Terms of Service
1. Who we are and what this covers
Rho MD and the rho.md cloud service are operated by Digital Factory Australia Pty Ltd (ABN 16 694 991 243), trading as rho.md ("we", "us"). These terms cover both: the App — the Rho MD desktop and mobile application you install — and the Service — accounts, storage, sync, sharing, publishing, and Rho AI at rho.md. Rho AI is available in the App and, for signed-in accounts, at rho.md/ai. You can create an account in the App or at rho.md. By installing or using the App, or by creating an account, you agree to these terms. Cloud accounts are for people aged 13 or over, or the higher minimum age where you live.
2. The App: your licence
We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use the App on devices you own or control, for personal or internal business use. The App is licensed, not sold: we and our licensors keep all rights, title, and interest in it.
You may not, except where the law expressly permits despite this limitation:
- copy (other than reasonable backup), modify, or create derivative works of the App;
- reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the App;
- redistribute, sell, rent, lease, sublicense, or bundle the App;
- remove or alter proprietary notices in the App.
We may issue updates that add, change, or remove features; these terms apply to updates unless an update comes with its own. The App includes open-source components licensed under their own terms — the full notices ship with the App as licenses.txt in its resources directory.
3. Your documents, and what leaves your device
Your documents stay yours. The App is local-first: your files live on your device and are not transmitted to us unless you explicitly use a cloud feature (publish, sync, Discover, Rho AI). When you use Rho AI, your conversation and any document content you hand it are relayed through rho.md to a third-party model provider to generate the reply; we do not store that content — our Privacy Policy (§5a) has the detail. Any API keys you add for third-party services are stored in your operating system's keychain, not in our infrastructure.
Optional features connect to services under their own terms — the rho.md cloud service (these terms and our Privacy Policy), and any third-party service you configure with your own key (that provider's terms). We are not responsible for third-party services.
4. What you upload, and your responsibility for it
You keep all rights to documents you upload. By uploading, you grant us the limited licence needed to store, render, and deliver your documents to the readers you choose (unlisted links and their access lists) or to the public (publishing).
You warrant that you have the right to share everything you upload. When you publish a document to the public index you additionally attest that it is your original work or that you hold the necessary rights. You agree to indemnify us against claims arising from content you upload in breach of this warranty.
5. What you may not do
You must comply with all laws that apply to you in the place where you live and use the Service, as well as the laws of Australia and the United States that apply to content hosted on the Service. Do not upload, share, or publish:
- unlawful content, or content that facilitates or instructs illegal activity;
- child sexual abuse material or any content that sexualizes minors — such content is removed immediately and reported to the relevant authorities;
- content that promotes, incites, or glorifies violence or terrorism;
- hate speech, or harassment, threats, or doxxing directed at any person or group;
- content that encourages self-harm or suicide;
- spam, scams, phishing, or anything else designed to trick readers out of money, credentials, or personal information;
- impersonation — passing yourself off as another person or organisation, or misrepresenting who you are affiliated with;
- malware or code designed to harm devices, data, or networks;
- content that infringes others' rights (copyright, trademark, privacy);
- abuse of the Service — scraping at scale, quota circumvention, attacks, or interfering with other users.
The same rules apply to what you ask Rho AI to produce or to do.
We may remove or restrict access to any content, and may suspend accounts, where we reasonably consider the content to violate these terms, to be unlawful, or to be otherwise harmful — with or without prior notice. We cooperate with lawful requests from courts, regulators, and law enforcement, including removal notices under Australia's Online Safety Act 2021. For repeated copyright infringement (three effective takedowns under our Copyright Policy) we terminate publishing rights and unpublish all public content of the account.
Names. Your handle and display name must not mislead people about who you are: do not use the name of a company, product, organisation, or person you do not represent. Some names are reserved and cannot be chosen, including look-alike spellings of them; an organisation can claim its reserved name from an account with a verified email address at its own domain. We may require you to change a handle, or reassign it to the organisation or person it names, where it impersonates them or where they show us that the name is theirs (for example, with an email address at their own domain). To report impersonation, use Report on one of the account's published documents or write to legal@rho.md.
6. Free and paid plans
The App is free to download and use. On rho.md, previews of published documents, guide pages and help pages need no account; reading a published document in full needs a free account, and a browser can open a limited number of different documents per hour and per day on one account. The App's limits are higher. Free accounts can store documents and share unlisted links within the storage and document-count quotas shown in your console, and can try Rho AI with a small number of free requests.
