§ 1 Scope and contracting parties
These terms govern the use of the software and software-related services offered under the trading name Autenova (“Autenova”). Your contracting party is the business identified in the legal notice; the details given there — provider, address and contact — form part of these terms.
They apply to all services provided by Autenova, whatever the product, the platform or the form of delivery. What is owed in an individual case follows from the description of the offer in question; these terms apply in addition. Any differing terms of the customer do not become part of the contract unless Autenova agrees to them in text form.
Where a service is bought through the shop, this creates two separate contracts:
- The contract of sale is concluded with Paddle.com Market Limited, 30 Old Bailey, London EC4M 7AU, United Kingdom (registered in England and Wales, company number 8172165), or the Paddle entity responsible for your location as set out in Paddle’s buyer terms. Paddle acts as the seller (“merchant of record”), issues the invoice, handles payment and is the addressee of any withdrawal. Paddle’s own terms apply to it.
- The use and service contract covering use of the service, access to updates and support is concluded with Autenova. These terms apply to it.
In that case, please direct questions about payment, invoicing, refunds and withdrawal to Paddle, and questions about the service, your access and support to Autenova.
Services not sold through the shop — in particular separately agreed professional services — are invoiced by Autenova itself. Fees, scope and schedule are then agreed individually; these terms apply in addition to those agreements as well.
§ 2 What is being supplied
Autenova provides services in three forms. Which of them your contract covers is stated in the description of the offer:
- Software you install yourself — programs that run in your own environment, together with updates and support.
- Services provided from Autenova’s servers — services accessible over the network for the duration of the contract.
- Individual professional services — setup, customisation, development, migration, training and comparable work, agreed as a one-off or on a time-and-materials basis.
Where software is distributed under an open source licence — for Autenova’s WordPress extensions this is the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later (GPL-2.0-or-later) — the rights granted by that licence are unaffected by these terms. This covers in particular use, copying, modification and redistribution of the program code. Nothing here restricts those rights or is intended to. The licence applying to a given piece of software is stated in the software itself and in its description.
In that case, what you pay for is therefore not the program code, but access to the following:
- updates delivered through Autenova’s update service,
- support as set out in § 6,
- activation of the paid features for the duration of the term.
§ 3 Credentials, licence keys and activations
To obtain a service you receive a means of access — depending on the service, a licence key or a user account. It is a personal means of access to the services under § 2 and is not part of the software.
A licence key permits activation on the number of installations stated for the tier you purchased; the figure shown during the order process governs. Activations can be released at any time and moved to a different installation.
Means of access must not be published, passed on, sold or otherwise made available to third parties. This restriction applies to the means of access only; it does not affect the rights under § 2. Please keep credentials safe and tell us if you suspect misuse.
If a means of access is published or used on a scale that substantially exceeds the tier purchased, Autenova may block it after prior notice and a reasonable period. Installed software remains usable regardless (§ 5).
§ 4 Term, renewal and cancellation
For services provided on a term basis, the term is one year, running from the point at which access is made available, and it renews automatically for a further year unless you cancel. Individual tiers are additionally offered on a monthly term, which renews monthly. The figure shown during the order process governs.
You can cancel at any time. The cancellation takes effect at the end of the term you have already paid for — there is no notice period, and no commitment beyond the term in progress. No refund is due for the remainder of that term; you keep access, updates and support until it ends.
Cancel through your subscription management at Paddle, or informally by contacting Autenova, in which case Autenova will pass the cancellation on to Paddle. Each party’s right to terminate for good cause remains unaffected.
Individual professional services under § 2 have no term; they end when they have been performed.
§ 5 What happens when the term ends
For software you have installed yourself, nothing is switched off when the term ends or the contract is cancelled. The installed software remains usable and, where a free edition exists, falls back to its feature set. Content and settings you have already created are kept.
What ends are the paid features, access to updates and support. Features that depend on a live connection to Autenova are then no longer available; the description of the offer states which those are.
For services running on Autenova’s servers, access ends with the contract — there is no other way for such a service to work. We keep the data you have stored in that service available for retrieval for a further 30 days after the contract ends and delete it thereafter; we will delete it sooner on request.
Exporting your own data is possible on every tier, including after the term has ended, in a common machine-readable format.
§ 6 Support
During the term you are entitled to support by e-mail at support@autenova.com, in German and English.
Support covers help with setting up and operating the service and the handling of bug reports. It does not cover adaptation to individual requirements, development of new features, debugging third-party software, or general consulting on the environment in which the service runs. Such work can be agreed separately as a professional service under § 2.
§ 7 Your cooperation
Services performed in your environment require your cooperation. You provide the necessary access, information and contacts in good time and ensure that the technical prerequisites stated in the description of the offer are met.
Backups are your responsibility. Before any intervention in an existing system, you create a complete, restorable backup. Autenova carries out work on production systems only where such a backup exists.
Delays caused by cooperation not being provided are not attributable to Autenova; agreed dates shift accordingly.
§ 8 Rights in work product
In the results of individually commissioned development and customisation work, you receive, upon payment in full, a non-exclusive right, unlimited in territory and time, to use them for your own purposes, including the right to modify them. Any rights beyond that are agreed separately.
