Who you are contracting with
taproute is an independent business, reachable at info@taproute.io. In these terms, "we" and "us" mean the business operating taproute; "you" means the person or organisation using it.
Payments are handled by a separate merchant. Credit packs are sold by Creem, which acts as the merchant of record. When you buy credits, your purchase contract for that transaction, including tax and your consumer rights in it, is with Creem, and Creem's own terms and privacy policy apply to it alongside ours.
By creating an account or using taproute, you agree to these terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind it. If you do not agree, do not use the service.
The service
taproute lets you create QR codes and short links, change where they point after they have been printed, and see how often they are scanned. These dynamic, hosted codes, the ones we redirect and measure for you inside a paid account, are the service these terms govern, and the only codes we operate or stand behind.
The free QR generator on our home page is a browser tool, not part of that service. It runs almost entirely in your browser: the codes it makes are static, we never host, redirect or store them, and we keep no record that you made one. The one thing that does reach us is the link you encode, sent when you press Download so that we can check it against the restricted categories below. Your design, your uploaded logo and every non-link field (a WiFi password, a phone number, a name on a vCard) are never sent. Once you download a free code it is yours alone and entirely your responsibility (what it encodes, where you print it, and how it is used are on you) and it is provided "as is", with no warranty and no support from us. The commitments in these terms and in our pledge (that a code keeps resolving, never carries advertising, and so on) can only apply to the dynamic, hosted codes you create in an account, because those are the only ones we run.
We may add, change or retire individual features over time. If we retire something you rely on, we will tell you in advance and give you a way to export your data.
Your account
- You must be at least 16 years old to hold an account.
- Give us accurate details, and keep your sign-in method secure. Activity under your account is your responsibility.
- You may invite others into your workspace. Anyone you invite can act within the permissions you give them, and you remain responsible for what they do there.
- Tell us promptly at info@taproute.io if you think someone else has access to your account.
Credits and payment
taproute is prepaid. You buy a pack of credits when you want one, and one credit is spent for one scan of a dynamic code. Creating a dynamic code costs one credit, once (including each serialized GS1 code you issue), and editing it afterwards is free. You are never charged a recurring fee for the number of codes you hold, and re-exporting a serialized run you have already issued costs nothing.
There is no subscription and no auto-renewal. We hold no standing authority to charge you, so we cannot bill you unless you actively choose to buy credits.
Payments are processed by Creem, which acts as the merchant of record and handles the transaction and any applicable tax. Your card details are given to Creem, not to us. We never see or store them. Prices are shown in US dollars and may exclude tax, which is calculated at checkout.
Purchased credits are valid for 18 months from purchase. Buying any new pack rolls your entire remaining balance forward a further 18 months from that day, so if you buy at all regularly you never lose a credit. We will email you at least 30 days before any credits are due to expire. We do not offer open-ended validity, because a credit is our promise to serve a scan at whatever it costs us to serve it, and those costs move. See section 05.
The signup trial is not a free tier. A new account receives 30 credits, valid for 7 days, to spend on anything. It exists so you can prove the product works before you pay for it. Trial credits do not carry a grace period, and they do not unlock the features below that cost us money to provide.
Some features require a purchase. A custom domain and AI-generated artwork carry a real, ongoing cost to us per account, so they unlock with a credit pack that includes them and stay unlocked for as long as that purchase is valid, including after you have spent the credits down to zero. Each pack states how many custom domains it includes and the maximum it may hold; domains beyond the included ones are an optional extra bought with a one-time slot in credits at the published rate (see section 05). It is not a yearly fee, and we never charge you for the same domain twice. What a connected domain does require is an active account: if your credits expire and you have not bought again, or a new extra domain's slot cannot be covered by your balance past its grace window, that domain is paused and its hostname released; we keep the name reserved for you and any top-up reconnects it. A paused domain is never billed.
If a paid balance reaches zero, a grace period begins and your codes keep redirecting while we warn you: up to 14 days, or 5% of your last pack's scans, whichever runs out first. We email you on the way in. If the grace period runs out, or if a trial runs out, codes pause rather than break: nothing is deleted, and the same printed code resumes the moment you buy credits. Trial credits carry no grace period.
Prices can change
The price of a credit pack is not fixed forever. Running taproute costs us money (infrastructure, payment processing, security screening of your destinations, email, tax) and those costs move. We may raise or lower the price of our credit packs, change how many credits a pack contains, or introduce new packs, to keep the service sustainable at the price we sell it.
