Terms of Service

1. These terms, and who they apply to

These terms cover your use of Earlier, an API that keeps one time-ordered record of your production changes and returns the changes that came before a moment you name. They are a contract between Earlier Labs Ltda., of Rodovia José Carlos Daux 4150, Sala 12, Saco Grande, 88032-005 Florianópolis, Brazil (“Earlier”, “we”) and the company that signs up (“Customer”, “you”).

The service is for businesses only, not consumers. By signing up you confirm that you are acting for your business and that you have the authority to commit your company.

The person who accepts these terms accepts them for the company, not for themselves. If you don’t have that authority, please don’t go ahead.

If documents disagree. This order applies: (1) a signed order form or agreement between us, (2) the data processing agreement, (3) these terms, (4) our Privacy Policy, (5) anything else on our website.

2. What the service is

Earlier is a hosted API. You connect your change sources with read-only credentials or post events to the ingest endpoint; we normalize each event, match it to a service, and store it in an append-only ledger ordered by the time the change took effect. When you or your incident tool ask what changed for a service before an onset time, we return the list, newest first, with a statement of which sources were reporting. A Slack app and a read-only web console present the same data. When a responder names a change as the cause of an incident, we record that naming.

3. What the service is not

These limits are deliberate, and they are part of what you are buying. They are not defects.

Not an investigator. Earlier does not read telemetry or code, does not determine root cause and does not return a cause. An ordering hint on a list is a hint. The decision about which change, if any, caused an incident is made by your responders.

Not an actor in your systems. Earlier holds read-only credentials and performs no rollback, flag change, pull request, alert silencing or any other action in your environment.

Not a complete record of what it was never sent. Earlier records the changes your connected sources report and the events you post. A change made outside those sources does not appear. The coverage statement says which sources were reporting; it cannot say what no source recorded.

Not a pager, an incident tool or a system of record for audit. Earlier does not page anyone or run an incident, and each source's own audit log remains the authoritative record of that source.

4. What you need to do, and why it matters

What you get from the service depends a lot on things only you control. Please read this section carefully, because sections 9 and 10 build on it.

Keep the sources connected. You supply and rotate the read-only tokens, configure the webhooks, mark which pipeline jobs are production deploys, and add the ingest call to anything that changes production outside a pipeline. A source you have not connected is a gap in every list.

Map your services. You supply the service catalog and answer the mapping queue. Until an event is mapped it appears as unmapped and may not be returned for the service it belongs to.

Keep secrets out of events. You do not post secret values to the ingest endpoint, and you tell us promptly if one reaches the ledger so it can be redacted.

Check the list before acting on it. Your responders verify a change against its source before acting on it. You decide what to roll back, and you do it in your own tools.

Name changes honestly. A naming is made by a person you have authorized, reflects their real conclusion, and is withdrawn if the conclusion changes. You do not withhold namings to avoid fees for incidents where the list held the answer.

5. Getting started, and what is free

Accounts are free to open and need no card. Connecting sources, the 90-day backfill, ingestion and queries are free without limit of time.

The first three incidents with a change named on a new account are not billed.

6. Fees

What is billed. One fee per incident in which a responder named a change that was already in the ledger before the incident's onset time: $120 for each of the first ten such incidents in a calendar month, $90 for the eleventh through the thirtieth, and $60 for each one after that. Prices are in US dollars and exclude tax: local taxes are added where Brazilian law requires them, and services billed to customers outside Brazil are exports that carry none.

What is never billed. Incidents that close with no change named; incidents where the named change was added to the ledger after onset; events received; sources connected; the backfill; queries; keys; Slack users and console viewers.

Withdrawn namings. A naming can be withdrawn within 30 days through the API, Slack or the console. The fee is removed from the current invoice or credited on the next.

Invoicing. We invoice monthly in arrears, listing each billed incident by date, title and the change named. Invoices are due in 30 days. A month with no billed incident produces no invoice.

7. Delivery, availability and support

Versions and notice. The API is versioned by date and you pin a version with the Earlier-Version header. Each version keeps working for 12 months after its successor ships, and we announce a successor by email to account admins.

