Terms of Sale

These terms set out the contract under which you buy a licence for CrystalKarat software from this website. Please read them before you buy, and in particular section 17 (your right to cancel), section 8 (activation), and sections 20 and 24 to 27 (the limits on our liability). Part B applies only if you are a Consumer, and Part C only if you are a Business Customer.

Part A: terms for every customer

1. These terms

1.1 These terms apply to every order for a licence placed on crystalkarat.com. Your use of the Software is governed by the End User Licence Agreement (the "EULA"), which forms part of this contract, and our Privacy Policy explains how we use personal data.

1.2 If these terms and the EULA conflict, these terms prevail on anything to do with buying a licence, and the EULA prevails on anything to do with using the Software.

2. Who we are

2.1 CrystalKarat is a trading name of Richard Ackroyd, a sole trader ("we", "us", "our"), whose trading address is Lytchett House, 13 Freeland Park, Wareham Road, Poole, Dorset, BH16 6FA. We are not a company.

2.2 You can contact us by email at support@crystalkarat.com or by post at the address above. We will contact you at the email address on your CrystalKarat account. When these terms say "in writing", that includes email.

3. Words with a particular meaning

• Consumer: an individual buying wholly or mainly for purposes outside their trade, business, craft or profession.
• Business Customer: anyone who is not a Consumer. That includes a company, partnership or other organisation, anyone ordering on behalf of one, and an individual buying for their work as a producer, engineer, composer, sound designer, musician or studio.
• Software: the CrystalKarat plugin named in your order, with its installers, updates and documentation.
• Licence: the right to use the Software granted by the EULA, and Licence Key the key that activates it.
• Activation Service: the online service that activates, renews and deactivates Licences, which we run through our licensing provider.

4. Who can buy

4.1 You must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract, and you need a CrystalKarat account. The details you give us must be true and complete.

4.2 If you order on behalf of a business, you confirm that you have authority to bind it, and that business is the Business Customer.

4.3 We do not sell to anyone who is the subject of UK financial sanctions, or who is in or ordinarily resident in a country or territory subject to comprehensive UK sanctions. By ordering you confirm that you are neither.

4.4 You must keep your sign-in details secure and tell us at once if you think someone else has used them. We are not responsible for what someone does with your account using sign-in details you disclosed or failed to keep secure, unless we caused it.

5. What you are buying

5.1 You are buying a Licence to use the Software on the terms of the EULA, either outright or as part of a monthly subscription to the plugins a subscription plan lists. You are not buying the Software itself, or any intellectual property in it.

5.2 The product page describes the Software's features, the plugin formats it is supplied in, the operating systems and hosts it supports, and its system requirements. Please check them before you buy. We do not promise that the Software will work with a host, operating system or hardware that the product page does not list, or with versions released after you buy, although this does not affect a Consumer's rights under Part B.

5.3 The free trial runs the complete Software on your own system, and is the best way to check that it suits you, your system and your taste before you buy. The demonstrations on this website run in your browser and illustrate how the Software behaves; they are not a promise of identical results on every system.

5.4 How the Software sounds is a matter of taste. Not liking its sound, or finding that it does not suit your material, is not a fault.

6. How the contract is made

6.1 You place an order at checkout. Before you pay you can review your order, and correct any mistake by going back or closing the checkout and starting again. The contract is in English.

6.2 The contract is made when we issue your Licence Key, which we show on screen and send by email. Until then we may decline your order for any reason, and if we do we will refund anything you have paid.

6.3 Even after we issue a Licence Key, we may cancel the contract and refund you in full if (a) the price was wrong and the mistake was obvious, so that you could reasonably have recognised it, (b) we reasonably suspect that the payment was fraudulent or unauthorised, or (c) section 4.3 applies to you.

6.4 We do not keep a separately filed copy of each contract for you. Your order confirmation email, your account and the versions of these terms and the EULA dated in that email are your record of it; please keep the email.

7. Price and payment

7.1 Prices are in pounds sterling, euros or US dollars. We show the currency for your location, and you can choose another of the three on the site. You pay in the currency shown at checkout. The total shown there is the full amount you pay, including any tax we are required to charge. Any fee your bank charges, for example for currency conversion, is between you and your bank.

7.2 Payment is taken by Stripe, our payment provider, when you place your order. We never see or store your full card details.

7.3 A promotion code can be used only on the terms it was issued with, only once per order unless those terms say otherwise, and has no cash value. We may withdraw an unused code at any time.

7.4 A change in price does not affect an order we have already accepted.

7.5 A subscription is paid monthly in advance, starting on the day you subscribe, and renews each month until you cancel. You can cancel at any time from your account, and the cancellation takes effect at the end of the month you have paid for; we do not refund part of a month. If a renewal payment fails, Stripe retries it for a short time, and if it still fails the subscription ends. We will email you before any change to a subscription's price takes effect, and you may cancel before it does.

