by email before a new price applies, and it takes effect on the first renewal after that notice. If you do not want to pay it, cancel before then. A price change never applies to a period you have already paid for.

Except where the law gives you a refund right, or where we have said otherwise above, payments are non-refundable and a partial period is not pro-rated. Paying does not buy a different promise about detection: the disclaimers in sections 12 and 13 apply to a paid plan exactly as they do to a free one, and section 3 is what monitoring can and cannot tell you either way.

Delivering an alert means handing it to somebody else. Apple carries push notifications and Live Activities; a telephony provider places the calls; an email provider sends the mail; and a webhook step sends incident data to a URL you chose. If you subscribe, a payment processor — Stripe on the web, or Apple for a purchase made in the app — takes the payment and holds the card details, which we never see.

Those providers have their own terms and their own outages. We are not responsible for their availability, their performance, or what they do with what passes through them, and a failure by one of them is not a breach of this agreement by us. Where a webhook is involved, the recipient’s handling of the data is entirely between you and them.

The iOS app and Apple

The iOS app is distributed through the App Store, and its use is also subject to Apple’s own terms. Downloading it gives you a personal, non-transferable licence to run it on Apple-branded devices you own or control, as far as Apple’s App Store Usage Rules permit. That licence is to the app on your devices, not to the hosted service behind it, which section 11 covers.

Apple requires the rest of this to be said plainly, and it is as true as it is dull:

• This agreement is with us, not Apple. Apple is not a party to it, and we alone are responsible for the app and everything in it.
• Support is ours. Apple has no obligation whatsoever to provide maintenance or support for the app. Ask us, at [email protected].
• Warranty. Any warranty is ours to honour, so far as section 12 does not disclaim it. If the app fails to conform to one, you may tell Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price of the app — which, for a free download, is nothing. Beyond that refund, and to the fullest extent the law allows, Apple has no warranty obligation at all, and anything else arising from a failure to conform is ours to answer for.
• Claims about the app. We, not Apple, address any claim you or anyone else makes about the app or your use of it — product liability, a failure to meet a legal or regulatory requirement, and claims under consumer protection, privacy or similar law.
• Intellectual property claims. If anybody claims the app, or your having and using it, infringes their intellectual property, we and not Apple are solely responsible for investigating, defending, settling and discharging that claim.
• Where you are. You confirm what section 15 already asks: that you are not in a country subject to a US embargo or designated by the US government as supporting terrorism, and are not on any US government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
• Other people’s terms. Using the app does not excuse you from third-party terms that apply to you anyway — your carrier’s, for one.
• Apple can enforce this. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of this agreement, and on your accepting it Apple has the right, and is deemed to have accepted the right, to enforce it against you as one.

Questions, complaints and claims about the app go to [email protected], or to [email protected] where they are legal rather than practical. Our postal address is available from either on request.

We may change, add or remove features, and may need to take the service down for maintenance. Where a change materially reduces what you rely on, we will give reasonable notice — urgent security or stability work excepted, which we will do first and explain afterwards.

Features labelled beta, preview or experimental may change or disappear without notice and carry no reliability expectation at all.

We may discontinue the hosted service. If we do, we will give at least 60 days’ notice by email and keep export working for that period.

You may stop using the service and delete your account at any time, for any reason, subject to the one restriction in section 4 on an account that still owns somebody else’s team. Deleting your account does not by itself cancel an App Store subscription — Apple holds that, and it is cancelled in Settings on your iPhone. See section 7.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you breach these terms — particularly section 5 — if your use is harming the service or a third party, or if we are required to by law. Except where the breach is serious, ongoing, or unlawful, we will contact you and give you a chance to fix it first.

On termination your right to use the service ends, your monitors stop being checked, and your data is deleted on the schedule in the privacy policy. Sections that by their nature should survive — 6 on your data, and 11 to 16 — survive.

