Legal

Terms and Conditions

The agreement between you and StreetShape. Written to be read, not to be scrolled past.

Last updated 17 September 2026

This document is a draft

It was written against how StreetShape actually works, and every factual claim in it is checkable against the code. What it does not yet have is the operator’s address, several retention periods, confirmation of which provider agreements are actually signed, or a review by a lawyer. Those gaps are marked in the text rather than filled with a guess.

35 outstanding items— show

serviceable postal address — the address the Impressum, the Terms and the withdrawal notice are all served at
commercial-register entry — whether registration as a Kaufmann applies, and the court and HRB number if it does
VAT identification number — whether one is assigned at all under the Kleinunternehmer rule, and the number if it is
second direct contact channel under §5 DDG — a telephone number, or another channel a person actually answers quickly
how the current-month refund promise applies to an annual plan — a twelfth, the unused remainder, or not at all. Decide before an annual plan is sold
the refund window on a founding lifetime purchase — 30 days from payment is the reading this draft assumes, and it needs confirming rather than inheriting subscription wording
languages the DSA contact point is answered in — the ones a person can actually handle, not the ones the interface is translated into
the seller for a paid contract — for a Paddle purchase, the Paddle entity named at checkout and on the invoice, with its postal address and email
Review of all ten documents, the Impressum and the implementation-fund rules by a lawyer in Germany — after the operator's address and registration position are settled, because that is half of what counsel checks.
Whether a data protection officer has to be appointed despite the headcount, which turns on whether location-linked consultation and survey responses amount to processing that requires a data protection impact assessment.
The roles in each institutional feature — whether a municipality is a controller, our controller, or a joint controller for consultations, residency registers and street reports — and the agreement that follows from each answer.
Which provider arrangements are actually signed, in which regions, and under which transfer mechanism. The provider table states what the code configures, which is not the same as a countersigned contract.
Whether the service is an online platform under the Digital Services Act rather than only a hosting service, and which of the platform duties the micro and small enterprise exemption removes.
Whether direct access to the production database is logged, and whether a backup restore has ever actually been run.
which accounting records fall in the 10, 8 and 6-year tiers of §147 AO — the periods differ by document class and run from the end of the calendar year, and the old ten-years-for-everything line was over-retention
when an invitation that is never accepted expires — it is an access grant sitting open, and "until somebody revokes it" is not a period
a period per category for correspondence — handling, then a justified follow-up or claims window. "Until somebody asks us to remove it" is not a retention period, it is the absence of one
how long verification evidence is kept after the thing it verified is decided — the decision has to outlast it, the document usually does not
when a waiting-list subscription expires if the list is never used — it survives account deletion, because it was left without needing an account
how long the identifiers that survive a webhook payload are kept — they are what stops a duplicate, and they are still linkable to a transaction
whether attribution should expire before the account does — it answers a question about a signup that stops being asked long before the account closes
the purpose and lawful ground for keeping a country code on the signup record. It is written whether or not attribution was accepted, which the privacy policy used to deny, and currency presentation does not need it stored
the retention configured on the analytics project, and whether an erasure here propagates to it
how long the evidence of a rights request is kept after it is met — a justified period, rather than "kept"
a schedule per civic feature, and the controller each one belongs to. A municipality running a consultation sets its own period; where we set it, it has to be written down
each provider's own log retention, and the maximum age of a backup before it expires
a justified maximum for the staff audit log, and the rule that reviews it. The 180-day expiry of the identifying half is enforced; the row itself has no end
a justified maximum for the record of a support session — somebody here opening your account to help — on the same footing as the staff audit log above
where the Photon instance we call actually runs, and who operates it
where the Nominatim instance we fall back to is hosted — the Foundation's establishment and its servers are separate questions
the session cookie's lifetime in production, and how it refreshes — a provider default is not an inventory
the `__client_uat` cookie's lifetime in production — the same question as the session cookie above, and the same answer is not safe to assume
a production cookie and storage inventory — signed out, signed in, on the map and through checkout. The lists on this page come from the code, which cannot see what a provider sets
whether the preference keys are exempt as part of a service you expressly requested, or have to be gated by consent
a persistent control for reviewing or withdrawing cookie consent — the banner does not come back once a choice is stored, and clearing site data in the browser is not the same thing

