Terms and Conditions

Causal is made by Causal Software Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17280800. Our registered office address is on the public register at Companies House against that number.

Where these terms say “we”, “us” or “our”, they mean Causal Software Limited. Where they say “you”, they mean the person using Causal.

You can reach us at contact@causal.so. That address is the right one for every notice in these terms, including cancelling, complaining, and reporting content that should not be here.

You agree to these terms when you create a Causal account. If you do not agree to them, do not create one.

These terms and our Privacy Policy at https://causal.so/privacy are the whole agreement between us. Nothing said anywhere else, on the website, in an email, or on social media, changes them.

If you are using Causal for your work, you confirm that you are allowed to agree to these terms on behalf of your employer or client, and “you” in these terms then means both of you.

You must be at least 16 years old to use Causal. We chose 16 so that one rule works across the UK and every EU member state, where the age of digital consent varies between 13 and 16.

An account belongs to one person. You may not share your account with someone else, and you may not let someone else use it as though it were theirs.

There is no password on a Causal account. You sign in with a one-time code sent to your email address, a link sent to your email address, or your Google account. Anyone who can read your email can therefore reach your canvases, so keep that inbox secure. Tell us straight away at contact@causal.so if you think somebody else has reached your account.

You are responsible for what happens on your account, including anything done by someone you gave access to.

Causal is a canvas workspace. You put notes, files, images, videos and links onto an infinite canvas and arrange them however you want. It runs in a browser and as an app for macOS.

Causal is a young product and it changes often. We add features, we improve the ones already there, and sometimes we remove one that is not working. We can change how Causal looks and what it does at any time.

If we remove or materially reduce a feature you are paying for, we will email you before it happens, and you can cancel and get back the unused part of what you have paid.

We may also stop offering Causal altogether. If we ever do, we will give you at least 60 days’ notice by email, we will give you a way to export your work during that time, and we will refund the unused part of any subscription.

Everything you put into Causal stays yours. We call it your content: your canvases, cards, notes, files, images, videos, links and comments. Creating an account does not give us any ownership of it, and nothing in these terms transfers your copyright to us.

To run the service at all we need your permission to handle your content. You give us permission to store it, back it up, copy it, and show it back to you and to anyone you have shared a canvas with. That permission exists only so that Causal works. It is not exclusive, we pay nothing for it, and it ends when you delete the content or close your account.

To be explicit about what that permission is not. We do not sell your content. We do not publish it. We do not use it to advertise to you or to anyone else. We do not use it to train machine learning models, and we do not allow the providers who help us run Causal to train on it either.

Our staff do not look at the contents of your canvases except in the narrow cases set out in our Privacy Policy, which are that you ask us to, that the law requires it, or that we are dealing with a live security problem or a credible threat of serious harm.

You are responsible for the content you put into Causal. By uploading something you confirm that you own it or have permission to use it, and that storing it on Causal and sharing it the way you have chosen breaks nobody’s rights and no law.

Your canvases may hold personal information about other people, such as a name in a note, a face in a photograph, or a client’s details in a document. You are responsible for having a proper basis to store that, and for telling those people if the law requires you to.

Things Causal is not built to hold

Please do not put any of the following into Causal. We have not built the controls these need, and storing them here would put you in breach of rules that apply to you rather than to us.

• Medical or health records covered by rules such as HIPAA.
• Card numbers, bank details or anything covered by the payment card security standards.
• Government identity numbers, such as a National Insurance or Social Security number.
• Classified or export-controlled material.
• Anything used to run safety-critical systems, such as aircraft, medical devices, or emergency services.

Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Causal is backed up, but it is a workspace rather than an archive, and no service is immune to failure.

You may not use Causal to store, create or share any of the following.

• Anything illegal, or anything that encourages someone else to break the law.
• Sexual material involving children, in any form. We report this to the authorities.
• Material that harasses, threatens, defames or incites violence against someone.
• Someone else’s work, where you do not have the right to use it.
• Malware, or anything designed to damage a computer or a network.
• Someone else’s personal information, where you have no proper basis to hold it.

You also may not do any of the following to the service itself.

• Resell Causal, or offer it to other people as though it were your own product.
• Copy, decompile or reverse engineer any part of it, except where the law says you may.
• Scrape it, or pull data out of it by automated means other than the interfaces we provide.
• Get around any limit on your plan, including node limits, file size limits and AI allowances.
• Probe or test its security without our written permission, or interfere with anyone else’s use of it.
• Send it so much traffic that it degrades for other people.

