The deal, in plain terms.

Status: draft, not yet effective. Applies to: the avano.app website and the Avano messenger application (pre-release).

1. Who we are

Avano is a metadata-minimizing communications tool. It will be operated by an Estonian private limited company (osaühing) that is being registered. Its name, registry code and address will be printed here and on the imprint when the registration is complete; until then these terms are not in force and no contract is offered. We name no party we have not confirmed.

2. Pre-release, and provided as it is

• Avano is early-access, pre-release software. It may contain defects, it will change, and it may be interrupted or discontinued. Described capabilities that this site marks as planned or in progress are not available today.
• The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure against every adversary — our limits page sets out precisely what we do and do not claim, and it is part of what you are agreeing you have been told.
• Nothing on this site or in the app is a guarantee of anonymity. We do not promise that any communication is untraceable or impossible to intercept, and we ask you not to read anything we publish that way.
• There is no backup and no export. If you lose your device, your messages are gone and we cannot recover them. Your recovery phrase, together with the recovery helpers you chose, restores your identity and your contact list, never your history; “Move to a new phone” carries the same to a new handset over your local network while you still have the old one.
• Notifications cannot always reach you. Avano alerts you the moment mail lands while it is running, but no push service carries your messages: nothing reaches an iPhone once Avano leaves the screen, because it locks itself and iOS suspends it, and no message alert appears while an Android phone is locked. On Android, turning on message alerts and the optional “Stay connected” service together keeps Avano receiving in the background and lets a call ring a locked phone; otherwise messages wait at the relay until you open Avano. If timely delivery matters to you, Avano may not be the right tool.
• No emergency calls. Avano cannot reach emergency services. It cannot call 112 or any other emergency number, and it sends nobody your location in an emergency. Use your phone's own dialler.
• A small-company exemption, said before you agree. While the company that runs Avano is a micro-enterprise and offers no other communications service, the end-user contract rules of Estonia's Electronic Communications Act (its chapter 9, which carries the European Electronic Communications Code's contract rules, such as a contract summary) do not apply to it. Your other consumer rights are not affected.

3. Acceptable use

Avano is a lawful communications tool and you agree to use it lawfully. You must not use it to:

• break a law that applies to you, or facilitate serious harm to another person;
• sexually abuse or exploit a child in any way, including grooming, or create, request, share or store child sexual abuse material. This is forbidden to every user in every country. We cannot see what you send, so we cannot find it; if you know of it, write to us at [email protected], and report it to the police or to a hotline such as those listed by INHOPE (inhope.org);
• use it if you are under 13, or under the age at which you can agree to these terms where you live (16 in parts of the EU): we collect nothing that tells us your age, so we rely on you for this;
• attack, overload or attempt to compromise a relay, the network, or other users — except for good-faith security research disclosed to [email protected] (the address in our /.well-known/security.txt), which we actively want;
• distribute modified builds as official, or represent something we have not endorsed as endorsed by us.

Because of how Avano is built, we cannot read what you send and we cannot monitor content. That is deliberate and it is not going to change. The one thing we do see is in the privacy policy: during a call, our call relay sees both callers' IP addresses and when the call starts and ends. Responsibility for lawful use is therefore yours, and stating this is not a way of avoiding a duty — it is a description of a capability that does not exist.

4. Your keys and your device

• Your identity rests on a key held on your device and a recovery phrase only you hold; the app keeps no copy of the phrase. If you lose them we cannot recover anything — there is no account on our side, no reset, and no support process that could verify you. Anyone claiming to offer one is not us.
• If you think someone else may have seen your recovery phrase, you can retire it from your phone. The phone makes a new identity with new words, which you must write down; your old words stop opening your account on that phone; and each contact is asked to check your new safety number with you before their phone accepts the change, and refuses your old identity once they have. It does not undo what the old words already opened elsewhere, recovery helpers must be set up again, and your existing groups go on under your old identity, so someone you meet afterwards cannot be added to them, only to a new group.
• The security of your device is your responsibility. As the threat model says plainly, a compromised device defeats any messenger, this one included.

5. Fees

The messenger is free. There is nothing to buy today. Cover traffic is free, not a paid feature, and runs by default for everybody: your phone polls the relay at a constant rate and sends at a constant rate, padding the gaps with decoys, so someone watching the network cannot tell when you send a message; how many messages you sent over a quarter of an hour, and every photo or file you send, still show. It costs about 750 MB a month and you can turn it off on a metered plan. It hides you from the network, not from our own relay, and the part that would also hide how much you receive is a separate switch in Settings (with it on, each check of your chats' message queues, and the acknowledgement after it, is the same size whether or not mail arrived; each chat's cover and older queues are still checked one by one), off by default, because it costs about 1.4 GB a month more. We keep it free and on by default because a privacy feature only some people have marks the people who have it.

If a paid tier is ever offered, it will cover things that do not change your traffic shape, and its terms and price will be presented before any purchase. What consumer rights would attach to such a purchase, given that we deliberately do not know who the customer is, is an unanswered question.

6. Intellectual property and licence

The Avano name and branding belong to the operating entity. The source code is licensed AGPL-3.0-or-later; it is not yet published, and when it is, that licence governs it. These terms do not grant you rights in our trademarks.

7. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising from your use of pre-release software, and total liability is limited to the amount you have paid us — which, for a free product, is nothing. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury, for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence, or any other liability that cannot be limited by law. Some jurisdictions do not permit these limitations, and where that is so they do not apply to you.

This section in particular requires review. Consumer-protection rules in several jurisdictions limit what a contract may exclude, and a clause that is void is worse than a narrower one that holds.

8. Ending it, and changing it

You can stop using Avano at any time, and erasing your identity in the app removes everything on your device. There is nothing on our side to close. We change the service only for a good reason, such as improving it, keeping it secure or following the law; when a change takes away something you rely on, we say so in the app before it takes effect, and you can stop using Avano instead. We may also suspend or end it for a good reason, such as security, the law, or the project ending, with reasonable notice in the app where we can give it. We change these terms only to follow the law, to describe a change in the app, or to fix a mistake; we tell you in the app before a change takes effect, you are asked to agree again, and you can stop using Avano instead. Each version is posted here with its date.

9. Governing law

These terms will be governed by the law of Estonia, and the Estonian courts (Harju County Court, Tallinn) will have jurisdiction, from the day the operating company is registered there. Nothing in this section takes away protections you cannot waive under the law of the country where you live, including a consumer's right under EU law to bring a claim in their own courts.

10. Contact

Questions about these terms: [email protected], or by post to the company's registered address, which will be printed here and on the imprint when the registration is complete. A person reads both.