Terms of Service

1. Who we are

These terms govern your use of Proofwire, a service operated by Armillary Sphere LLC, a Texas limited liability company ("we", "us"). Our registered address is Austin, Texas 78735, United States. You can reach us at hello@armillaryspherellc.com.

By placing an order you agree to these terms. If you are ordering for a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

2. What we sell, precisely

We distribute press releases to a partner network of news and syndication outlets, and we then check what was published.

We guarantee submission. We do not guarantee publication. Whether any given outlet runs your release is that outlet's editorial decision, and no distributor can promise otherwise. Anyone who tells you they can is describing something they do not control.

We also do not promise:

• that a placement will remain online permanently — syndicated pages are routinely removed, and your report records only what was live when we checked;
• any search-engine ranking, traffic or conversion outcome;
• that a link will pass search-engine credit. Most press links do not;
• that any AI assistant will cite your release.

3. Your content

You keep ownership of everything you send us. You grant us a licence to reproduce, format and transmit it to our partner network for the purpose of distributing it, and to display excerpts and the resulting URLs in the report we deliver to you.

You confirm that:

• you own the content or have permission to publish it;
• it is accurate and not misleading;
• it does not infringe anyone's rights, and does not defame anyone;
• you have permission for any third-party name, trademark, logo or quotation in it.

Releases run 250 to 1,200 words with one image and up to five outbound links. The word range and the link cap are the distribution network's own limits; the single image is ours, because the brief form collects one. A release under 250 words is refused at intake, so we will tell you before anything is sent rather than after.

4. Categories we do not accept

We do not distribute releases for gambling, adult content, or pharmaceutical and supplement products. Our payment processor prohibits some of these categories outright, and the networks we buy from reject the content. We would rather tell you before you pay than fail afterwards.

We also decline anything unlawful, deceptive, or that a network's editorial policy refuses. If we decline your release for any of these reasons before submitting it, you pay nothing.

5. Editorial check, and the order of things

Every release is checked automatically, before it is submitted and at no charge, against category bans that wires publish and the structure they expect. A release whose wording reads as gambling or betting, adult content, supplements or pharmaceuticals, or firearms is held for a person before any cost is incurred with the network. Anything else the check flags does not hold your release; it is submitted as you wrote it.

Payment comes first, then you send us the release, then the check, then distribution. Our stated turnaround runs from when your release reaches us, not from payment — we cannot start a clock on copy we do not have.

6. Refunds

If we cannot submit your release to the network at all — we hold it and conclude it will not be accepted, or the network declines the category — we refund the order in full. That decision is made within 48 hours of your release reaching us, before any cost is incurred with the network.

If we have not submitted your release to the network within 48 hours of receiving final copy, you may cancel for a full refund, for any reason and without asking us why. That right lasts for exactly as long as the release is still sitting with us: it opens when the 48 hours pass, and it closes the moment we submit. We can offer it unconditionally because of when it applies — an unsubmitted release has cost us nothing with the network, so there is no case where honouring it is expensive enough to argue about — and the same fact is why it ends at submission rather than outliving it: once the release has gone out, the cost has gone with it. So if you want to use it, tell us before we submit. We will stop, and you get everything back. It covers the part of the process that is ours: our review and our submission. It does not cover how quickly the network then publishes, or whether a given outlet runs it, because neither is ours to promise.

Once a release has been submitted, the order is not refundable on the basis of which outlets chose to publish it. That is an editorial decision we do not control and cannot honestly sell against. Where you bought a specific named placement as its own line item and the network itself returns it as rejected, we refund that line.

7. What we report, and its limits

After distribution we open the URLs the network reports, up to 300 per release, and check them. Your report sorts every placement into one of three sections, and each row carries the outcome we can evidence:

• Live (verified) — we opened the page and found your release on it;
• Submitted, awaiting review — it is queued, sent, or sitting with an editor, and has not resolved yet. Rows can still be here when a report is delivered;
• Not accepted — the publisher declined it, it was published and later removed, or a page the network reported was not there when we checked.

Some outlets exclude automated checks in their robots.txt, or answer automated requests with a challenge. We honour those exclusions. Those rows are marked for a person to confirm instead, and are never reported as missing on the basis that a machine could not reach them.

Domain ratings are published only where we can attribute them to a source. Where we cannot, the report says so rather than printing a figure.

8. Payment

Payments are processed by Stripe. We never receive or store your full card number. Prices are in US dollars and exclude any tax that applies to you.

9. Your account

Access to your orders uses a single-use link sent to your email address. Keep access to that mailbox secure; anyone who can read it can see your orders.

10. Liability

We provide the service with reasonable skill and care. To the extent the law allows, our total liability for any claim arising from an order is limited to the amount you paid for that order.

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

We are not liable for an outlet's editorial decisions, for a publisher removing a page after publication, or for how a search engine or AI system treats a published page. None of those are within anyone's control.

11. Changes

We may update these terms. When we do, the revised version is published on this page and the date at the top of it changes; that dated version is the notice, and we do not email you about every edit.

