BALANCED SUM END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

*** DRAFT — REQUIRES ATTORNEY REVIEW BEFORE LAUNCH ***
*** This document has NOT been reviewed by a lawyer. Do not treat it as   ***
*** binding, complete, or enforceable until it has been. It is a plain-  ***
*** language starting point for that review, written by the product's   ***
*** own developer to capture intent — not a substitute for counsel.      ***

Last drafted: 2026-08-01
Last revised: 2026-08-08 — Section 5 now discloses the aggregate request
counts kept by the website (downloads and version checks: running and
per-day totals, with nothing recorded about the request or the requester).
Previously revised 2026-08-05 — the product was renamed from its earlier
working name, which was not available; the terms themselves are unchanged,
except that Section 5 describes the Section 7 version check explicitly and a
contact address for notices was added.
Product: Balanced Sum (name pending trademark registration — see "Ownership"
below)
Contact: support@balancedsum.com — the address to use for any notice,
question, or support request under this agreement. It is email only; there
is no phone line and no support portal.

This is the agreement between you (the person or business installing and
running Balanced Sum) and the owner of Balanced Sum (referred to below as "we,"
"us," or "the owner") for your use of the software. By downloading,
installing, or running Balanced Sum, you agree to these terms.

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1. WHAT YOU'RE GETTING
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Balanced Sum is software you download once and run on your own computer. It
is not a hosted service, and we do not operate any part of it on your
behalf.

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2. GRANT OF LICENSE
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We grant you a free, non-exclusive license to install and use Balanced Sum:

  - for personal use, commercial use, or both;
  - on as many computers as you like, and for as many companies/books as
    you like, so long as they are computers and companies you own or
    control (for example: your own business, a nonprofit you run, or a
    client's books you manage as a bookkeeper or accountant on their
    behalf, with their knowledge).

There is no license fee, no subscription, and no usage limit imposed by
this license itself.

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3. RESTRICTIONS — WHAT YOU MAY NOT DO
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You may NOT:

  - redistribute, resell, sublicense, rent, lease, or otherwise make
    Balanced Sum (in whole or in part, modified or not) available to any
    other person or business as if it were your own offering or a
    product you are distributing;
  - publish, host, or distribute a derivative work, fork, or modified
    version of Balanced Sum to anyone else, including making your own
    modified copy of the source code publicly or privately available to
    third parties (modifying your own local copy for your own use is
    fine — see Section 6; sharing that modified copy with someone else
    is not);
  - remove, obscure, or alter any copyright, trademark, or license
    notice contained in Balanced Sum;
  - use the Balanced Sum name, logo, or branding to imply that a product,
    service, or fork you distribute is affiliated with, endorsed by, or
    sponsored by the owner, without our prior written permission.

Running Balanced Sum for your own business, or on behalf of a client whose
books you manage, is USE — not distribution — and is allowed under
Section 2 even though a client is, technically, "another person." What's
restricted is giving someone else their own copy of the software (the
zip, the source, an installer) to run independently, or offering it to
the public as a product or service.

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4. OWNERSHIP
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Balanced Sum, including its source code, design, and documentation, is and
remains the property of the owner. This license gives you the right to
use it under the terms above — it does not transfer any ownership to you.

"Balanced Sum" is a name the owner intends to register as a trademark; that
registration may not be complete as of any given release. Whether or not
registration is complete, you may not use the name to brand, market, or
imply endorsement of anything other than your own use of the unmodified
software under this license.

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5. YOUR DATA
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Your books, and everything in them, belong to you. Balanced Sum is designed
to run entirely on your own computer:

  - We do not collect, receive, or have access to your data. There is no
    telemetry — nothing about your books, your company, or how you use
    the software is ever transmitted. The one and only outbound
    connection the software makes is the optional version check described
    in Section 7: a request for a public file listing available versions,
    at most once a day when you start the app. It sends nothing but the
    request, it can be switched off entirely (leave UPDATE_FEED_URL blank
    in your .env), and everything else works identically with no internet
    connection at all.
  - The one measurement that does exist is a count. Our web server keeps
    a tally of how many version-check requests arrive and how many
    downloads are taken from the website: a running total and a total per
    calendar day. Nothing about the request, the machine, or the person
    making it is recorded — no IP address, no identifier, no version of
    yours (the software does not send one) — so those totals cannot be
    attributed to you or to any individual copy. They are described in
    full on the privacy page at balancedsum.com.
  - Your data is stored in a database that runs on your own machine (or a
    machine you control), not in any cloud service we operate — because
    we do not operate one.
  - Backups, exports, and everything else your data touches stay under
    your control, on storage you choose.

