The agreement, in plain English

1. Who runs Shoal

Shoal is built and run by Coral Orbit Studio, which is one person rather than a company with a team. These terms are the agreement between you and the studio, and where they say "we" or "us", that means the studio.

2. What Shoal is

Shoal is a web analytics service. You install a first-party tracking script on a site you run, and Shoal counts visitors, page views, devices, countries, pages and referrers for that site. It also exposes those numbers through an API so an agent or a script can read them.

Shoal is free to use, and the free plan carries no badge, watermark or attribution link on your site.

Pro is £6 a month or £60 a year, charged in pounds sterling by Stripe. It includes up to twenty sites, twenty agent keys and 100,000 page views a month across all of your sites; the free plan includes one site, one agent key and 10,000 page views a month. Bot traffic is recorded but does not count against either allowance, and no plan puts a badge on your site.

A subscription renews automatically until you cancel. Cancel in Settings at any time and Pro runs to the end of the period you have already paid for, with no further payment taken. If a payment fails, Pro stays on while Stripe retries the card, and the dashboard tells you. If you think you have been charged in error, email us and we will sort it out.

3. Your account

You need an account to use Shoal. Keep the details accurate, keep your password to yourself, and tell us promptly if you think someone else has got into it. You are responsible for activity through your account.

• You must be at least 13 years old. If you are under 18, you should have your parent or guardian's permission.
• One account per person, please.
• You can delete your account and its data at any time from Settings, and it is removed immediately. If you subscribe, deleting the account cancels the subscription first, so nothing is charged after you leave.

4. Agent keys

Shoal issues keys that let a script or an agent read your numbers. The free plan includes one active key; Pro raises that limit. Treat a key like a password: the raw key is shown once and we only store a hash of it, so we cannot recover it for you. If a key leaks, revoke it and make another.

You are responsible for what your keys do, including anything an agent does with the numbers it reads.

5. Acceptable use

Shoal is for measuring sites you run. Please do not:

• Track a site you do not own or have permission to measure.
• Use Shoal to follow individual people, build profiles, or combine the data with anything that identifies someone.
• Resell or rebrand the service as your own, or offer it as a paid product without an agreement with us.
• Try to break, overload or probe the service, or work around its rate limits.
• Use it for anything unlawful, or for a site whose content is unlawful.

6. What we store

Shoal records page views without cookies, and without probing the device for a fingerprint. We store the path, referrer, a coarse device type, an approximate country, and a visitor hash that is salted and rotates every day, so a visitor counted today cannot be matched to the same person tomorrow. We do not store IP addresses or user agent strings.

Free accounts keep a rolling twelve months of visits; Pro keeps them until you delete them. The numbers belong to you: you can read them out through the agent API at any time, and deleting a site or your account deletes them with it.

The Privacy page describes this in more detail, and it forms part of these terms.

7. Availability

Shoal is a small, independently run service. We aim to keep it up, but we do not promise any particular uptime, and it may be unavailable while we work on it or while a provider we depend on has a problem.

Features may change, and the service may be discontinued. If that happens we will give reasonable notice where possible, and a way to export your data.

Do not rely on Shoal as your only record of anything important.

8. Our stuff and your stuff

The Shoal name, mark, design and code belong to Coral Orbit Studio. You get a personal, non-transferable right to use the service as described here.

Your data, and your site's content, stay yours. We claim no ownership over them.

If you send us feedback or an idea, we may use it without owing you anything. We will not publish your words as a testimonial without asking.

9. Liability

We will take reasonable care, but Shoal is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, lost profits, or lost data.

Nothing in these terms limits your rights as a consumer under UK law, or our liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

10. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the product changes. The date at the top will always change with them. Where a change materially affects you, we will give reasonable notice. Continuing to use Shoal after a change means you accept it.

11. If Shoal changes hands

Shoal is a personal project, not a startup with investors. If it is ever transferred to someone else, your account and its data would move with it, and the terms in force at that point would carry over to the new owner. We would tell you first, and you would be free to delete your account instead.

12. Which law applies

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes go to the courts there. If you live elsewhere in the UK or the EU, this does not take away the protection of the consumer law where you live.