Terms of Use

1. Acceptance and eligibility

You must be at least eighteen (18) years of age, or the age of majority in the jurisdiction where you reside, whichever is greater, to use the Service. If you create an account or use the Service on behalf of an organization, employer, lab, or other entity, you represent and warrant that you have the authority to bind that entity to these Terms, in which case "you" refers to both you individually and that entity. You may not use the Service if you are barred from receiving it under applicable law.

2. Account

You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account, for the accuracy of the information you provide at sign-up and thereafter, and for maintaining the confidentiality of your credentials. You agree to notify us promptly of any unauthorized access to or use of your account. We may, in our sole discretion and without liability, refuse to register, suspend, or terminate any account that we believe violates these Terms, applicable law, or the rights of others.

3. The Service is in active development

You acknowledge and agree that the Service is in active and ongoing development. Features may be added, changed, replaced, deprecated, or removed at any time, with or without notice. Data formats, schemas, storage locations, and processing behaviors may change. We may, in our sole discretion, modify, suspend, limit, or discontinue all or any portion of the Service at any time, temporarily or permanently, without liability to you. You acknowledge that errors, defects, downtime, data corruption, and data loss are reasonably foreseeable consequences of using software in active development, and you accept those risks as a condition of using the Service.

4. Your content; license to us

As between you and Pace Technologies, you retain ownership of the data and materials you submit to the Service, including samples, recipes, etchants, micrographs, studies, notes, and other content (your "Content"). You grant Pace Technologies a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, and sublicensable (solely to our service providers acting on our behalf) license to host, store, reproduce, process, transmit, display, analyze, and otherwise use your Content for the purposes of:

• operating, maintaining, securing, supporting, troubleshooting, and improving the Service;
• developing new features, products, and services;
• generating analytics, insights, and internal reporting; and
• informing the product, marketing, and sales activities of Pace Technologies and its product lines, including decisions about which customers to contact, when to contact them, and what to offer them.

No model training on private Content. We do not use Content that you have not published through a public-sharing feature to train, fine-tune, or evaluate machine-learning models. Inputs you send to the optional Metallogic AI add-on are governed by Section 16 below; the third-party model provider does not train on those inputs either.

Public sharing and ownership transfer. The Service may include features that let you publish portions of your Content to other users of the Service, such as publishing an atlas entry to the global atlas, or sharing a recipe through a community library. Publishing through one of these features is opt-in at the level of the individual entry; nothing is published unless you affirmatively choose to publish it.

When you publish Content through one of these features, you irrevocably assign and transfer to Pace Technologies, effective at the moment of publication, all of your right, title, and interest in and to the published Content, including all copyrights and other intellectual property rights, throughout the world and for the full duration of those rights. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, you also waive, and agree not to assert, any moral rights or rights of attribution or integrity in the published Content, except for the attribution described below. Pace Technologies may use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, create derivative works of, distribute, display, perform, and commercially exploit the published Content in any medium and for any purpose, including in printed publications, reference materials, training and educational materials, datasets used to train or evaluate machine-learning models, and other Pace Technologies products and services.

Attribution. When published Content is displayed inside the Service, we will attribute it to the lab or organization you indicate as the contributor, using the name as it appears in your account at the time of display. We may, but are not required to, provide attribution outside the Service, and we may abbreviate, normalize, or omit attribution where space, formatting, or context reasonably requires.

License back to you. Despite the assignment above, Pace Technologies grants you a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual license to continue to use, reproduce, modify, and distribute the Content you contributed for your own internal laboratory and business purposes, including reuse in your own private records inside the Service. Nothing in the assignment is intended to prevent you from using your own work product in your own lab.

Unpublishing.You may request that we unpublish a previously-published entry, and we will do so within a reasonable time, though we may retain copies for backup, audit, and operational purposes. Unpublishing removes the entry from the public surfaces of the Service. Unpublishing does not reverse, terminate, or otherwise affect the assignment of rights described above; Pace Technologies' ownership of the assigned Content survives unpublishing and survives termination of these Terms.

