Terms of Service

This page outlines the terms of service and use of Gruntwork’s products and services.

It’s important to understand these Terms of Service, as they define your rights and our rights in our relationship. But legalese is not always easy to understand, so we’ve provided “plain English” summaries on the left side of the page to help you understand the official legal language on the right side of the page. Remember that we’re providing you these summaries for informational purposes only. Our actual Terms are the ones on the right under "Legalese" and will apply if we ever need to work through any issues.

Last Modified: September 10, 2020

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Plain English
Legalese

By using Gruntwork products and services, you agree to these Terms of Service, our Website Terms and our Privacy Policy.

You must have a Gruntwork Subscription to use any other Gruntwork services.


General Terms

1. Updates

We might update these terms (e.g. when we introduce new services) and if we do, we’ll notify you in advance. If you disagree with the changes, you have the right to cancel your subscription per Section 5.2.

If we update the terms, we’ll email you, post the update to our Legal CHANGELOG, or let you know through some other means.

2. Authorized Users

Both you and your affiliates can use Gruntwork.

An Authorized User is a human or machine user that accesses our private repos, training materials, or support services. Email support@gruntwork.io to add/remove users.

3. Additional Terms for the Services

Our individual services each have their own supplemental terms. Scroll down or click on the relevant link to see them.

Per Section 5.2, you can cancel individual services without canceling other services, but you must have an active Gruntwork Subscription to receive any services.

4. Compensation and Invoicing

You’ll pay the pricing published at https://gruntwork.io/pricing or in the contract you signed with us.

It’s rare, but we might change our prices at some point. If we do, we’ll notify you in advance; the changes won’t take effect until your annual renewal date; and if you don’t like the new pricing, you can always cancel the services on your next annual renewal date.

When you sign up through our website, we’ll immediately charge you a $500 deposit. If for some reason we reject your oder, we'll refund the full deposit.

Once we approve your order, we'll charge your credit card for the first month of service plus any one-time fees. After that, we'll bill you once a month. You can always ask us to invoice you and bill you via ACH or international wire transfer.

If you’re late with your payments, you’ll owe us a 1.5% late fee and plus any costs to collect from you.

If it turns out we owe taxes on your purchase, you agree to pay all applicable taxes.

5. Term and Termination

The services require an annual subscription. Your subscription will renew every 12 months.

If you want to cancel, just let us know at least 30 days before your contract renews. If you cancel in the middle of your subscription period, you’ll owe us the remaining amount for the entire subscription period. Of course, you'll also have access to the service for the remainder of the period.

Per Section 5.7, after your subscription ends, you can still use the code!

If either of us fails to live up to these terms, we have to let the other one know, and if the problem isn’t fixed within 30 days, the agreement between us will terminate. Under certain very specific circumstances, we can suspend or terminate your account immediately.

If you cancel within the first 30 days, we’ll refund 100% of your money and let you out of your annual subscription, but you lose the license to all our code and must delete all copies of it.

Unless you cancel during the Trial Period or Gruntwork fails to live up to these terms, you will need to pay for the entire annual subscription.

If you stick with the annual subscription for at least one year, even if you cancel, you can keep using all the code you had access to at the time of cancellation at no additional cost.

We recommend that before termination, you fork any Gruntwork repos and update your infrastructure code to remove all references to private Gruntwork repos.

6. Intellectual Property Rights

We're granting you a very permissive license to do just about anything you want with the code, but you can't share our code or training with another company, resell it, publish it as open source, or try to sub-license it. The license is valid for just your company to use and update our code and training to manage your own infrastructure.

Each person on your team who accesses our code, training, or support must be an Authorized User. For example, we don’t allow the use of a single GitHub profile that’s shared by multiple individuals.

Note that our license allows you to keep using the code even if you cancel, unless you cancel during the Trial Period or decide to compete with us.

We give you a very permissive license to the code, but we remain the official owners of it.

We plan to share this code with other customers just like you!

Anything you do with our code in your own code repos is your intellectual property, and Gruntwork will not have any rights to it.

