Terms of service

These terms are between you and Barko Studio, based in the Republic of Ghana, trading as Fortell ("we", "us"). By creating an account or using the service you accept them. If you are accepting on behalf of an employer or institution, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

The Privacy Policy forms part of this agreement and explains what we do with your data.

Fortell is a hosted tool that takes a spreadsheet through a machine-learning pipeline — profiling, cleaning, feature work, training, tuning, evaluation and prediction — plus time-series forecasting, data visualisation, and an agent that drafts cited research papers from published literature.

Fortell is a tool, not an advisor. It is not a provider of financial, medical, legal, engineering or scientific advice, and no output it produces is a professional opinion. Section ten covers what that means in practice, and it is the most important section in this document.

• You must be at least 18. One person, one account — do not share sign-in links.
• Sign-in is passwordless. Anyone with access to your email inbox can sign in as you, so securing that inbox is your responsibility.
• Keep your email address current. It is the only channel we have for account and service notices.
• You are responsible for everything done under your account, including by people you invite to your workspace.

You agree not to:

• upload data you have no right to process, or personal data you lack a lawful basis to handle;
• upload special-category data — health records, biometric or genetic data, and the like. Fortell is not built or certified for it;
• use Fortell to build models intended to discriminate unlawfully, to surveil individuals, or to make consequential decisions about people without human review;
• attempt to circumvent quotas, rate limits, seat counts or the compute-token allowance, including by creating multiple accounts to obtain repeated free allowances;
• resell, sublicense or provide the service to third parties as your own, or scrape the interface to build a competing product;
• probe, load-test or attack the infrastructure, or attempt to reach data belonging to another account or workspace;
• upload malware, or content that is unlawful under Ghanaian law.

Automated rate limits apply to every endpoint. They are an abuse ceiling rather than a usage quota, and normal use does not reach them.

You keep all rights in the data you upload and in the models, forecasts, charts and papers Fortell produces from it. We claim no ownership of any of it.

You grant us only the licence we need to run the service for you: to store, process, transform and transmit your data for the purpose of producing the outputs you asked for, including sending the parts described in the Privacy Policy to the AI providers that power the AI features. This licence ends when you delete the data.

In plain terms — We do not train models on your data for other customers, and we do not sell it.

Keep your own copy. Fortell is not a backup service. You are responsible for retaining the original of anything you upload.

The mechanical machine-learning pipeline — profiling, cleaning, feature selection, training, tuning, evaluation, forecasting, clustering, visualisation and downloading predictions — is unmetered on every plan, including Free. It never consumes an allowance and it does not stop when one runs out.

What is metered is AI: insights, explanations and research papers. These are billed in compute tokens, a unit that lets one allowance cover several different underlying models honestly. Your plan includes a monthly slice of them.

• The monthly slice expires at the end of each billing period. It does not roll over.
• Top-up packs last 12 months from the day you buy them. Buying another pack extends every unexpired credit you already hold to the new date, so an account that keeps buying never loses anything.
• The slice is always spent before top-ups, and among top-ups the batch closest to expiring goes first — so you never lose purchased credit to an expiring allowance, or to spending in the wrong order.
• Credits bought before we introduced expiry never expire. They were sold under terms that said so, and that promise stands for as long as you hold them. The 12-month life applies only to credits bought afterwards. Your billing page shows every batch you hold and the date each one ends — the ones with no date are these.
• You can see every batch you hold, and the date each one ends, on your billing page. We write to you before a batch expires.
• New accounts receive a one-time welcome grant. It is once per account, ever — not monthly.
• When the allowance is exhausted, AI features stop and everything else keeps working.

Plans also carry limits on how many datasets you may store, upload size, total storage and how long inactive work is kept. The live figures are on the pricing page, which reads them from the same table the service enforces, so the two cannot disagree.

One limit deserves calling out. On the Free plan, stored work is retained for seven days. Paid plans keep your work for as long as the plan is active. Download anything you need to keep.

Prices are in Ghana cedis (GHS) and are shown before you pay. Payment is taken by Paystack; your card details are entered on Paystack's checkout and never reach our servers.

