Terms of Use

Effective date: 2026-05-29 · Last updated: 2026-05-29 · Version 2

These Terms govern your use of commoditizationstack.org and the application it hosts (the "Service"), accompanying the working paper The Cost Gradient of the Build (ISBN 978-65-02-13475-7). By creating an account or otherwise using the Service you agree to these Terms.

Statutory rights preserved. Nothing in these Terms reduces or waives any right granted to you by mandatory consumer-protection law in your country of residence — including but not limited to the Brazilian Código de Defesa do Consumidor (Law 8.078/1990), Marco Civil da Internet (Law 12.965/2014), the EU Consumer Rights Directive and Brussels I-bis / Rome I, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and the equivalent statutes elsewhere. Where a clause below would conflict with such a mandatory rule, the mandatory rule prevails over the clause and the clause is read as narrowly as needed to preserve the rest.

1. What the Service is

The Service provides interactive valuation, scenario-saving, and Multidimensional Technology Readiness assessment tools derived from the framework described in the working paper. It is offered as research and decision-support software — not as regulated financial, investment, accounting, tax, or legal advice. Outputs are heuristic and depend entirely on the inputs you provide.

Four operating modes. The home page offers four entry points into the same computational engine: (a) Explore the framework — reproduces the paper's figures using the NeuroCertify and DataFlow Pro case companies; (b) Value your company — 11-step workflow for the founder valuing their firm for fundraising or M&A; (c) Defend your project — 9-step workflow for the intrapreneur building a business case for an internal project, without cap table or funding round; and (d) Teach a cohort — instructor-orchestrated university classes or corporate-training cohorts (coming soon). The four modes share the same valuation engine and the same regulatory floor described in these Terms.

Account-free local mode and account mode. The Service operates in two modes equivalent in functionality, which the user freely chooses:

• Local mode — no account or registration required. All scenarios, answers, and parameters stay exclusively in the browser on the user's device. The operator has no access to these data; nothing is sent to a server. The Service is fully usable in this mode, including offline. The safekeeping, protection, and continuity of local data is entirely the user's responsibility: the operator holds no copy, cannot recover data deleted by the user or by the browser, and is not liable for losses resulting from clearing storage, switching browsers, losing the device, or third-party access to the browser profile. The Service provides instruments to mitigate these risks — exporting a JSON archive and activating the local vault with a passphrase (AES-GCM-256 encryption at rest) — whose use is optional and at the user's discretion.
• Account mode — optional. An account is created to enable cloud sync of scenarios and access from any device. This mode triggers the data collection documented in the Privacy Policy.

The Service's interface indicates, on every relevant screen, which mode the user is working in. The choice may be reverted at any time — signing out returns the browser to local mode with no loss of local data.

2. Eligibility and account

Local mode: using the Service without an account carries no age restriction imposed by these Terms. It remains the user's or legal guardian's responsibility to observe the legislation applicable in their jurisdiction.

Account mode: you must be 18 years or older to register on your own. Adolescents 12–18 may create an account only with documented authorisation from a parent or legal guardian sent in advance to the DPO (LGPD art. 14). Children under 12 may have an account only with specific written parental consent (LGPD art. 14 §1°).

You are responsible for keeping your password and any session cookie confidential, and for all activity under your account. If you suspect unauthorised access, request a password reset and a session reset by contacting the DPO.

3. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• access another user's account or data;
• scrape, mirror, or rate-abuse the Service beyond the published rate limits;
• process personal data of third parties through the Service without a lawful basis under applicable privacy law;
• upload payloads containing malware, secrets you are not authorised to share, or content that is unlawful to transmit;
• reverse-engineer the Service in a way that exceeds what is permitted by the underlying open-source licence.

4. Intellectual property

The application source code is published at github.com/commoditizationstack/commoditization-stack under the MIT Licence. Copy, modify, and reuse it under those terms.

The working paper, its figures, and the prose of this site are not covered by the MIT Licence. You may quote and cite them under academic fair use, with attribution; substantial republication requires the operator's written permission.

Your scenarios are yours. We do not claim ownership over the inputs or outputs you produce in the Service. You retain the right to extract them at any time via the data-export tool.

5. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is"for research and educational use. Subject to Sections 7 (best-effort) and 8 (limitation of liability with consumer-protection carve-outs) below:

• Valuation outputs are illustrative; they are not investment recommendations.
• The TRL → WACC adjustment is a documented heuristic, not a calibrated econometric estimate.
• Capital-needs alerts use "consider", "typical", and "order-of-magnitude" language and are not financial advice.

