LakehouseBox — Terms of Service

Version: 30 October 2026
Effective: 20 October 2026
Provider: Lakehousebox, S.L., calle Bárbara de Braganza, 2, 2ª planta, 28004 Madrid, Spain, NIF B05742093

1. Who we are and what this is

1.1 Lakehousebox, S.L. ("LakehouseBox", "we") operates LakehouseBox, a managed Apache Iceberg lakehouse: an Iceberg REST catalog, an S3-compatible object store, a control plane API, a command-line tool and a website, all run by us in Frankfurt, Germany (the "Service").

1.2 These Terms are a contract between LakehouseBox and the organisation or person that opens an account ("you", the "Customer"). By creating an account, or by using the Service, you accept them.

1.3 The Service is for businesses, public bodies, researchers and developers acting in a professional capacity. It is not offered to consumers. You must be at least 18 years old and, if you act for an organisation, authorised to bind it.

1.4 These documents are part of the contract: the Data Processing Agreement (where you store personal data in the Service) and the Privacy Policy. The Acceptable Use Policy is clause 6 of these Terms. If they conflict, the Data Processing Agreement prevails for personal data, then these Terms, then the other documents.

2. Accounts and organisations

2.1 An account is created with a verified email address, in one of two ways. On the website, we send a single-use link to the address, valid for 3 days; the account exists once you use it to set a password, which we store only as a hash. From the command-line tool, we send a six-digit one-time code to the address, valid for 10 minutes; the account exists once the code is entered, and no password is involved. Clause 2.5 describes the one exception: a catalog an agent makes before anyone has an account.

2.2 An account holder creates an organisation, or joins one by invitation. An organisation may claim a company email domain once it has proved control of the domain with a DNS record; if it then enables it, later account holders with an address on that domain are offered membership and join only if they accept. Nobody is added to an organisation by their email domain alone, and someone who left or was removed is not offered it again for twelve months. Public mail domains (for example gmail.com) cannot be claimed. Organisations have admins and members.

2.3 You are responsible for everyone who acts under your organisation's accounts, including automated agents you give credentials to.

2.4 A human may sign in with email and password, or with a passkey, on the account page at lakehousebox.com/app/ and there create API keys, or approve a command-line tool through the device-approval flow. You may add a second factor to password sign-in with an authenticator app (enabling it also gives you single-use backup codes), or add passkeys to sign in directly or to complete that second step. Sign-in with third-party identity providers is not offered on the managed Service at the moment.

2.5 Catalogs an agent makes without an account. An automated agent may create a catalog without an account, with the command-line tool's lhbox new or the API's agent registration (POST /v1/agent/identity). Sending that request accepts these Terms and the Acceptable Use Policy on behalf of whoever operates the agent, who is the Customer for that catalog until a person claims it. An application connecting to LakehouseBox through our authorisation page (for example an AI assistant) may also create one for a person who has no account, when that person chooses to let that application set it up there: the click accepts these Terms and the Acceptable Use Policy, and that person is the Customer for the catalog. Until then the catalog belongs to an organisation with no account holder: it holds at most 1 GB, nothing in it can be made public, its credentials read and write its data and nothing else, and it is deleted with its data 72 hours after it was made, without further notice. One network address may make at most 5 such catalogs an hour and 20 a day.

2.6 Claiming it. A person claims such a catalog by opening the link the agent shows, signing up or signing in, and typing the code the agent gives them. The catalog then belongs to an organisation the person administers (or to a new one, when they administer none), and these Terms apply to it as to any other catalog of that organisation. Claiming ends every credential issued before the claim; the agent receives a new one with the access the person chooses. Claim only a catalog your own agent made for you.

3. Credentials

3.1 The Service issues three kinds of credentials: long-lived API keys (shown once, stored by us only as a hash), short-lived tokens for our API (15 minutes), and short-lived storage credentials scoped to one table or one catalog (60 minutes). You keep API keys secret and revoke any key you no longer need. A lost API key cannot be recovered; a new one is issued by signing in on the account page or by approving lhbox login again, and the old keys keep working until you revoke them.