Paid plans are subscriptions, and each one contains everything in the plan before it: Rho Cloud Pro adds public publishing, sync, higher quotas, and private reading stats; Rho Cloud Pro+AI adds Rho AI with a monthly usage allowance; Rho Max adds a larger allowance. The plans on offer, their prices, and their allowances are listed at rho.md/#pricing and in the App under Settings › Account. Prices are in US dollars and include applicable taxes — the price shown is the price you pay.
Rho AI allowances are measured in model usage (tokens) and searches. They reset each calendar month (UTC), do not carry over, and some plans also have a daily limit. When an allowance is used up, Rho AI pauses until it resets; we do not charge overage.
We may adjust quotas and allowances over time. We will not reduce what an active paid account already stores, and a reduction to a paid plan's allowance only applies to you from your next renewal.
6a. Rho AI
Rho AI's replies are generated by machine-learning models run by third-party providers. They can be wrong, incomplete, or out of date: check anything that matters before you rely on it, and do not treat it as professional advice. At rho.md/ai, Rho AI answers from documents published on Rho Cloud and points to the ones it used; it can also search the web. It can misread or misattribute a source — open the source before you rely on the answer. In the App, what Rho AI does in your library — writing, moving, renaming, or rewriting documents — it does at your request, and you are responsible for reviewing the result. Between you and us, what Rho AI produces for you is yours to the extent the law allows; you remain responsible for how you use it, including under §4 and §5 if you upload or publish it.
7. Billing
Payments are processed by Stripe as Merchant of Record — your purchase, receipts, and applicable taxes are handled by Stripe, and we never see your card details. Subscriptions renew monthly or yearly, according to the billing period you chose, until cancelled. You can change plan or cancel at any time from Settings › Account or your console. An upgrade takes effect immediately and you are charged the prorated difference; a downgrade or a cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and §9 describes exactly what happens to your content. Refunds are handled in line with Stripe's consumer terms and applicable consumer law.
If we change the price of a plan we will tell you at least 30 days before it applies to you, and the new price only takes effect at your next renewal — so you can always cancel first and keep everything you have already paid for.
8. Warranties and liability
The App and the Service are provided "as is" without warranty of any kind. To the maximum extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement; we aim for high availability of the Service but do not guarantee it.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, we will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or exemplary damages, or for loss of data, profits, or revenue. Our total liability will not exceed the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or USD 10 if you paid us nothing. Nothing in these terms excludes rights or liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law, including the Australian Consumer Law, whose statutory guarantees may apply to you.
9. Cancellation and your data
If your subscription ends: published documents revert to unlisted (existing links keep working), your author page goes dormant (handle reserved), sync stops, and Rho AI is no longer included. Nothing on your devices is touched, and re-subscribing restores everything with one click. You can delete your cloud documents at any time, and you can request account deletion as described in our Privacy Policy. Deleting your account also ends your subscription — we cancel it as part of processing the request, so you are not billed again.
10. Automated organization
We use automated processing (including machine learning) to organize public topics and to power discovery — for example grouping public tags into shared topics. This processing uses only public data and the signals described in the Privacy Policy, never the content of your local or unlisted documents.
11. Changes, suspension, and termination
We may update these terms; material changes will be announced on the site or by email at least 14 days in advance, and continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance. We may suspend or terminate accounts for serious or repeated violation of these terms; where reasonable we will warn you first. Your licence to the App ends automatically if you breach §2, and on termination you must stop using and uninstall it.
If we discontinue a paid plan, or the Service itself, we will give you notice, refund the unused portion of anything you have prepaid, and leave you a window to export your cloud documents. The App and everything already on your device keep working either way — your documents are ordinary files you hold, not rows in our database.
Sections 3, 4, 6a, 8, and 12, and our rights under §2, survive termination.
12. Governing law and contact
These terms are governed by the laws of Victoria, Australia, and disputes are subject to the courts of Victoria — without limiting any mandatory consumer protections where you live. If a provision is held unenforceable, the rest remains in effect. These terms are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the App and the Service. Contact: legal@rho.md — Digital Factory Australia Pty Ltd, trading as rho.md.