Where work product is based on software under an open source licence, that licence applies to the result and takes precedence over this provision.
Autenova remains entitled to make further use of general knowledge, experience and reusable building blocks that arise or are used in the course of the work. Your data, your content and your internal business information are excluded from this.
§ 9 Licence checks and technical data transmission
To verify entitlement and deliver updates, installed software transmits the following to Autenova’s server: the licence key, an installation identifier, the address of the installation, and the version numbers of the program and of the environment it runs in. No other data is transmitted; in particular, no usage or content data is collected.
Details are set out in the privacy policy.
If Autenova’s server is temporarily unreachable, the entitlement is treated as valid. A fault on Autenova’s side does not cause loss of functionality.
§ 10 How we handle personal data
How personal data is processed, and on what basis, is set out in the privacy policy. Beyond its statutory obligations, Autenova undertakes the following for all of its services:
- Data minimisation. We collect only what is required to provide the service. The privacy policy states which data that is for each service.
- Pseudonymisation wherever an identifier is enough. Where a purpose does not require a plain value, we do not store one: installations are tracked by a derived identifier, and in our own data stores IP addresses are held only as a non-reversible check value. IP addresses do occur in the server logs that operation technically requires; they are not analysed there and are kept only for as long as secure operation requires.
- Anonymisation instead of retention. Where data is needed beyond performance of the contract — for debugging, statistics or further development — we use it only in anonymised or aggregated form, with no reference to any particular person, installation or customer. An anonymised data set is not re-linked to personal data.
- Support and diagnostic data. Anything you give us for debugging — logs, extracts from data stores, screenshots — is used only for the case reported and deleted once that case is closed. If a case is pursued beyond that, the data is anonymised first. We ask you to remove personal data before sending it wherever you are able to.
- Credentials. Access you grant us for a service is used only for the agreed purpose and only for as long as the service lasts. We delete it on our side afterwards; we recommend that you also revoke it.
- No secondary use. Customer data and data from customer installations is not sold, not rented out, not used for advertising, not combined into profiles, and not used to train AI models.
- Disclosure only where the service requires it. Data reaches third parties only where this is necessary to provide the service — for example payment processing, hosting and mail delivery. Those recipients are named in the privacy policy; where they process on our behalf, a contract under Art. 28 GDPR is in place.
- Processing on your behalf. Where, in the course of a service, Autenova is given access to personal data for which you are the controller, we process it solely on your instructions. We will enter into a contract under Art. 28 GDPR on request and at no additional charge.
- Deletion when the contract ends. After the contract ends, data stored to provide the service is deleted or anonymised as soon as it is no longer needed. Excluded is whatever must be retained by law, in particular invoices and accounting records. Such data is restricted for the duration of the retention period and not used for any other purpose.
- Incidents. If we become aware of a personal data breach affecting you, we will inform you without undue delay and tell you what we know and what we are doing about it.
§ 11 Domains, servers and infrastructure
Where services are provided from Autenova’s servers, the servers, storage, network connectivity, configurations, scripts and monitoring tools remain Autenova’s property and operating resources. You acquire no rights in them; what you receive, for the duration of the contract, is access to the agreed service. This also applies to environments set up specifically for you.
If you run the service in your own environment or with a provider of your choosing, this section does not apply; the infrastructure is then yours.
Domains that Autenova registers or administers for you are held and looked after by Autenova for the duration of the contract: registration, renewal, technical records and dealings with the registry all run through Autenova. While the contract is running, Autenova alone controls the domain.
At the end, however, the domain remains yours to take. At your request — and at the latest when the contract ends — Autenova will transfer the domain to you or to a provider you name, and will supply whatever the registry requires to do so (release, auth code, transfer request). Any fees charged by the registry and the new provider are yours to pay.
Your content, your data and your credentials remain yours in every case; § 5 applies to them.
§ 12 Warranty and liability
Statutory provisions apply.
For claims arising from the contract of sale — in particular payment, invoicing and refunds — Paddle is your contracting party (§ 1).
§ 13 Changes to these terms
Autenova may change these terms with effect for the future where the change is reasonable. You will be notified in text form at least six weeks before a change takes effect. If you do not object within that period, the change is deemed accepted; the notification will draw your attention to this consequence separately. If you do object, either party may terminate the contract with effect from the date the change would take effect.
For any individual purchase, the version in force at the time of the order governs.
§ 14 Final provisions
German law applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. Mandatory consumer protection provisions of the country in which the consumer is habitually resident remain unaffected.
Should any provision of these terms be invalid, the validity of the remaining provisions is unaffected.
§ 15 Precedence of separate agreements
Where you and Autenova have entered into a separate agreement for a service — an accepted quotation, a project or framework contract, an agreement on response times, or a data processing agreement — its provisions take precedence over these terms to the extent that they differ from them.
These terms then govern everything the separate agreement does not cover. They do not fall away; they step back behind it, point by point.
We ask that such agreements be recorded in text form — not as a condition of their validity, but so that what applies can be looked up later. An individually negotiated agreement takes precedence in any event under § 305b of the German Civil Code, whatever its form and whenever it was made.