Terms of Use

1The short version

Here are the main points:

• Cognos is an AI chat app for research, writing, productivity, coding, drafting, and analysis.
• You need an account to use Cognos.
• Cognos stores supported chat data encrypted so that Cognos cannot read it from storage.
• Cognos is not broadly described as “end-to-end encrypted” or “zero-knowledge”. Live AI requests are processed in plaintext by our backend and by selected AI providers so the AI can respond.
• You own your prompts, chats, uploaded files, and outputs, subject to applicable law and third-party rights.
• We do not use your chats to train Cognos models.
• AI output can be wrong, incomplete, outdated, biased, offensive, or unsuitable.
• Do not use Cognos as a replacement for professional legal, medical, financial, emergency, safety-critical, employment, insurance, credit, or similar advice.
• Do not abuse the service, break the law, harm others, upload illegal content, or try to bypass our security or usage limits.
• Paid plans renew automatically unless cancelled.
• We may change features, models, providers, limits, prices, and plans.
• The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, within the limits allowed by law.

2Who we are

Cognos is provided by:

Climacrux GmbH
St. Niklausenstrasse 96
6047 Kastanienbaum
Switzerland

Legal contact: legal@cognos.io

Company registration number: CHE-372.115.477

3Who may use Cognos

You may use Cognos if:

• you are at least 16 years old, unless a higher age is required by law where you live;
• you can legally enter into these Terms;
• you are not prohibited from using Cognos under applicable law; and
• your account has not been suspended or terminated by us.

Cognos is available worldwide unless we say otherwise. We may restrict access in some countries or regions if required by law, compliance rules, security concerns, payment availability, provider restrictions, or operational reasons.

4Accounts

You need an account to use Cognos.

You must provide accurate account information and keep it up to date. You are responsible for keeping your login credentials secure. Cognos currently supports email/password login and authenticator-app multi-factor authentication. Other login methods may be added later.

You are responsible for activity under your account, unless the activity happened because of our failure to protect systems under our control.

You may delete your account yourself. If you have an active paid plan, you may need to cancel it first.

We may suspend or terminate your account if we reasonably believe that:

• you breached these Terms;
• you failed to pay amounts due;
• you used Cognos illegally, abusively, fraudulently, or harmfully;
• your account creates a security, compliance, or operational risk;
• you attempted to bypass limits, security controls, or payment systems;
• your use places excessive load on our infrastructure; or
• we are required or reasonably expected to act for legal, regulatory, or provider-compliance reasons.

Where practical and legally permitted, we will try to give notice before suspending or terminating access. In urgent cases, we may act immediately.

5What Cognos is

Cognos is an AI chat application. You can use it to generate, transform, analyse, summarise, draft, code, brainstorm, and discuss content.

Cognos is a productivity, research, writing, and chat tool. It is not a professional adviser, emergency service, legal service, medical device, financial adviser, insurance adviser, employment decision tool, credit decision tool, or safety-critical system.

You are responsible for reviewing and deciding how to use any output.

6Encryption and account keys

Cognos is designed to protect stored chat history and related private data.

For supported data, Cognos stores content encrypted so that Cognos cannot read it from storage. This may include chat message content, chat titles, conversation memories or summaries, personas, files, attachment manifests, redaction mappings, and private-key backups.

Some data is not encrypted as chat content because we need it to operate the service. This may include account email and authentication data, billing data, routing and ownership metadata, model identifiers, token and cost metadata, expiry fields, and operational logs.

Important: Cognos should not be understood as broadly “end-to-end encrypted” or “zero-knowledge”. During live AI requests, your prompt and relevant context are processed in plaintext by the Cognos backend and by selected third-party AI providers or gateways so the AI can generate a response.

Climacrux cannot read stored chat history from the database. Staff access to live plaintext request content is prohibited by policy except where strictly necessary for security, abuse prevention, debugging, legal compliance, or service operation, and subject to internal controls.

You control your Account Key. Your Account Key is not sent to or stored by Cognos. Private keys may be encrypted client-side before backup.

If you lose your Account Key, we may not be able to recover your encrypted chat history. If you lose both your password and your Account Key, your encrypted data may also be unrecoverable.

Password recovery by email may be available, but it does not guarantee recovery of encrypted data.

7AI providers

Cognos uses third-party AI providers, gateways, and model hosts to process live AI requests. Specific provider details are described in our Privacy Policy, so we can keep provider information accurate without changing these Terms each time.

By using Cognos, you understand that live prompts, relevant context, files, and outputs may be sent to selected third-party providers so they can process your request.

