Terms of Service

§ 1. Quick summary

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are a binding agreement between you and WhyItFailed. They govern your use of whyitfailed.fyi and the diagnostic service offered there (the “Service”). By visiting the site, submitting a diagnosis, or purchasing credits, you accept these Terms. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the Service.

§ 2. Who these terms cover

In these Terms, “you” means the person using the Service. “We,” “us,” or “our” means WhyItFailed, the operator of the site.

These Terms apply alongside our Privacy Policy and Affiliate Disclosure, both of which are incorporated by reference.

§ 3. Eligibility

• You must be at least 16 years old to use the Service. If you are under 18 (or under the legal age of majority in your jurisdiction), you may use the Service only with the involvement of a parent or legal guardian who agrees to these Terms on your behalf.
• You must be capable of entering into a legally binding contract under the laws of your jurisdiction.
• You must not be a person prohibited from receiving services under applicable law (for example, on a US embargoed-country list).
• If you are using the Service on behalf of an organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization.

§ 4. The service

WhyItFailed accepts a photo of a failed 3D print plus optional context (printer, slicer, filament, free-text description) and returns an AI-generated diagnosis: a primary problem, three ordered fixes, alternative possibilities, and an optional Amazon affiliate link to a relevant product where appropriate.

The AI is provided by a third-party model vendor (currently Anthropic’s Claude API). The Service is the application wrapper around that model — the prompt engineering, the printer context library, the form, the result rendering, the credit and feedback infrastructure, and the affiliate-link resolver.

We may add, remove, or change features at any time. We may suspend the Service for maintenance, abuse mitigation, or to comply with the law.

§ 5. Your account & device ID

You don’t need to create an account to receive a free diagnosis. We assign your browser a random device ID (stored as a cookie) so we can enforce the free-trial limit and, after a purchase, associate credits with your device.

When you purchase credits, you provide an email address through our payment processor (Stripe) at checkout. After the purchase we send you a magic-link sign-in URL so your credits can follow you across devices. You are responsible for keeping that email account secure. Anyone with access to your email can use any unspent credits.

We may revoke or rotate device IDs and magic links if we reasonably believe they’ve been compromised.

§ 6. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Use the Service to upload or process content that is illegal, harmful, harassing, sexually explicit, or violates any third party’s rights.
• Upload images that are not photographs of 3D-printed objects in an attempt to abuse our AI capacity. We may detect and block this; you bear the cost in credits and we may suspend access.
• Attempt to reverse-engineer, scrape, or systematically extract content from the Service, the diagnoses we return, or our prompts.
• Use the Service to compete with us, train competing models, or build a derivative dataset.
• Resell or sublicense access to the Service, share credits in bulk without authorization, or use multiple devices to circumvent the free-trial limit.
• Probe, scan, or test the security of the Service. Responsible disclosure is welcome — email support@whyitfailed.fyi with the word “Security” in the subject.
• Submit content with the apparent intent to manipulate our affiliate-tracking, click-rate, or feedback metrics.
• Use the Service in any way that violates applicable law, including sanctions, export control, intellectual property, privacy, and consumer protection laws.

We can suspend or terminate access for any conduct that violates this section. We may also report illegal activity to authorities.

§ 7. Credits, pricing, and renewals

The Service runs on a credit model:

• Prices are in U.S. dollars and exclude any applicable taxes.
• One credit is consumed per diagnosis. Refining a diagnosis with additional context counts as a new diagnosis and consumes a credit.
• Credits do not expire under normal circumstances. We may set a reasonable expiration if we discontinue the Service or a billing partner becomes unavailable, with notice.
• We do not run subscriptions. There are no recurring charges. Each credit purchase is one-time.
• Prices may change. New prices apply only to credits purchased after the change.

§ 8. Refunds

Credits and individual diagnoses are non-refundable by default. They’re a low-cost, instantly-fulfilled digital good and the cost to us of generating the AI response is incurred at the moment the diagnosis runs.

