Terms of Use

By accessing or using Chessco (“the Service”) you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

We may update these Terms. The current version is always available at this URL with its effective date. Material changes will be communicated to signed-in users by email or in-app notice at least 14 days before they take effect.

Chessco is operated by Foto Master LLC (“we”, “us”), a Delaware limited liability company at 1013 Centre Road, STE 403-B, Wilmington, DE 19805, United States, doing business as Chessco.

The Service is currently in beta. Paid features described in our public roadmap (subscription tiers and the in-product credits economy) will be made available through Paddle, our merchant of record, when launched.

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. Residents of the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and other jurisdictions with a higher digital-services age of consent must be 16 or older, or have verifiable parental consent.

You are responsible for keeping your sign-in credentials secure and for activity on your account. Notify us at support@chessco.org if you believe your account has been compromised.

Scout identifies likely chess.com and Lichess accounts for a named player using public rating-list data and statistical match against the games we have indexed. Scout output is a best-guess ranked list, not a determination of identity, and should not be relied on as proof of who controls an account.

Prepare fetches public games for an account you specify and builds an opening tree and per-line statistics. We do not represent that our copy of a player's games is current to the moment. There is always some lag between the source platform and our index.

Practice lets you publish a position from your prep work and play it against another user. Free practice exchanges no credits; paid practice spends 1 credit per game from the publisher and rewards the opponent 1 credit per completed game. Any future paid feature will require an additional click-through agreement before you can use it.

Credits are an internal, non-monetary balance used to spend on and earn from features of the Service. Credits have no cash value and are not money, currency, securities, or stored-value instruments. They are not redeemable, transferable, or withdrawable for cash or any other form of value outside the Service, and they are not subject to the rules that apply to deposit accounts, prepaid access, or e-money.

Credits are granted to you (for example as a signup bonus, a subscription benefit, a referral reward, or as a reward for completing paid practice games) and consumed when you publish a paid practice challenge or unlock certain features. Subscription credits expire at the end of each billing cycle; other credit grants do not expire unless we disclose a different expiry at the time of the grant.

We may modify, suspend, expire, or revoke credit balances at any time, including to address suspected abuse such as collusion, multi-account farming, fraud, or violations of these Terms. We may impose caps on how many credits can be earned in a given window or from a given counterpart. We are not obligated to refund credits in cash under any circumstance.

Paid plans on the Service are sold on a subscription basis. Payments may be processed by Paddle, our merchant of record. We do not store your full card details. Paddle handles billing, invoicing, and the calculation and remittance of applicable sales tax, VAT, GST, or equivalent indirect taxes where required.

Refunds. You may cancel and request a full refund within 14 days of your initial paid charge without giving a reason. After the 14-day window, fees are non-refundable except where required by law or expressly approved by us. Subscription credits that you have already consumed during a refunded period will not be clawed back.

Cancellation. If you signed up online, you may cancel online. Cancellation stops future renewals but does not reverse fees already incurred unless required by law or expressly approved.

Plan changes. You may upgrade or downgrade your subscription at any time. Upgrades take effect immediately and credits granted by the new tier are added to your balance; downgrades take effect at the end of the current billing cycle. We do not pro-rate downgrades.

You agree not to:

• Use the Service to harass, dox, impersonate, or target any person.
• Scrape, crawl, or systematically extract data from the Service except via documented public endpoints used within reasonable rate limits.
• Use Scout output as the basis for any high-stakes decision about a real person, including but not limited to employment, contracting, fraud allegations, or tournament-integrity rulings. Scout is a probabilistic tool, not an identification service.
• Violate the terms of service of any third-party platform (including chess.com and Lichess) through your use of Chessco.
• Attempt to bypass any rate limit, authentication, or access control on the Service.
• Use the Service for cheating in chess, including in matches arranged through it.

When you link a chess.com or Lichess account to your Chessco profile, you authorize us to read public data about that account on an ongoing basis, plus any additional data the platform exposes to us after you complete the platform's verification step. You can unlink at any time from your account settings; we will stop refreshing data from the unlinked account, though already-indexed historical games may remain in the index subject to our removal policy (see Privacy Policy §4).

You retain ownership of any content you submit (uploaded PGNs, prep notes, profile details). You grant Chessco a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, copy, and process that content solely to provide and improve the Service.

The Chessco name, mark, original written content, UI, and code are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by intellectual-property law.

Indexed third-party chess data (including games, ratings, titles, and federation information) belongs to its respective sources. Lichess game data is published by Lichess under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal dedication. Other sources rely on their own public-availability terms; we operate within those terms and honour removal requests as described in the Privacy Policy.

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, OR ACCURACY.

Without limiting the foregoing: Scout matches are statistical estimates and may be wrong; opening trees may be outdated; rating data may have ingest lag. Do not treat any Service output as authoritative.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Chessco and its operators will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or any loss of profits, revenue, data, or goodwill, arising from your use of the Service.

Our aggregate liability for any direct damages arising from the Service is capped at the greater of (a) the total fees you paid to us in the 12 months immediately preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) fifty US dollars (USD 50).

You agree to indemnify and hold Chessco and its operators harmless from any claim or demand, including reasonable attorneys' fees, made by any third party arising from your breach of these Terms, your user content, or your violation of any third party's rights.

We may suspend or terminate your account for material breach of these Terms or for conduct that risks harm to the Service or to other users.

You can delete your account at any time from your settings page or by writing to support@chessco.org. Sections that by their nature should survive termination (intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, governing law) will survive.

These Terms are governed by applicable law as determined by Chessco. Before filing a formal claim, you agree to contact us and attempt to resolve the dispute informally.

Questions about these Terms? Email support@chessco.org.