Terms of Service

These terms are a contract between you and Matariki Limited, a Hong Kong limited company trading as Gutter Tokens (“we”, “us”, “our”). Our address is 21/F, CMA Building, 64 Connaught Road Central, Hong Kong.

Section 17 requires most disputes to go to individual arbitration and waives your right to a jury and to take part in a class action. Section 8 prohibits you from sending personal data through the API. Both are worth reading before you agree.

1. Accepting these terms

You accept these terms when you create an account, and again each time you use the API. Account creation records the version you accepted, the date, and the IP address it came from.

Using the API accepts these terms even if you never saw the signup form — for instance where you hold a key issued on someone else’s account, or call the endpoint directly. The account holder remains responsible for everything billed to that account either way.

2. What the service is

Gutter Tokens sells prepaid access to large language models aggregated or operated by third parties, through a single API endpoint. You buy credits in advance, we route your requests to an upstream provider, and your balance is reduced by the tokens you actually use.

Our upstream providers are not the model providers; we do not have direct contracts or relationships with the model providers like Anthropic or OpenAI and instead rely on other upstream providers to provide the services. The model names we advertise on our site are the same as the names provided to us by our upstream providers, but we cannot assure with 100% certainty that the results provided were actually provided by those models; we may monitor our providers' quality-of-responses using canaries and remove upstream channels if the quality does not meet our standards. This is "gutter tokens" after all.

Monitoring our providers never means monitoring you. A canary is a synthetic request of our own — our prompt, our expected answer, sent on our own account and paid for by us. Checking quality does not involve reading, sampling, scoring, storing, or otherwise looking at your requests or the responses you receive. Section 9 says we do not retain them, and nothing in this section qualifies that.

We are a reseller. We do not train, host, or operate the models themselves. We do not control how they behave, whether they are available, or what the provider serving your request does with it.

3. Who may use it

The service is sold for business and professional use only. By opening an account you represent that you are doing so in the course of a trade, business, craft or profession and not as a consumer. This is not a consumer contract, and consumer-protection rules that depend on the customer being a consumer do not apply to it.

You must be at least 18 years old. If you are opening an account for an organisation, you must have authority to bind it, and “you” in these terms means that organisation.

You must not use the service if you are located in, ordinarily resident in, or acting for anyone in a country or territory subject to comprehensive sanctions imposed by the United Nations, the United States, the European Union or the United Kingdom, or if you or your organisation appear on a sanctions or restricted-party list maintained by any of them. Complying with export control and sanctions law in your own jurisdiction is your responsibility as well as ours.

We do not direct the service at any particular country. It is offered by a Hong Kong company and runs on infrastructure in the European Union. It is not marketed to, or intended for, any specific country or region. That you can reach it from where you are does not mean we offer it there, does not give us any local presence, and does not mean we accept the regulatory obligations of your jurisdiction.

Whether your particular use is lawful where you are is your responsibility to determine. Nothing on this site, in our documentation, or in anything our support says is legal, regulatory, or tax advice, or any assurance that your use is permitted in your country.

4. Accounts and API keys

You must verify your email address before you can use the service.

An API key is shown once, when it is created, and cannot be retrieved afterwards. If you lose one, revoke it and create another. You are responsible for keeping keys secret and for all usage billed to them, including usage by someone you did not authorise. Tell us promptly if you believe a key has been exposed.

5. Credits, payment, and tax

Credits are prepaid and are consumed as you make requests, at the prices published in the catalog at the time of the request. An in-flight request reserves an estimate against your balance and settles the difference when it completes.

Payment is processed by Creem, acting as merchant of record. Your contract for the purchase transaction itself is with Creem and their terms apply to it. Card details never reach our servers.

Prices may change. A change applies to requests made after it is published; it does not reprice credits you have already spent, and it does not change the number of credits already in your balance.

Prices are exclusive of tax unless stated otherwise. Where Creem collects tax as merchant of record it appears on the receipt they issue you. Any other tax arising from your use of the service is yours to account for.

Checking what you were charged. Your dashboard lists every billed request with its timestamp, model and cost, from the moment it is billed. If you think a charge is wrong, tell us. Raise it within 60 days of the request and we will investigate it; after that the charge is treated as accepted and we are not obliged to re-open it. We keep the underlying records for far longer than 60 days — see the Privacy Policy — so this is a deadline for raising the question, not the point at which the evidence disappears.