A price change never touches credits you have already bought. Whatever you paid, one credit is still one scan, and your balance keeps its full value until it expires. We will not revalue, discount or reprice a balance you already own. Pricing only ever applies to purchases made after the change takes effect, and the price shown to you at checkout is the price you pay.
Actions that consume credits are priced on a published rate card, and every one of them is a flat number of credits: the same on every pack, with nothing to look up per plan. Creating a dynamic code costs 1 credit (each serialized GS1 code you issue is a dynamic code); a GS1 catalogue item, meaning the product record itself and its resolver entries, costs 200 credits once (except the first one on your account, which is granted at no credits), and the serials you issue beneath it are 1 credit each as above; changing the routing rules on a code costs 5 credits for each rule changed, where adding a rule, editing one and removing one each count as a change and are each charged the same, a flow condition counts as a rule, saving routing you have not changed is free, changing a code's destination address is free, and no charge is refunded if you later remove a rule; a change that only removes rules is charged but is never refused for want of credits, so you can always switch routing off; AI-generated artwork, AI page drafts, page chat and custom-code blocks each cost a flat number of credits; making a hosted page smart or giving it a custom section layout each cost a one-time per-page unlock, and scans of such pages bill 1 extra credit per unlocked layer (so a smart or section page bills 2 per scan, and a page that is both bills 3), these being the two published exceptions to the 1-credit scan rate; an Experience template, a premium art-directed page built on the section layout, costs a one-time per-page unlock charged at its first publish (picking one and drafting on it are free), includes the section unlock within it so the same page is never charged for its layout twice, and its scans bill the section rate above rather than adding a further exception; and an extra custom domain beyond the ones included with your pack costs a one-time slot in credits. A rate-card price may be adjusted if the underlying cost to us changes, with the same 30 days' notice as any increase. The current credit cost of each action is always shown before you confirm it, and an extra domain whose slot cannot be covered is paused, never billed.
We will publish any change on our pricing page before it takes effect, and we will email account holders at least 30 days in advance of a price increase. A price change is not a reason to charge you anything: there is no subscription and no stored authority to bill you, so nothing happens until you choose to buy again. If you do not like a new price, simply do not buy. Your existing credits and codes carry on working exactly as before.
Refunds and cancellation
If you are a consumer, you may cancel a purchase and receive a refund of your unused credits within 14 days of buying them, in line with the consumer protection law that applies to you. Credits already spent on scans are not refundable, because the service they paid for has already been delivered.
Because Creem is the merchant of record, refunds are issued through Creem and are subject to their process. Email info@taproute.io and we will start it for you.
There is nothing else to cancel. You do not need to close a subscription, because you never opened one.
What we commit to
The following are binding commitments, not marketing. They are also set out at length in our pledge.
Your codes will not be killed. A code you create keeps resolving for as long as your account is alive · and a code still being scanned keeps it alive. If you run out of credits it pauses. It is not deleted, recycled or pointed somewhere else. Top up and it resumes immediately, on the same printed code.
We will never put advertising in a scan. A scan goes straight to your destination. We will not insert interstitials, upsells or any page of our own into that path, on any account, free or paid.
Your data stays exportable. Your codes, destinations and scan history can be exported at any time, including while your balance is empty. Leaving is always possible.
Acceptable use
You may not use taproute to point people at, or to distribute:
- Malware, phishing pages, or anything designed to deceive people into giving up credentials, money or personal data.
- Content that is illegal where you or your audience are, including material that sexually exploits children.
- Unsolicited bulk messaging, or codes used to disguise the true destination in a spam campaign.
- Content that infringes someone else's rights, or impersonates a person or brand you have no right to represent.
Restricted categories
Codes on our shared domain, tap2u.link, all resolve on one hostname. Network filters, from school and office networks to mobile carriers, categorise that hostname as a whole. If adult or gambling material sits behind it, the filters can block the domain itself, and every other customer's printed codes would stop working with no way to reissue them.
So, on the shared domain, you may not point codes at:
- Pornography or other adult content.
- Betting, casinos or other gambling.
- Content that attacks or demeans people for who they are.
The same three restrictions apply to free codes made in our QR studio, for a different reason: a free code is a static code that points straight at your link, so it never touches our shared domain, but it does carry our mark. You accept these terms before you download one, and the link you encode is checked at that moment.
