Terms of service

1. The service

Patent77 (“we”, “us”) provides AI-assisted searching of the public patent record: prior-art searches, patentability reports, patent lookups, monitoring, and the API and MCP interfaces to them. Using the service means agreeing to these terms; if you use it for an organization, you represent that you can bind that organization.

2. Not legal advice — read this one

Patent77 is a search and analysis tool, not a law firm, and nothing it produces is legal advice or a legal opinion. No search — automated or professional — can guarantee that all relevant prior art has been found. Search outputs and reports are inputs to a decision you should make with a registered patent attorney or agent, and every reference links to its source so it can be verified. You remain responsible for filing decisions, disclosure duties and deadlines.

3. Accounts and keys

Keep your credentials and API keys confidential; activity under your key is your responsibility. Keys can be rotated or revoked in settings at any time. We may suspend accounts that threaten the service’s integrity (see acceptable use).

4. Plans, billing and quotas

Plans, prices, allowances and overage rates are stated on the pricing page and in machine-readable form at /api/v1/pricing. Subscriptions are monthly, bill via Stripe, and can be cancelled anytime with access through the end of the paid period. Metered overage (reports beyond the allowance) bills at the stated per-report rate. We may change prices with notice; changes apply from your next billing period.

5. Acceptable use

• No attempts to circumvent rate limits, quotas or the anonymous-tier truncation.
• No reselling raw API access without an agreement (building products on the API is what it’s for; contact us for volume terms).
• No unlawful use, and no submitting content you lack the right to submit.
• Free-tier and anonymous API responses carry an attribution notice; keeping it intact is a condition of free use.

6. Your content

You own your invention descriptions and the reports generated for you. You grant us the limited licence needed to operate the service (processing descriptions through our AI provider, storing your saved searches). We claim no other rights, and we do not train models on your content. See the privacy policy for handling detail.

7. Availability and changes

We aim for high availability but the service is provided “as is” without warranty of uninterrupted operation. The underlying corpus and AI backends are third-party systems; when they fail we return explicit errors rather than degraded fabricated results. We may improve or change features; material regressions to paid features will be notified.

8. Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our aggregate liability for claims arising from the service is limited to the amounts you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, including losses arising from filing (or not filing) decisions informed by search results.

9. Termination

You can delete your account at any time, which deletes your data as described in the privacy policy. We may terminate accounts for material breach of these terms, with notice where practicable.

10. Contact

Questions about these terms: hello@patent77.com.