3.2 You are responsible for what is done with credentials issued to your account until you revoke them or tell us at hello@lakehousebox.com that they are compromised.

4. The free tier and paid plans

4.1 Every account may use the free tier: up to the storage allowance published on the pricing page and reported at GET /v1/usage per organisation. No other dimension is metered on the free tier. Operational limits that exist to prevent abuse (such as catalogs per project, the number of objects and the commit rate) are published at GET /v1/usage and described in the Acceptable Use Policy and are visible to you at GET /v1/usage.

4.2 Paid storage. An administrator of an organisation may turn on paid storage in the account page (Settings → Billing): the details its invoices carry, a monthly budget, and a card saved with our payment provider, Mollie B.V. (the Netherlands); or, by agreement with us, payment by bank transfer against invoice (for example against a purchase order). Private storage above the free allowance is then charged per GB-month at the price published on the pricing page; nothing else is metered. The budget caps it: storage beyond what the budget covers stops accepting writes, and nothing is deleted. Only an administrator, signed in to the account page, can change these settings; tokens and API keys can read them but not change them. Nothing in these Terms obliges you to pay for the free tier, and nothing obliges us to keep the free tier open indefinitely (see clause 12 on changes and clause 13 on termination).

4.3 When the free-tier limit is reached, we may refuse new writes and new credentials until you are back within the limit or on a paid plan. We will not delete your data for exceeding the limit without the notice in clause 13.

5. Your data

5.1 Yours. Everything you store — tables, files, metadata, schemas — is yours. We claim no rights in it beyond what is needed to run the Service for you (store it, back it up, serve it to credentials you authorise, run table maintenance on it).

5.2 Open formats. Your tables are Apache Iceberg tables with Parquet, ORC or Avro data files; your files are plain objects. You can read and export them with any compatible tool at any time.

5.3 Where it lives. Your data, metadata, backups and logs are stored on infrastructure in the European Union. Since 28 October 2026 it is in Frankfurt, Germany, with a replicated copy of the stored data and backups in Stockholm, Sweden. We do not move them outside the European Union / European Economic Area, with one exception you choose: when you make a catalog public, copies of its files are cached by our content delivery network on edge servers worldwide so that anyone can download them, and removed from them when you make it private or delete it. Our sub-processors are listed in Annex III of the Data Processing Agreement and in the Privacy Policy.

5.4 Personal data in your data. If you store personal data, you are the controller and we are your processor under the Data Processing Agreement, which applies automatically.

5.5 Maintenance. The Service runs automated table maintenance on your tables (compaction of small files, expiry of old snapshots, retention of old metadata files, removal of orphaned files) to keep them fast and within storage limits. On the free tier, snapshots beyond the retention published at GET /v1/usage may be expired; time travel to expired snapshots is then no longer possible. These settings are published at GET /v1/usage.

5.6 Isolation. Each catalog is a separate bucket with its own identity; the catalog service enforces that a credential for one catalog cannot reach another. This is the core of the Service and is described in the Security overview.

6. Acceptable use

This clause is the Acceptable Use Policy (until 20 October 2026 a document of its own). It says what may not be done with the Service and what the operational limits are. It exists because every customer shares the same catalog software and, today, the same host: one customer's abuse is every customer's outage. You will use the Service only as this clause and applicable law permit.

6.1 You may not use the Service to

store, process or distribute content that is unlawful under Spanish or EU law, or that infringes someone else's rights (copyright, trade secrets, personality rights, data protection);
store personal data you have no lawful basis to process, or special-category data (Art. 9 GDPR) without the safeguards the GDPR requires of you as controller; the Service is not designed for health, biometric or criminal-record data and we have not assessed it for those;
attack the Service or anyone else from it: probing or scanning other tenants' catalogs or buckets, trying to defeat the catalog isolation, credential guessing, denial of service, or using the Service as a relay or command-and-control for malware;
resell or sublicense the Service, or run it as a hosting service for third parties without an agreement with us;
use the Service to send unsolicited mail or to host phishing or malware payloads, including in the catalog's blob (file) bucket (<handle>--<catalog>--blobs);
circumvent the free-tier limit or the operational limits below by creating multiple accounts or organisations for the same use, including by making catalogs without an account (lhbox new) again and again to get round the limits on one;
impersonate another person or organisation, including by claiming an email domain you do not control.