If you think something on Causal breaks these rules, email contact@causal.so and tell us where to look.

Causal lets you turn a canvas into a read-only link. Anyone holding that link can view that canvas without signing in. The link cannot be guessed, but it is not protected by a password, so treat a shared canvas as public.

• A link covers one canvas. Canvases nested inside it are not readable through it.
• You can revoke a link at any time with “Stop sharing”. Access stops immediately, and file links already handed out expire within roughly 15 minutes.
• Sharing a canvas is your decision and your responsibility, including where it holds someone else’s work or personal information.

We can remove a share link without notice if we are told that what it exposes breaks these terms or the law. The canvas itself stays in your account.

We respect copyright and we expect the people using Causal to do the same. If you own the rights to something and believe a Causal user is storing or sharing it without your permission, email contact@causal.so with the following.

• What the work is, and enough detail for us to identify it.
• Where on Causal it appears. A share link is usually the only part of Causal a rights holder can see.
• Your name and how to contact you.
• A statement that you believe the use is not authorised, and that the information you have given us is accurate.

We will look into every report we receive. Where a complaint is well founded we will remove the content or the link that exposes it, and we will tell the account holder what was removed and why, so that they can respond. We close accounts that repeatedly infringe other people’s copyright.

Causal includes an assistant that can read a canvas and create, place and edit things on it for you. Every plan gets a monthly allowance of assistant requests, and the assistant stops for the rest of the month once you have used yours.

To answer you, the assistant sends the relevant parts of your canvas to the model providers we use. Those providers are bound by contract to process it only to produce your answer, and not to train on it or keep it for their own purposes. Our Privacy Policy sets out who processes data for us.

The assistant gets things wrong. It can misread a canvas, invent a detail, or place something where you did not want it. Check anything it produces before you rely on it, and do not use it as your only source for a decision that matters. Anything it puts on your canvas is your content, and you are as responsible for it as for anything you made yourself.

You may not use the assistant to produce anything the “What you must not do” section forbids, or to generate content at a scale intended to exhaust the service rather than to do your own work.

Causal has a Free plan and a paid plan called Pro. The Free plan costs nothing, needs no card, and does not expire. It is not a trial. Every feature of the canvas is on it, and Pro raises the limits rather than unlocking anything.

The prices above include VAT where it applies. The limits shown in the app are the ones that count, and we may change them as the product develops. We will email you before reducing a limit on a plan you are paying for.

Payments are handled by Stripe. We never see or store your card details. By subscribing you authorise us to charge that card each month or each year until you cancel.

A subscription renews automatically at the end of each period at the price then in force. If we are going to raise your price we will email you at least 30 days beforehand, and you can cancel before the rise takes effect.

If a payment fails we will try again over the following days, and we may reduce your account to the Free plan if it keeps failing. Your work is not deleted when that happens. The “Cancelling, refunds and going back to Free” section explains what a Free account looks like when it holds more than the Free plan allows.

Cancelling

You can cancel at any time from the billing screen in Causal, which opens Stripe’s billing portal. Cancelling stops the next payment. You keep Pro until the end of the period you have already paid for, and then your account moves to the Free plan.

Refunds

You have a legal right to change your mind within 14 days of first subscribing. If you cancel inside those 14 days, email contact@causal.so and we will refund you, less a proportionate amount for the part of the period you have already used. Where you have not used Causal at all in that time, we refund the whole payment.

After 14 days a payment is not refundable. You keep what you have paid for until the end of the period and are charged nothing further. If something has gone wrong and you think a refund is fair, email us anyway. We would rather sort it out than stand on this paragraph.

These rules do not limit your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. If Causal is not provided with reasonable care and skill, you are entitled to a repeat performance or a price reduction, whatever these terms say.

Going back to the Free plan

If your account holds more than the Free plan allows when it moves back to Free, we do not delete anything. Everything you made stays where it is, and you can read it, open it, export it and delete it exactly as before. What you cannot do is add more until you are back under the Free limit, either by removing things you no longer need or by subscribing again.

Storing files costs us money for as long as we hold them, including for people who left years ago. So if a Free account has not been signed into for 12 months, we may close it and delete what it holds.

We will not do that without warning you. We will email the address on the account at least 30 days beforehand, and signing in during that time is enough to keep the account. If you do nothing, the account and its content are deleted and cannot be recovered.

This does not apply while you are paying for Pro.

You can close your account at any time by emailing contact@causal.so. Cancel any subscription first, because closing an account does not by itself stop a Stripe payment.

