Terms of Service
Last updated: 9 July 2026 · Version: 1.1
1. Who we are
MicrostructureDB (“the Platform”, “Service”) is operated by ePotentia VOF, a company organized under Belgian law, company number 0725.714.903, registered at Frans van Dijckstraat 59, 2100 Deurne (Antwerpen), Belgium (“we”, “us”, “ePotentia”).
By creating an account or using the Platform you agree to these Terms. If you use the Platform on behalf of an organization, you confirm you are authorized to bind that organization.
2. Eligibility; consumers and business users
You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding contract to use the Platform. Registration currently requires a valid invite code.
For the purposes of these Terms:
- a “Consumer” is a natural person using the Service for purposes outside their trade, business, craft, or profession, within the meaning of the Belgian Code of Economic Law;
- a “Business User” is any other user, including anyone using the Service on behalf of a company, research institution, university, or other organization, or for professional or academic-research purposes.
Provisions in these Terms that grant rights specifically to Consumers (including the right of withdrawal in Section 10) apply only to Consumers. Business Users cannot invoke them, and nothing in these Terms is intended to grant Business Users any consumer-protection rights beyond what mandatory law requires.
3. The Service
The Platform provides tools for storing, analysing, visualising and managing materials microstructure data, including EBSD analysis, and an AI assistant feature. We may add, change or remove features over time. The Platform is offered in different tiers (e.g. free, academic, and paid subscription); the features, limits, and prices of each tier are described at sign-up or on our pricing page.
Changes to paid tiers. If we increase the price of, or materially reduce the features or usage limits of, a paid tier you subscribe to, we will notify you at least 30 days in advance by e-mail or in-app notice. You may cancel your subscription before the change takes effect; if you cancel for this reason, we will refund any prepaid fees for the period after cancellation on a pro-rata basis, excluding consumed metered usage (Section 9). If you do not cancel, the change applies from the notified effective date.
4. Accounts
You must provide accurate information, keep your credentials secure, and are responsible for activity under your account. Notify us promptly of any unauthorized use. We may suspend or terminate accounts that breach these Terms.
5. Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- upload unlawful, infringing, or malicious content;
- upload personal data of third parties without a lawful basis;
- attempt to gain unauthorized access, probe, or disrupt the Platform or other users’ data;
- reverse-engineer, scrape, or overload the Service;
- copy features of the Service, or use non-public aspects of the Service or data or output obtained from it, to build or substantially assist in building a competing product or service (ordinary benchmarking and academic evaluation of the Service are permitted);
- misuse the AI assistant to generate unlawful content or to attempt to extract other users’ data.
6. Your content, data ownership, and model training
You retain all rights in the data, images, datasets and metadata you upload (“Your Content”). You grant us a limited, non-exclusive license to host, process, and display Your Content to provide the Service to you.
- Private and industry data is never used to train AI models.
- If you choose to contribute content to an open / public dataset, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide license to use that contributed data (including to train and improve materials-science models). Contributed open data is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0) and may remain available after your account closes. Before publication we remove direct identifiers and account linkage; where contributed data has been fully anonymized (i.e. it can no longer be related to you), data-protection rights no longer attach to it. See the Privacy Policy.
You are responsible for ensuring you have the rights to upload and process Your Content.
Data processing agreement. Where Your Content includes personal data for which you (or your organization) act as controller, our Data Processing Addendum applies and forms part of these Terms.
7. Our intellectual property
The Platform software, interface, branding, and documentation are owned by ePotentia or its licensors and protected by intellectual-property law. These Terms grant you a limited, non-transferable right to use the Service and no other rights.
Third-party models and components integrated into the Service may carry their own license terms; where relevant, those terms apply in addition to these. An overview of material third-party components and their license terms is available on request at support@epotentia.com. License terms for on-premise deployments are set out in the applicable order form or enterprise agreement, not in these Terms.
8. AI assistant
The AI assistant generates responses automatically and may produce inaccurate or incomplete output. Do not rely on it as a substitute for professional or scientific judgment. You are responsible for verifying any output before acting on it. See the Privacy Policy for how assistant interactions are processed.
9. Fees, billing, and metered usage
Paid tiers are offered as subscriptions, billed at the price and interval stated at sign-up or on the pricing page. A subscription may include a storage quota and an allowance of included usage credits for metered features (e.g. compute-intensive analysis and AI-assistant usage). Additional prepaid usage credits may be purchased on top, at the rates shown on the pricing page.