6.2 Security research

You may test the security of your own catalogs and credentials. You may not test another customer's, and you may not run load tests against the shared service without asking first. If you find a vulnerability, tell us at hello@lakehousebox.com; we will not take action against good-faith research that follows this paragraph and does not access other customers' data.

6.3 Operational limits (free tier)

The free tier is priced on one dimension only: the bytes an organisation stores, up to the allowance published on the pricing page and reported by the service. Every other limit is operational, not pricing: it protects the shared service. The service publishes the values in force at GET /v1/usage, each marked as enforced or as a guideline (they cover, among others, catalogs per project, objects per catalog, commit rate and spacing, snapshot retention, credential lifetimes and the signup rate). Those published values govern; this clause does not restate them, so that it need not change when they do. Limits may be raised on request, and paid plans will carry their own.

Automated maintenance (compaction, snapshot expiry, metadata retention, orphan-file removal) runs on every catalog; it is how those limits are kept and is not optional on the free tier.

6.4 Egress and fair use

Reading your data out of the Service carries no fee: like requests, ingress and compute, egress is not charged. That covers analytical use: engines and agents reading and querying your tables, you copying your own data out, and others reading a catalog you have published as a public dataset.

It does not cover using the Service as a content-delivery network or a download host: sustained bulk serving of files to the public, hot-linking objects from websites or applications, or egress far out of proportion to the data your organisation stores. The level of monthly egress, relative to what an organisation stores, above which we look at its use is published with the other limits in the documentation (the fair-use limits). Crossing it is not in itself a breach; it is when we look.

We count the bytes sent out of each catalog's buckets from the store's own counters; you see the same figures, per day, in GET /v1/usage. As in clause 6.5, we do not read your data to judge its use.

If your egress goes beyond fair use, we contact you first and give you the chance to change it. Only if it continues do we restrict or suspend the traffic concerned, for example by revoking the credentials that carry it or withdrawing a catalog's public read access. We never delete data because of egress. Traffic that is an attack under clause 6.1(3) is handled under clause 6.5, not here.

6.5 What happens on a breach

We may, in proportion to the problem: refuse writes or new credentials, revoke specific credentials, suspend the account, or terminate it under clause 13.2. Where the breach is not urgent, we tell you first and give you a chance to fix it. Where it endangers other customers or the Service, we act first and tell you afterwards. We never read your data to look for breaches; we act on what we can see without doing so (metrics, error patterns, abuse reports, legal notices).

6.6 Reports

Abuse reports and takedown notices: hello@lakehousebox.com. We acknowledge within 2 business days and act as Spanish law (LSSI-CE, Arts. 16 and 17) requires of a hosting provider once we have actual knowledge of unlawful content.

7. Availability, support and changes to the Service

7.1 No service level agreement yet. The Service is offered without a committed availability level. We publish what we do to keep it running in the Security overview (single host today, backups at least daily (currently the catalog's state every 5 minutes, the data files replicated to a second site) with a rehearsed restore, no high availability yet). A service level agreement for paid plans will be published later and will not apply to the free tier unless it says so.

7.2 We may change, add or remove features. We will not remove the ability to export your data in open formats.

7.3 Support is by email at hello@lakehousebox.com on a best-effort basis.

8. Fees and taxes

8.1 The free tier is free. Prices are published on the pricing page excluding VAT; VAT is added where Spanish or EU law requires: Spanish VAT for customers in Spain and for consumers in the European Union, none for businesses in another EU member state with a valid VAT number (reverse charge) or for customers outside the EU.

8.2 Paid storage is charged in arrears: each calendar month on the first day of the next month, for the days paid storage was on; or earlier, for the whole days so far, once they pass the amount shown in Settings → Billing. A month that comes to less than EUR 1 is not charged.

