Terms of Service

Version of 30 July 2026. Effective from the launch of paid services. The Polish version at /pl/regulamin/ is the binding version in case of any discrepancy.

§1. General provisions

  1. These terms govern the electronic services provided at cytado.com, including the user panel (together: the Service).
  2. The provider is ecopywriting.pl Karol Leszczyński, Papowo Biskupie 119/18, 86-221 Papowo Biskupie, Poland, VAT ID: 9562203948 (the Provider).
  3. Contact: contact@cytado.com or the contact form in the panel.
  4. Using the Service requires accepting these terms. They are provided free of charge in a form that can be downloaded, stored and printed.
  5. All you need is an internet-connected device with a current browser, JavaScript enabled and the cookies required for the Service to work. No additional software is required.

§2. Definitions

  1. User — a natural person with full legal capacity, a legal person or an organisational unit with legal capacity, who has created an account in the Service.
  2. Consumer — a User acting for purposes outside their trade, business, craft or profession, as well as a natural person entering into a contract directly related to their business where the contract is not of a professional nature for them.
  3. Project — a set of source results created in the Service for a thesis topic supplied by the User, together with the functions described in §3.
  4. Unlocking a Project — a paid digital service giving the User full functionality of a given Project (§3(5)).
  5. Source — a publication (e.g. a research article, monograph, report, dataset, statute or court ruling) identified by the Service in publicly available databases and internet resources, presented as metadata, a summary, an assessment and short excerpts.
  6. Search — the automated process in which the Service queries publication databases and internet resources based on the Project topic, downloads publicly available documents, analyses their content and matches them to the topic.

§3. Scope of services and prices

  1. The Service supports academic work: it finds existing, publicly available Sources matching a topic supplied by the User, presents their metadata, automatically generated summaries and quality assessments, excerpts with page numbers, and generates footnote and bibliography suggestions in the selected citation style.
  2. Processing time. A Search queries more than a dozen databases, downloads documents and analyses their content, and typically takes between roughly fifteen and thirty minutes. Progress is shown in the panel and you do not need to keep the page open. This is not a contractual deadline — it depends on the availability and speed of external databases.
  3. Bibliography checker — a tool that verifies whether entries in a list pasted or uploaded by the User (text file or PDF) exist in public academic databases. A free account includes one full check of an entire list, after which only the first few entries are checked (preview); a full check of all entries, a suggested correct citation format and export are available to Users who have unlocked at least one Project. The result is advisory: a “not confirmed” status only means the entry was not found in the databases searched — it is not a statement that the source does not exist or is fabricated. Final verification is the User's responsibility.
  4. A free account includes: one unpaid Project, a single Search for that Project, full access to the three best-matching Sources (with excerpts and citations) together with a count of the remaining Sources found, and one full bibliography check (paragraph 3).
  5. Unlocking a Project — a one-off payment (PLN 49) — covers, within that Project:
    • access to all Sources found, with excerpts and page numbers,
    • citations and bibliographies in Polish footnote style, APA 7, MLA and Chicago,
    • export in Word (DOCX), PDF, plain text (TXT), LaTeX, BibTeX and RIS,
    • repeated Searches (“add more sources”) within the limits in §7,
    • access to the paragraph source finder (an account-wide feature available once at least one Project is unlocked), within the limits in §7,
    • full use of the bibliography checker (paragraph 3).
    Unlocking applies to one specific Project and is not time-limited.
  6. Result history. The Service stores the results of paragraph source searches and bibliography checks in your account history so you can return to them. Repeating the same query within 30 days may return the stored result instead of running the analysis again; such a repeat does not count against the limits in §7.
  7. The Provider is exempt from VAT. Prices shown are final — no VAT or other charges are added. The binding price is the one displayed in the Service when the order is placed.
  8. Subject to §11(4), prices may also be shown in other currencies for guidance only. Payment is settled in Polish złoty (PLN) unless the payment summary states otherwise; your bank or card issuer may apply its own conversion rate and fees.

§4. User account

  1. Registration requires an email address and password confirmed by a verification code, or signing in with a Google account.
  2. The User must provide accurate details and must not share login credentials. Accounts are personal and may not be shared.
  3. Creating and maintaining an account is free. The User may change their password and delete their account at any time in the panel (Account tab); deletion removes the User's Projects and history, is irreversible, and does not entitle the User to a refund for services already performed.
  4. Personal data processing is described in the privacy policy.