- Included credits are granted per billing period, do not roll over to the next period, and have no monetary refund value.
- Purchased prepaid credits are valid for 12 months from purchase, as disclosed at the time of purchase; unused credits expire thereafter.
- Credits and metered usage are consumed at the moment the corresponding compute, AI-assistant, or storage work is performed and, once consumed, are non-refundable except where these Terms or mandatory law provide otherwise. Where both are available, included credits are consumed before purchased credits.
- Storage quota. When you reach your storage quota, new uploads are blocked until you free up space, upgrade your tier, or purchase additional storage; your existing data remains accessible. We do not bill storage overage automatically.
10. Consumer right of withdrawal
This Section applies only to Consumers (Section 2).
If you are a Consumer, you may withdraw from a paid subscription or purchase of usage credits within 14 days of concluding the contract, without giving reasons, by contacting support@epotentia.com (a model withdrawal form is available on request).
Immediate performance and metered usage. By purchasing, you expressly request that we begin providing the Service (including access to compute and AI-assistant features) before the withdrawal period ends, and you acknowledge that:
- if you withdraw after performance has begun, you must pay a proportionate amount for what was provided up to withdrawal — including all metered usage (compute, AI-assistant, storage) actually consumed, valued at the applicable rates — and any refund will be reduced accordingly;
- for prepaid usage credits, the refund covers unconsumed credits only; consumed credits are not refunded;
- once the service has been fully performed — including where purchased credits have been fully consumed — the right of withdrawal is lost.
For the avoidance of doubt: withdrawing does not entitle you to a refund of compute or AI-assistant usage you have already consumed.
11. Availability and service levels
We aim for high availability but may perform maintenance and do not guarantee uninterrupted access. For paid tiers, service-level commitments are set out in the Service Level Agreement, which forms part of these Terms for paid subscriptions. Service credits under the SLA are your sole and exclusive remedy for unavailability of the Service.
12. Warranties and disclaimers
To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose and accuracy of results. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot be excluded under Belgian law, and nothing in this Section limits the statutory rights of Consumers.
13. Limitation of liability
Nothing in these Terms limits liability for fraud, intentional fault, gross negligence, or death or personal injury, or any liability that cannot be excluded under Belgian law.
Subject to the above, ePotentia is not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, loss of data, or loss of profit. Our total aggregate liability is limited to the greater of (a) the fees you paid in the 12 months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) €500.
14. Indemnification (Business Users)
If you are a Business User, you will indemnify and hold ePotentia harmless from third-party claims, damages, and reasonable costs (including legal fees) arising from (a) Your Content, (b) your breach of Sections 5 or 6, or © your violation of applicable law in using the Service. This Section does not apply to Consumers.
15. Suspension and termination
You may close your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate access for breach of these Terms or where required by law. On termination, your right to use the Service ends; data handling follows the Privacy Policy. Sections 6 (licenses granted), 7, 12, 13, 14, and 17 survive termination.
16. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. For material changes, we will notify you at least 30 days before they take effect, by e-mail or in-app notice. If you do not agree, you may terminate your account before the effective date; if you are on a paid tier and terminate for this reason, we will refund prepaid fees for the period after termination on a pro-rata basis, excluding consumed metered usage. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance. Non-material changes (e.g. clarifications, new features) may take effect on publication.
17. General provisions
- Force majeure. Neither party is liable for failure to perform (other than payment obligations) caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including outages of upstream cloud or model providers, provided reasonable mitigation efforts are made.
- Severability. If any provision is held invalid, the remainder stays in force, and the invalid provision is replaced by a valid one closest to its intent.
- Assignment. We may assign these Terms to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. You may not assign your rights without our consent.
- Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, the DPA (where applicable), the SLA (for paid tiers), and any order form, form the entire agreement and supersede prior discussions. In case of conflict, an order form prevails over these Terms.
- No waiver. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
- Notices. We may send notices to your account e-mail address or in-app; you may send notices to support@epotentia.com.
18. Governing law and jurisdiction
These Terms are governed by Belgian law. Disputes fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Antwerp (Ondernemingsrechtbank Antwerpen, afdeling Antwerpen), without prejudice to any mandatory consumer-protection rules, including a Consumer’s right to bring or face proceedings before the courts of their own domicile where mandatory law so provides.