Atlas — Terms of Service

1. Your account

Atlas is operated for adults. You must be 18 or older to hold an Atlas account. Atlas does not verify age and does not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18; if you believe a child has an account, write to us and we will remove it.

You need an account to generate a world, create a Project or take part in Community. You can sign in with an email address and password, or with Google. Either way your account is identified by its email address, and you are responsible for keeping access to it secure — including your password, if you use one, and the mailbox that can reset it.

Give accurate account information and keep it current. Do not create accounts to get around a plan limit, a free-world allowance, a rate limit or a moderation decision, and do not share one account between people in a way that circumvents what a plan permits.

2. Using Atlas

Atlas generates synthetic business worlds, converts supported Excel workbooks into web dashboards, hosts Projects you publish, and gives those Projects a public page and an optional place in Community Creations. You may use all of it for analysis, coursework, portfolio work, teaching, testing and commercial purposes, subject to these terms.

Atlas is a product, not a professional service. Nothing Atlas produces is financial, legal, accounting or other professional advice.

3. Subscriptions and billing

How Atlas plans work

Basic, Analyst and Power User are monthly subscriptions that renew automatically until you cancel. Each carries a number of world generations per billing cycle:

Basic — $10 per month, 2 generations per billing cycle.
Analyst — $20 per month, 4 generations per billing cycle.
Power User — $50 per month, 10 generations per billing cycle.

Your billing cycle starts on the day you subscribe, not on the first of the calendar month, and your allowance is scoped to that cycle. Unused generations expire at the end of the cycle and do not roll over. Cancelling does not reset, refund or carry forward an allowance.

Payment

Payments are processed by Stripe. Card details are entered on Stripe's own pages; Atlas never receives or stores them. You authorise the recurring charge for your plan when you complete checkout, and it continues each cycle until cancelled.

If a renewal payment fails, paid generation stops immediately while Stripe retries. Updating your payment method restores access once a payment succeeds. Nothing is deleted while a payment is failing — your worlds, Projects and profile are unaffected.

Cancelling

Cancel at any time from your Account page, through Manage subscription, which opens Stripe's billing portal. Cancelling stops future renewals; you keep paid access and any remaining allowance until the end of the period you have already paid for. There is no cancellation fee and no requirement to contact support.

Refunds

Charges are non-refundable except where a refund is required by law, or where Atlas grants one at its discretion. Ask at support@atlasworldbuilder.com.

Awaiting legal review. Refund and automatic-renewal terms are regulated differently in different countries and in several US states. This clause states Atlas's current practice and has not been reviewed against those regimes.

Master cohorts

The Master cohort offering is cohort pricing rather than a subscription. It is not purchased on the site, does not renew, and its terms are agreed with us directly — see Contact.

Price changes

Atlas may change plan prices or allowances. A change takes effect for your subscription no earlier than your next billing cycle, and we will tell you before it does.

4. The free world

Every Atlas account may generate one free world. It is one per account and it is not renewed. Creating additional accounts to obtain additional free worlds is not permitted, and Atlas uses limited technical signals to detect it (described in the Privacy Policy).

A free world is a single-store world, and choosing your own variation seed is not available on it — both of those are paid capabilities. History length is available on every plan, including the free world. Free access is not guaranteed to continue in its current form.

5. Generated worlds

Atlas worlds are synthetic. They are generated to be internally consistent and to behave like a business, and they describe no real company, customer, transaction or person. They are intended for analysis, teaching, portfolio work and testing.

Atlas does not warrant generated data as fact. A world may contain errors, implausible outcomes or patterns that do not hold in any real market. Do not present Atlas data as real-world data, and do not rely on it for a decision that needs real data. Any analysis or conclusion you draw from a generated world is yours.

A world you generate is yours to use, publish, teach with and sell work derived from. Atlas claims no ownership of the datasets it generates for you.

6. Atlas Publisher

Publisher takes a supported Excel workbook you upload and builds a web-viewable dashboard from it. The two halves are separate and it matters which is which:

Your source workbook: Stored privately, used to build the dashboard, and never published as a downloadable file. Publishing a Publisher Project does not make your workbook available to anyone.
The published artifact: A web page Publisher constructs, containing only the data and computation the supported dashboard needs in order to reproduce the analysis. This is what a visitor sees.

Publisher may refuse a workbook it cannot express. A refusal is not a judgement about your work; if it happens you can still publish the workbook itself as a direct file Project, which is governed by §7 and is a materially different decision.

Atlas does not promise perfect confidentiality or perfect reconstruction. Publisher exposes what its design requires, and it is your responsibility to be satisfied that the analysis you are publishing is one you are allowed to publish. Atlas does not review your workbook for confidential material.

7. Files you upload

You must have the right to upload it

Upload only material you are authorised to upload and, where you publish it, authorised to publish. You are responsible for confidentiality obligations, employer and client restrictions, contractual terms, copyright and other intellectual-property rights, privacy rights and applicable law. If you are not sure you may publish something, do not.

