The contract,
in English
not legalese.

01What Backline is

Backline is a one-page tool that parses the official Instagram DM export Meta gives you, classifies each conversation (zone, country, role, booking signal), runs a Claude Sonnet 4.6 narrative summary on the qualified ones, and lands the qualified contacts in your private Backline dashboard at backline.so/dashboard. A CSV export of the same data is available from the dashboard at any time.

It's run by Josh Torrent, solo, as a complement to a music management business. Not a startup, not a SaaS, not VC-backed. The infrastructure is Cloudflare Pages + Workers + KV. The summarization model is Anthropic's Claude.

02What you get when you pay

Each tier is a one-time payment for one specific deliverable. There is no monthly subscription, no auto-renewal, no recurring charge.

• Free — 20 randomly-picked qualified contacts get full Sonnet 4.6 narratives. The rest are sorted with regex but locked.
• One Run (€99) — one managed run on our API key, all qualified contacts get full narratives, all surfaced in your private dashboard. The license is consumed after one successful run.
• Update (€29) — single-run add-on for past One Run buyers, when you want to re-run after fresh DMs.
• BYOK (€79) — unlimited runs using your own Anthropic API key. Your key is stored securely on our infrastructure (Cloudflare KV) and used solely to route your parse requests to Anthropic — it is never shared or used for any other purpose.

Your license key is delivered by email immediately after Stripe confirms the payment. Format: BACKLINE-<TIER>-<ID>. Paste it in the URL ?license=... or in the app's license field — it's stored in your browser's localStorage, nowhere else.

03What the license actually grants

You get a personal, non-transferable, non-sublicensable right to use Backline for your own contact list, on whatever device you control. Concretely:

• You can use it for the artist(s) you manage, or yourself
• You cannot resell access, share your license key publicly, or rebrand the output as your own product
• You cannot bypass the rate limits, the free-tier cap, or the IP-based anti-abuse signals
• You cannot reverse-engineer the proxy to extract our Anthropic key

Anti-sharing is loose by design — the license stamps the IP of first use, but we don't kick you out for traveling or using a VPN. We do revoke keys we see being passed around in Discord servers or shared in screenshots.

04Refunds

The free tier exists specifically so you can verify Backline works on your archive before paying. 20 qualified contacts get full narratives at zero cost — that's the trial.

That said: if you bought a tier and the run fails for a reason that's our fault (proxy down, model misbehaves, license validation broken on our end), email [email protected] within 14 days. Refund within 48h, no questions.

We don't refund:

• Cases where you ran out of qualified contacts because your archive is short — that's a feature of your archive, not a bug
• Cases where the summaries don't match your subjective expectations
• BYOK keys after multiple successful runs (since you're using your own key, you've already gotten the value of the software)

05What we don't promise

Backline is provided as-is. It's a tool built by one person, on top of third-party APIs (Anthropic, Cloudflare, Stripe, Brevo). When any of those break, Backline breaks too.

• No uptime SLA. We aim for "available almost always" but we're not paged at 3am
• No guarantee that Sonnet 4.6 will classify any specific conversation correctly. The model is good, not perfect
• No guarantee Instagram won't change their export format and silently break the parser. We patch quickly when it happens
• No guarantee about the quality, accuracy, or business outcome of the contacts surfaced — Backline is a triage tool, not a booking agent

If accuracy or uptime is mission-critical to you, Backline is probably the wrong tool. Build it yourself.

06Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law: our liability for any claim related to Backline is capped at the amount you paid for the license in the 12 months preceding the claim. For free-tier users, that cap is €0.

We're not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages — including lost bookings, lost income, or lost opportunities — arising from your use of Backline. This applies even if we were advised of the possibility.

07Termination

You can stop using Backline anytime. Just delete backline_license from your browser's local storage. There's nothing to "cancel" — there's no subscription.

We can revoke a license key, with or without notice, if we see:

• Public sharing of the key (Discord, forums, screenshots)
• Use against the rate limits or anti-abuse measures
• Chargebacks or fraudulent payment
• Use that exposes us to legal risk we didn't sign up for

Revoked keys are not refunded. If you think a revocation is a mistake, email [email protected].

08If these terms change

If we change anything material — pricing, license rules, or what third-party services we depend on — we update this page and email every license holder before the change takes effect. Your existing license keeps the rules under which you bought it. New rules apply to new purchases.

09Governing law & contact

These terms are governed by the laws of France. Any dispute that can't be resolved by emailing each other goes to the competent courts of Paris, France. EU consumer rights are not waived by this clause.

For anything contract-related: [email protected]. Reply within 48h is the norm.