That said, we’re a small operation and want you happy. If a diagnosis was unhelpful, the Service was unavailable, or you were charged in error, email support@whyitfailed.fyi within 30 days of the charge with the word “Refund” in the subject. We’ll review on a case-by-case basis. Approval is at our reasonable discretion. Approved refunds are issued back to the original payment method, typically within 5–10 business days.

Nothing in this section limits non-waivable rights you may have under your local consumer protection laws (for example, statutory cooling-off periods in the EU/UK).

§ 9. AI-generated advice — please read this

The diagnoses produced by the Service are generated by an AI model and may be wrong, incomplete, or unsuitable for your specific situation. You acknowledge and agree:

• Diagnoses are guidance, not professional service. They are not a substitute for proper inspection, diagnosis, or repair by a qualified person.
• You will exercise your own judgment before acting on a diagnosis. Some recommendations involve hot, sharp, electrical, or pressurized components; doing them incorrectly can cause property damage, personal injury, or fire.
• Recommendations that involve modifying your printer, changing temperatures beyond manufacturer specifications, or bypassing safety features should be evaluated against your manufacturer’s documentation and, where in doubt, a qualified service technician.
• We do not guarantee that following a diagnosis will fix your print, save your filament, restore your printer, or be economically beneficial.
• The AI model may identify the wrong failure mode, misinterpret what’s in the photo, recommend a product that’s incompatible with your printer, or suggest an action that voids your printer’s warranty. The decision to act is yours.

By using the Service, you assume all risk of acting (or not acting) on the diagnoses we provide. See Sections 15 and 16 for the legal effect of this acknowledgement.

§ 10. Your content

You retain all ownership rights to the photos and text you submit (your “User Content”). You don’t transfer ownership to us by using the Service.

You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to:

• Process User Content for the purpose of producing a diagnosis, including transmitting it to our AI provider (currently Anthropic’s Claude API).
• Store derived metadata about a diagnosis (your selected printer, slicer, filament, the AI’s response, your feedback flag) in our database for the operational lifetime of the Service.
• Use anonymized, aggregated information about diagnoses (e.g., “X% of users with Bambu A1 Mini chose PLA”) to evaluate and improve the Service. We do not publish identifiable User Content.

We do not store image bytes — see Section 9 of the Privacy Policy.

You represent and warrant that you have the rights necessary to upload your User Content and that doing so does not violate any third party’s rights or any law.

§ 11. Our content

The site, the prompts, the printer-context library, the diagnostic format, the codebase, the brand, and all other elements of the Service (collectively, “Our Content”) are owned by WhyItFailed or our licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark, and other laws.

The diagnosis returned to you for a specific request is licensed to you under a non-exclusive, worldwide license to use it personally for the purpose of fixing your print. You may share a specific diagnosis URL we issue, save the text for your own reference, and act on the recommendations. You may not:

• Resell, sublicense, or commercially redistribute diagnoses or aggregated outputs in a way that competes with us.
• Train AI models on a corpus of our diagnoses without our prior written consent.
• Remove or alter any attribution, FTC disclosure, or affiliate disclosure that accompanies a diagnosis.

§ 12. Third-party services

The Service depends on third parties (Anthropic for AI inference, Stripe for payments, Supabase and Vercel for infrastructure, Amazon for affiliate links, and others listed in our Privacy Policy). Your use of those third-party services is governed by their own terms and privacy policies. We are not responsible for outages, policies, or actions of those third parties beyond the operation of our integration with them.

§ 13. Affiliate links

Some diagnoses include a link to Amazon for a product the AI recommends. We participate in the Amazon Associates Program and may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. Our recommendations are not paid placements; we don’t accept compensation from any specific brand. See our Affiliate Disclosure for the full FTC-compliant statement.

§ 14. Suspension & termination

You can stop using the Service at any time by closing your tab. You may request deletion of any account or stored records per the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or terminate your access immediately if we reasonably believe you have violated these Terms, are abusing the Service, or that your continued access creates legal or technical risk to us or our users. Where practical we will give you notice and an opportunity to cure.

