Terms of Service

Effective Date: August 5, 2026

1. Acceptance of Terms

Bollwark is provided by Hauke Jung ("we," "us," or "our"). By accessing the platform, embedding the widget, or maintaining an account, you agree to these Terms of Service ("Terms") and the policies referenced in them. If you do not agree, do not use the service. These Terms govern your access to and use of Bollwark at https://bollwark.eu and the hosted service at api.bollwark.eu.

These Terms govern the hosted service only. The Bollwark CAPTCHA software is published under the MIT licence at github.com/hauju/bollwark-api. If you run your own copy, the MIT licence is the whole of your agreement with us — you owe us nothing, you need no account, and nothing in this document restricts you.

2. Description of Service

Bollwark is a proof-of-work CAPTCHA. Visitors' browsers solve a memory-hard computational puzzle to demonstrate they are browsers rather than automated clients, and two scoring passes bracket each solve to decide whether to let a request through, make the puzzle harder, or refuse it.

The hosted service comprises the CAPTCHA endpoints, the embeddable widget, a dashboard with traffic analytics, site key management, and documentation. It is aimed primarily at business and organisational use within the European Union. If you use it as a consumer, your statutory rights under EU and German law apply and are not affected by these Terms.

3. Accounts

You must be at least 18 and legally able to enter a contract.
Registration requires accurate information, kept current.
You are responsible for safeguarding your credentials and for everything done under your account.
Your secret key is a credential. It authenticates server-to-server verification calls. Never place it in client-side code, a public repository or a mobile app bundle. If it leaks, rotate it in the dashboard immediately — rotation invalidates the old key at once.
Authentication is provided by FerrisKey (self-hosted by us).
Tell us at info@bollwark.eu immediately if you suspect unauthorised access.
We may suspend or terminate accounts that breach these Terms or create a security risk.

4. Acceptable Use

You agree to:

Comply with applicable EU, German and local law, including the GDPR.
Tell your visitors that a bot check runs on your pages and what it processes. Our Visitor Privacy Notice is written to be linked from your own privacy notice; using it is the simplest way to meet this obligation.
Use the service only on domains and origins you control and have registered.
Not use it to gate access to unlawful content, or as a component of a scheme to defraud.
Not resell, sublicense or offer the hosted service to third parties as your own without a written agreement. (Self-hosting under the MIT licence is a different matter and is expressly permitted.)
Not attempt to circumvent, degrade or reverse the protection for anybody other than yourself, nor build or operate a solving service against it.
Not attack the infrastructure, or conduct load testing or penetration testing against the hosted service without our prior written consent. Testing your own self-hosted instance needs no permission from anybody.
Respect documented rate limits and technical boundaries.

Security research on the hosted service is welcome under the disclosure policy in SECURITY.md. Follow it and clause 4 will not be held against you.

5. Intellectual Property

The CAPTCHA service software is licensed to everyone under the MIT licence. Nothing in these Terms narrows the rights that licence grants you.
The hosted platform, the dashboard, this website, their design and their documentation remain our intellectual property or our licensors'.
Subject to these Terms, we grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the hosted service for the duration of your subscription.
You retain all rights to your own data. You grant us a limited licence to host and process it solely to provide the service.
Trademarks, logos and the Bollwark name belong to us or to third parties and may not be used without prior written consent. The MIT licence covers the code, not the brand.

6. Data Protection

We process personal data as described in our Privacy Policy.
For traffic on your sites, you are the controller and we are the processor. You must have a lawful basis for running the check and must inform your visitors. We process visitor data only on your instructions and as described in the Visitor Privacy Notice.
These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the Visitor Privacy Notice, set out the subject matter, duration, nature and purpose of that processing, the categories of data and data subjects, and our obligations under Article 28 GDPR. A separate signed data processing agreement is available on request at info@bollwark.eu.
Current sub-processors are listed in the Privacy Policy. We will give reasonable notice before adding one, and you may object on reasonable data protection grounds.
Visitor IP addresses are truncated before storage and no cookies are set — the design commitments described in the Visitor Privacy Notice are contractual, not merely descriptive.