What must not be uploaded

Atlas is not built to hold sensitive or regulated personal information and is not certified for it. Do not upload:

passwords, API keys, access tokens or other secrets;
payment card numbers or financial account credentials;
government identification numbers;
medical, health or genetic records;
other sensitive personal information subject to specific legal protection, including data about children;
data obtained unlawfully, or in breach of somebody else's terms;
malicious files, or content that is illegal where you are or where Atlas is operated.

Atlas makes no compliance claim. Atlas is not certified under HIPAA, PCI DSS or any comparable regime, and nothing in the product should be read as one.

Direct file Projects

A direct Excel workbook, PDF or image Project publishes the file itself. Visitors download the bytes you uploaded. Atlas checks that the file is structurally what it claims to be and scans it for known malware before it may be published, and beyond that:

Atlas does not remove hidden sheets, source data, formulas, comments, connections, macros or document metadata;
Atlas does not inspect your file for confidential or personal information;
a clean malware scan is not a statement that a file is safe, correct or trustworthy — it means a scanner recognised nothing in those exact bytes.

For a macro-enabled workbook (.xlsm) the distinction is sharper still: a clean malware scan says nothing about whether a macro somebody wrote is trustworthy. Atlas does not run, read or evaluate macro code. Anyone downloading such a file decides for themselves whether to enable macros.

Before a direct workbook can be published, Atlas asks you to acknowledge that the workbook itself becomes public. That acknowledgement is recorded against the specific file it was given for; replacing the file requires a new one.

Downloading other people's files

Files on Atlas are provided by the people who created them. Downloading one does not grant you rights beyond those its creator gives you or that the law allows. Atlas is not a licensing intermediary and does not assess what rights a creator holds.

8. Your public profile

A profile is the public half of an Atlas account. What you save in the Page Editor may appear on a page anyone can open, including your display name, username, profile picture, headline, bio, role or field, school, location, tools and skills, LinkedIn and website links, your published Projects, and your public counts of Projects, Likes and followers.

Your email address is not shown on your profile and is not published anywhere by Atlas. Every profile field is optional; an empty field simply does not appear. You control what is there and can change or clear it at any time.

Your profile becomes reachable at its public address once you claim a username. Do not impersonate another person or organisation, or claim a username in order to pass yourself off as one.

9. Projects and publication

Public, Community-discoverable and Featured are three different things, and Atlas keeps them apart on purpose:

Draft — private: Only you can open it. Nothing is on the public web.
Published — public: The Project has a public page and appears on your profile. Anyone with the link can open it, and it can be found through your profile.
Community-discoverable: An additional, separate opt-in. A Project must already be published and public, and you must tick the Community box on that Project, before Atlas will show it in Community Creations. You can untick it at any time and it stops appearing.
Featured: Atlas's own editorial selection from Projects that are already eligible. Featuring cannot make a private Project public, cannot override a Community opt-out, and cannot survive an unpublish or a safety hold. Being featured is not an endorsement of the work or its creator.

You can unpublish a Project, which withdraws its public page and removes the files Atlas hosts for it, or delete it, which additionally removes the Project and everything attached to it and cannot be undone. For a Project that links to somewhere else, withdrawing removes the Atlas page — the destination is not Atlas's and is unaffected.

10. Ownership and licence

You keep ownership of everything you create and upload. Atlas claims no ownership of your Projects, your files, your profile, your comments or the worlds Atlas generates for you.

To operate the service, Atlas needs permission to handle your content in specific ways. By using Atlas you grant Atlas a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, back up, transmit, reproduce and technically adapt your content, and to create thumbnails and previews of it, solely so that Atlas can run the service and show your content on the surfaces you choose. Specifically:

for a private Draft, the licence covers storing and processing it so you can work with it — nothing more;
for a published Project, it additionally covers displaying and distributing that Project on its public page and on your profile;
for a Project you opt into Community, it additionally covers showing it in Community Creations and, while it is eligible, in Featured areas — including the Project's title, description, cover image or thumbnail, tool tag and creator handle on a card;
for comments, it covers displaying them on the Project they belong to.

The licence is limited to operating and promoting the Atlas service and to the public surfaces you have chosen. It is not perpetual and it is not a right to sell, sublicense or repurpose your work. It ends for future display when you unpublish, delete, opt out of Community, or close your account — subject to reasonable limits nobody can engineer away: caches and content-delivery copies expiring, routine backups ageing out, material another person has already downloaded, and anything Atlas must retain to meet a legal or security obligation.

Awaiting legal review. The precise scope and duration of this licence, and the wording of the exceptions above, have not been reviewed by a lawyer.

Comments are public and are shown with your username and picture on the Project they were posted to. Follows are public in the sense that follower and following counts appear on profiles. A Like contributes to a public count on the Project you liked.

Do not use these features for spam, harassment, threats, impersonation, advertising, malicious or deceptive links, or anything illegal, and do not use scripts or multiple accounts to inflate counts or manipulate what appears in Community.