The version that applies to your order is the one published when you placed it. A change we make later cannot alter an order you have already paid for, which is why posting is enough — nothing we publish here can reach backwards into work you have already bought.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute arising out of them or out of your order will be brought exclusively in the state courts of Travis County, Texas, or the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, Austin Division, and both of us consent to the jurisdiction of those courts and waive any objection that they are an inconvenient forum. Nothing here stops either of us bringing a qualifying claim in a small-claims court.

13. Your indemnity

Your release is written to be published. We submit it under our own account, and outlets put it on their own sites, so a complaint about what it says arrives at our door and at theirs — not only at yours. Section 3 is where you confirm the content is yours to publish; this is what happens if that turns out not to be true.

You will indemnify us — Armillary Sphere LLC, the people who work for us, and our distribution partners — against any third-party claim, demand or proceeding, and any loss, damage, fine, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or connected with:

• the content you send us, including a claim that it defames someone, infringes a copyright, trademark or other right, breaches a confidence or an embargo, or is inaccurate or misleading;
• any breach of the confirmations you gave in section 3, or of section 4;
• your use of the service, and anything published as a result of it.

We will tell you promptly about a claim we expect you to cover, and we will not settle it in a way that admits fault on your behalf without asking you. You may not settle a claim in a way that requires us to admit fault, or to pay or do anything, without our agreement. If you do not defend a claim, or the claim also concerns something that is not your content, we may take over the defence and you cover our reasonable costs of doing so.

The cap on our liability in section 10 limits what we owe you. It does not limit what you owe under this section.

14. Refusing, pausing or ending an order

We may refuse an order, pause work on one, or end it, if:

• the release falls into a category in section 4, or breaks a confirmation you gave in section 3;
• we reasonably believe distributing it would expose us, an outlet or a reader to a legal claim or to harm;
• our distribution partners decline it, or our payment processor reverses, holds or disputes the payment for it;
• you do not give us the copy, the approval or the named contact an order needs, after we have asked for it;
• you ask us to send something we have already told you we will not send.

Money already paid is dealt with under section 6, and nowhere else — there is no second, softer policy running alongside it. If we end an order because we will not submit the release, nothing has been spent with the network and you are refunded in full; section 4 says the same thing about the categories we decline. Once a release has been submitted, the money is spent and section 6 is the whole of what is owed.

One case sits outside all of that, and we would rather say so than let you find out later: if an order ends because the copy, the approval or the named contact never reached us, the clock in section 5 never started and the cancellation right in section 6 never opened. These terms promise no refund there.

Ending an order does not end the parts of these terms meant to outlast it. The licence in section 3, and sections 6, 10, 12, 13, and 16 to 19, continue to apply.

15. Events outside our control

We are not liable for a delay in, or a failure of, anything we owe you here where the cause is outside our reasonable control. For this business that mostly means one thing: an outage, suspension, refusal or policy change at our distribution partners or at an outlet, or a failure of a network, hosting, payment or email provider we depend on. It also covers the ordinary list — fire, flood, epidemic, war, civil unrest, industrial action, and any act or restriction of a government or regulator.

What this section does not do is move the refund. If we have not submitted your release within 48 hours of receiving final copy, section 6 applies whatever the reason for it, including a reason nobody could have avoided. An unsubmitted release has cost us nothing, so there is nothing here for us to argue about and we do not intend to argue about it.

If an event like that runs for more than 30 days and your release still has not been submitted, either of us may end the order, and section 6 settles the money.

16. Transferring this agreement

We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another business — including to a buyer of this business or its assets, or to a company in the same group — without asking you, provided the transfer does not reduce what you are owed on an order you have already placed. You may not transfer yours without our written consent, which we will not withhold unreasonably.

We use subcontractors to do the work — our distribution partners are exactly that — and we stay responsible to you for the parts of the service these terms say are ours.

17. Notices

Notices to you go to the email address on your order. That address is the operative one: it is where the order confirmation, the sign-in link and the report all go, so keep it current and keep it readable. A notice sent there counts as given whether or not you read it.

Notices to us go to hello@armillaryspherellc.com, with the order reference in the subject line where you have one. A message left in a chat window, sent to a social media account, or sent as a reply to marketing email is not notice under these terms and may not reach anybody.

An emailed notice counts as given on the day it is sent, unless it bounces back undelivered — in which case it was not given, and the sender should try again by another route.

18. If part of these terms does not hold

If a court decides that part of these terms cannot be enforced, that part is read as narrowly as it can be while still working, or treated as removed if it cannot work at all. The rest of these terms carry on unaffected. One clause failing does not take the others with it.

If we do not enforce something straight away, or at all, we have not given it up.

19. The whole agreement

These terms, the description of the package you bought, and the order confirmation we sent you are the whole agreement between us for that order. They replace anything said beforehand that is not in them — on a call, in an email, or on another page of this site. Where another page of this site says something different, these terms are the ones that count.

Nothing in this section limits your rights in respect of anything we said fraudulently.