1. These terms, and who they are with

These terms govern your use of StreetShape at streetshape.org and the editor, account, collaboration and civic-participation services reached through it. The service is provided by Daniel Halabi, Sole trader (Einzelunternehmen), at [serviceable postal address — the address the Impressum, the Terms and the withdrawal notice are all served at] in Germany — referred to here as “StreetShape”, “we” and “us”. You can write to us at hello@streetshape.org.

“You” means the person using the service, or the organization on whose behalf an authorized person agrees to these terms. A consumer is someone acting mainly outside their trade, business or profession; several clauses below give consumers more than they give everybody else, and say so where they do.

What else forms part of this contract

The acceptable use policy and the cancellation, withdrawal and refund policy are part of these terms. So is the description of the plan you bought and anything we specifically promised at checkout. Where we have signed a separate agreement with you, that agreement wins over this page to the extent the two disagree. Mandatory law wins over both.

The privacy policy explains what happens to personal data. Agreeing to these terms is not consent to optional analytics, to marketing, or to anything else that needs consent of its own.

We make these terms available before you agree to them. An account agreement is made when you accept them during registration and we activate your account; a paid contract is made at checkout, where the seller and the total are shown. Reading the site does not put you under an obligation that requires an agreement.

2. What StreetShape is, and what it is not

StreetShape lets you create, visualize, share and discuss street-design concepts. Depending on the feature and the plan, it offers maps, measurements, diagnostics, design references, exports, public proposals, consultations and street-issue reporting.

This is not engineering software

StreetShape does not give professional engineering, surveying, architectural, legal or road-safety advice. A measurement, a diagnostic, a reference, a score, a visualization or a suggested geometry is not a certification that anything is accurate, compliant, buildable or safe. The mapping underneath it comes from third parties and can be incomplete, out of date or simply wrong, and the dimensions derived from it are approximate.

Nothing produced here may be used as a construction instruction, a certified survey, a statutory approval or a substitute for professional assessment. Anything you intend to build has to be assessed by people qualified to assess it and permitted by whoever grants the permission. If you pass an output on, describe it accurately: an informal concept, a submission, or a document somebody independently checked outside StreetShape are three different things.

Civic submissions are not emergency communications. If something is dangerous now, tell the emergency service or the authority responsible for it. Posting here does not guarantee that an authority receives, reads, investigates, adopts or builds anything — each board and consultation says whether an authority is taking part and what its process is.

3. Your account

You must be at least 16 to hold an individual account. If you are under 18 you may enter into a contract only so far as the law applicable to your legal capacity allows, and with your legal representative’s consent where that is required.

The age limit is about holding an account, not about being able to enter into a paid contract. Those are different questions and the second one is answered by law rather than by this page.

Give us accurate account details and keep the ones that matter up to date. An account belongs to one person: do not share it or sell it. If you use StreetShape for an organization, use the seats and permissions it gave you, and have the authority to act for it.

Look after your credentials and tell us promptly if you think somebody else has got into your account. You are responsible for breaking these obligations, so far as the law makes you responsible — which is not the same as being automatically liable for everything done through an account somebody else broke into.

Using StreetShape with children below the minimum age, in a classroom or anywhere else, needs a separate arrangement written for it. An adult’s account is not a way around that.

4. Plans and payment

What each paid plan includes, what it limits, what it costs, in which currency, how often it bills and for how long are all shown before you buy, with the tax and the total at checkout. A feature described as planned or in development is not a feature you are buying unless your order says it is — which does not take away anything you are entitled to because of a binding description or promise made before the purchase.

Who you are buying from

Purchases go through Paddle. The Paddle entity named at checkout and on your invoice is the merchant of record and sells to you as a reseller, and its terms govern that transaction. We supply the access under these terms and remain responsible for our own obligations. We never receive or store your card details.