7. Payment

Paid plans are billed through Polar, which acts as merchant of record. Prices and tiers are on bollwark.eu/pricing.
You are billed per verify — a submission that reaches a scoring decision. Traffic refused at the block tier never receives a puzzle, never reaches verify, and never reaches your invoice. An attack does not raise your bill.
Fees are due at the start of each billing cycle. Charges are non-refundable unless stated otherwise or required by law.
Exceeding your allowance never turns protection off. A CAPTCHA that stops verifying at a quota line is a security incident, and it would happen during a traffic spike. We keep verifying, tell you, and bill the overage at the published rate.
If payment fails after reasonable retries, we may downgrade or suspend the account until the balance is settled. We will give notice before we do.
Refund requests are considered case by case — write to info@bollwark.eu.
Consumers in the EU retain their statutory right of withdrawal under § 355 BGB.

8. Availability and Failover

We aim for high availability but offer no contractual uptime guarantee on the Free and Starter plans. An SLA can be agreed separately for Growth and Enterprise use.
We may perform maintenance, and will give advance notice for anything planned that affects availability.
The service is designed to fail open, not to take your forms down with it. An optional failover mechanism lets the widget mint an "I could not reach the service" claim during an attested outage window; where it is enabled and the claim is honoured, the verification response is flagged so you can accept-but-flag rather than reject. This is a deliberate, bounded trade of protection for availability, and enabling it is your decision.
Two failure modes it structurally cannot cover — the widget script never loading, and your own backend being unable to reach us — are documented as integrator-side patterns in INTEGRATION.md. Handle them on your side.

9. Disclaimers

The service is provided "as is" and "as available." We do not warrant uninterrupted or error-free operation.
No bot protection is perfect, and we do not claim otherwise. Bollwark raises the cost of automated abuse; it does not make it impossible. We do not warrant that every bot will be stopped or that no legitimate visitor will ever be challenged or refused. You remain responsible for your own security posture, and Bollwark should be one layer of it rather than the only one.
Except where the law requires otherwise, we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

10. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for lost profits or revenue.
Our aggregate liability for any claim arising from the service will not exceed the fees you paid us in the twelve (12) months preceding the event giving rise to it.
These limits apply regardless of the theory of liability and even if we were advised such damages were possible.
Nothing here limits liability for intent (Vorsatz), gross negligence (grobe Fahrlässigkeit), injury to life, body or health, claims under the Produkthaftungsgesetz, or breach of a cardinal obligation (Kardinalpflicht) — an obligation whose fulfilment makes performance of the contract possible at all and on which you may routinely rely. For simple negligence in breach of such an obligation, liability is limited to foreseeable damage typical of this kind of contract.

11. Termination

You may close your account at any time in the dashboard or by writing to info@bollwark.eu.
We may suspend or terminate access if you breach these Terms, fail to pay, or create a security or legal risk.
On termination your licence to the hosted platform ends. Your right to run the open-source software under the MIT licence is unaffected and survives — you can move to a self-hosted instance.
Export your data before termination takes effect. We may keep backups for a limited period as required by law or contract.
Termination does not release either party from obligations already incurred.

12. Governing Law and Disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. For consumers, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your habitual residence.
Raise disputes with us first at info@bollwark.eu; we will attempt to resolve them amicably.
For business customers, the place of jurisdiction is Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, to the extent permitted by law.
Nothing in this section prevents either party from seeking injunctive relief in a competent German court.

13. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms to reflect changes in the law, the service, or our business.
Material changes are announced by email or in the dashboard at least thirty (30) days before they take effect, unless the law requires them sooner. If you do not accept them, you may terminate before the effective date without penalty.
Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance.

14. Severability and Entire Agreement

If any provision is found invalid or unenforceable, the rest remains in force and the invalid provision is replaced by one that comes closest to its economic intent. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, the Visitor Privacy Notice and the Cookie Policy, constitute the entire agreement between you and us regarding the hosted service.

15. Contact

Hauke Jung
Hauptstr. 41
79199 Kirchzarten, Germany
Email: info@bollwark.eu
Website: https://bollwark.eu