8. Delivery and activation

8.1 Delivery is digital. Once your payment is confirmed we issue a Licence Key for each plugin you have bought or subscribed to (an account keeps one key per plugin), show it on screen, email it to you and save it in your account, and the installers become available from your account. Some payment methods take longer to confirm, and the Licence is issued when they do.

8.2 The Software uses technical protection. It must be activated online once on each computer, and must then reach the Activation Service at least once every 30 days to renew its activation. If it cannot, it stops producing sound until it reconnects. Without a valid activation it stops producing sound after 30 seconds and does not save its settings. The EULA describes this in full.

8.3 We run the Activation Service and downloads through third-party providers. We aim to keep them available but do not promise that they will be uninterrupted. A short interruption does not affect a computer that is already activated, because it keeps working offline for up to 30 days.

8.4 A Licence you buy outright has no end date. A Licence that comes with a subscription lasts while the subscription is paid up, and ends when the month you have paid for ends after you cancel. If we ever decide to stop running the Activation Service permanently, we will give you at least 60 days' notice by email and will use reasonable efforts, before it stops, to make available a version of the Software or a way of activating it that lets you keep using your licensed copy without the Activation Service.

8.5 Please keep your own copy of the installer. Your account offers the newest installer for your platform; we do not promise to keep earlier versions available.

9. Refunds, payment disputes and suspension

9.1 If a payment is refunded in full, the Licence it bought is suspended, and you must deactivate and uninstall the Software.

9.2 If you dispute a payment with your bank or card issuer, we suspend the Licence while the dispute is open, and restore it if the dispute is resolved in our favour. Please contact us first: most problems are put right faster that way.

9.3 We may suspend a Licence or account straight away, and will tell you why, if we reasonably suspect fraud, or that a Licence Key has been shared, sold or published in breach of the EULA.

10. Events outside our control

We are not responsible for any delay or failure to perform caused by an event outside our reasonable control, including the failure of a payment, licensing, hosting, email or internet provider, a cyber attack, or a change made by an operating system or host developer. If one happens we will tell you, and do what we reasonably can to limit its effect. This does not affect a Consumer's rights under Part B where the Software itself is faulty.

11. Transferring this contract

11.1 We may transfer our rights and obligations under this contract to another person or organisation, including a company we set up to carry on this business. We will tell you in writing if we do. A transfer will not reduce a Consumer's rights or the protection they have under this contract.

11.2 You may transfer your Licence only as the EULA allows.

12. Complaints

Please send any complaint to support@crystalkarat.com, with your order details and what has gone wrong. We will acknowledge it within 5 working days and aim to give you a full response within 14 days. If, when you complain, we are a member of an alternative dispute resolution scheme or are required to use one, our final response will tell you about it.

13. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms for future orders. The version that applies to your order is the one shown on this page when you placed it, and its date is in your order confirmation email.

14. Other important terms

14.1 If a court or other authority decides that part of these terms is unlawful or unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

14.2 If we do not insist straight away that you do something you are required to do, or delay taking action, we can still insist on it, or take that action, later.

14.3 This contract is between you and us. No other person has any right to enforce any of its terms, under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 or otherwise.

14.4 Sections that by their nature should continue after the contract or Licence ends, including those on liability, ownership and the law that applies, continue to apply.

15. Law and courts

15.1 These terms, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them or their subject matter (including a non-contractual one), are governed by the law of England and Wales.

15.2 If you are a Consumer, you may bring proceedings in the courts of England and Wales, or, if you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, in the courts there. If you live in the European Union, you also keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live.

15.3 If you are a Business Customer, the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

Part B: if you are a Consumer

16. Your statutory rights

16.1 Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, digital content you pay for must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described. If it is not, you are entitled to a repair or a replacement, and if that is impossible, or is not done within a reasonable time and without significant inconvenience to you, to a price reduction or a refund. If defective digital content we supply damages your device or other digital content because we did not use reasonable care and skill, we will repair the damage or compensate you.

16.2 This is a summary of your key legal rights. Nothing in these terms takes them away or limits them. For more detailed information, contact Citizens Advice (citizensadvice.org.uk, 0808 223 1133).

17. Your right to cancel

17.1 When you buy digital content online you would normally have 14 days to cancel. You lose that right once supply of the digital content begins, if (a) you have expressly asked us to supply it immediately, (b) you have acknowledged that you will lose the right to cancel, and (c) we have confirmed both in your order confirmation.

17.2 Our checkout asks you for that request and acknowledgement before you pay, and your order confirmation email confirms both. Supply begins when we issue your Licence Key. From that moment you cannot cancel because you have changed your mind, as permitted by regulation 37 of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. Your rights under section 16 are not affected.