You can delete your own comments. The owner of a Project can delete comments on it, and Atlas can remove any comment that breaks these terms.

12. Safety and moderation

Files uploaded for publication are scanned for known malware by a third-party security provider before they may be published, and a file that cannot be confirmed clean cannot be published. The Privacy Policy names the provider and explains what is sent. Scanning reduces risk; it does not guarantee that a file is safe, and you decide what you download and open.

Anyone signed in can report a Project or a comment. Reports are private: they are not shown on the site and the person reported is not told who reported them.

Atlas may, where warranted:

hide a Project from Community discovery;
disable public access to content that appears unsafe, malicious or unlawful;
remove a comment;
remove a Project from Featured;
suspend or restrict an account.

Atlas's safety controls and your own controls are separate: a safety hold cannot be lifted by changing your own settings, and Atlas will tell you on the Project's edit screen that one is in place. Where there is a security or legal reason to act immediately, Atlas may act without notice. There is no formal appeals process today; write to us and a person will read it.

13. Links to other sites

A Project may link to a dashboard or page hosted somewhere else. Atlas checks the shape of such a link and shows it behind a page that names the destination before you leave, but Atlas does not control, fetch, review or endorse third-party sites and is not responsible for what is on them. Once you leave Atlas, that site's own terms and privacy policy apply.

14. Atlas's own property

Atlas owns the Atlas software, the Atlas name and mark, the site's design, and the systems that generate worlds and convert workbooks. Nothing in these terms transfers any of it to you. You may not copy, modify, reverse-engineer or create derivative works from the service, except where the law expressly says you may despite this.

The worlds Atlas generates for you and the Projects you create are yours — §10 says so and this section does not take it back.

15. Things you must not do

Bypass, or try to bypass, plan limits, generation allowances, rate limits, publication gates or the malware check.
Probe, scan or attack Atlas's infrastructure, or attempt to access an account, Project, Draft or file that is not yours.
Upload or distribute malware, or content designed to phish or deceive.
Send spam, or automate interactions to inflate counts or flood the service.
Scrape the site in bulk, or use automated tools to collect content or profile information at scale.
Impersonate another person or organisation, or misrepresent an affiliation.
Upload material you have no right to publish, or that §7 prohibits.
Evade a moderation decision, a suspension or a safety hold.
Resell or redistribute Atlas access itself.

16. Availability

Atlas is provided as it is, and Atlas does not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free availability. Features may change, and parts of the service may be suspended for maintenance, security or capacity reasons. Atlas does not offer a service-level commitment.

17. Ending your account

Closing it yourself

You can close your account from your Account page. Closing an account is permanent and is not reversible. When you close it:

any active subscription is cancelled immediately, and no further charge is made. There is no refund for the remainder of a period already paid for;
your Projects are unpublished and deleted, along with the files Atlas hosts for them — their public pages stop working and they disappear from Community and Featured;
your profile, profile picture, comments, Likes and follows are removed;
your Atlas sign-in identity is deleted.

Some records survive, and the Privacy Policy says which and why: Stripe keeps its own payment and invoice records to meet its legal obligations, Atlas keeps a record of moderation actions taken, and routine backups age out on their own schedule. Material another person already downloaded is out of anybody's reach.

Atlas ending it

Atlas may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, that is being used to harm other people or the service, or where Atlas is legally required to. Where a suspension is a response to an active security problem, Atlas may act first and explain afterwards. If Atlas closes a paid account other than for breach, Atlas will cancel the subscription so no further charge is made.

18. Disclaimers and liability

This entire section is a draft awaiting legal review. Warranty disclaimers, liability limits and indemnification are the clauses whose enforceability varies most between jurisdictions, and none of what follows has been reviewed by a lawyer or adapted to any particular country's consumer law.

Atlas is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. To the fullest extent the law allows, Atlas disclaims implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, and does not warrant that generated data is accurate, that a converted dashboard reproduces a workbook faithfully, that a scanned file is safe, or that the service will be uninterrupted.

To the fullest extent the law allows, Atlas is not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential losses, for lost profits, or for loss of data — including a decision you made on the basis of a generated world, or the consequences of publishing a file you were not authorised to publish. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid Atlas in the twelve months before the claim arose.

You agree to indemnify Atlas against claims arising from content you upload or publish, from your breach of these terms, and from your infringement of somebody else's rights.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

Governing law and dispute resolution are deliberately not stated here. Atlas's operating entity and jurisdiction have not been settled, and naming one before they are would be a claim rather than a term. This will be added with legal advice.

19. Changes to these terms

Atlas may update these terms. The effective date at the top of this page changes when they do, and the version string identifies which set of terms you are reading. Material changes will be announced before they take effect. Continuing to use Atlas after a change means you accept the updated terms.

20. Contacting us

For anything about these terms, your account or a legal question, write to hello@atlasworldbuilder.com. For billing and account help, support@atlasworldbuilder.com. Every Atlas address is listed on the Contact page.

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