Terms of Service

1. Who we are

ArchCanvas is operated by Chan Meng, trading as ArchCanvas (“we”, “us”). Contact: hello@archcanvas.uk. These terms are governed by the laws of New Zealand, and the New Zealand courts have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

If you are a consumer, that choice does not take anything away from you. You keep every protection that the law of the country you live in gives you and that cannot be contracted out of, and you can bring proceedings in your own local courts. Where those rules and these terms disagree, those rules win.

2. What the service is — and what it is not

ArchCanvas turns a written brief into a concept / schematic floor plan and an AI rendering, which you can then refine in conversation. The plans are precise, dimensioned and exportable, and they are intended to be taken to a professional.

They are not construction documents and not a permit set. We do not check your plan against any building code, zoning rule, egress requirement, structural standard or accessibility standard, and we make no warranty of compliance with any of them. The soundness checks we do run (reachability, door clear widths, room areas) are advisory only. Before you build, price, or submit anything, have a qualified architect, engineer or building professional review it. You are responsible for that review and for any decision you take from a plan.

Designs are generated by AI models. They are not guaranteed to be correct, complete or novel, and you should treat every dimension and every assumption as something to be checked. This is a description of what the technology does, not an attempt to sign away your statutory rights: if you are a consumer, the quality rights your own law gives you over paid digital content apply in full and we do not exclude them.

3. Your account

You need an account to generate designs. Keep your login credentials to yourself; you are responsible for activity under your account. You must be old enough to enter a contract where you live. Don’t use the service to break the law, to infringe someone else’s rights, or to attack the service (scraping, automated abuse, attempts to bypass rate limits or credit accounting). We may suspend an account that does.

4. Credits, payment and refunds

• ArchCanvas is pay-per-result. There is no subscription. You buy a one-time pack of credits and spend a credit only when a new design is generated; refining an existing design is free.
• New accounts receive one free design generation, plus a limited number of free refinements and renderings. No card is required to start.
• Credits do not expire while your account is open. They have no cash value, are not transferable, and cannot be exchanged for money outside a refund below.
• Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card number. Prices are shown in US dollars; your bank may add conversion or foreign-transaction fees we do not control.
• Refunds. If you have not spent the credits from a purchase, email hello@archcanvas.uk within 14 days of the purchase and we will refund it in full. When a purchase is refunded, the credits it granted are removed from your balance (down to a floor of zero). Once credits have been spent on a generation, the compute has been paid for, so we do not refund spent credits simply because you changed your mind. That is not the answer when the design itself was faulty. If a generation failed, or what came back was not of satisfactory quality, tell us: we will re-run it, and if that does not put it right we will refund the credits it consumed. Where consumer law in your country gives you a stronger right than this paragraph, that law wins.
• The 14-day cancellation right, and how it ends. As a consumer buying at a distance you normally have 14 days to cancel. Credits are delivered to your balance the moment you pay, which is why the checkout asks you to confirm two things: that you want them straight away, and that you understand you lose the right to cancel for the credits you then spend. Anything still unspent stays refundable for those 14 days under the paragraph above.
• If a payment is charged back or disputed, the corresponding credits are reversed.

5. Your content, and the rights in your designs

What you upload stays yours. Your briefs, reference images and sketches are your own and we claim no ownership of them. You grant us only the licence we need to run the service: to store them, send them to the AI and image providers listed in the Privacy Policy in order to produce your design, and display the result back to you (and to anyone you deliberately share a link with).

You promise they are yours to upload. Only upload a photo, drawing or plan that you took, that you own, or that you otherwise have permission to use — including the permission of anyone identifiable in it and of whoever owns the building you photographed. If material reaches us through your account that should not have, we may remove it, and we may suspend an account that keeps doing it.

Whatever rights we may hold in your designs, we hand to you. For every plan, drawing, export and rendering the service produces for you, we assign to you — outright, worldwide, the moment it is generated — every right we may have in it. Where a right cannot be assigned, we waive it and will not assert it against you. You do not need our permission to build from a design, sell it, publish it, or hand it to a professional to develop further, and we do not publish your designs without your permission.

We are not promising those rights amount to anything. Who owns copyright in machine-generated output is genuinely unsettled. Both the UK and New Zealand say the author of a computer-generated work is “the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken” — no court in either country has decided whether that means you or us, and the UK Government has proposed removing that protection altogether. The US Copyright Office has already concluded that a prompt on its own is not enough to make you an author. Floor plans are functional drawings, and functional things attract thin protection at best. So we transfer everything we have and we warrant nothing about it: we do not promise your design is protected by copyright, that it is original or novel, that it does not resemble a design produced for someone else from a similar brief, or that it does not infringe anyone else’s rights. If any of that matters to your project, take your own advice before you rely on it. As everywhere in these terms, if you are a consumer none of this touches rights your own law gives you that cannot be signed away.

A refund or a chargeback takes the licence with it. Section 4 says the credits come back when a purchase is reversed; the rights come back with them. If a purchase is refunded or charged back, the assignment above falls away for the designs those credits paid for, and you no longer have permission to use them. You keep the files — you just cannot rely on them. The exception is the one that matters: where we refunded you because a generation failed or what came back was not of satisfactory quality, there is nothing worth taking back and we will not ask for it.

We may use aggregate, non-identifying statistics — how often plans compile cleanly, for example — to improve the product. Those numbers never contain your brief, your chat or your plan.

6. Availability, and limits on liability

The service is provided “as is”. It is run by a very small team on modest infrastructure: it can be slow, it can be down, and features can change or be withdrawn. We do not promise uptime, and we recommend you export anything you care about.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss — including construction cost, delay, rework, lost profit, or any decision made from a design — and our total liability to you is capped at what you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot legally be excluded.

7. Ending it

You can stop using ArchCanvas at any time and ask us to delete your account (see the Privacy Policy). We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms. Unspent credits on an account you close at your own request are refundable under section 4.

8. Changes

We may update these terms. The date at the top changes when we do, and material changes will be announced in-product or by email. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept it.