§5. Payments

  1. Payments are handled by Stripe. Available methods include payment cards, BLIK and Revolut Pay; the current list is shown at checkout. The Provider does not store card details.
  2. The contract for Unlocking a Project is concluded upon payment; access is granted immediately after the payment is confirmed.
  3. Subject to §11(14) (invoices for API services, issued without a separate request), an electronic invoice or receipt is issued on request submitted through the contact form in the panel or by email, to which the User consents by accepting these terms.

§6. Right of withdrawal

This section applies to Consumers and to natural persons entering into an agreement directly related to their business where it is not of a professional character for them. It does not apply to the API agreement (§11), concluded exclusively with businesses in connection with their trade or profession.

  1. Unlocking a Project consists in supplying digital content not on a tangible medium and in a service performed in full immediately after the contract is concluded.
  2. By paying for Unlocking a Project, a Consumer expressly requests immediate performance — access to the content before the 14-day withdrawal period expires — gives prior express consent to it, and acknowledges that once the content has been supplied they lose the statutory right of withdrawal (Article 16(m) of Directive 2011/83/EU, implemented in Poland by Article 38(1)(13) of the Act of 30 May 2014 on consumer rights). This information is shown before payment.
  3. Losing the right of withdrawal does not affect the Consumer's rights where the service does not conform with the contract (§10) or the right to complain.
  4. Statements to the Provider may be sent by email to contact@cytado.com. Any refunds are made without undue delay and no later than within 14 days, using the same payment method the Consumer used, unless they agree otherwise.

§7. Rules of use and limits

  1. The Service is a research tool. It must not be used in a way that breaches the law or third-party rights, nor for:
    • bulk or automated querying of the Service (bots, scripts) beyond normal use of the panel,
    • reselling or publicly redistributing the Service's output as your own service,
    • using excerpts of Sources beyond the limits of fair use and the right of quotation (paragraph 3),
    • creating multiple accounts to circumvent the limits in paragraph 2.
  2. To keep the Service stable and fairly used, the Provider applies technical limits, in particular: one unpaid Project per account, a daily cap on new Projects, caps on repeated Searches per Project and per day, a daily cap on paragraph source finder queries, and a daily cap on free Searches from a single IP address. The paragraph source finder may fetch new Sources on the fly when a topic is not yet covered; such a fetch counts towards the daily Search limit. Current values are shown in the panel next to the relevant features. Limits are set so as not to restrict normal thesis work and may be raised on justified request (contact form).
  3. Third-party content. Sources presented in the Service come from publicly available academic databases and internet resources and remain the property of their authors or publishers. The Service provides metadata, its own (automated) summaries and short excerpts within the limits of the right of quotation, always with a link to the original. Full text is shown only for Sources under open licences or in the public domain. The User may use excerpts in their own work only within the limits of fair use and permitted quotation, with correct attribution (which the generated citations serve).
  4. Nature of results. Summaries, quality assessments, matches and page numbers are generated automatically (including with artificial intelligence) from document content. The Provider takes care to make them reliable, but they are advisory — before using a quotation the User should verify it against the original Source (a link is always provided). The Service does not guarantee that Sources will be found for every topic, nor their number or completeness; both depend on what is publicly available for the topic in question.
  5. The User is responsible for the content of their work, the selection and use of Sources, and compliance with the requirements of their university or publisher. The Service is not a thesis-writing service and does not produce substantive content for the User.

§8. Content published in the Service

  1. The Service publishes its own material: a blog and topic pages with source listings. This material is informational and does not constitute academic or legal advice.
  2. Topic pages present only publication metadata, links and the Provider's own commentary. They contain no Users' Projects or thesis topics — content entered by Users is never published.
  3. The Provider's own material (texts, layout, the Service software) is protected by copyright. Copying it to build a competing service requires the Provider's consent.

§9. Availability

  1. The Provider makes every effort to keep the Service running continuously but reserves the right to technical breaks (maintenance, updates). Users will be informed of longer planned breaks in the Service where possible.
  2. The Provider is not liable for interruptions caused by circumstances beyond its control, in particular failures of third-party infrastructure (academic databases, the payment operator) or force majeure, but will work to resolve their effects without undue delay.
  3. If a Search fails for technical reasons the User may repeat it; a failed Search does not count against the limits in §7.

§10. Complaints and liability

  1. Complaints may be sent by email tocontact@cytado.com or through the contact form in the panel, and should describe the problem and identify the account and Project.
  2. The Provider responds to complaints within 14 days of receipt.
  3. The Provider is liable to Consumers for the conformity of digital services and content with the contract under applicable consumer law. For Users who are not Consumers, liability is limited to the fee paid for the Project concerned and excludes lost profits.
  4. Consumers may use out-of-court complaint and redress procedures. Information on consumer dispute resolution in the EU is available from the European Commission ateuropa.eu/youreurope.