17.3 If you change your mind before we issue your Licence Key, for example while a payment is still being confirmed, tell us and we will cancel the order and refund you within 14 days.

18. If you think something is wrong

18.1 Tell us at support@crystalkarat.com as soon as reasonably possible, and give us the information we reasonably need to understand and reproduce the problem: your operating system, host and their versions, and what you did. We may fix a fault by supplying an update, and may ask you to install it.

18.2 The Software was described to you as working on the systems listed on its product page, activated and used as the EULA explains. So the following are not faults in the Software, although this does not limit your rights where the Software itself does not meet the standards in section 16:

• a problem caused by a host, operating system or hardware the product page does not list;
• a problem caused by other software, plugins or hardware on your system;
• a problem caused by changes you make to the Software, or by not following the EULA;
• the Software going silent because a computer has not reached the Activation Service for more than 30 days.

19. Free trials

A free trial is not a purchase. Because nothing is paid for it, the rights in section 16 that apply to digital content you pay for do not apply to it. Section 3 of the EULA sets out the terms of a trial, including our liability for it.

20. Our liability to you

20.1 We are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking this contract or failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss or damage that is not foreseeable. Loss or damage is foreseeable if it is obvious that it will happen, or if, at the time the contract was made, both we and you knew it might happen.

20.2 Please keep regular backups of your projects, sessions and recordings. Where loss or corruption of your data would have been avoided by keeping a reasonable backup, we are not responsible for the part of the loss that the backup would have prevented.

20.3 We are not responsible for damage to your hearing or equipment caused by playing audio at an unsafe level (see the safe-listening section of the EULA), unless our negligence caused it.

20.4 Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for breach of your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 summarised in section 16, or for anything else for which the law does not allow liability to be limited or excluded.

Part C: if you are a Business Customer

21. How Part C applies

21.1 Part C applies to every order by a Business Customer, and Part B does not. You confirm that you are not buying as a Consumer. The statutory rights of consumers, including the 14-day right to cancel, do not apply to you.

21.2 You are responsible for making sure that everyone who uses the Software under your Licence complies with the EULA, and for what they do with it.

22. Warranty and your remedy

22.1 For 90 days from the date we issue your Licence Key, we warrant that the Software will perform substantially as described on its product page when used on a system the product page lists.

22.2 If it does not, and you tell us in writing within that period, we will at our option correct the problem by an update or workaround within a reasonable time, or end the Licence and refund the price you paid for it. This is your sole and exclusive remedy for a breach of the warranty in section 22.1.

23. Exclusion of other terms

Except for the warranty in section 22.1, the Software is supplied "as is". To the fullest extent permitted by law, all other warranties, conditions and terms, whether express or implied by statute, common law or otherwise, are excluded, including any as to satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, and the use of reasonable care and skill. We do not warrant that the Software will be uninterrupted or error-free, that it will meet your requirements, or that it will work with any particular host, plugin, hardware or version not listed on the product page.

24. Losses we are not liable for

Subject to section 26, we have no liability to you, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty, misrepresentation, restitution or otherwise, for any:

• loss of profits, sales, business, revenue, contracts or anticipated savings;
• business interruption, or wasted expenditure or management time;
• loss or corruption of data, sessions, projects, recordings or software;
• loss of goodwill or damage to reputation;
• loss arising from playing audio at an unsafe level, or from use in live performance or broadcast; or
• indirect or consequential loss,

in each case whether direct or indirect, and even if we were told it might happen.

25. Our maximum liability

Subject to section 26, our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or in connection with the contract, the Licence and the Software, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty, misrepresentation, restitution or otherwise, is limited to the greater of (a) the total price you paid for the Licence the claim relates to and (b) £100.

26. Liability that is not limited

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else for which the law does not allow liability to be limited or excluded.

27. Time limit for claims

You must notify us in writing of any claim within 12 months of the date you became aware, or ought reasonably to have become aware, of the facts giving rise to it, and start any proceedings within 18 months of that date. Otherwise the claim is barred.

28. Your indemnity

You will indemnify us against all losses, damages, costs (including reasonable legal fees) and expenses we incur as a result of (a) you, or anyone using the Software under your Licence, breaching the EULA, or (b) any claim by a third party that material you created or processed with the Software infringes its rights.

29. Entire agreement and allocation of risk

29.1 These terms, the EULA and the product page at the time of your order are the entire agreement between you and us about your order, and replace any earlier statement, understanding or arrangement. You confirm that you have not relied on any statement, promise or representation that is not set out in them, and you will have no remedy for one. This does not limit liability for fraud.

29.2 You acknowledge that the price reflects the allocation of risk in Part C, that you are better placed than we are to protect against the losses in section 24, by backups and insurance, and that Part C is reasonable.