Terms of Service

These terms cover your use of Owl Watch. By creating an account you agree to them. They are written to be read, not to be impenetrable, and the short version is this: Owl Watch is a beta service, provided free and as is, and it must not be the only thing standing between you and an outage.

The service

Owl Watch watches hostnames, ports and mail servers on a schedule you set, records what it finds, and tries to tell you when something changes. It is currently in beta and free to use. There is no paid plan, no contract term, and no service level agreement. Features may change or be withdrawn, and the service itself may be discontinued.

Your account

• You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for everything done under your account.
• You must give an email address you actually control — it is how alerts and password resets reach you.
• Everyone you add to your team can see and change everything belonging to it.

What you may watch

You may only add hosts, domains and mail servers that you own or are authorised to monitor. Adding somebody else's infrastructure means directing repeated automated requests at a system you have no permission to touch, and that is your responsibility, not ours.

You must not use Owl Watch to:

• scan, probe or load-test systems you do not control;
• generate traffic intended to degrade or overwhelm anything;
• circumvent access controls, rate limits or bot protection;
• break any law that applies to you, or anyone else's rights.

Accounts doing any of the above may be suspended or removed without notice.

No guarantee that you will be told

This is the most important section on this page, and it is deliberately blunt.

Monitoring is a best-effort observation made from one place at one moment, over networks nobody controls end to end. Owl Watch does not guarantee that any check will run, that any alert will be sent, that an alert will arrive, or that it will arrive in time. In particular, and without limiting the above, Owl Watch gives no guarantee against:

• Missed alerts — an outage that happens and that you are never told about.
• Late alerts — notice that arrives long after it would have been useful, including through delays at your email provider, your webhook endpoint, or the messaging platform you forward to.
• False negatives — a check that reports everything as healthy while your service is in fact broken, including where a page returns a perfectly normal response while the thing behind it does not work.
• False positives — a check that reports a problem that is not real, including outages of our own infrastructure, network faults between us and you, and hosts that refuse or rate-limit our checks.
• Incorrect or stale data — certificate, domain, DNS and mail information read from third-party registries and resolvers that are themselves wrong, out of date, or unavailable.
• Gaps in coverage — periods where checks did not run at all, whether through scheduled maintenance, faults, or the service being unavailable.

Treat Owl Watch as one signal among several. If an outage would cause you real harm, you need redundant monitoring and your own escalation path as well.

Provided as is

To the fullest extent the law allows, Owl Watch is provided "as is" and "as available", with no warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or uninterrupted or error-free operation.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Owl Watch and anyone involved in providing it will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, business, goodwill, data, or anticipated savings, arising out of or connected with your use of — or inability to use — the service.

This expressly includes any loss caused by an alert that was not sent, was sent late, was wrong, or was never received, and any loss caused by an outage, certificate expiry, domain lapse, mail delivery failure or search de-indexing that Owl Watch failed to detect or failed to report.

Because the service is provided free of charge, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid for the service — which is currently nothing — or, where a monetary cap is required, one hundred euros (€100).

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. If your local law does not allow some of these exclusions, they apply to you only to the extent permitted.

Your own responsibilities

You are responsible for the availability and correctness of your own systems, for acting on what Owl Watch reports, and for having a plan for the case where it reports nothing. You agree to indemnify Owl Watch against claims arising from your use of the service in breach of these terms, including monitoring systems you were not authorised to monitor.

Ending it

You can delete your account at any time from your profile settings. We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, or withdraw the service entirely — in which case we will give reasonable notice by email where we can.

Changes to these terms

These terms may change as the product does. The date at the top of this page will change with them, and material changes will be sent to you by email before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept them.