§11. Application programming interface (API)

  1. Nature of the service. API access is provided exclusively to businesses in connection with their trade, business or profession. §6 does not apply to the API agreement, and the statement in §3 that prices in other currencies are indicative is superseded, for the API, by paragraph 4 below.
  2. Definitions. For the purposes of this section:
    • API Customer — a business that has issued itself a Key or activated a Plan;
    • Key — the credential authenticating requests to the API, issued in the panel; the Provider stores only its cryptographic hash and cannot reconstruct its value;
    • Test key — a Key prefixed cyt_test_, never billed, subject to the monthly ceiling shown in the panel and to a separate, lower ceiling on New topics, since building a body of sources is incomparably more expensive than reading one;
    • Resolved citation — the billing unit. It arises when the API returns source material to the Customer: either a single claim for which a source with a page number was returned, or a single source document delivered in response to a request for sources for a topic or a chapter;
    • Already-billed document — a source document the Customer has paid for within a given topic. Delivering the same document again within the same topic is not a Resolved citation and is not charged, regardless of how many requests are made. The same document under a different topic is a separate Resolved citation;
    • New topic — building a body of sources for a subject not previously present in the corpus, triggered only at the Customer's explicit request and billed separately. Polling the status of such a job is not charged, and a single job is billed once regardless of how many status requests are made;
    • Plan — a subscription defining the monthly allowance of Resolved citations and New topics, and the unit prices above that allowance;
    • Billing period — a calendar month in UTC.
  3. Conclusion and term. The agreement is concluded when a Plan is activated and renews automatically for successive Billing periods until cancelled. The Customer may cancel at any time in the billing portal; cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid Billing period, and the fee for that period is not refunded pro rata.
  4. Fees. The subscription fee is charged in advance for each Billing period. The binding currency is the United States dollar (USD); amounts shown in other currencies are informational only. Usage above the Plan allowance is charged at the unit prices of the Plan in force during the Billing period in which it arises and added to the next invoice — it is not collected during the Billing period. Such usage is capped at an additional 100% of the Plan allowance per Billing period; once the cap is reached, further billable requests are rejected until the end of the Billing period or until the Customer moves to a higher Plan. Where no further subscription invoice will be issued (for example after cancellation), the Provider may invoice the amount immediately after the Billing period closes.
  5. Basis of billing and verification. Billing is based on the usage records kept by the Provider. The Customer has continuous, free access to those records — in the panel and through GET /usage, which returns the same figures the invoice is built from. Objections to an invoice must be raised within 14 days of it being made available; after that period the statement is deemed agreed. Raising an objection does not suspend the due date of the undisputed part.
  6. A miss is free. Where the API finds no source for a submitted claim, it returns an explicit miss and that request is not billed. Formatting of footnotes and bibliographies is not billed on any Plan.
  7. Transparency of billing. In the panel the Customer can see every request made to the API together with the endpoint used, the number of sources returned, the number of units charged and the reason for any zero charge. For each charge the Provider identifies the specific documents that make up the amount, with author, title, year and a link to the publication. The Customer can verify the bill on that basis both before and after payment.
  8. HTTP notifications. The Customer may register a URL in the panel to which the Provider will send a signed notification at 80% and 100% of the Plan allowance, on the closing of a Billing period, after an invoice is issued, and when a source-gathering job requested by the Customer finishes, whether it succeeded or failed. Notifications are signed with an HMAC-SHA256 digest using a secret set by the Customer. The Provider makes one delivery attempt per notification; notifications are a convenience and do not replace the account status shown in the panel or the content of the invoice, which remain binding. Failure to receive a notification does not release the Customer from payment and does not affect limits.
  9. Key security. The Key is confidential. The Customer is responsible for requests made with the Key issued to it, including by third parties who obtained it for reasons attributable to the Customer. The Customer may replace the Key in the panel at any time with immediate effect; from that moment the previous Key stops working. The Customer undertakes to replace the Key without delay if disclosure is suspected.
  10. Test key. The Test key is for integration and testing only. It is never billed, uses the same corpus and is subject to a monthly ceiling; once exhausted, requests are rejected until the end of the Billing period. A separate, lower ceiling applies to New topics: once that one is exhausted, only building a body of sources for a new topic is blocked, while reading an existing body, formatting and verification keep working unchanged. Using a Test key to serve production traffic is a breach of these terms.
  11. The panel console. Calls made from the console available in the Customer's panel are API calls within the meaning of these terms: they are subject to the same limits and are billed exactly as calls sent from the Customer's own server. The console is another way of sending a request, not a separate free service. The cost preview (dryRun) is free, creates no job and consumes no allowance.
