Terms

Who this is between

Visible Storage is made and run by Pickaxe LLC, a New York limited liability company. Using it means you’re agreeing to what’s below. It sits alongside the Privacy page, which covers what we do with your information and is worth reading first.

We’ve written this the way we wrote that one, in language you can actually follow. A version drafted by lawyers will arrive before we launch properly. If anything here reads as vague or convenient to us, tell us and we’ll fix it rather than hide behind it.

What alpha means

This is near the top rather than buried at the bottom, because it’s the thing most likely to affect you. Visible Storage is invite-only and early. Things will break. We may need to rebuild your server, change how it works, or start parts of it again from scratch. Features will appear, and some will disappear.

So for now, keep your original exports. Don’t let Visible Storage be the only copy of anything you’d be upset to lose. We’re building for permanence and we mean it, but permanence is earned over years and we’re at the beginning of ours.

Your archive belongs to you

Everything you put in is yours. We claim no ownership of it and no licence to use it beyond running the service for you. We don’t sell it, share it, or train models on it.

Because it lives in a cloud account in your own name, you can take it and leave whenever you like, and it keeps running if we stop existing. That’s deliberate. A promise of permanence you can only keep by trusting us wouldn’t be worth much.

The software belongs to us

The apps that run your archive are ours, and using the service doesn’t transfer them to you. You have the right to run them for your own archive for as long as you’re a user. Please don’t resell them, rebrand them, or take them apart to build a competitor. Poking at your own server to understand how it works is fine, and honestly encouraged.

Your account

Use a real email address, since it’s how we reach you about your own server. Your sign-in link is the key to your account, so treat it like one and don’t forward it. Anything done through your account we’ll treat as done by you. If you think someone else has got in, tell us straight away and we’ll help.

What it costs

Nothing, for now. During the alpha we pay the cloud bill for your server as well as building the software that runs on it. That isn’t the long-term shape of this. The point is that you end up owning the account, which means eventually owning the bill that comes with it.

We’ll tell you well before anything starts costing you money, and you’ll get to decide then rather than find out from a statement. If your usage ever gets extreme enough to worry us, we’ll come and talk to you about it instead of quietly capping you.

Use it well

Don’t use Visible Storage to store or share anything illegal, to keep material you have no right to, to attack anyone else’s server, or to attack ours. Don’t try to reach accounts that aren’t yours. Don’t use it to send anyone spam.

If you do, we may suspend your server, and in serious cases close your account and report it. If you believe someone is using Visible Storage to infringe your copyright, email us and we’ll act on it.

Ending it

You can stop whenever you like. Email team@pickaxe.nyc and we’ll delete your record and release what we set up for you. The Privacy page spells out exactly what that covers. Your archive is in your own account, so leaving doesn’t take it away from you.

We can end things too, if you break the terms above or use the service in a way that puts us or other people at risk. We’d tell you why, and outside of obvious abuse we’d give you a chance to put it right first.

What we don’t promise

The service is provided as it is. We don’t promise it will always be available, always be correct, or never lose anything. We’ll work hard at all three and we’ll tell you when we fall short, but we’re not going to sign up to a guarantee we can’t honour at this stage.

If we let you down

To the extent the law allows, our total liability to you is capped at whatever you’ve paid us over the previous twelve months, which during a free alpha is nothing. That’s the honest arithmetic of a free product rather than a trick, and it’s exactly why the note about keeping your own copies sits so near the top of this page.

When these change

We’ll update this page as the product grows up. If a change materially affects your rights, we’ll email you before it takes effect. Carrying on using Visible Storage after that means the new version applies to you.

The legal bits

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, and any dispute goes to the state or federal courts sitting there. If part of this turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of it still stands. These terms and the Privacy page are the whole of the agreement between us, and they replace anything we’ve said to you in an email or over a drink.

Talking to us

team@pickaxe.nyc, same as everywhere else on this site. If something here doesn’t sit right with you, we’d rather hear it now than find out later that you signed up uneasy.

Last updated August 3, 2026