Terms of service

Silent Fail watches for a signal that does not arrive. You create a monitor, it gives you a URL, and your automation requests that URL each time it finishes. If a request does not arrive within the schedule plus the grace period you set, we email you. When pings start again, we email you once more to say so.

That is the whole product. One down email per outage and one all-clear. Email is the only channel; there is no SMS, no Slack app and no phone call.

There is no uptime guarantee, no service level agreement and no credit scheme, and this section is the important one. Silent Fail is a monitoring tool that can itself go down, be unable to send mail, or have its alert land in a spam folder. When that happens you get silence, and silence is exactly what a working monitor also looks like most of the time.

So: do not make this the only thing standing between you and a consequence you cannot absorb. If an automation moves money, or a missed run costs more than the subscription, it needs a safeguard that does not depend on us as well. The honest description of this product is that it substantially raises the odds you find out quickly, not that it guarantees you will.

We may change how the service works, and features may be added or removed. If a change removes something you were relying on, the account address gets an email about it.

You need a working email address, and it needs to be one you actually receive, because it is where every alert goes. An account whose address bounces is a monitor that cannot do its job.

So we check. Signing up sends a confirmation link, and until you follow it you can sign in and look around but cannot create a monitor. That is deliberate: a monitor whose alerts go nowhere is worse than not having one, because it looks like cover. You can have the link sent again from the dashboard at any time.

Keep your password to yourself; anything done through your account is treated as done by you. If you think someone else has access, reset the password — doing so ends every other signed-in session on the account immediately.

One person or one organisation per account. You must be able to enter a contract, and the service is not intended for children.

The plan sets how many monitors the account may have. These are the current plans, and the page renders them from the same configuration the application enforces:

The limit applies in two places. You cannot create a monitor beyond it: the form is withheld and the action itself refuses. And if your plan goes down so that you are over the limit, the excess is switched off — described under cancelling below, because that is when it usually happens.

Only monitors that are actually being watched count against the limit. A switched-off monitor does not occupy a slot, so it never costs you the ability to create one.

Paid plans are billed monthly in advance through Paddle, which is the merchant of record for the transaction. That means your contract for the payment itself is with Paddle: they take the money, hold the card details, issue the invoice and handle tax. We never see your card.

Prices are in US dollars and exclude any tax Paddle is obliged to add for where you are. If a price changes, it will not change for you without notice to the account address first.

You can cancel at any time. The subscription runs to the end of the period you have already paid for; when Paddle reports it as cancelled, the account returns to the free plan.

Nothing is deleted, ever. Not the monitor, not its settings, not its ping history. A subscription lapsing must not cost you your configuration, so a plan going down never removes anything.

What does happen: if you have more monitors than the new plan covers, the excess is switched off. A switched-off monitor is genuinely not watched — it raises no alerts — so it is worth being blunt that this is a real reduction in cover, not a cosmetic flag.

Which ones stay on is decided by what is demonstrably in use: the most recently pinged are kept, and the quietest are switched off first. That choice is made immediately and automatically, because leaving the account over its limit until you pick would mean either the limit is not real or everything stops, and both are worse.

It is a default, not a verdict. You get an email naming exactly which monitors were switched off — every one of them, not a count — and a link to a page where you can choose a different set, up to whatever the plan allows. Monitoring that stops without telling you is the failure this product exists to catch, so we do not do it quietly to our own customers.

Their ping URLs keep working and keep returning success. Your automations will not start failing because of a billing change on our side. And if you upgrade again, the switched-off monitors come back on by themselves, up to the new limit.

The first payment on an account is fully refundable for 7 days, no questions asked. After that, renewals are not refundable as of right and unused time is not pro-rated, but we will refund at our discretion where the service genuinely failed through our fault. Paddle processes the refund either way, as merchant of record.

The full policy — what qualifies, how to ask, and what a refund does to your account — is on the refunds page.

The ping endpoint exists to receive a request from your own automation. Do not point it at someone else’s system, use it to relay or amplify traffic, or otherwise make it part of an attack. Do not try to reach another account’s data. Do not create accounts automatically to get around a plan limit.

Load that materially degrades the service for other people is not acceptable either. There is no published rate limit on pings; the working rule is that a monitor should ping about as often as its schedule says, not thousands of times a minute.

Signing in, signing up and requesting a password reset are rate limited. Repeated failed sign-ins get progressively slower rather than locking the account, so someone guessing at your password cannot lock you out of it. If you are ever slowed down by this in normal use, tell us and we will look at the limit.

You can stop using the service whenever you like, and ask for the account to be deleted by email. We can suspend or close an account for a breach of the section above, or if we are required to. Where the situation allows for it, you get an explanation and a chance to put it right first.

If Silent Fail shuts down altogether, active subscribers get notice by email, in time to arrange something else, and are not billed for a period they cannot use.

The service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, Silent Fail is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and total liability for any claim is limited to what you paid in the twelve months before it arose. On the free plan, that is nothing, which is the trade you are making by not paying.

Specifically: we are not liable for what a stopped automation cost you. Deciding whether that risk is one this product can carry is the reason the second section above is written as plainly as it is. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

The date at the top is the last time this page changed. Material changes are emailed to the account address before they take effect, and continuing to use the service after that is acceptance. If you would rather not accept, cancel — that is what the notice period is for.

Questions go to contact@silentfailapp.com.