On termination, the licenses you grant us in Section 10 continue for derived data and aggregate analytics; the licenses we grant you in Section 11 end. Sections that should reasonably survive termination (Sections 9, 10, 11, 14–21) survive.

§ 15. Disclaimers

The service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, statutory, or otherwise.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we expressly disclaim all warranties, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, and any warranties arising from course of dealing or trade usage.

Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, we make no warranty that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, error-free, or that any diagnosis will be accurate, reliable, complete, or appropriate for your specific situation. The AI model is probabilistic and may produce incorrect or harmful recommendations.

Some jurisdictions don’t allow exclusion of certain warranties. If you live in one, the disclaimers above apply to the maximum extent permitted by your local law and you may have additional rights.

§ 16. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, WhyItFailed will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenues, data, use, goodwill, or other intangible losses, arising out of or related to your use of the Service.

Our aggregate liability to you for all claims arising from or relating to the Service in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us during that period, or (b) USD $20.

Some jurisdictions don’t allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages. To the extent any limitation is unenforceable, our liability remains limited to the smallest amount permitted by law. The above does not limit liability for gross negligence, willful misconduct, fraud, death, personal injury caused by our negligence, or any liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law.

§ 17. Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless WhyItFailed and its operators from and against any third-party claims, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or related to:

• Your User Content;
• Your use or misuse of the Service;
• Your violation of these Terms or applicable law;
• Your violation of a third party’s rights, including intellectual property or privacy rights.

We’ll let you know about any covered claim and reasonably cooperate with your defense at your expense. We may also retain control of the defense of any claim that reasonably could affect our other users.

§ 18. Governing law & disputes

Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, U.S.A., without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

Informal resolution first

If you have a dispute with us, please contact support@whyitfailed.fyi first and try to resolve it informally. We will do the same. Either party may proceed to formal dispute resolution if the dispute is not resolved within 30 days.

Binding individual arbitration

Any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by JAMS under its Streamlined Arbitration Rules, held in San Francisco, California, or by video conference at the arbitrator’s discretion. The arbitrator’s award is binding and may be entered as a judgment in any court of competent jurisdiction.

Class action waiver

You and we agree that any proceeding will be brought only in individual capacity, not on a class, collective, consolidated, or representative basis. The arbitrator may not consolidate proceedings.

30-day arbitration opt-out

You may opt out of the arbitration and class-waiver provisions within 30 days of first accepting these Terms by emailing support@whyitfailed.fyi with the words “Arbitration opt-out” in the subject and your name and email used at purchase in the body. Opting out does not affect any other part of these Terms.

Small-claims and injunctive carve-outs

Either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court for disputes that qualify. Either party may seek injunctive or equitable relief in court for intellectual-property infringement without going to arbitration first.

EU and UK consumers

If you are a consumer resident in the EU or UK, mandatory consumer protection laws of your country of residence apply in addition to these Terms. Nothing here removes the consumer rights you have under those laws, and you may bring a dispute in the courts of your residence to the extent local law requires.

§ 19. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms as the Service evolves. The “Last updated” date at the top reflects the most recent change. For material changes, we’ll surface a banner on the homepage for at least 14 days and email any user with active credits whose email we have on file. Continued use of the Service after the effective date of a change is your acceptance of the new Terms.

§ 20. Miscellaneous

• Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and the Affiliate Disclosure are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service. They supersede prior agreements.
• Severability. If any part of these Terms is unenforceable, the rest remains in effect.
• No waiver. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign them to a successor in interest (for example, in an acquisition) on notice to you.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for failures caused by events outside their reasonable control (acts of God, war, embargoes, internet outages, denial-of-service attacks, etc.).
• Notices. We may give you notice via email or through the Service. You give us notice via email at the address in Section 21.
• Headings in these Terms are for convenience and do not affect interpretation.

§ 21. Contact

For questions about these Terms, support, refunds, abuse reports, or anything else, email support@whyitfailed.fyi. Please use a descriptive subject line so we can route your request — e.g., “Refund,” “Privacy,” “Security,” “Dispute.”