6. Automated outputs and human review

You may request human review of any automated output the Service produced for you, by emailing the Data Protection Officer with a copy of the scenario JSON. The Service does not use its automated outputs to make decisions about you — they are produced for you, to inform your own decisions.

7. Best-effort delivery

The Service is provided on a best-effort, "as-is" basis, in keeping with the open-source development model under which its code is published. The expression "best effort" means the operator commits to applying reasonable diligence and currently available technology, but does NOT guarantee any specific outcome beyond that diligence.

The operator commits to:

• Maintaining the Service to the best of available technology and the operator's reasonable capacity;
• Applying security patches and updates as known vulnerabilities become public, within reasonable time;
• Investigating reported bugs in good faith and patching them when feasible;
• Disclosing security and personal-data incidents transparently per the timelines in the Privacy Policy (LGPD art. 48 / GDPR art. 33);
• Honouring data-subject rights within the statutory deadlines (LGPD art. 18 §3°: 15 days; GDPR art. 12: one month).

The operator does NOT guarantee:

• Uninterrupted availability or a specific uptime SLA;
• Bug-free or error-free operation;
• Specific response times to feature requests, general support questions, or bug reports outside of the legal deadlines listed above;
• That the methodology, formulae, segment templates, or heuristics published in the working paper or implemented in the Service will produce numerically calibrated results for any specific business context;
• Continued availability of the Service beyond the operator's reasonable capacity to maintain it. If we ever need to wind it down, we commit to giving signed-in users at least 30 days' notice and a data-export window.

Best-effort delivery applies to the provision of the Service itself. It does NOT override:

• Mandatory consumer-protection rights under the Brazilian Código de Defesa do Consumidor, EU Consumer Rights Directive, UK Consumer Rights Act 2015, or any equivalent statute applicable to you;
• The operator's data-protection obligations under LGPD, GDPR, ePrivacy, CCPA / CPRA, or Marco Civil — these are statutory and not subject to a best-effort caveat;
• The carve-outs to the limitation of liability in Section 8 below (fraud, wilful misconduct, gross negligence, personal injury).

Documentation of the methodology. The operator further commits to documenting the methodology used to develop the Service's compliance posture (including the AI-assisted self-review under docs/lgpd-analysis.md), the encryption posture, the audit-log retention rules, and the deletion-approval workflow in publicly versioned git so that the diligence is verifiable independently of any claim made in this document.

8. Limitation of liability — with mandatory carve-outs

Subject to the carve-outs below, to the extent permitted by law the operator's aggregate liability arising out of or related to the Service is limited to the amount you paid to use the Service in the twelve months before the claim. The operator is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages.

The limitation above does NOT apply to, and nothing in these Terms limits or excludes:

• liability for fraud, wilful misconduct (dolo), or gross negligence (culpa grave) — preserved by Brazilian Civil Code art. 393 and equivalent rules elsewhere;
• liability for personal injury or death caused by our negligence;
• your rights under Brazilian Consumer Code (CDC) arts. 6, 8, 12, 14, 18, 20, 39 and the strict-liability regime for service defects (CDC art. 14) — CDC art. 51 IV renders abusive limitations void ab initio;
• your rights under mandatory consumer-protection law in your country of residence (EU Consumer Rights Directive, UK Consumer Rights Act 2015, California Civil Code § 1668, etc.);
• our obligations under LGPD, GDPR, CCPA / CPRA, and any other personal-data protection statute. LGPD art. 42 establishes joint and several liability that no contract may waive.

9. Termination

You may close your account at any time via the two-step flow on Account settings. The operator may suspend or terminate access if you materially breach these Terms or if it becomes impractical or unsafe to continue the Service. We will give you reasonable advance notice unless an immediate suspension is necessary to protect other users or to comply with a legal order. On termination, your data is handled as described in the Privacy Policy, Section 6.

10. Privacy

How we handle your personal data is documented in the Privacy Policy, which forms an integral part of these Terms.

11. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. Material changes are announced on the landing page, in the changelog, and (for signed-in users) by email at least 15 days before they take effect. Continued use of the Service after a material change constitutes acceptance.

12. Governing law and forum

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Federative Republic of Brazil. Disputes will be resolved in the courts of São Paulo, SP, Brazil except where:

• you are a consumer resident in Brazil — in that case CDC art. 101 I gives you the right to file in your own domicile, which prevails;
• you are a consumer resident in the EU/EEA — Brussels I-bis (Regulation 1215/2012) arts. 17–19 give you the right to file in your country of residence, which prevails;
• you are a consumer resident anywhere else and your local law gives you a stronger forum-selection right — in that case your local rule prevails.

Questions: contact the administrator.