However, if you find a bug in our code or see an opportunity for an improvement and you decide to contribute some code back to us, we’ll want to share that code with all our customers. So, if you open a Pull Request on one of our GitHub repos, we’ll own the code you submit. If you don't want us to own the code, just don't contribute it our repos.

You give us permission to use your data to provide the services to you. When applicable, we promise to keep your information confidential per Section 8.

Some of the code in our library contains open source tools that use a “copyleft” license like GPL (e.g. wget). We won’t modify these tools in such a way that we trigger a “viral” obligation that requires our code (or your derivative works from our code) to be released as GPL. We’ll always comply with Gruntwork’s Open Source Usage Policy when using open source software.

In Section 6.9 we made a commitment not to modify any open source code in a way that triggers a “viral” obligation.

Here, we ask you to do the same. In practice, this means that if you modify our code, you can’t modify any GPL code that we distribute with the code. For example, we use wget in many of our bash scripts. If you need to make a change to how we use wget, don’t modify wget itself because the GPL license on wget will then require that all the code that uses wget be made GPL as well.

TL;DR: Don’t modify source code written by a third party when you submit a Pull Request to us.

If you give us a great idea, we get to use it and share it!

7. Third-Party Applications

When using Gruntwork, you may need to access third-party services like GitHub or Slack, and they may require you to agree to their own terms and conditions and policies. You should carefully review those before agreeing to them.

8. Confidentiality

We won’t share any confidential information about you, and you agree not to share any confidential information about us, including our code.

We’ll each treat each other’s confidential information at least as carefully as we treat our own.

This is a pretty typical definition of Confidential Information, and what’s specifically not considered Confidential Information.

If a government body tells either of us we have to disclose the other’s confidential information, we’ll do it, but we’ll make sure to update the other party on what happened.

9. Privacy and Data Security

We both agree to comply with the laws related to the use and safekeeping of personal data (the information someone can use to identify you).

By agreeing to these terms, you agree to our Privacy Policy, which contains important information about how we may use your personal data.

Gruntwork has adopted appropriate security measures to keep the services and your data safe.

If you or your company are a resident of the European Union, the Data Protection Addendum will also apply to you. The Data Protection Addendum covers the EU’s requirements related to the security and confidentiality of personal data.

You promise that you have permission to give Gruntwork personal data about your Authorized Users.

You promise that under no circumstances will you give Gruntwork your customers’ personal data.

If you or your company are a resident of the European Union, you agree that by sending us your personal data, you are instructing us to use that data to provide you with our services and possibly interact with components in your environment.

You promise not to share any sensitive data with us (such as social security numbers or health information).

Sometimes we collect user data on an anonymous basis to meet legal obligations or to provide better services to you and our other customers.

10. Limited Liability

Outside of certain limited exceptions, our total liability to you is limited to what you paid us in the last 12 months.

11. Indemnifications

If someone else sues us or has any other claim against us for something that’s really your fault and not ours, you’ll defend and cover us.

If someone else sues you because our code or services infringe on their intellectual property rights, we’ll defend and cover you.

12. Representations and Warranties

You are stating to us that you can enter into this agreement and that you are not violating any other agreements or the law by doing so.

We’ll do a good job with our services to you, and we won’t violate any other agreements or the law or steal someone else’s intellectual property in providing them.

We are not stating anything else to you about the quality of our services beyond what we say in Section 12.2.

If someone claims that part of our code is really theirs and not ours, we’ll either get their permission for you to keep using it, replace or modify that portion of the code, or ask you to stop using it.

13. Export Control

You promise that neither you, your company, nor the country in which either of you is located is listed on any U.S. government lists of people, organizations and countries we aren’t allowed to do business with. You also agree not to send any of our code or services to these people, companies or places in violation of US laws.

14. Independent Contractor

We’re not going to become an employee of yours, but we are grateful to become your vendor!

15. Use of Services to Compete

If you compete with us by selling reusable infrastructure modules, we will immediately terminate your license.

16. Force Majeure

If an earthquake or some other kind of major crisis occurs and we can’t deliver our services to you, you can’t consider that a breach of contract as long as we deliver on our commitment to you as soon as we reasonably can.

17. Notices

An official notice under this agreement can be sent by personal delivery, registered or certified mail, overnight courier, or email.

