Terms of service

These terms are the agreement between you and Carrel Inc. (“Carrel”, “we”) for use of carrel-ai.com and the Carrel application. By creating an account you accept them.

If your university or department has signed a separate agreement with us, that agreement governs where the two differ.

Who can use Carrel

You need to be at least 16, and old enough under the law where you live to enter a contract. You are responsible for what happens under your account, so keep your password to yourself and tell us if you think someone else has it.

Give us an email address that reaches you. Invitations, receipts and security notices go there.

Your work stays yours

You own everything you put into Carrel and everything you make with it: your papers, your highlights, your notes, your synthesis sections and your manuscripts. Nothing in these terms transfers any of that to us.

You give us a narrow licence to host, copy, transmit and process that content — including sending the relevant parts to our AI provider — strictly so that we can run the features you are using. It exists for no other purpose. We do not use your content to train AI models, and neither does our AI provider. When you delete something, the licence ends with it.

What you upload

Carrel is a place to organise research you already have lawful access to. It is not a source of papers and it grants you no rights to any of them.

You confirm that you have the right to upload and store what you upload, whether that is under your institution’s subscriptions, an open-access licence, your own authorship, or fair dealing and fair use where they apply. Publisher terms for a PDF you downloaded still apply to that PDF, and we cannot and do not waive them on your behalf.

Do not upload anything unlawful, anything containing other people’s personal data you have no right to process, or anything you are contractually forbidden to copy.

Using Carrel properly

Please do not:

• resell, sublicense or white-label the service;
• share one account between several people — seats exist for that;
• scrape the product, or use it to build a competing dataset or model;
• work around usage limits, metering or access controls;
• attack, overload or probe the service, or try to reach data that is not yours;
• use Carrel to produce work you then pass off in breach of somebody’s rules.

That last point deserves its own section.

Accuracy, and academic integrity

Carrel grounds what it produces in the passages of papers you imported, and makes every citation a link back to the passage behind it. That is a design that makes checking fast. It is not a guarantee of correctness.

Extraction can misread a table. A retrieved passage can be the wrong one. A model can misinterpret a passage it is looking straight at. Everything Carrel generates is a draft to be verified, not a fact to be trusted, and you are responsible for what you submit under your own name.

You are also responsible for knowing and following your institution’s rules on AI assistance, and for any declaration it requires. Those rules differ between universities, departments and even supervisors. We cannot make that judgement for you, and nothing in the product should be read as permission.

Plans, trials and payment

Current plans, prices and limits are on our pricing page, and those are the ones that apply.

Trials. A trial requires a card and charges nothing until it ends. Cancel before it ends and you are not charged.

Subscriptions. Plans renew automatically at the end of each period — monthly or yearly — until cancelled. Per-seat plans are billed for the seats in your workspace; adding someone mid-period is charged pro rata.

Cancellation. You can cancel at any time, from inside Carrel. Your plan keeps working until the end of the period you have already paid for, and then stops. We do not refund part-used periods, except where the law says we must or where we have plainly got something wrong — in which case, write to us.

Metered usage. Some features are counted against a monthly allowance, which the pricing page states. Reading, annotating, importing and searching are not metered. Running out does not delete anything.

Price changes. We will give you at least 30 days’ notice by email before a price change affects you, and you can cancel before it does.

Tax. Prices are exclusive of VAT and sales tax, which are added where they apply.

Availability

We work to keep Carrel up and your data safe, but self-serve plans come without a service level agreement. Maintenance happens; so, occasionally, do outages. For a written uptime commitment, talk to us about an institutional agreement.

We may change, add or withdraw features. If we withdraw something you depend on, we will give you reasonable notice and a way to export what it held.

Suspension and termination

You can close your account at any time.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, that is being used unlawfully, or that puts the service or other customers at risk. Unless the breach makes it impossible, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right. If we close your account for anything other than a serious breach, you will have a reasonable period to export your data.

No warranty, and the limit of our liability

Carrel is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we make no warranty that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for any particular purpose, and we disclaim the implied ones.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, lost data, or a grade, submission, publication or funding decision that did not go your way. Our total liability for any claim is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before it arose.

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

You agree to cover us against claims arising from content you uploaded that you had no right to upload.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects you we will give notice in the product and by email before it takes effect, and the date at the top will change. Continuing to use Carrel after that means you accept the new version; if you do not, cancel.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of [JURISDICTION], and the courts of [JURISDICTION] have exclusive jurisdiction — except that if you are a consumer, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country you live in, and may bring proceedings there.

Contact

legal@carrel-ai.com for anything in this document. For how we handle personal data, see the privacy policy.