Terms of Service

1. Acceptance

These Terms of Service form a binding agreement between you and Keel API, Inc., a Delaware corporation doing business as Keel ("Keel," "we," "our," or "us"), when you access or use the Keel website, dashboard, APIs, documentation, or related services. If you use Keel on behalf of an organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization to these terms.

If you have a separate written agreement with Keel API, Inc. that covers the service, that agreement controls to the extent of any conflict.

2. The Service

Keel is an AI control plane for governed execution. Keel is not a model host and does not provide its own foundation model outputs.

Depending on the integration path and configuration, Keel may allow, deny, or challenge requests; impose constraints; select or record routing decisions on supported routes; relay requests to third-party providers; and persist permit, usage, lifecycle, and audit evidence related to those requests.

3. Accounts, Access, and Project Scope

You may access the service only through authorized credentials, including project-scoped API keys and administrative or user credentials that we issue. You are responsible for activity under your accounts, projects, API keys, and users.

You must maintain appropriate internal access controls and may not share credentials except as permitted by our documentation, attempt to access another customer's project or data, or circumvent permit decisions, routing restrictions, or security controls.

4. Permit Decisions, Routing, and Denials

You authorize Keel to evaluate governed requests and issue permit decisions according to your configuration, applicable policies, documented route behavior, and service design. Keel may deny, constrain, challenge, or fail closed where required context, policy state, pricing, credentials, or other enforcement conditions are missing or indeterminate.

Some routes are provider-native, some are normalized, and some are partial or provider-dependent. Keel does not promise that every provider, route, modality, or feature supports the same fallback, replay, firewall, or output behavior.

5. Third-Party Providers

The service depends on third-party providers and infrastructure vendors. You are responsible for selecting whether and how to use those providers, obtaining any required rights or consents for customer data submitted to them, and complying with applicable provider terms.

When you use permit-first workflows, your application may call the provider directly after an allow decision. When you use Keel-managed execution routes, you authorize Keel to transmit the relevant request data to the applicable provider as necessary to perform the requested governed execution.

6. Fees and Billing

You agree to pay fees specified in the applicable plan, pricing page, or order form. Unless expressly stated otherwise, Keel bills based on governed requests rather than seats or raw upstream token usage.

Governed request billing, included volumes, overages, credits, retries, and dispute handling may vary based on the applicable plan or written agreement. You remain separately responsible for any fees charged by third-party providers.

7. Customer Responsibilities

• You are responsible for the legality, accuracy, and appropriateness of your data and configurations.
• You must obtain all necessary rights, notices, authorizations, and consents for submitted data.
• You are responsible for reviewing permit decisions and AI outputs before relying on them in sensitive or regulated contexts.
• You are responsible for the security of your systems, endpoints, downstream applications, and user access.
• You must use the service within documented route, provider, and feature boundaries.

8. Acceptable Use

You may not use the service to:

• Violate law or third-party rights.
• Process data without required notice, consent, or other legal basis.
• Send malware, harmful code, or unauthorized probes.
• Evade or abuse permit decisions, rate limits, routing restrictions, or security controls.
• Facilitate fraud, abuse, harassment, unlawful surveillance, or secret exfiltration.
• Misrepresent provider-generated output as guaranteed, verified, or solely produced by Keel.

9. Data Handling

To operate the service, Keel may process and persist account, billing, support, project configuration, request metadata, permit records, routing metadata, usage reports, prompts or provider-shaped request content on governed execution routes, outputs or response metadata generated through the service, and audit, lifecycle, security, and observability records.

Keel treats customer data as customer confidential information and discloses it only as needed to provide, secure, support, bill, or administer the service, as directed by your use of the service, or as required by law.

Because auditability, accounting, and lifecycle reconstruction are core service functions, deletion may not be immediate and some records may be retained for security, legal, accounting, backup, or dispute-resolution purposes.

10. Security and Service Levels

Keel is responsible for the security of the service environment it controls. You are responsible for the security of your own systems, users, application logic, and downstream decisions made using permit decisions or provider outputs.

No service level agreement applies under these terms unless expressly stated in the applicable plan, order form, or another written agreement.

11. Beta Features and Provider Outputs

Beta, preview, experimental, and limited-availability features are provided on an as-is, as-available basis and may be incomplete, unstable, provider-dependent, disabled at any time, or subject to materially different behavior.

Keel does not create, own, or guarantee model outputs from third-party providers. You are solely responsible for deciding whether to execute, rely on, review, or validate those outputs.

12. Intellectual Property

As between you and Keel, you retain rights in your customer data. Keel retains all rights in the service, documentation, software, APIs, workflows, service improvements, and service data.

13. Termination

These terms begin when you first access the service and continue until terminated. We may suspend or terminate access if you materially breach these terms, your use creates security, legal, or operational risk, or required third-party provider access becomes unavailable.

You may stop using the service at any time. Provisions that should survive by their nature, including payment obligations, confidentiality, intellectual property, disclaimers, limitations of liability, and retained audit or legal records, will survive termination.

14. Disclaimers and Liability

Except as expressly stated in a written agreement, the service, documentation, beta features, and all related results are provided on an as-is and as-available basis. Keel disclaims implied warranties to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Keel is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or exemplary damages to the fullest extent permitted by law. Any broader or different liability commitments must be stated in a separate written agreement.

15. Changes to These Terms

We may update these terms from time to time. We will post the updated version here and revise the last updated date. Continued use of the service after an update takes effect constitutes acceptance of the revised terms, unless a separate written agreement says otherwise.

16. Contact

Questions about these terms and legal notices for Keel API, Inc. may be sent to legal@keelapi.com.