8.3 Every charge has an invoice, issued before the card is charged and available in Settings → Billing.

8.4 If a card payment fails we tell you and try again (every three days, up to three times; at once when you save another card). If an amount is still unpaid 14 days after the first failure, the organisation's catalogs become read-only until it is paid: reading and exporting keep working. We do not delete data for non-payment.

8.5 You may stop paid storage at any time in Settings → Billing. The organisation goes back to the free allowance at once (above it, its catalogs become read-only; nothing is deleted), and the days of paid storage already used are charged on the first day of the next month.

8.6 Organisations that pay by invoice pay within the term stated on the invoice.

9. Confidentiality

Each party keeps the other's non-public information confidential and uses it only for this contract. Your data is confidential information. This clause survives termination for three years; for your data, for as long as we hold it.

10. Our warranties, and their limits

10.1 We will provide the Service with reasonable skill and care, in accordance with these Terms and applicable law.

10.2 Beyond 10.1, the Service is provided as described in the documentation and without further warranty. In particular we do not warrant that it is fit for a purpose we have not been told about, or that it is uninterrupted or error-free.

10.3 Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited under Spanish law, including liability for wilful misconduct (dolo) or gross negligence (culpa grave), for death or personal injury, or for breach of data protection law to the extent it cannot be limited.

11. Limitation of liability

11.1 Subject to 10.3, neither party is liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of business or loss of anticipated savings.

11.2 Subject to 10.3, our total liability under this contract in any twelve-month period is limited to the fees you paid us for the Service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, and, for the free tier, to EUR 100.

11.3 Backups are ours; copies are yours. We back up the Service daily and keep copies off-host for 14 days, but a single loss event could still lose up to one day of writes (currently the catalog's state is backed up every 5 minutes and the data files are replicated to a second site as they are written), and we cannot restore a single table for you from a backup today. You should keep your own copy of data you cannot afford to lose. This is not a limit on 10.3.

12. Changes to these Terms

We may change these Terms (the Acceptable Use Policy included) and the Data Processing Agreement. We will email every account holder at least 30 days before a change takes effect and publish the new version with its version date and change log. If you do not accept a change, you may end the contract before it takes effect (clause 13.1). Continuing to use the Service after the effective date is acceptance. Changes that only add features, fix errors, or are required by law may take effect immediately.

13. Term and termination

13.1 By you. You may stop using the Service at any time and ask us to delete your account by writing to hello@lakehousebox.com from the account's email address. We delete the account, its credentials and its data within 30 days of the request, except for copies in backups, which expire within a further 14 days, and records we must keep by law (clause 13.4).

13.2 By us, for cause. We may suspend or terminate an account immediately if it breaches the Acceptable Use Policy (clause 6), if its credentials are being abused, if we are required to by law or by a competent authority, or if the security of the Service or of other customers requires it. We tell you why, unless the law prevents it.

13.3 By us, for convenience. We may end the free tier or close an account on the free tier with 60 days' notice by email. During the notice period you can export your data; after it, clause 13.1 deletion applies.

13.4 What survives. Clauses 9, 10.3, 11, 14 and 15 survive termination, as do accounting and tax records we are required to keep by Spanish law.

13.5 Catalogs nobody claimed. A catalog made without an account (clause 2.5) ends when its 72 hours run out: it is deleted with its data and its credentials, with no notice, since there is no account to send one to. Clauses 13.1 to 13.3 apply to it once it is claimed.

14. General

14.1 Entire agreement. These Terms and the documents in clause 1.4 are the whole contract. They replace earlier discussions. Order forms or plan descriptions for paid plans may add to them.

14.2 Assignment. Neither party assigns this contract without the other's consent, except that we may assign it to a successor of the business that takes on these obligations, with notice to you.

14.3 Notices. To you: the email address of your account. To us: hello@lakehousebox.com. Notices by email are effective when sent, unless a bounce is received.