Renewal and price

A subscription renews on the terms and for the period disclosed before you bought it, and only so far as the law allows. Cancelling stops future renewals and normally takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for; where the law gives you a right to end it sooner, you keep it.

We do not raise the price of a period you have already paid for. Raising it for a future period needs a basis in the contract and whatever consent the law requires, and we will tell you the amount, the date it takes effect and how to cancel, in advance. Where the law requires you to agree, saying nothing is not agreeing.

Municipal and separately invoiced services may run on their own agreement. Student and resident access can depend on your remaining eligible or on an institution continuing to sponsor it; we will tell you before an eligibility-based grant ends, unless fraud or another serious breach means it has to stop at once.

5. Founding lifetime access

A founding lifetime offer is a single purchase of the access that offer describes, with no recurring fee and no ordinary expiry date. If we stop selling it, that does not cancel the grants already bought.

The offer says which tier it includes and what it materially limits before you buy. “Lifetime” is not a license for us to end your access by renaming or retiring a plan: if we materially change, discontinue or terminate it, the contract and consumer law decide what you are owed, including repayment. We do not invent a notional lifetime in order to make a refund smaller.

6. Your designs stay yours

You keep the intellectual-property rights you have in what you make. We do not acquire ownership of your plans, text, images or anything else you contribute.

You give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free permission to host, copy, process, technically adapt, back up and display your content, only so far as running the service and carrying out the sharing, collaboration, publication or submission you asked for actually requires. The same permission extends to the providers listed on the subprocessor page, for those purposes and no others, and it is worldwide because hosting and access are.

The permission ends when the content is deleted from the live service. What survives it is narrow and deliberate: a backup until it expires, anything a law requires us to keep, and a submission that a consultation or an organization is separately and lawfully holding. A copy kept for one of those reasons is not used for anything else.

Four things we will not do

Sell your private plans.
License them to anybody for an unrelated purpose.
Use them to train machine-learning models.
Put them in marketing without asking you first.

Publishing something yourself makes it public. It does not transfer ownership of it to us or to anybody else.

You need the rights to whatever you upload and share. Using your own work commercially, including for clients, is fine — subject to the rights in any mapping, imagery, fonts or other third-party material it contains, which the attribution page explains.

8. Acceptable use

The acceptable use policy is part of this contract. It covers unlawful content, harassment, impersonation, false claims of official approval, manipulation of civic processes, interference with the service and misuse of map data — and it says how a decision under it is made, explained and appealed.

Using a documented public API is permitted within the access conditions and limits published for it. Being able to reach an endpoint is not a license to the personal data or the third-party mapping behind it.

9. Map data and third-party licenses

Maps, imagery, elevation and other third-party material stay under their own licenses, whatever you do with the design you put on top of them. Keep the attribution that travels with them, and check what the license permits before you print, publish, redistribute or machine-process an export. The map data, attribution and licensing notice sets out the sources, the credits and the distinctions that matter — particularly that a rendered picture and an extracted dataset are not governed the same way.

10. Availability, maintenance and changes to the service

We provide the service in line with this contract, with the conformity requirements that apply to it, and with any duty to keep it updated. We do not promise a particular uptime percentage unless we have specifically agreed one — which does not exclude your remedies if we fail to supply the service or supply it defectively.

We may make the changes reasonably needed to keep the service secure, lawful, working, interoperable and in step with the things it depends on. A change beyond keeping it conforming needs a basis in the contract, a valid reason and compliance with the law, and it may not add a charge you did not agree to.

Where a change would impair a consumer’s access or use more than insignificantly, we will tell you about it in advance on a durable medium, along with what you can do about it. Where §327r BGB applies you may terminate free of charge within the statutory 30-day period, on that provision’s conditions and exceptions. Your other rights are unaffected.

A provider outage is not automatically our excuse. Whether we are responsible for one is decided by this contract and the law, not by the fact that the failure happened somewhere else.

