# Terms of Service

**Vasily Salmin**, sole proprietor, trading as **Verbi** — Montréal, Québec, Canada
Contact: contact@verbi.services · Last updated: 2026-09-04

These terms govern your use of the Verbi speech-to-text API at https://verbi.services (the
"Service"). By creating an API key or calling the Service, you agree to them. If you are agreeing
on behalf of a company, you confirm you may bind it.

## 1. What the Service does

You send audio; Verbi transcribes it and returns the transcript in the same response. Features included
at no extra charge: speaker diarization, per-word confidence and timestamps, SRT/VTT captions,
per-request glossary, language detection.

Neither the audio you send nor the transcript returned to you is stored — both exist only for the
duration of the request that carries them. See the [Privacy Policy](/privacy).

## 2. Accounts and API keys

An API key is issued on signup. **You are responsible for keeping your key secret and for all use
made with it.** Report an exposed key immediately at contact@verbi.services and a replacement is
issued — and see below if you have lost every key on the account, which is a
different problem. Free allowances are per account and per network: every key on an account
shares its allowances, purchased credit and concurrency limit, and creating accounts to evade a
limit is a breach of §5.

**No email address is required to buy or use the Service.** A verified email raises your free
allowance and your concurrency limit; a completed payment raises the concurrency limit further, on
its own. The two are independent and they do not stack: an account that has paid gets the higher
limit whether or not it carries an email, and verifying an email after paying adds free hours
without changing that limit. Your address is never sold or shared (see the Privacy Policy).

**If you lose every key on an account, what can be done depends on what the account carries.** With a
verified email, a key can be re-issued against that address. Without one, recovery works from your
payment: the checkout you are sent to carries your account id, so the receipt Stripe sent you leads
back to the account that was credited — keep it. **An account with neither a verified email nor a
payment cannot be recovered**, because there is nothing about it to match you to; that is the same property that
keeps it anonymous. Your account id is on `GET /v1/billing`, so record it, mint a second key with
`POST /v1/keys` and keep it elsewhere, or attach an email — any of the three, before you need it.

## 3. What you pay, and for what

**Billing counts detected speech, not file duration.** Every response reports `audio_duration_sec`,
`billed_speech_sec` and `speech_ratio`, and exactly the reported `billed_speech_sec` is drawn from
your balance. Silence is not billed. Speech detection is automated and deliberately errs on the
side of keeping speech, so a small fraction of non-speech audio can bill as speech — instrumental
music typically around 5% of its runtime. The optional `vad_diar_off` mode turns detection off and
bills the full audio duration.

- Price: **$0.10 per speech-hour**, prepaid, and shown to you before you confirm a purchase.
  Minimum top-up: **10 hours ($1.00)**.
- Free allowances are granted per period at Verbi's discretion and are not purchased credit.
- Billing follows delivery: speech is charged only after the response carrying its transcript has
  reached you. A request that fails or disconnects before delivery costs nothing; on the optional
  utterance stream you are charged for exactly the speech whose transcript frames were
  delivered to you.
- The detection of speech is performed by an automated meter whose accuracy is verified daily
  against human-timed reference audio. If you believe a bill is wrong, get in touch with the
  `request_id` — every response carries one.

Credit you have already bought is honoured at the price you paid, and `/v1/pricing` always carries
the price in force. If the price changes, accounts with a verified address are given **30 days' notice**
by email; for any account, a change only ever affects purchases made after it.

## 4. Refunds

- **Unused prepaid credit is refundable on request within 12 months of purchase**, less any amount
  already consumed. Ask from the account's registered address if it has one, from the address on
  your Stripe receipt with the receipt to hand, or with an authenticated request on the account
  itself. Refunds go to the original payment method and never to a different one, so a request from
  the wrong address cannot redirect your money.
- **Delivered transcription is not refundable** — the service was rendered.
- **If the Service fails you** — it is unavailable, or a request is billed without delivering its
  transcript — report it and the affected speech-hours are credited back to your balance, or
  refunded if you prefer. This is the remedy for service failure and is in addition to the
  refund right above.
- Free allowance has no cash value and is not refundable.
- **Deleting your account forfeits any unused prepaid credit on it.** Account deletion is
  self-service and permanent, so it is asked for twice: the first call only shows you what would be
  removed, including the exact credit at stake, and the confirmation has to repeat that figure
  before it will run. Ask for the refund *before* you delete — once the account is gone what was
  forfeited is still visible, and a claim made within the 12-month window above is honoured, but
  the account and the credit cannot be restored.

## 5. Acceptable use

You must have the right to send the audio you send, including any consent required from the
people recorded. You must not use the Service to:

- process audio you have no lawful right to process, or that was obtained by unlawful recording;
- attempt to identify individuals from audio in a way that breaks applicable law;
- probe, overload, or circumvent the Service's limits, or evade free-allowance caps;
- resell raw access in a way that is materially indistinguishable from reselling the Verbi API, without
  a written agreement.

A key that is breaking these rules may be suspended, and you are told why. Unused prepaid credit on
a suspended account is refundable under §4 unless the breach was fraudulent.

## 6. Availability, limits, and support

Limits are published at `/v1/pricing` and in `/llms.txt` (per-file cap, concurrency, and network
limits). High availability is the aim, but the standard Service is offered **without a service-level
agreement**; an SLA is available with committed-volume agreements — get in touch. Service health is
monitored continuously and incidents affecting your account are notified by email where a verified
address is on file; a public status page, which is how every account will see them, is in
progress.

Support is by email at contact@verbi.services. Replies come as promptly as is reasonable.

## 7. Your content and Verbi's

You keep every right in the audio you send and the transcript you receive. You grant Verbi only the
narrow, temporary licence needed to process the audio in order to produce your transcript — nothing
more. **Models are never trained on your audio or transcripts.**

Verbi keeps every right in the Service itself.

## 8. Warranties and liability

The Service is provided **"as is"**. Automatic speech recognition is imperfect: transcripts may
contain errors, and accuracy varies with audio quality, accent, background noise and content type.
**Do not rely on a transcript as the sole basis for a decision with legal, medical, financial or
safety consequences without human review.** To the fullest extent permitted by law, implied
warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement are disclaimed.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Verbi's total liability arising out of or relating to the
Service is limited to **the greater of (a) the amount you paid Verbi in the 3 months before the event
giving rise to the claim, or (b) $100**. Neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special
or consequential damages, or for lost profits or data.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

## 9. Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time; unused credit is refundable under §4. You may also
close your account yourself at any time, from the API, which deletes the account, every api key on
it, and its usage history — see §4 on what that does to unused credit. Verbi may terminate
or suspend for breach of §5, for non-payment, or on 30 days' notice for any other reason — in which
case unused prepaid credit is refunded in full.

## 10. Changes to these terms

These terms may be updated. Material changes are announced by email to accounts with a verified
address, and by publishing the updated terms with a new date — that publication is the notice for
any account that cannot be reached at a verified address. A material change takes effect 30 days after the
published date, and continued use after that is acceptance. The current version is always at
https://verbi.services/terms, with the date it was published.

## 11. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the **Province of Québec and the federal laws of Canada
applicable there**, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and the courts of the district of
Montréal have exclusive jurisdiction — except that either party may seek injunctive relief in any
competent court, and except where mandatory consumer-protection law gives you the courts of your
own residence. If any provision is unenforceable, the rest stands.