Your representations. You represent and warrant that you own, or otherwise have the full right and authority to assign, the Content you publish; that the assignment will not violate any agreement, policy, or obligation you owe to your employer, your customer, or any third party; and that the published Content will not infringe the rights of any third party. The indemnification in Section 9 applies in full to any claim arising out of Content you publish. We may, in our sole discretion, remove or unpublish Content that we believe violates these Terms or the rights of any third party.

Other than through public-sharing features you choose to use, we do not sell, rent, or share your Content with any third party for that third party's own purposes, and we do not license your Content to anyone outside Pace Technologies and our service providers, who are bound by contract to use it solely on our behalf. Our handling of personal information is further described in our Privacy Policy.

5. Acceptable use

You agree that you will not, and will not permit any third party to:

• use the Service in violation of any applicable law, regulation, or third-party right;
• upload, transmit, or store any content that is unlawful, infringing, defamatory, obscene, or that contains malware, viruses, or other harmful code;
• upload, transmit, or store any data that is subject to a specialized regulatory regime for which the Service is not designed, including without limitation protected health information governed by HIPAA, technical data subject to ITAR or EAR export controls, classified or otherwise restricted government information, payment card data subject to PCI DSS, special categories of personal data under GDPR (such as data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, biometric data, or health data), or any other data the storage or processing of which would impose specific compliance obligations on us, in each case without our prior written consent;
• attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Service, to other users' accounts, or to any underlying systems or data;
• reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, scrape, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code, structure, or non-public elements of the Service, except to the limited extent applicable law expressly prohibits this restriction;
• resell, sublicense, time-share, or otherwise commercially exploit the Service, or use the Service to provide services to any third party, without our prior written consent;
• use the Service to develop, train, or evaluate any competing product or service; or
• interfere with, disrupt, or impose an unreasonable load on the Service or its infrastructure.

Sanctions and export compliance.You represent and warrant that you are not, and are not acting on behalf of any individual or entity that is, (a) located in, or a national or resident of, any country or territory that is the subject of comprehensive U.S. trade sanctions (currently including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, the Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions of Ukraine), (b) named on the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List, the Sectoral Sanctions Identifications List, or any other U.S. or non-U.S. restricted-party or sanctions list, or (c) otherwise the subject of any U.S., EU, UK, or UN sanction that would prohibit Pace Technologies from making the Service available to you. You will not access or use the Service, and will not permit any third party to access or use the Service, in violation of any applicable export-control, sanctions, or anti-boycott law. If your status changes such that any of the foregoing representations becomes untrue, you must immediately stop using the Service and notify Pace Technologies. We may suspend or terminate accounts and block access from any IP address or country in order to comply with these laws, with or without notice.

We may investigate suspected violations and take any action we determine appropriate, including suspending or terminating access, removing Content, and cooperating with law enforcement.

6. Service availability; no backups provided

The Service is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, error-free, or free of data loss. We do not provide any service-level commitment, uptime guarantee, or backup-and-restore service. You are solely responsible for maintaining your own backups, exports, and offline copies of any Content or other information you cannot afford to lose. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Pace Technologies has no liability for any loss, corruption, or unavailability of Content, whether caused by us, by our service providers, by you, by third parties, or by force majeure.

As a convenience, lab admins may export their lab's data from lab settings, and organization owners may export every lab's data at once from organization settings. The export produces a zip of CSVs and original journal images. We provide this feature so you can take your data with you at any time; it is not a substitute for your own backup discipline.

7. Disclaimer of warranties

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE SERVICE AND ALL CONTENT, MATERIALS, AND OUTPUT MADE AVAILABLE THROUGH IT ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITH ALL FAULTS, AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE. PACE TECHNOLOGIES SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, TITLE, ACCURACY, AND QUIET ENJOYMENT, AND ANY WARRANTIES ARISING OUT OF COURSE OF DEALING, COURSE OF PERFORMANCE, OR USAGE OF TRADE.

The Service is a record-keeping tool. It is not a substitute for, and you must not rely on it as, professional metallurgical, engineering, safety, regulatory, or legal advice. You are solely responsible for the methods, materials, equipment, and procedures used in your laboratory and for the safety of your personnel.

8. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL PACE TECHNOLOGIES OR ITS OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, OR SERVICE PROVIDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, BUSINESS, GOODWILL, DATA, OR OTHER INTANGIBLE LOSSES, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS, REGARDLESS OF THE LEGAL THEORY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT, STATUTE, OR OTHERWISE, AND EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

OUR TOTAL CUMULATIVE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNT YOU ACTUALLY PAID PACE TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE SERVICE IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM OR (B) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100). YOU AGREE THAT THESE LIMITATIONS REFLECT A REASONABLE ALLOCATION OF RISK AND ARE AN ESSENTIAL BASIS OF THE BARGAIN BETWEEN YOU AND PACE TECHNOLOGIES, AND THAT THEY APPLY EVEN IF ANY LIMITED REMEDY FAILS OF ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE.

YOU AGREE THAT ANY CLAIM OR CAUSE OF ACTION ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS MUST BE COMMENCED WITHIN ONE (1) YEAR AFTER THE CLAIM OR CAUSE OF ACTION ACCRUED OR IT WILL BE PERMANENTLY BARRED, EXCEPT WHERE A LONGER PERIOD IS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW THAT CANNOT BE WAIVED BY AGREEMENT.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages; in those jurisdictions, the foregoing exclusions and limitations apply only to the extent permitted by law.

9. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Pace Technologies, its officers, directors, employees, agents, and service providers from and against any and all claims, demands, actions, liabilities, damages, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or related to (a) your use of the Service, (b) your Content, (c) your breach of these Terms or violation of any applicable law, or (d) your violation of the rights of any third party. We reserve the right, at our own expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you, in which event you agree to cooperate with us in asserting any available defenses.

10. Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time. Organization admins can delete their organization and all of its data directly from organization settings, which signs the actor out and removes the organization, every lab inside it, and all stored Content. Members who are not organization admins, and individual users, may request account deletion by emailing us at the address below. We may suspend or terminate your access to all or part of the Service at any time, with or without notice, for any reason or no reason, including if we believe you have violated these Terms or if we are required to do so by law. Upon termination, your right to use the Service ends, and we may delete your account and Content. For customers to whom our Data Processing Addendum applies (see Section 17), return-or-deletion of Customer Personal Data on termination is governed by Section 10 of the DPA, which prevails over this Section to the extent of any conflict. Sections that by their nature should survive termination (including ownership and license provisions, disclaimers, limitations of liability, indemnification, governing law, and these general provisions) will survive.

11. Fees and changes to fees

The Service, or specific features of it, may be made available at no charge or for a fee, as we determine and publish from time to time. We may, in our sole discretion, introduce fees for the Service or any feature, change the amount or structure of any fee, change which features are free or paid, introduce or modify subscription tiers, or discontinue any free tier. We will provide reasonable advance notice through the Service or by email of any change that would materially affect your continued use, including at least thirty (30) days' notice to paying users of any fee increase. We may also issue, modify, or revoke promotional codes, complimentary access, and other discounts in our sole discretion. If you do not agree to a new or changed fee, your sole remedy is to stop using the affected feature or to terminate your account. Except where required by applicable law, all fees paid are non-refundable.

12. Changes to these Terms

We may modify these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we will provide notice through the Service or by email before they take effect. Your continued access to or use of the Service after the effective date of the revised Terms constitutes your acceptance of those changes. If you do not agree to the revised Terms, your sole remedy is to stop using the Service.

13. Force majeure

Pace Technologies will not be liable for any failure or delay in performance of the Service due to causes beyond our reasonable control, including acts of God, natural disasters, war, terrorism, civil unrest, governmental action, labor disputes, telecommunications or internet outages, failures of third-party service providers, or any other event of force majeure.

14. Governing law; venue

These Terms, and any dispute arising out of or related to them or the Service, are governed by the laws of the State of Arizona, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. The exclusive venue for any such dispute is the state and federal courts located in Pima County, Arizona, and you and Pace Technologies each consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

15. General

These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy and, where it applies under Section 17 below, our Data Processing Addendum, constitute the entire agreement between you and Pace Technologies regarding the Service and supersede any prior or contemporaneous understandings. If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, that provision will be enforced to the maximum extent permissible and the remaining provisions will remain in full force and effect. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of that provision. You may not assign or transfer these Terms or any of your rights under them without our prior written consent; we may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. There are no third-party beneficiaries to these Terms.