  12. MCP interface. The Provider also exposes the API in the Model Context Protocol standard (at cytado.com/api/mcp), intended to be called by artificial-intelligence tools (agents) acting on the Customer's behalf. Calls made through the MCP interface are API calls within the meaning of these terms: they authenticate with the same Key, are subject to the same limits and are billed under the same rules as other calls. The Customer is responsible for calls made by tools to which it has provided its Key, including costs arising from their autonomous decisions; the MCP tool descriptions state which operations are billable. Corpus-coverage previews and job-status reads remain free of charge.
  13. Text-editor add-ins and browser extensions. The Provider offers add-ins for Microsoft Word and Google Docs in which the Customer finds sources and inserts footnotes directly in the edited document, and a browser extension in which the Customer finds sources for text selected on any web page. An add-in or extension gains access when the Customer signs in to their cytado account (OAuth authorization); in the account panel the authorization is visible as a separate key (“Word add-in”, “Google Docs add-on”, “Chrome extension”), and deactivating that key immediately revokes access. Calls made from add-ins and the extension are API calls within the meaning of these terms: they are subject to the same limits and billed under the same rules, and usage records are labelled with the channel they came from. To find a source, the Provider receives only the content the Customer submits (the selected sentence and the topic of the work) — add-ins do not transmit the rest of the document, and the extension does not transmit the content of pages the Customer visits.
  14. Technical safeguards. The API applies a per-minute request limit that protects against runaway loops on the Customer's side. The Provider may temporarily restrict or suspend access where the manner of use threatens the stability or security of the Service or breaches these terms, informing the Customer without delay and stating the reason and the conditions for restoring access.
  15. Limits of the service. The Provider supplies a tool for finding and matching sources, not a guarantee of outcome. In particular the Provider does not warrant that a source will be found for any given claim, nor that a source found will be accepted as sufficient by the recipient of the Customer's materials. A miss is not a defect of the service. Whether a given source is suitable for citation in a specific context is for the Customer to judge.
  16. Use of returned content. The API returns source metadata, a page number and a short excerpt within the limits of permitted quotation. The Customer is not entitled to reproduce or distribute the full text of sources for which the Provider holds no rights permitting such use. The Customer is responsible for how the returned content is used in its own materials, including the accuracy and integrity of citations in works it publishes.
  17. HTTP notifications. The Customer may designate an address to which the Provider will send notifications about the state of its account. The Customer is responsible for the security of that address and for the consequences of actions taken automatically on the basis of such notifications. Notifications are signed; the Customer should verify the signature and timestamp. The Provider makes a single delivery attempt and does not retry — the result of the last attempt is visible in the panel. Notifications are a convenience and do not replace the billing records referred to in paragraph 5.
  18. Availability and liability. The Provider does not undertake to maintain any particular level of API availability; it uses reasonable efforts to keep interruptions short and schedules maintenance outside peak hours. The Provider's liability towards the API Customer for non-performance or improper performance is limited to the fees paid by the Customer in the three Billing periods preceding the event. This limitation does not apply to damage caused intentionally, nor where exclusion or limitation of liability is not permitted by law.
  19. Invoices. For API services the Provider issues invoices without a separate request from the Customer, through a system integrated with the Polish National e-Invoicing System (KSeF), and makes them available electronically — in the panel and to the email address associated with the account. The Customer consents to receiving invoices in electronic form.
  20. Billing data. Usage records necessary to bill and document the sale are retained for the period required by tax law, including after a Key is deactivated and after the agreement ends. Deactivating a Key does not delete usage history created before the deactivation.
  21. Price changes. The Provider may change Plan prices or the unit prices for usage above the allowance, giving Customers with an active Plan at least 30 days' notice. The change applies from the first Billing period beginning after that notice expires. A Customer who does not accept the change may cancel before it takes effect.

§12. Final provisions

  1. Personal data processing, including the information required by the GDPR, is described in the privacy policy.
  2. The Provider may amend these terms for important reasons (changes in law, changes to the scope or manner of the services, security). Users with an account will be informed in the Service at least 14 days in advance. Amendments do not affect services paid for before they take effect. A User who does not accept an amendment may delete their account.
  3. These terms are governed by Polish law. This choice does not deprive a Consumer of the protection afforded by the mandatory provisions of the law of their country of habitual residence. Disputes with Users who are not Consumers are settled by the court with jurisdiction over the Provider's registered office; disputes with Consumers are governed by general rules of jurisdiction.
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