When you delete a canvas or a file it becomes recoverable for 30 days and is then permanently destroyed, along with the underlying file. When you close an account we delete it and its content within 30 days, except for anything we are legally required to keep. Deleted material may remain in encrypted backups for a short time afterwards before being overwritten.

If you need something destroyed sooner than that, tell us and we will do it. Export anything you want to keep before you close your account, because after 30 days we cannot get it back for you.

We can suspend or close an account if you break these terms, if we are legally required to, if the account is being used in a way that threatens the service or another person, or if payment for it has failed and stayed unpaid.

Where the problem can be put right, we will tell you what is wrong and give you a fair chance to fix it before we do anything. We will only act without warning where the law requires it, or where waiting would risk real harm to someone.

If we close your account we will give you 30 days to export your work, unless the law prevents us. We will refund the unused part of any subscription, unless we closed the account because you broke these terms.

The macOS app is the same service in a window. We give you a personal, non-exclusive licence to install and use it while your account is open, and it updates itself in the background so that you are on a supported version. Uninstalling it does not close your account.

The app includes open source software, each piece under its own licence. Those licences apply to those components and take precedence over these terms for them. The notices are included with the app.

Causal can also be connected to an AI agent of your own through MCP. If you do that, you are choosing to give that agent read access to your canvases, and you are responsible for what it does with them. We have no control over another company’s agent and we are not responsible for how it behaves. You can revoke its access at any time from your settings.

We work hard to keep Causal running and to keep your work safe, and we will provide the service with reasonable care and skill. Beyond that we make no promises, and Causal is provided as it is.

• We do not promise that Causal will be available without interruption. We take it down for maintenance, and it sometimes breaks.
• We do not promise that it is free of faults, or that every fault will be fixed.
• We do not promise that it will meet a particular need of yours, or work with a particular tool.
• We do not promise that the AI assistant will be accurate.
• We do not promise that content will never be lost, which is why you should keep your own copies of anything irreplaceable.

Some features are labelled as beta or experimental. Those are offered so that you can try them and tell us what you think. They may change or disappear without notice, and nothing in this section or the next is a promise about them at all.

Causal can connect to services run by other companies. What those companies do is between you and them, and we are not responsible for it.

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, for breach of the terms implied by the Consumer Rights Act 2015, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit. Nothing in them affects your rights as a consumer.

Subject to that, our total liability to you for everything connected with Causal is limited to whichever is greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the problem arose, or £100.

We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of an opportunity, or loss of data, and we are not liable for any loss that was not a foreseeable result of us breaking this agreement.

That limit reflects what Causal is. It costs £10 a month at most, and a great deal of it is free, so we cannot carry the risk of what your work is worth to you. That is also why we ask you to keep your own copies.

If somebody brings a claim against us because of content you put into Causal, or because of the way you used it, you agree to cover our reasonable costs and losses in dealing with that claim.

This applies only where the claim results from you breaking these terms or the law. It does not apply to anything caused by us, and it does not apply where you are using Causal as a consumer rather than for a business.

What we do with your personal data is set out in our Privacy Policy at https://causal.so/privacy, which forms part of this agreement. It explains what we collect, why, who processes it for us, how long we keep it, and the rights you have over it.

For the content you put on your canvases we act as the data controller under UK and EU data protection law. If we later offer Causal to organisations for their teams, we would act as a processor for those teams under a separate agreement, and we would update both documents before that changed.

We will need to change these terms as Causal changes and as the law does. When we do, we update the effective date at the top of this page.

If a change matters to you, meaning it reduces what you get, adds an obligation, or changes what you pay, we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you do not accept it, you can cancel before that date and we will refund the unused part of what you have paid. Carrying on using Causal after the date means you accept the new terms.

Smaller changes, such as correcting a mistake or making a sentence clearer, take effect when we publish them. We keep previous versions and will send you one on request.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction over any dispute. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may bring a claim in your own courts, and if you live elsewhere in the UK or the EU you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer laws of the country you live in.

If you have a complaint, email contact@causal.so and tell us what has gone wrong. We would much rather fix it ourselves than have you take it anywhere else, and we will reply within a few working days.

This agreement is between you and us. You may not transfer it to somebody else. We may transfer it if our business is sold or reorganised, and if that happens we will tell you and your rights under it stay the same.

If a court decides that part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest of them continue to apply. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

The sections covering your content, what you are responsible for, our responsibility to you, your responsibility to us, and this final section carry on applying after your account is closed.