16. AI features (Metallogic AI)

Metallogic AI, branded in the product as “M.AI” and as “Mai” in conversation, is an optional add-on that uses third-party large-language-model infrastructure (Anthropic) to generate prep recommendations, etchant suggestions, and troubleshooting guidance from your inputs. By enabling and using Metallogic AI, you agree to the following:

Advisory output, not certified procedure.Recommendations produced by Metallogic AI are advisory and informational. They are not qualified, validated, or certified preparation procedures. You and your organization remain solely responsible for evaluating, validating, and approving any recipe, etchant selection, parameter, or technique before relying on it for production work, regulated work, QA-graded work, failure analysis reports, or any decision with safety, legal, or financial consequence. Metallographic prep involves hazardous materials and procedures (acids, solvents, abrasives, electricity, heat); you are responsible for following your lab's safety protocols regardless of anything the AI suggests.

Inputs sent to Anthropic. When you use Metallogic AI, the content of your message, attached images, and a structured snapshot of the active sample (material, hardness, mount type, analysis goal, journal entries, and the lab's owned consumables and matching recipes) are transmitted to Anthropic to generate a response. Do not include data you are not permitted to send to a third-party processor under your contractual, regulatory, or export-control obligations. We do not use your prompts or responses to train models, and Anthropic does not train on API traffic.

Usage caps and rate limits. The add-on includes a generous monthly conversation budget that resets on the first of each calendar month, plus a short-window per-user rate limit. We may adjust these caps from time to time to manage cost or abuse; we will not materially reduce included caps without notice for paying customers.

No professional advice. Output from Metallogic AI does not constitute professional metallurgical, engineering, medical, legal, or other professional advice, and use of the add-on does not create any professional or fiduciary relationship between you and Pace Technologies.

Disclaimer.METALLOGIC AI IS PROVIDED ON THE SAME “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS AS THE REST OF THE SERVICE. WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO ITS OUTPUT, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. THE LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY IN SECTION 8 APPLY IN FULL TO ANY CLAIM ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO METALLOGIC AI.

17. Data Processing Addendum

If you are subject to the EU General Data Protection Regulation, the UK GDPR, the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, the California Consumer Privacy Act, or another comprehensive privacy law that requires a written data- processing agreement between a controller (or business) and a processor (or service provider), then our Data Processing Addendum (the "DPA") is incorporated into these Terms by reference and applies to your use of the Service. The DPA includes the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Module Two for controller-to-processor transfers, Module Three for processor-to-processor transfers) and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, with annexes already completed, and is the document we will rely on to satisfy Article 28 of the EU GDPR and the analogous provisions of other applicable privacy laws.

Pace Technologies may update the DPA from time to time on the terms set out in the DPA itself. The version posted at /dpa from time to time is the operative version. If your organization requires a counter-signed copy or has specific negotiated terms, contact legal@metallographic.com.

18. Copyright complaints (DMCA)

We respect the intellectual property rights of others and respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement consistent with the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the "DMCA"). This section applies to all Content accessible through the Service, including Content that users have published through public-sharing features and that is now owned by Pace Technologies under Section 4.

If you believe Content accessible through the Service infringes a copyright you own or control, you may send a written notice to our designated agent. To be effective under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3), your notice must include:

• a physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or a person authorized to act on the owner's behalf;
• identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed;
• identification of the material claimed to be infringing and information reasonably sufficient to allow us to locate it (such as a URL);
• your contact information, including name, mailing address, telephone number, and email address;
• a statement that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and
• a statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of the right that is allegedly infringed.

Send notices to our designated DMCA agent:

DMCA Agent
Pace Technologies Corporation
legal@metallographic.com

If we receive an effective notice, we will remove or disable access to the material identified and will, where appropriate, notify the user who posted it. If you are the user whose material was removed and you believe the removal was a mistake or misidentification, you may submit a counter-notice meeting the requirements of 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3) to the same agent. We may, in appropriate circumstances and at our discretion, terminate the accounts of users we determine to be repeat infringers. Misrepresentations in either a notice or counter-notice may subject the sender to liability under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f).

19. Contact

Pace Technologies Corporation
pace@metallographic.com