Refunds. Because there is no automatic renewal, there are no surprise charges to reverse. If you buy a plan or a pack and the service fails to deliver what was paid for — an outage, or a defect on our side — write to support@fortell.site within 14 days and we will refund the unused portion. Compute tokens already spent are not refundable, because the underlying AI cost has already been incurred. Nothing here limits any statutory right you have under Ghanaian consumer law.

Prices may change. A change never affects a period you have already paid for.

Every account has a personal workspace. You can invite others into a shared one, in which case the workspace — not the individual — is the billing account, and everyone in it shares one allowance.

• A seat is consumed when an invitation is sent, not when it is accepted. Withdraw an unaccepted invitation to release the seat.
• Datasets and reports in a shared workspace are visible to its members. Your in-progress pipeline state remains your own.
• Only an owner or admin can buy a plan, because a purchase changes the plan for everyone in the workspace.
• Removing a member ends their access to that workspace's data immediately.

Fortell offers an optional agent you install on your own machine so training runs on your hardware instead of ours. Installing it is your choice and your responsibility.

• The agent executes only named recipes from a fixed catalogue. The server sends parameters, never code.
• When you claim a job, a snapshot of that job's dataset is downloaded to your machine. Securing it there is up to you.
• Device tokens are credentials. Treat one like a password; revoke it from the Runners page if a machine is lost.
• We are not liable for anything that happens on your hardware — cost, wear, downtime or data loss — and you should not run the agent on a machine you are not authorised to use this way.
• The agent is distributed as a Python package under its own licence, which governs the software itself.

Read this section even if you read nothing else. Fortell produces outputs that look authoritative, and some of them will be wrong.

• A model's score is a measurement, not a promise. Accuracy on held-out rows describes the data it was measured on. It does not guarantee performance on new data, on data collected later, or on a population the training set did not represent.
• A forecast is not the future. Confidence bands describe uncertainty the model can see. They cannot account for events absent from the history it was fitted on.
• Research papers are drafted by AI and must be verified. Fortell checks each claim against the retrieved evidence, prunes uncited sources, flags citations it cannot support and reports markers that resolve to no source — and none of that makes the output publishable as it stands. Every quotation, number and citation must be checked against the original before you rely on, submit or publish it.
• Academic integrity is yours. If you submit work produced with Fortell to an institution or a journal, you are responsible for complying with its rules on AI assistance and authorship. Many prohibit or require disclosure of exactly this. We take no responsibility for the consequences of an undisclosed submission.
• Do not use an output as the sole basis for a consequential decision about a person's health, finances, employment, credit, insurance, education or legal standing. A human who understands the domain must review it.

In plain terms — Fortell gets you to a defensible draft far faster than doing it by hand. It does not replace your judgement about whether the answer is right.

Fortell is provided on a best-effort basis. There is no uptime guarantee and no service level agreement. We perform maintenance, deploy changes and occasionally break things.

We may add, change or remove features. If we remove something you paid for within a period you have already paid for, tell us and we will refund the unused portion of that period.

Some features are experimental and are labelled as such in the product. They may change or disappear without notice.

You may stop using Fortell at any time and ask us to delete your account by writing to support@fortell.site.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches section four, that is being used to attack or degrade the service, or that we are legally required to close. Where the breach is not deliberate or dangerous, we will contact you first and give you a chance to fix it.

On closure, your datasets, models and reports are deleted. Export anything you want to keep before you ask us to close the account.

Fortell — the software, interface, name and branding — belongs to us. These terms grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service, and nothing more. You may not copy, reverse-engineer or create derivative works from the hosted service.

This does not affect your ownership of your own data or of the outputs produced from it, as set out in section five.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Fortell is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that results will be accurate or reliable, or that defects will be corrected. Nothing in this section excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, nor for loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, data, or business opportunity, however caused.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with this agreement is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or GHS 500.

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

You will indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your uploading data you had no right to process, your use of an output in breach of section ten, or your breach of section four.

This agreement is governed by the laws of the Republic of Ghana, and the courts of Ghana have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it.

Before starting proceedings, please write to us. Most disputes about a charge or an account are a misunderstanding, and an email resolves them faster than anything else will.

We may update these terms. The date at the top reflects the current version. For a change that materially reduces your rights we will email account holders at least 14 days before it takes effect, and continuing to use Fortell after that date means you accept it.

Barko Studio, based in the Republic of Ghana.
Email: support@fortell.site

See also the Privacy Policy.