Rate limits. Reads are limited to 600 requests a minute per key and ingestion to 6,000 events a minute per account. Requests beyond that receive a 429 response with a Retry-After header and are not dropped silently.

The coverage statement. Every list states each connected source, the time of its last event and whether it has been quiet longer than its usual gap. If any source is quiet or disconnected the list is marked partial.

Support. Support is by email at [email protected]. We aim to reply within one business day. That is a target, not a guarantee.

8. The ledger, late events, redaction and export

Append-only, ordered by effect. Rows are ordered by the time the change took effect at its source. An event that arrives late is inserted at its true time and marked late. Neither you nor we can edit or delete a row.

Redaction. An account admin can file a signed redaction for a row that contains a secret or personal data that should not be there. The text is removed and a tombstone stays, showing that a row existed, when, and who asked for its removal.

Export. You can export the whole ledger and every incident record as newline-delimited JSON at any time, and for 30 days after the account closes.

9. What we promise, and what we don’t

We promise to provide the service with reasonable skill and care, and that we have the right to provide it.

We promise that the API behaves as its published reference says, that rows are ordered by the time the source reported the change took effect, that every list carries a truthful coverage statement, that our credentials to your sources are read-only, and that a service match under 0.80 confidence is never applied without a person. We do not promise that the ledger contains every change made to your systems, that an ordering hint points at the cause, or that the change a responder names is the true cause. Those depend on what your sources report and on your responders' judgment.

Beyond that we give no other warranty. As far as the law allows, we exclude all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

10. Liability

10.1 Neither of us limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else the law says can’t be limited.

10.2 Losses neither of us covers. Neither of us is liable for lost profit, revenue, expected savings, business, goodwill or reputation, or for any indirect or consequential loss, however it arises.

10.3 Specific exclusions. We are not liable for the length or cost of an incident, for any action your responders take or do not take after reading a list, for a change that no connected source reported or that a source reported late or wrongly, for an ordering hint that ranked the cause below another change, or for the unavailability of a third-party source, pager or chat tool.

10.4 Cap. Our total liability is capped at the fees you paid in the twelve months before the claim, or $500 if you have paid less than that. If a fee was charged for an incident that did not meet the billing conditions, the remedy is that fee back.

10.5 You accept that the limits in sections 9 and 10 are a fair way to share risk, given the price and your part under section 4, and that we could not offer the service at this price without them.

11. Confidentiality and data

Your ledger describes how your production systems are built and changed, and we treat all of it as your confidential information: we do not disclose it, we do not use it to describe or market the service, and we do not share any account's ledger, catalog or incident records with any other customer.

How we handle personal data is set out in our Privacy Policy and in the data processing agreement between us, which forms part of these terms. If the DPA and these terms disagree about personal data, the DPA wins.

12. Who owns what

You own your change events, service catalog and incident records, and the confirmed target-to-service pairs derived from them. We own the API, the connectors, the models and the ranker's shared training features, which contain no text, names or identifiers from any account.

You may use the API's responses inside your own tools, runbooks and post-incident reviews without restriction.

You may not use our name or logo in public, and we may not use yours, without written permission first.

13. How long this lasts, and how it ends

13.1 The contract starts when you sign up and runs until one of us ends it.

13.2 You can end it. Cancel at any time. It takes effect at the end of the current billing month, unless section 6 sets a minimum term.

13.3 We can end it. We can end it with 30 days’ notice. We can end it immediately if you seriously break these terms and don’t fix it within 14 days of being told, if you become insolvent, or if your use exposes us to legal risk.

13.4 What happens then. We stop delivering and stop billing. You keep everything already delivered to you, and your right to use it continues. We delete or return our working copies as the DPA says. Sections 9, 10, 11 and 12 continue to apply.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. A change that matters takes effect 30 days after we email you about it. If you don’t accept it, you can end the contract before then. Using the service after that date means you accept the change.

15. Contact

Earlier Labs Ltda., Rodovia José Carlos Daux 4150, Sala 12, Saco Grande, 88032-005 Florianópolis, Brazil
[email protected]

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