On your own custom domain these restrictions do not apply, provided the content is lawful where you and your audience are. Your domain carries its own reputation and cannot affect anyone else's codes. The rest of this section still applies everywhere, on any domain.
If you publish content on your own domain that is regulated where your audience is, gambling and adult content being the obvious cases, you confirm you hold every licence, registration and age-verification measure that applies, and that you are responsible for meeting them. We do not check this, and nothing in these terms should be read as us assessing or approving your compliance.
We check destinations automatically where we can, and those checks are not perfect in either direction: some restricted material will not be detected, and occasionally something legitimate is misidentified. A code being accepted is not a statement that we have reviewed it or that it complies with anything. If a code of yours is refused and you believe that is wrong, write to us and we will look at it.
To make those checks we look up the destination's hostname and may request the page, which means the hostname you enter is shared with the security and categorisation providers named in our privacy notice. We do this when a code is created or its destination changed, and periodically afterwards.
We screen destinations for known threats and we act on reports. If we find a link that breaks these rules, we may disable that link, and, for serious or repeated abuse, close the account. Where the situation allows it, we will tell you first and give you a chance to fix it. You can report a link to us at any time from our report page.
You also may not attempt to disrupt the service, work around your credit balance, or resell access in a way that hides that taproute is behind it, unless we have agreed otherwise in writing.
Your links and content
Everything you put into taproute (your destinations, your codes, your uploaded images, your hosted pages) remains yours. We claim no ownership of it.
You give us permission to store, process and display that content only to the extent needed to run the service for you: to redirect a scan, to render a page you asked us to host, to show you your own analytics. Nothing more.
You are responsible for what you point a code at, and for having the rights to any logo, artwork or trade mark you upload.
Availability and no warranty
We work hard to keep scans resolving, and we publish our uptime on the status page. We may occasionally take the service down for maintenance, and where a planned interruption is likely to matter we will give notice.
Beyond that, and to the fullest extent the law allows, the service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, and there is no contractual uptime guarantee.
Do not use taproute where a failed scan would be dangerous, for example as the only route to safety information, medical dosing instructions, or emergency contact details. The service is not designed or certified for life-critical use, and you must keep an offline fallback wherever a failure would cause real harm.
Suspension and closure
You can close your account at any time, from Settings. Your codes stop resolving straight away · anyone scanning one sees an “archived” notice rather than an error · and nothing is deleted for 30 days, so you can sign in and cancel if you change your mind. Export your data first. After those 30 days it is erased and we cannot bring it back.
Accounts that go completely silent are eventually closed. If an account has had no sign-ins, no scans of any of its codes, and no unexpired credits for six months, we close it and then erase it. A code that is still being scanned keeps your account alive whether or not anyone signs in · we measure the printed object, not the login. Before anything happens we email you four times over ninety days, and signing in once cancels it. After the closure begins you still have the normal 30 days to sign in and undo it. This never destroys credits you paid for: the rule cannot apply while you hold any unexpired balance.
We may suspend or close an account that breaks the acceptable use rules above, or where we are legally required to. If we close your account for a reason that is not your fault, we will refund your unused credits.
Unused credits are not refunded if we close your account because you seriously or repeatedly broke these terms.
Liability
Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Where you deal with us as a consumer, your mandatory rights under the consumer law that applies to you are unaffected by this section.
Subject to that, and to the fullest extent the law allows:
- Our total liability to you for all claims connected to taproute is capped at the greater of US$100 or the amount you paid for credits in the 12 months before the claim arose.
- We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including lost profits, lost revenue, lost or corrupted data, business interruption, reputational harm, or the cost of reprinting or reissuing any physical material a code was printed on.
- We are not liable for third parties, including any outage, act or omission of our hosting, payment or email providers, or of the destination site a code points at.
You indemnify us. You are responsible for the destinations you publish and the content you upload. If a third party brings a claim against us because of a code you created, a destination you pointed it at, content you uploaded, or your breach of these terms, you will defend us against that claim and cover the losses, damages and reasonable legal costs that come out of it.
Any claim connected to taproute must be brought within one year of the event that gave rise to it, or it is waived, except where a longer period is required by law.
Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. If a change materially affects your rights, we will email account holders at least 30 days before it takes effect, and you may close your account and take a refund of unused credits if you do not accept it.
We will not use a change of terms, or a change of price, to walk back the commitments in section 07. Those are the point of the product.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which the business operating taproute is established, and the competent courts of that jurisdiction have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, though we would much rather you email us first at info@taproute.io and let us fix it.