We cannot access, restore, or recover your data for you, precisely
because we never have it. Backing up your own data is your
responsibility (Balanced Sum includes tools to help — see the
documentation), and losing it because you didn't keep backups is not
something we can help you undo.

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6. YOUR OWN MODIFICATIONS
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Because the zip you download contains readable source code (see the
"Honesty note" at the end of this document), you are able to read it and
change it for your own use. You may modify your own local copy of
Balanced Sum for your own use. What you may not do is distribute that
modified copy to anyone else (Section 3) or claim the modified version is
an official Balanced Sum release.

We provide no support, warranty, or update path for a modified copy — the
guarantees in Sections 7 and 8 below apply only to Balanced Sum as we
distributed it to you.

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7. UPDATES
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Updates to Balanced Sum, when we release them, are free — there is no
separate charge to update to a newer version. Updates are optional and
user-initiated: Balanced Sum may check whether a newer version is available
and tell you about it, but it will never download or install anything
automatically. You choose if and when to update, following the steps in
UPDATING.md.

We may change, discontinue, or stop releasing updates for Balanced Sum at
any time, for any reason, without obligation to continue supporting any
particular version. Nothing in this agreement guarantees any specific
future release, feature, or timeline.

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8. NO WARRANTY
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BALANCED SUM IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE,
AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. THE OWNER DOES NOT WARRANT THAT BALANCED SUM WILL BE
ERROR-FREE, UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, OR THAT ANY DEFECT WILL BE CORRECTED.
YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR VERIFYING THAT BALANCED SUM'S OUTPUT (INCLUDING
FINANCIAL REPORTS, BALANCES, AND ANY DATA IMPORTED FROM ANOTHER SYSTEM)
IS ACCURATE AND SUITABLE FOR YOUR PURPOSES, INCLUDING TAX FILING AND ANY
OTHER LEGAL OR REGULATORY USE. BALANCED SUM IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR ADVICE
FROM A LICENSED ACCOUNTANT, BOOKKEEPER, OR ATTORNEY.

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9. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY
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TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
OWNER BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR
PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, OR BUSINESS
OPPORTUNITY, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE
BALANCED SUM, EVEN IF THE OWNER HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE OWNER'S
TOTAL LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY CLAIM ARISING FROM THIS AGREEMENT OR YOUR
USE OF BALANCED SUM SHALL NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNT YOU PAID FOR BALANCED SUM
(WHICH, AS OF THIS RELEASE, IS ZERO).

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain
warranties or damages, so some of the above limitations may not apply to
you in full.

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10. TERMINATION
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This license is effective until terminated. It terminates automatically,
without notice, if you breach any of its restrictions (Section 3). We may
also terminate it if you materially breach this agreement and fail to
correct that breach within a reasonable time after being notified. Upon
termination, you must stop using Balanced Sum and destroy any copies of it
in your possession — except that this does not affect your ownership of,
or right to continue accessing, your own data, which was always yours
(Section 5) and was never part of what this license covered.

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11. GOVERNING LAW
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This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of [STATE], without
regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. [PLACEHOLDER — to be finalized
by counsel; jurisdiction/venue for disputes should be specified here as
well.]

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12. CHANGES TO THIS AGREEMENT
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We may update this agreement in future releases. The version included
with the release you downloaded is the one that applies to your use of
that version.

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HONESTY NOTE — WHY THIS ZIP CONTAINS READABLE SOURCE CODE
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Balanced Sum is a Node.js application. Unlike a compiled program, there is
no practical way to distribute it as an unreadable binary without
fundamentally changing how it's built and run — so the download you
received contains its actual source code, same as it exists in
development. "Closed source" here is not a technical measure; it is this
license (Sections 2 and 3): you're free to use the software, including
reading its code to understand or adapt it for your own use, but you are
not free to redistribute it, publish a modified version, or offer it to
others as a product or service. We'd rather tell you this plainly than
have you discover it and wonder if it was an accident.