14.4 Severability. If a clause is unenforceable, the rest remains in force and the clause is read as narrowly as needed.

14.5 Language. These Terms are written in English, which is the governing text. A Spanish courtesy translation will be published; in case of conflict the English text prevails.

14.6 No waiver. Not enforcing a clause once is not a waiver of it.

15. Governing law and courts

These Terms are governed by the laws of Spain. Disputes are submitted to the courts of Madrid, Spain, without prejudice to any mandatory jurisdiction rule that applies to you.

16. Contact

Lakehousebox, S.L., calle Bárbara de Braganza, 2, 2ª planta, 28004 Madrid. Email: hello@lakehousebox.com. NIF: B05742093.

Change log

2026-09-19-draft — first draft, written from the product as built on this date. Not published.
2026-09-21 (factual corrections, still draft) — cl. 2.4: the identity provider at auth.tablemere.com was retired 2026-09-20; sign-in is the account page at lakehousebox.com/app/ plus the CLI device approval. "warehouse" → "catalog" in prose. Backup clause carries a note; numbers untouched.
2026-09-24 (factual corrections, still draft) — cl. 2.1 describes both ways an account is created (the website's set-password link, the command-line tool's one-time code), replacing a sentence that covered only the second; cl. 2.4 names the optional authenticator-app second factor (live since 2026-09-23).
2026-10-01-draft — company name and registered office: Lakehousebox, S.L., calle Bárbara de Braganza, 2, 2ª planta, 28004 Madrid (still in formation, CIF pending).
2026-10-01 (factual correction, still draft) — cl. 2.2: an email domain no longer adds anyone to an organisation (security audit 2026-10-01, M5). A claim takes effect only after a DNS proof, and a verified domain offers membership that the person accepts; "owners" removed (the role was retired 2026-09-20).
2026-10-02 (presentation only; the version above is unchanged) — notes for the lawyer and placeholders no longer appear on the published page, which carries a banner saying the document is a draft and the company is in formation. Where a placeholder stood, the page shows what is known: the CIF, registry data and contact addresses are "to be published on incorporation", the effective date reads "not yet in force", the free-tier liability cap is marked "(proposed)", and the courts are those of Madrid, as assumed throughout the drafts. No term changed.
2026-10-02 (factual corrections, still draft) — the review note at cl. 11.3 records the backups as they run since 2026-09-24 (platform/docs/recovery.md §1: hourly store metadata and data files, a weekly full archive) instead of "data nightly"; the clause's text is unchanged and is for the founder and the lawyer.
2026-10-02-draft, founder decisions — the free-tier liability cap of EUR 100 (cl. 11.2) and the courts of Madrid (cl. 15) are confirmed; English governs (cl. 14.5, confirmed); the contact for security, support and notices is hello@lakehousebox.com (cl. 3.2, 7.3, 13.1, 14.3, 16); backups are in the European Union, in Germany with a second copy in Finland (cl. 5.3); backups stay committed at least daily, and cl. 7.1 and 11.3 add that we currently copy hourly (about an hour of writes).
2026-10-02 (factual correction, still draft) — cl. 2.2: a departure is remembered for twelve months, then forgotten (the platform purges the record).
2026-10-09-draft — paid storage, as built (platform/docs/billing.md): cl. 4.2 describes how an organisation turns it on (invoice details, a monthly budget, a card with Mollie, or payment by invoice) and that the budget caps storage; cl. 8 states the VAT treatment, charging in arrears (monthly, earlier past a threshold, nothing under EUR 1), invoices before charges, failed payments (three retries, read-only after 14 days, no deletion) and stopping paid storage.
2026-10-09-draft — clause 5.3 names the third, locked copy of the recent backups, kept by Scaleway SAS in France (security review 2026-10-08, H2); still within the European Union. AL_TERMS_VERSION stays (the 2026-10-02 founder decision: bumped once, on incorporation).