18. Assignment

You can’t give this agreement to someone else, but if you’re acquired by or merged with another company, the agreement will transfer to the new company.

19. Governing Law and Dispute Resolution

If we have a dispute, we’ll attempt to settle it directly with each other for at least 30 days. If that fails, either of us can bring a court action in Maricopa County, Arizona.

20. Miscellaneous

This agreement overrides any other verbal or other written agreement we might have related to the services, unless we have an existing Master Services Agreement or similar agreement, in which case this agreement only adds to the other agreement but does not take away anything.


Gruntwork Subscription Terms

Unless otherwise defined in these Gruntwork Subscription Terms, capitalized terms will have the meaning given to them in the Terms.

1. Term and Termination

If you terminate your Gruntwork Subscription, all other Gruntwork services will be terminated.

2. Included Features

See https://gruntwork.io/training for additional details.

We’ll notify you when we publish a new blog post at https://blog.gruntwork.io that we think you’ll find relevant.

Gruntwork offers a free community support tier

3. Disclaimer Regarding Software Updates

We’ll take responsibility for updating our code, but it’s your responsibility to deploy those updates to your infrastructure.


Support Terms

The Community Support Tier, the Professional Support Tier and the Enterprise Support Tier shall each be referred to herein as a “Support Tier” and collectively as the “Support Tiers”.

1. Term and Termination

We offer 3 support tiers – community, professional and enterprise. You’ll always have access to our community support tier while your Gruntwork Subscription is active. You also can upgrade to the professional or enterprise tier for an additional cost.

2. Included Features

This section lists what’s included with each of the support tiers. For more information, see https://Gruntwork.io/support.

Needless to say, your support requests should be related to your Gruntwork subscription.

We’ll provide community support via our customer-only Slack workspace. We do not commit to any Service Level Agreement (SLA) at this tier.

We'll provide Professional Support via email or a shared Slack channel.

We’ll respond as promptly as we can but (for a reasonable number of inquiries) never later than 2 business days after we receive your Professional Support Request.

We’ll provide Enterprise Support via email, shared Slack channel, or phone/video chat.

We’ll respond within four business hours to (a reasonable number) of your Enterprise support requests, which may sometimes mean the next morning or after a weekend or holiday.

For Enterprise support customers, we’ll start fixing any bug you find in our services 2 business days or less after you let us know.

We do not provide 24/7 coverage or emergency support. There may be days like Christmas or New Year’s when no one is available for support inquiries, but we’ll let you know in advance if such a day will occur.

Otherwise, we’ll respond according to our usual Service Level Agreement.


Reference Architecture Terms

Unless otherwise defined in these Reference Architecture Terms, capitalized terms will have the meaning given to them in the Terms.

1. Term and Termination

Once you sign up for the Reference Architecture, we don’t offer a refund (unless we fail to deliver what we said we would or you cancel during the Trial Period).

2. Included Features

This section lists the features included in the Reference Architecture. For more information, see https://gruntwork.io/reference-architecture/.


CIS Compliance Terms

Unless otherwise defined in these CIS Compliance Terms, capitalized terms will have the meaning given to them in the Terms. You may only access and use the CIS Compliance product ("CIS Compliance") if you have a current and valid Gruntwork Subscription.

1. Term and Termination

You may subscribe to CIS compliance services only when you have an active Gruntwork subscription.

2. Included Features

CIS Compliance is designed to make it easier to comply with the Center for Internet Security AWS Foundations Benchmark.

This section lists the features included in the CIS Compliance services. For more information, see https://gruntwork.io/achieve-compliance/.

We will do our best to comply with as many CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark requirements as possible, but we cannot guarantee that we will be compliant with every single requirement.

While we cannot promise free custom development, we will try our best to resolve your questions, concerns and issues.

You can expect updates and improvements to CIS Compliance, the CIS Modules and/or the CIS Reference Architecture within one calendar quarter after the calendar quarter in which CIS releases a new version of CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark.

3. Compliance with CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark

We’ll take responsibility for our CIS Modules being certified by CIS, but we cannot guarantee compliance with every CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark requirement because, by their nature, some requirements must be implemented by you.

4. Additional Provisions