11. Cancelling, withdrawing and refunds

Three different things, and the refund policy keeps them apart. Cancelling stops future renewals. Withdrawing reverses a qualifying purchase inside the statutory period. A refund can also be due under our voluntary policy, or because the service was not what it should have been. Using one does not give up another.

Voluntarily, we offer a full refund within 30 days of a first subscription payment, and after that the current subscription month refunded on request when you cancel. The refund policy carries the statutory withdrawal notice, the model withdrawal form and the seller to send it to.

You can cancel through the billing controls in your account or by writing to hello@streetshape.org. Where the law requires an online cancellation or withdrawal function, that function is an additional route and not a replacement for writing to us.

This page used to say the right of withdrawal ended as soon as you used a paid feature. That is the rule for separately supplied digital content, not for an ongoing service, and opening the editor was never a valid waiver of it. The refund policy now states the position properly.

12. If you downgrade, stop paying, or leave

Downgrading, cancelling or a failed payment does not delete your plans. They stay openable and exportable within the limits of the plan you are on. If you are over the new plan’s limit you may not be able to create more until you are under it again. We will tell you about a payment problem before reducing paid access, unless the law or the prevention of fraud requires us to act at once.

Deleting your account is a separate, deliberate act, and it does remove your private content — the privacy policy sets out what goes and what has to stay. Export anything you want first. If you are asking for erasure while a subscription is running, tell us, so that the deletion does not leave a renewal behind it.

13. When we restrict or close an account

We may restrict content or access where that is reasonably necessary to deal with a material breach, unlawful activity, a credible security risk or a binding legal obligation. What we do will be proportionate to what happened. Where it is practicable and appropriate, we will explain the problem and give you a reasonable chance to put it right before terminating; where it is urgent, we may act first.

You get reasons and a route to review, as described in the acceptable use policy, unless the law stops us from explaining.

Closing an account does not automatically forfeit what you have paid in advance. What you are owed, and anything we are lawfully entitled to set off against it, is decided by the refund policy and by law — and we will show the calculation.

14. Liability

We are liable without limitation for intent and gross negligence, for culpable injury to life, body or health, for fraudulently concealing a defect, for anything covered by a guarantee we expressly gave, and for anything the law does not allow us to limit — including under product-liability law.

For ordinary negligence in breaching an essential contractual obligation, we are liable for the damage that was foreseeable and typical for this kind of contract when it was made. An essential obligation is one that has to be met for the contract to work at all, and that the other side may ordinarily rely on being met.

For ordinary negligence in any other case, our liability is excluded so far as the law permits and no further.

What this clause does not do

It does not restrict your statutory remedies for a digital product that is not as agreed, your rights to compensation under data-protection law, or any other mandatory consumer right. The limits in section 2 describe what the service is for; they do not exclude liability that cannot be excluded.

There is no longer a cap of one month’s fees and no blanket exclusion of lost data or consequential loss. A cap set that low is not enforced as written under §§307–309 BGB — it is struck out entirely, which would leave us with no limitation at all rather than a small one.

15. Changes to these terms

The version you accepted governs your contract until it is changed by agreement or by another mechanism the law recognizes. We will explain a material proposed amendment and when we intend it to take effect, in advance.

Where your agreement is needed, continuing to use the service and failing to object are not, on their own, a substitute for it. A change does not take away a right you have already accrued.

16. Law, disputes and everything else

Germany law applies. If you are a consumer, that choice does not deprive you of the mandatory protections you would have under the law that would otherwise apply, including the law where you habitually live. Which court has jurisdiction is decided by law; these terms do not require a consumer to sue in Germany.

We are neither willing nor obliged to take part in consumer arbitration, unless a rule of law or a separate undertaking requires it. You can raise a dispute with us without giving up any court or regulatory remedy.

If a provision is ineffective, the law decides what follows. Anything individually agreed with you, and every mandatory right, survives. Neither of us may transfer this contract in a way that strips out a consent or a protection the law requires.

Daniel Halabi, [serviceable postal address — the address the Impressum, the Terms and the withdrawal notice are all served at] · hello@streetshape.org