This is separate from a payment dispute with your card issuer, which Section 6 deals with, and it does not shorten any period mandatory law gives you.

6. Credits are not refundable

Credits do not expire while your account is open.

Unused credits are not refundable. They are forfeited if you delete your account, if we suspend or terminate your account for breach of these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, and if we close it for inactivity under Section 15.

Inactivity is the only one of those you can trigger by doing nothing, so it is worth stating plainly: sign in or make a request at least once every twelve months and a balance cannot be lost this way.

This is a condition of prepayment and it is reflected in what you pay. If you are not willing to accept it, do not buy credits.

If you dispute a charge with your card issuer rather than raising it with us, we may suspend the account while the dispute is open and set the disputed amount off against any remaining balance. Raising it with us first is faster; Creem handles the payment side.

7. Acceptable use

Your use must comply with our Acceptable Use Policy, which forms part of these terms.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches it. Section 15 sets out how.

8. No personal data in requests

You must not submit personal data through the API. Do not send names, addresses, contact details, government identifiers, account or payment numbers, location data, health information, biometric data, or anything else that identifies or could identify a living person — whether it appears in a prompt, a system message, an attachment, or data your application inserts automatically.

We are not able to clean up after a breach of this, and the reason matters: we do not retain the substance of requests or responses at all, so we hold nothing to find, produce, or delete. We cannot answer a data subject request about content you sent, and we cannot tell you whether an upstream provider still holds it. Strip or pseudonymise the data before it reaches us.

You are responsible for any personal data you send in breach of this section, including for anything an upstream provider does with it, and you indemnify us for it under Section 14.

9. Your content

You keep all rights to what you send and to what the models return. We claim no ownership of either.

You grant us only what running the service requires: the right to transmit your request to the upstream provider serving it and return the response to you, for as long as that takes and no longer.

We do not retain the substance of your requests or the models’ responses. We do not use them to train or improve any model, and we do not sell or disclose them to anyone other than the upstream provider serving the request.

We do record metadata about each request — timestamp, model, input and output token counts, duration, and cost — because that is what your bill is calculated from. It cannot be switched off while you hold an account. The Privacy Policy describes it in full.

The upstream provider receives the content of your request in order to serve it, and handles it under its own terms. We do not control what it retains and we have no way to verify what it retains. Do not treat a request as private from the provider.

If you send us feedback or suggestions about the service, we may use them without restriction and without owing you anything for them.

10. Our rights

The service, the API, the dashboard, and the material we publish about them are ours. While these terms are in force and your account is in good standing you have a non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use them, and nothing more.

You must not:

• Reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble any part of the service.
• Probe or test its security without our prior written permission. If you find something anyway, report it the way the Acceptable Use Policy describes — it undertakes that we will not pursue you for it, and that undertaking governs.
• Use our name, marks, or branding except to state accurately that you are a customer.

11. Availability and changes to the service

There is no uptime commitment and no service level agreement.

We apply rate and concurrency limits to keep the service usable for everyone, and we may change them. We may add, change, or remove models, including because an upstream provider withdraws one or stops serving us — and where the change comes from upstream, we may have to make it without notice.

Capacity depends on upstream providers. A request may fail because they are unavailable or have rejected it. That is not a breach of these terms. A request that fails before producing any output is not charged; a response that fails part-way through is charged only for the tokens actually delivered.

12. No warranties

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from a course of dealing or usage of trade.

Model output can be wrong, and can be confidently wrong. It is produced by statistical prediction, not by reasoning about facts. You are responsible for checking anything you rely on and for the consequences of relying on it.

Nothing produced through the service is medical, legal, financial, or other professional advice, and no professional relationship arises from your use of it.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

• Neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, or business interruption — whether or not the possibility was known.
• Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to these terms or the service, on any theory of liability, is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the three months before the event giving rise to the claim, or one hundred US dollars.

These limits apply even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose. They do not apply to liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited.

They also do not limit what you owe us under Section 14 (indemnity). The limits are a basic part of the bargain: the prices reflect them, and we would not offer the service at these prices without them.