We own the service, the software behind it, the Last Seen Up name and logo, and everything on this site apart from your own data. Nothing here transfers any of that to you. You may not copy, resell or reverse engineer the service, or use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse you.

Feedback. If you send us a suggestion we may use it freely and without obligation to you. We will not ask for it back and you should not send us anything you consider confidential.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the service is provided “as is” and “as available”, with all faults and without warranty of any kind. We disclaim all warranties, express, implied or statutory, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, and uninterrupted or error-free operation.

We do not warrant that the service will detect any outage, deliver any notification, or produce accurate results. No advice or information from us, written or spoken, creates any warranty.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here limits consumer rights that cannot be waived where you live.

Excluded damages. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost goodwill, business interruption, or the cost of substitute services — including where those losses follow from an outage we failed to detect or an alert that did not arrive. This applies even if we were told such damages were possible.

Cap. Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the service will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or USD $100. At the prices in section 7 the floor is always the higher of the two, so in practice the cap is USD $100 whether you pay us or not.

What is not limited. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, death or personal injury caused by negligence, gross negligence, or wilful misconduct.

These limits are a fundamental part of the agreement and apply even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose. They reflect what the service costs set against what an outage can cost, which is the whole reason section 3 says plainly that this is one layer among several rather than the only one.

You will defend, indemnify and hold us harmless from any claim, damage, loss, cost or expense — including reasonable legal fees — arising from your use of the service, your breach of these terms, the targets you chose to monitor, the credentials or third-party personal data you supplied, or your violation of any law or third-party right. We will notify you of any such claim, let you control the defence of it, and cooperate at your expense; you may not settle in a way that admits fault on our part without our consent.

You will comply with all applicable export control and sanctions laws, including those of the United States and the European Union. You confirm you are not located in an embargoed jurisdiction, are not a restricted or denied party, and will not make the service available to anyone who is.

Governing law. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to its conflict of laws rules, and excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

Talk to us first. Before starting anything formal, email [email protected] with a description of the dispute and what you want. Most things are resolved this way, and we will engage in good faith for 30 days.

Arbitration. If that does not resolve it, any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the service will be settled by binding arbitration administered by JAMS under its Streamlined Arbitration Rules, before a single arbitrator, seated in Wilmington, Delaware. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court with jurisdiction.

Class action waiver. Disputes must be brought individually. Neither of us may bring a claim as a plaintiff or class member in a class, consolidated or representative action, and the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person’s claims.

Always available. Either of us may bring a claim in small claims court, or seek an injunction in court to protect intellectual property or stop unauthorised access.

Consumers. If you are a consumer in the UK, the EEA or another jurisdiction whose law gives you the right to bring proceedings locally, this section does not take that right away, and mandatory consumer protections where you live continue to apply.

Time limit. Any claim must be brought within one year of when it arose, to the extent the law allows a limit to be agreed.

We may update these terms. The effective date at the top changes whenever we do. For material changes we will give at least 30 days’ notice by email or in the dashboard, and they take effect on the date stated. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept them; if you do not, close your account before then. Changes never apply retroactively to a dispute that has already arisen.

• Entire agreement. These terms, with the privacy and cookie policies, are the whole agreement about the service and replace anything said before. A signed order form, if one ever exists, takes precedence over any clause it conflicts with.
• Severability. If a provision is unenforceable it is narrowed to the minimum extent needed and the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. Not enforcing something once does not waive it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these terms without our written consent. We may assign them in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets.
• Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond reasonable control — network and power outages, provider failures, cyberattacks, natural disasters, war or labour disputes.
• Independent parties. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, agency or employment relationship.
• Notices. We reach you at the email address on your account or in the dashboard. You reach us at [email protected]. We do not publish a postal address; email us to arrange service of process.
• US government users. The software is “commercial computer software” under FAR 12.212 and DFARS 227.7202, and government users get only the rights in these terms.

Questions about any of this: [email protected]. Questions about using the service: [email protected].