2026-10-11-draft — clause 5.3: the off-site copies are in France only (founder, 2026-10-11): the second copy of the backups in Finland is no longer made, and the copy of the cold storage tier moved from Finland to France; still within the European Union. AL_TERMS_VERSION stays (the 2026-10-02 founder decision: bumped once, on incorporation).
2026-10-12b-draft — cl. 2.5: an application connecting through our authorisation page may create such a catalog for a person who has no account and chooses to let that application set it up; the click accepts these Terms and the Acceptable Use Policy, and that person is the Customer (research/71, founder 2026-10-12). AL_TERMS_VERSION stays.
2026-10-12-draft — catalogs an agent makes without an account (research/70, decided by the founder 2026-10-12): cl. 2.5 (sending the agent-registration request accepts these Terms for whoever operates the agent; 1 GB, nothing public, data only, deleted with its data after 72 hours, 5 an hour and 20 a day per address), cl. 2.6 (claiming one: a person signs up or signs in and types the code; earlier credentials end), cl. 13.5 (an unclaimed catalog ends without notice). Factual correction in cl. 3.1: a lost key is replaced by signing in or lhbox login, not by the email-code recovery retired on 2026-10-01. AL_TERMS_VERSION stays (legal/CLAUDE.md: bumped once, on incorporation).
2026-10-14-draft — clause 5.3: the one exception to "we do not move them outside the EU": copies of the files of a catalog you make public are cached by bunny.net on edge servers worldwide (PLAN 24.3, infrastructure/tofu/bunny/public_data.tf). AL_TERMS_VERSION stays (legal/CLAUDE.md).
2026-10-14b-draft (factual correction) — clause 2.4 names passkeys (sign-in on their own, or as the second step after email and password; live since 2026-09-25, docs/login.md). AL_TERMS_VERSION stays (legal/CLAUDE.md).
2026-10-14c-draft — the company is incorporated (public deed of 2026-10-09): Lakehousebox, S.L., NIF B05742093 (provisional NIF), registered office unchanged; "in formation" removed. AL_TERMS_VERSION stays: the documents remain drafts not in force, and the bump with the clause-12 notice is the founder's call.
2026-10-15-draft (presentation; founder) — section 16 names the company by its NIF only. No term changes.
2026-10-16 — in force from 16 October 2026 (founder, 2026-10-16); the draft label is removed from the published page. No term changes.
2026-10-20 — the Acceptable Use Policy becomes clause 6 of these Terms, its text unchanged (its sections are now 6.1–6.6 and its cross-references say so); clause 1.4 no longer lists it as a separate document, and its page, /legal/aup/, points here (founder, 2026-10-20: one page for the terms). No right or obligation changes, so under clause 12 the change takes effect at once; everyone who had accepted the previous version is recorded on this one by continued use (schema step 43) and is not asked again.
2026-10-28 (factual correction) — clauses 1.1 and 5.3: the move to bunny.net (research/106; research/results/t106_swap.txt): the Service runs on bunny.net in Frankfurt, Germany, its storage replicated to Stockholm, Sweden (infrastructure/tofu/bunny-cells/cell/); Hetzner keeps the services not moved yet and the read-only copy kept as the way back; Scaleway keeps copies made before the move until they expire. No term changes. TERMS_VERSION in platform/control_plane/plane/core.py stays at 2026-10-20 (no new acceptance asked); flagged for the founder.
2026-10-30 (factual correction) — clause 5.3: the Service and its data are in Frankfurt, Germany, with a replicated copy in Stockholm, Sweden; the hosting used before 28 October 2026 is deleted (the founder, 2026-10-30: the Hetzner project is deleted, with every server, volume, object-storage bucket and backup in it, and the Paris copies made before the move are gone; production runs in Frankfurt, Germany, its data replicated to Stockholm, Sweden: research/106, platform/cell/); the sub-processors stay named in Annex III of the DPA and the Privacy Policy. Clauses 7.1 and 11.3: the "we currently copy hourly" asides now say what is done today (the catalog's state every 5 minutes, the data files replicated to a second site); the daily-backup and 14-day commitments are unchanged and remain flagged for the founder. No term changes. TERMS_VERSION in platform/control_plane/plane/core.py stays at 2026-10-20 (no new acceptance asked).