14. Indemnity

You will defend, indemnify, and hold us harmless against any claim, loss, liability, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your use of the service, the content you send or receive through it, personal data you submit in breach of Section 8, or your breach of these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy. The cap in Section 13 does not limit this.

We will tell you about any such claim promptly and will not settle it without your consent, which you will not withhold unreasonably. You may control the defence, but not admit liability on our behalf.

15. Suspension and termination

You may delete your account at any time from the dashboard. Deleting it revokes your API keys, ends further use, and forfeits any remaining balance.

We may suspend or terminate an account:

• for breach of these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy;
• where the law, or an upstream provider, requires us to;
• where continued use presents a security, fraud, or payment risk; or
• after twelve months of inactivity.

Where a breach is serious or unlawful we may act without notice and may report it. Otherwise we will tell you what the problem is and give you a chance to fix it, where the circumstances allow.

If we discontinue the service altogether, we will say so on this page. Publication is the notice here too — we will not email you about it — so check this page before relying on the service remaining available. Section 6 still applies to your balance.

Sections 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18 and 19 survive termination — Section 5 among them, so a charge already in dispute stays governed by the clause that governs it.

16. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. The version in force and its effective date appear at the foot of every page here.

We give notice of a change by publishing it on this website, and that is the only notice you will get. We do not email you about it. Every change — material or not — takes effect when it is published, and the version and effective date at the foot of the page are how you tell that one has happened.

Because publication is the whole of the notice, check this page before you rely on what it says. Continuing to use the service after a change is published is acceptance of it.

If you do not accept a change, stop using the service and delete your account. Section 6 still applies to your balance.

17. Disputes, arbitration, and class action waiver

Read this section. It changes how claims between us are resolved, and it gives up your right to a jury trial and to take part in a class action.

Talk to us first. Before starting arbitration, send a written description of the claim and the relief you want to legal@guttertokens.com; we will send ours to the address on your account. Neither of us may begin arbitration until 30 days after that notice. Any applicable limitation period is paused while this runs.

Arbitration. Any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the service that is not resolved in those 30 days will be referred to and finally resolved by arbitration administered by the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre under its Administered Arbitration Rules in force when the Notice of Arbitration is submitted, before a single arbitrator. The seat is Hong Kong, the language is English, and hearings are held by videoconference unless the arbitrator directs otherwise. The Arbitration Ordinance (Cap. 609) governs this section, and judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

Individually only. Claims may be brought only in your individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate claims, may not preside over any representative proceeding, and may award relief only to the individual party seeking it.

Jury waiver. Both parties waive any right to a trial by jury.

Exceptions. Either party may bring a qualifying individual claim in a small-claims forum — in Hong Kong, the Small Claims Tribunal — and either party may ask a court for injunctive relief to protect intellectual property or to stop unauthorised access to the service. Doing either does not waive the rest of this section.

If part of this fails. If the class action waiver above is held unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim alone is severed from arbitration and heard in the courts named in Section 18, and the rest of this section continues to apply to every other claim. If any other part of this section is held unenforceable, it is severed and the remainder stands.

18. Governing law and venue

These terms are governed by the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

For any claim not subject to arbitration under Section 17, the courts of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region have exclusive jurisdiction. Both parties consent to that jurisdiction and waive any objection to that venue.

19. General

Entire agreement. These terms, with the Acceptable Use Policy and the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between us about the service and replace anything said or written beforehand.

Assignment. You may not assign these terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or to a successor in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

No waiver. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given it up.

Mandatory law. Nothing in these terms limits any right you have under the law of your country that cannot lawfully be waived or excluded. Where a provision here conflicts with such a right, that provision applies as far as the law allows and no further, and everything else stays in force. This paragraph prevails over anything else in these terms that says otherwise, including Section 3.

Severability. If a provision is unenforceable it is limited or severed to the minimum extent needed, and the rest stays in force.

No third-party beneficiaries. Nobody other than you and us has rights under these terms.

Independent parties. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, or employment relationship.

Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a failure to perform caused by something outside its reasonable control. This does not excuse payment.

Notices. Notices to you go to the email address on your account. Notices to us go to legal@guttertokens.com, and anything requiring hard copy service goes to Matariki Limited, 21/F, CMA Building, 64 Connaught Road Central, Hong Kong.

Headings. Headings are for convenience and do not affect meaning.