We do not allow providers to use your chats to train Cognos models. Provider-specific processing is described in our Privacy Policy and, where applicable, their own terms or data-processing commitments.

8AI output

AI systems are imperfect. Outputs may be inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, biased, offensive, unsafe, or unsuitable for your situation.

You must not rely on Cognos as the sole basis for:

• legal, medical, financial, tax, accounting, or other professional advice;
• emergency decisions;
• safety-critical decisions;
• employment, housing, credit, insurance, healthcare, legal status, public-benefit, or similar high-impact decisions;
• decisions that could seriously affect a person’s rights, safety, finances, health, or livelihood.

You are responsible for checking outputs before using, publishing, sending, or relying on them.

9Your content

“Your content” means prompts, chats, uploaded files, documents, images, instructions, and other material you submit to Cognos. It also includes outputs generated for you, to the extent rights in those outputs can legally belong to you.

You own your content, subject to applicable law and third-party rights.

You give Climacrux a limited licence to process your content only as needed to:

• provide Cognos;
• process AI requests;
• store and sync your encrypted chat history;
• secure, maintain, and troubleshoot the service;
• prevent abuse, fraud, and misuse;
• comply with law; and
• improve service reliability, safety, and functionality, subject to our privacy commitments and no-training promises.

You are responsible for your content. You must have the rights and permissions needed to upload, process, and use it.

You may share outputs publicly if lawful, but you are responsible for how you use them. Do not present AI output as human-written, professional, verified, or authoritative where doing so would be misleading.

10What you may not do

Do not use Cognos to do, assist, encourage, or conceal anything unlawful, harmful, abusive, deceptive, exploitative, or infringing.

You must not use Cognos for:

• illegal activity or illegal content;
• child sexual abuse material or sexual exploitation;
• terrorism, violent extremism, or serious violence;
• malware, credential theft, phishing, spam, scams, or fraud;
• privacy violations, doxxing, stalking, harassment, or abuse;
• infringement of intellectual-property, confidentiality, or personality rights;
• impersonation or deceptive activity;
• bypassing safety systems, security controls, filters, limits, or billing systems;
• reverse engineering, scraping, automated account creation, model extraction, or rate-limit bypassing;
• security testing, probing, scanning, or attacking systems without written permission;
• excessive infrastructure use or interference with service operation;
• reselling, sublicensing, renting, or providing third-party access without our written permission;
• using bots, automated tools, or unofficial APIs unless we expressly allow it; or
• making regulated or high-impact decisions as the sole basis for outcomes affecting people.

We may enforce these rules using technical controls, account limits, suspension, termination, reporting, or other measures.

11Business and organisation use

If an organisation uses Cognos, that organisation is responsible for its users and for ensuring that its use of Cognos complies with law, internal policies, and these Terms.

Business customers may contact us if they need a separate data-processing agreement, order form, enterprise agreement, security review, or procurement documentation. We do not provide those by default unless agreed separately in writing.

If there is a separate written agreement between you and Climacrux, that agreement controls where it conflicts with these Terms.

12Payments, plans, and renewals

Cognos is a paid product, although we may offer free trials, trial credits, free credits, beta access, or promotional access.

Prices, plan features, usage limits, fair-use thresholds, supported models, and billing terms are shown in the app, at checkout, or in an applicable order form. We avoid listing exact prices in these Terms because plans may change.

Payments may be processed by a third-party payment provider or merchant of record, such as Paddle. Payment processing, taxes, invoices, chargebacks, and some refund handling may be subject to that provider’s terms and processes.

Paid subscriptions renew automatically unless cancelled before renewal. You can cancel anytime, usually effective at the end of the current billing period unless the checkout page or applicable plan terms say otherwise.

Usage-based or pay-as-you-go plans may include minimum commitments, credits, usage ledgers, overages, or other usage rules shown in the app or checkout flow.

You are responsible for taxes, fees, and charges associated with your purchase, except where a payment provider or merchant of record handles them directly.

13Refunds

We may offer a money-back guarantee, refund window, trial credit, or similar promotion for certain plans. Where offered, the applicable terms will be shown in the app, checkout page, plan page, or refund policy.

A refund or money-back guarantee may depend on fair use. We may deny refund requests where we reasonably believe there has been abuse, excessive usage, fraud, breach of these Terms, repeated refund requests, chargeback abuse, or other unfair use of the refund policy.

Nothing in these Terms limits mandatory refund, withdrawal, cancellation, or consumer rights that apply under the law where you live.

