Terms of Service - Smarkdown

The short version

Smarkdown is free to use for personal and commercial purposes. It is provided as-is, with no warranty. Do not upload illegal content. Do not abuse the service. We reserve the right to rate-limit or block abusive traffic.

Who provides this service

Smarkdown is provided by Mycelium Consulting Limited, registered in England and Wales (registered office: 30 Westgate, Otley, LS21 3AS). For brevity, "we", "us", or "Smarkdown" in these terms refers to Mycelium Consulting Limited.

Acceptance

By using smarkdown.xyz or our API at api.smarkdown.xyz, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

Permitted use

You may use Smarkdown:

To convert documents you own, or have permission to convert.
For personal, commercial, academic, or any other lawful purpose.
Programmatically via the API, subject to rate limits.

Prohibited use

You agree not to:

Upload malware, viruses, or files designed to exploit the service.
Upload content you do not have the legal right to process.
Upload content that is illegal under UK law (including child sexual abuse material, terrorist content, or content that violates intellectual property).
Attempt to overwhelm the service, scrape it at industrial scale, or circumvent rate limits.
Resell the conversion service as a paid product without prior written agreement.

Rate limits and fair use

The free service has per-IP rate limits (default: 30 requests per minute). These are subject to change. Sustained abuse may result in temporary or permanent IP blocking. If you need higher limits for a legitimate use case, get in touch.

File handling

How we handle your files is described in detail in our Privacy Policy. In short: PDFs are processed in your browser. Other formats are converted on a stateless server and deleted immediately after the response.

Service availability

Smarkdown is provided "as-is" and "as-available". We do not guarantee uptime, conversion accuracy, or that the service will meet your specific requirements. We may change, suspend, or discontinue any part of the service at any time without notice.

Conversion accuracy

Document conversion is best-effort. Complex layouts, scanned PDFs, embedded fonts, password-protected files, and unusual formats may not convert perfectly. Always review the output before using it for critical purposes.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Smarkdown and Mycelium Consulting Limited shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of the service. Total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you have paid us, which (for a free service) is zero.

Intellectual property

You retain all rights to the documents you upload and the converted output. We do not claim any ownership over your content. The Smarkdown name, logo, and site design are the property of Mycelium Consulting Limited. The Smarkdown source code is open source on GitHub; refer to the LICENSE file in the repository for source-code terms.

Third-party services

The conversion engine is built on top of Microsoft's MarkItDown (open source). PDF compression uses Ghostscript. OCR uses Tesseract. We host on Hetzner (Germany) and Netlify (global). Your use of Smarkdown is also subject to the relevant terms of these underlying providers where applicable.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. Material changes will be posted here with an updated "Last updated" date and (where significant) highlighted on the homepage for at least 14 days.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. Any dispute will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

Contact

Questions? Email hello@smarkdown.xyz or use the contact form.