Terms of Service

Last updated: July 26, 2026

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your use of Eloist at eloist.com, operated by Starfish Engineering (“we”, “us”). By using Eloist, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

1. Acceptance of terms

By creating an account or otherwise using Eloist, you accept these Terms and our Privacy Policy. If you use the service on behalf of an organization, you represent that you are authorized to accept these Terms on its behalf.

2. Description of the service

Eloist fetches your public Chess.com or Lichess game history and analyzes it to surface the recurring mistakes costing you rating, along with analytics, a descriptive “chess style profile”, insights, and AI-generated coaching. The service is provided for analysis and entertainment. It is not professional coaching, and nothing in it is financial, investment, or other professional advice. We make no guarantee that using Eloist will improve your rating or results.

3. Accounts and eligibility

You must be at least 13 years old to use Eloist, or at least 16 in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom. You are responsible for activity under your account and for keeping your login secure. You agree to provide accurate information and to only connect a Chess.com or Lichess username that you have the right to use.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Scrape, crawl, or bulk-download the service, or access it through automated means we have not authorized.
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract source code or underlying models.
• Interfere with, overload, or disrupt the service or its infrastructure.
• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to any account, system, or data.
• Use the service to break the law or to infringe anyone’s rights.

5. Subscriptions, purchases and billing

Eloist offers an optional “Pro” subscription, currently $12/month or $99 per year, processed by Stripe. You pay the price shown at checkout when you subscribe, and it keeps applying to your renewals until we give you notice of a change. Subscriptions auto-renew for the same period until canceled. You can cancel anytime through the Stripe billing portal; cancellation stops future renewals and your Pro access continues until the end of the current billing period.

Eloist also offers Eloist Deep Scan, a one-time purchase of $7, also processed by Stripe. It is not a subscription: it does not renew, and there is nothing to cancel. It entitles you to one engine pass over the full game archive of the chess account you have connected (rather than only the most recent games a free account gets analyzed) and to the leaks and drills we derive from that pass. Very large archives are sampled across your playing sessions rather than analyzed game by game. A Deep Scan is bought once per account, and it does not include the Pro subscription’s ongoing benefits: after the scan, new games are not analyzed automatically.

A Deep Scan is queued and runs on our servers, so it completes some time after purchase rather than immediately. Once your scan has run, the purchase is non-refundable except where required by law. If it has not run, or if you were charged more than once for it, email us and we will refund it.

Except where required by law, subscription payments are non-refundable and we do not provide refunds for partial billing periods. We may change our prices; any change will apply to your next renewal after we give you notice.

6. Third-party services and chess platform data

Eloist relies on third-party services (including Supabase, Vercel, Stripe, Resend, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, PostHog, and Vercel Analytics) and on the Chess.com and Lichess public APIs as the source of your game data. Your use of the service may also be subject to those providers’ own terms.

You represent that you have the right to the Chess.com or Lichess data associated with the username you connect. We access only data that Chess.com and Lichess make publicly available through their public APIs. Eloist is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Chess.com or Lichess. “Chess.com” and “Lichess” are trademarks of their respective owners.

7. Intellectual property

The Eloist name, software, design, analytics, and content (excluding your underlying game data) are owned by Starfish Engineering and protected by intellectual-property laws. We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service for your personal use. You retain any rights you have in your own game data.

8. Disclaimers

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any analysis or AI output will be accurate. AI-generated coaching may be incomplete or wrong; use your own judgment.

9. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Starfish Engineering will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, profits, or goodwill, arising from your use of the service. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or US $50.

10. Termination

You may stop using Eloist and delete your account at any time from your account page. Deleting is not the same as cancelling: it ends an active subscription immediately rather than at the end of the period, and, as section 5 says, we do not refund partial periods; if you have just paid, write to us before you delete. Analysis filed under the public chess handle you connected is shared with anyone else who connected it and is not removed; our Privacy Policy sets out exactly what deletion removes and what it does not.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you violate these Terms or if we reasonably need to protect the service or other users. Sections that by their nature should survive termination will survive.

11. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we do, we will revise the “Last updated” date above. Your continued use of the service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

12. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the United States and the State of Delaware, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. You agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts located in Delaware for any dispute that is not otherwise resolved.

13. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Email Starfish Engineering at shaun@starfish.engineering.