14Changes to Cognos

Cognos will change over time.

We may add, remove, suspend, or change features, models, providers, prices, plans, limits, fair-use thresholds, integrations, availability, and technical requirements.

We may also discontinue Cognos or parts of it. Where practical, we will try to give reasonable notice before material changes or discontinuation.

We are not responsible for third-party AI providers changing, suspending, limiting, or discontinuing their models or services.

15Service availability

Cognos is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis.

We do not promise uninterrupted access, specific uptime, error-free operation, permanent storage, or continued availability of any model, feature, provider, or plan.

We may suspend the service for maintenance, security, provider outages, legal reasons, abuse prevention, or operational needs.

16Export and deletion

Cognos may provide browser-side export tools so you can export supported data.

You may delete your account, subject to active billing cancellation and any technical, legal, security, or backup-retention limits.

Some records may be retained where needed for billing, tax, security, abuse prevention, legal compliance, dispute handling, or legitimate business records. Encrypted backups or logs may persist for a limited time before deletion according to our retention practices.

More details are provided in our Privacy Policy.

17Our intellectual property

Climacrux GmbH owns Cognos, including the Cognos brand, software, user interface, website, documentation, service design, and related materials.

You may use Cognos only as intended and as allowed by these Terms.

You must not copy, modify, host, sell, rent, sublicense, reverse engineer, decompile, scrape, or reuse Cognos or its software, interface, documentation, branding, or service design except where allowed by law or by a separate written licence.

The names, logos, and trademarks of Cognos and Climacrux may not be used without our permission.

Third-party AI providers, model creators, and software providers retain their own rights.

18Feedback

If you send us feedback, suggestions, bug reports, or ideas, you allow us to use them without restriction or compensation. This does not give us ownership of your private content.

19Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, share, protect, and retain personal data.

Because Cognos involves encrypted storage and live AI processing, please read the Privacy Policy carefully. It describes provider use, account data, billing data, operational logs, encryption limits, and your rights.

If these Terms and the Privacy Policy conflict, these Terms control the contractual use of Cognos, and the Privacy Policy controls personal-data processing unless the law requires otherwise.

20Warranties

To the maximum extent allowed by law, Cognos is provided without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory.

We do not warrant that:

• Cognos will meet your needs;
• outputs will be accurate or suitable;
• the service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free;
• data will always be recoverable;
• any specific model or provider will remain available; or
• defects will be corrected by a specific time.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranty exclusions. In those cases, the exclusions apply only to the extent allowed by law.

21Liability

To the maximum extent allowed by law, Climacrux GmbH is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, data, business, opportunities, or reputation.

To the maximum extent allowed by law, our total liability for claims relating to Cognos is limited to the greater of:

• the amount you paid to Climacrux for Cognos in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim; or
• CHF 100 if you did not pay for Cognos during that period.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability where it would be unlawful to do so, including liability for intent, gross negligence, fraud, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or mandatory consumer rights.

22Indemnity

If you are using Cognos as a business or organisation, you agree to indemnify Climacrux GmbH against claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs, and expenses arising from:

• your breach of these Terms;
• your unlawful use of Cognos;
• your content;
• your violation of intellectual-property, privacy, confidentiality, or other rights; or
• misuse of Cognos by your users.

For consumers, this section applies only to the extent allowed by applicable law.

23Termination

You may stop using Cognos at any time.

We may suspend or terminate your access as described in these Terms.

After termination, your right to use Cognos ends. Sections that by their nature should survive will continue to apply, including sections on ownership, payments due, disclaimers, liability, indemnity, governing law, and dispute resolution.

24Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time.

If changes are material, we will notify you by email, in-app notice, website notice, or another reasonable method.

The updated Terms will apply from the effective date shown. If you continue using Cognos after that date, you accept the updated Terms, subject to mandatory consumer rights.

If you do not agree to the updated Terms, you must stop using Cognos and, if applicable, cancel your paid plan.

25Governing law and courts

These Terms are governed by Swiss law, excluding conflict-of-law rules.

The courts of Lucerne, Switzerland have jurisdiction, subject to mandatory consumer-protection and jurisdiction rights that may apply where you live.

If you are a consumer in Switzerland, the EU/EEA, the UK, or another jurisdiction with mandatory consumer rights, nothing in these Terms removes rights that cannot legally be waived.

26Contact

For legal questions about these Terms, contact:

legal@cognos.io

Climacrux GmbH
St. Niklausenstrasse 96
6047 Kastanienbaum
Switzerland