Terms of Service

What Octana is

Octana generates video. You describe what you want; the platform writes a script, generates or sources the visuals, synthesises a voiceover, renders an MP4, and — if you ask it to — publishes the result to a channel you have connected.

Almost every step of that runs at a third-party model vendor. That matters in several places below, so it is worth saying once at the top: we assemble and orchestrate, and other companies do the generating.

Your account

You are responsible for what happens under your account, including anything done with an API key you issue. Keys inherit your account’s permissions and its balance, so treat one like a password.

You must follow the Acceptable Use Policy. It is part of these terms, and it is the document that describes the conduct we can actually detect and act on.

Credits, and what they cost

Work is paid for in credits. One credit is one cent of retail value, so 100 credits is one US dollar, and a plan grants its monthly price multiplied by 100. A job draws credits as each stage runs, priced from what the underlying vendor call costs plus our margin.

• Creating an account grants 0 credits. Credits arrive when a subscription activates, so an account that has not subscribed sits at zero rather than being able to spend real vendor money before paying anything.
• Plan credits do not roll over. The next period’s grant closes the previous period’s.
• Credits bought as a top-up, and credits paid out through the referral programme, expire 90 days after they are granted. Credits we grant you manually, and credits we refund, do not expire.
• Spending draws from whichever credits expire soonest, so nothing lapses that your balance could have used.
• If you supply your own vendor API keys, work run against them is not charged in credits at all. Your content reaches that vendor under your contract with them rather than ours.

Credits are an account balance, not money held for you. There is no path in the software that turns credits back into cash, and we do not offer one.

A charge is recorded once per attempt at a stage, however many times the platform is told about it. A genuine re-run is a new attempt and is charged again, because it cost a second real vendor call.

When we do not charge you

Two situations return credits automatically. You do not have to ask, and the amount is recomputed from your ledger each time rather than remembered, so it cannot be paid twice.

• We refused to make it. When the quality gate refuses a video and you discard it, everything that video cost comes back — every stage, every attempt — because you keep nothing. A refusal that still charged you would be a gate you had to pay for.
• A job died part-way. When a job fails, each stage is compared against what it delivered, and the difference is refunded. A stage that produced its output keeps its charge, because retrying resumes past it and you still have the result.

Refunds are returned as credits, to the account that was charged, and those credits do not expire.

Three things are deliberately not refunded. A job you cancelled, because cancelling is not a failure. A job that finished, because finishing is not a failure either. And a stage charged twice for two real vendor calls, where one was wasted by a timeout — we cannot tell that apart from two deliberate re-runs, and we paid the vendor both times. If you think one of these went wrong for you, write to us at legal@octana.one and we will look at the ledger.

What you make is yours

You own the scripts, images, audio and video you generate here. We do not claim ownership of them, and we do not train models on your content. The one exception is the one you ask for: a voice clone or a presenter avatar is trained from the sample you supply, at the vendor, under the consent record you signed.

What a model vendor does with what we send them is governed by their terms, not by ours. The privacy policy names every vendor that can receive your content.

That ownership is real but it is not unlimited, and the limit is not ours. Generation happens at model vendors, each of whom imposes their own terms on the output of their own model — on commercial use, on what may be depicted, and on what they will honour. Where their terms are narrower than ours, theirs are what constrain you, and we cannot grant you rights they have not granted us.

We also cannot promise your output is unique. The same model, asked something similar by somebody else, can produce something similar.

Content credentials

Rendered video carries C2PA content credentials: a signed manifest, attached to the finished MP4 after the last encode, saying the file was generated by Octana and when. Synthesised audio carries an inaudible watermark. Both are recorded so that we can answer later which file was marked, with which certificate, and on which date.

Two honest limits. Marking can fail — when it does, the render still completes, and the failure is recorded rather than hidden, so the job page tells you. And rendering re-encodes every frame, which destroys any content credentials carried by files you upload; the manifest we attach describes our render, not their history.

A manifest signed with a development certificate verifies as valid but untrusted on public verifiers. Where that is the case, the job page says so rather than implying a trust the file does not carry.

Publishing

Octana publishes only to channels you connect, and only when you choose to publish. Connecting a YouTube channel grants us permission to upload to it, to read that channel’s own videos so the planner can avoid repeating a topic, and to read that channel’s own analytics. Nothing is uploaded because a schedule elapsed or a job finished; a person presses publish.

You can disconnect a channel at any time. Doing so stops future publishing; it does not retract videos already posted, which live on that platform under your control, not ours.

Publishing anywhere means that platform’s rules apply to what you post, on top of these terms. The Acceptable Use Policy explains what that means in practice.

Suspension

We can suspend an account for breaking the Acceptable Use Policy. A suspended account cannot use the app, and its API keys stop working at the same moment.

The trigger we act on fastest is cloning a voice or a likeness without permission. If a report about your account reaches us, we will usually suspend the voice first and ask you afterwards — the person reporting it is generally not one of our customers, and waiting for your answer means the copy of their voice stays live while we wait. You get told what was reported and a chance to respond.

Availability

We do not promise uptime. There is no service level agreement, no credit for downtime, and — being plain about it — no alerting infrastructure behind a promise like that today. Publishing an uptime figure we have not built the means to measure would be a number invented for a document.

Vendors go down, models get deprecated and rate limits get hit, and when that happens jobs fail. Failed jobs refund their undelivered stages, which is the practical answer to an outage here.

Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Octana is provided as is, without warranties of any kind, and we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential losses, or for lost profits, revenue or data. Where we are liable, our total liability is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

A clause of that kind has not been reviewed by a lawyer, and it is worth saying plainly what that means rather than leaving the block above to speak for itself. An unreviewed limitation may not be enforceable where you live. If it is not, it protects nobody while still reading as though it does — which is a worse position for you than having no clause at all, because you might rely on it being settled. It is not settled.

Changes to these terms

We update this page when the product changes. The effective date at the top moves when the substance changes, not when a typo is fixed. If a change materially affects you, we will email the address on your account before it takes effect.

Ending it

You can delete your account whenever you like. Deletion is scheduled with a seven-day grace period during which you can undo it; after that, records and stored files are removed. Signed consent releases are kept, because a release is a third party’s signature and the only proof of authority for videos that are still published.

We can end your access for a breach of these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy. Unused credits are not refunded as money in either case — see the credits section for why there is no mechanism to do so.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to legal@octana.one. If you are reporting a voice or a likeness used without permission, you do not need an account and you do not need to email us — use /takedown, which reaches a named person immediately.