Legal

Terms of Service

Effective date: April 29, 2026 — Last updated: April 29, 2026

1. Agreement to these Terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") form a binding agreement between you and the operator of UtiliForge ("UtiliForge", "we", "us", "our") and govern your access to and use of the website at utiliforge.com, every page within it, and every tool, feature and content item we make available through it (collectively, the "Service"). By visiting the Service, by interacting with any tool, by clicking a link to a UtiliForge URL, or by otherwise using the Service in any way, you agree to these Terms. If you are using the Service on behalf of a company or other organisation, you represent that you have the authority to bind that organisation, in which case "you" refers to that organisation as well.

2. Changes to the Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we do, the revised version is effective from the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. If a change is material, we will provide reasonable advance notice on the homepage of the Service and, where required by law, will obtain your express consent before the change takes effect. Your continued use of the Service after a change becomes effective constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms. If you do not agree with the revised Terms, you must stop using the Service.

3. Eligibility

The Service is intended for users who are at least 13 years old (or, if higher, the minimum age of digital consent in your country — for example, 16 in some EU member states, 14 in some US states). By using the Service, you represent and warrant that you meet this age requirement. If you are below the age of legal majority in your jurisdiction, you may use the Service only with the involvement and consent of a parent or legal guardian.

You also represent that you are not (and are not acting on behalf of a person who is) on a sanctions list maintained by the United States government, the United Kingdom, the European Union or other relevant authorities, and that you are not located in a country or region subject to a comprehensive embargo by such authorities. If those circumstances change, you must stop using the Service.

4. The Site and the Tools

UtiliForge is a static website that publishes free utility tools — such as JSON formatters, encoders, decoders, hash generators, JWT decoders, regex testers, text counters and similar utilities — that run inside your browser. We do not store, transmit, or process the input you paste into any tool on our servers; tool input stays on your device. The list of tools available may change over time without notice. We may add, modify, restrict or remove tools, blog posts, or other content at any time and for any reason, including for legal or operational reasons.

5. Licence to use the Tools

Subject to your compliance with these Terms, we grant you a limited, personal, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable licence to access the Service and to use its tools for your own personal or business purposes. Output that a tool produces from input you provide ("Tool Output") is yours to use without attribution to UtiliForge for any lawful purpose, including commercial purposes, subject to any underlying rights of the third parties whose data you may be processing.

This licence does not include any right to:

• resell, rent, lease, sub-licence, or commercially exploit the Service or any part of it as a product or feature distinct from your own work product;
• copy, modify, distribute or display the design, layout, source code or content of the Service except as expressly permitted in these Terms;
• use the Service or its tools to power, replicate or compete with the Service through automated re-publication;
• remove, obscure or alter any proprietary notices, version stamps or branding on the Service.

6. Acceptable use

You may use the Service for lawful, personal or commercial work. You agree to use the Service in good faith, in accordance with these Terms, and consistent with all applicable laws. You are responsible for any consequence of using a tool against data that you do not own, do not have rights to, or are not permitted to process under applicable law (including, without limitation, data-protection law, banking-secrecy law, or contractual obligations).

7. Prohibited conduct

You agree that you will not, and will not attempt to, do any of the following:

• use the Service in violation of any applicable law, regulation or third-party right;
• use the Service to process data that you are not lawfully entitled to process, or to commit, facilitate or encourage any unlawful act, including fraud, identity theft, money laundering, harassment, infringement of intellectual property, or violation of computer-misuse law;
• upload, paste, transmit, or process malware, viruses, ransomware payloads, exploits, scripts or any code intended to disrupt, damage, gain unauthorized access to, or interfere with any system, network or device — whether ours, yours, or a third party's;
• probe, scan or test the vulnerability of the Service, breach or attempt to breach our security, authentication or rate limits, or interfere with the proper working of the Service or its underlying infrastructure;
• send automated requests at a volume that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionate load on our infrastructure or our service providers (this prohibition does not preclude search engines from indexing the Service in accordance with our robots.txt, nor accessibility or assistive technologies);
• scrape, mirror, frame, hot-link, copy or republish the Service or any non-trivial portion of its content, design, or markup, except as permitted by Section 18;
• misrepresent your identity, impersonate any person, or affiliate yourself with UtiliForge in a way that is misleading;
• reverse-engineer, decompile or disassemble any part of the Service, except to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law;
• use the Service in connection with the development of weapons of mass destruction or any prohibited end-use under applicable export-control law.

We reserve the right to investigate suspected violations of this section and to take any action we consider appropriate, including blocking access from particular IP addresses or networks, removing content, and reporting unlawful activity to the relevant authorities.

8. Your content and your responsibility

You are solely responsible for any content you paste into a tool, save in your browser, or otherwise process through the Service ("Your Content"), and for the consequences of doing so. Although Your Content does not leave your device, you must still ensure that you have all necessary rights and permissions to process it (for example, that you have the right to decode a JWT belonging to your employer, or to format a JSON document containing customer data).

Because the tools run client-side and we do not receive Your Content, we cannot review, approve, monitor, recover, restore, undo or moderate it. You must keep your own copies of any input you care about. We are not responsible for any data loss, data corruption or unintended disclosure that arises from your use of any tool, your browser, your device, your network or any extension you have installed.

9. Our content and intellectual property

The UtiliForge name, logo (including the {UtiliForge} wordmark), the visual design of the Service, the layout of every page, the original copy that surrounds each tool (including hero text, FAQs, blog posts, and supporting articles) and the implementation of each tool's user interface and JavaScript are owned by, or licensed to, the UtiliForge site operator, and are protected by copyright, trade-mark and other intellectual-property laws. Except for the limited licence in Section 5, nothing in these Terms transfers any of those rights to you.

Some open-source software is incorporated into specific tools and is governed by its own licence (for example, the js-yaml library used by the YAML Validator is published under the MIT licence). Where third-party content is used under an open-source or other licence, that licence governs that content; nothing in these Terms purports to override it.

You may quote short excerpts from the Service for the purposes of criticism, review, news reporting or teaching, provided that you do not present those excerpts in a way that is likely to mislead readers as to the source.

10. Copyright complaints (DMCA)

If you believe that material on the Service infringes a copyright that you own or control, please send a written notice to contact@utiliforge.com that includes:

1. your physical or electronic signature;
2. identification of the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed (or a representative list if multiple works are claimed);
3. identification of the material on the Service that you believe is infringing, with enough detail (including a URL) for us to locate it;
4. your name, address, telephone number and email address;
5. a statement that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material is not authorized by the rights holder, its agent, or the law;
6. a statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or are authorized to act on the rights holder's behalf.

We will respond to valid notices in accordance with the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and equivalent procedures in other jurisdictions. Submitting a false notice may expose you to liability for damages, including costs and attorneys' fees.

11. Third-party services and links

The Service may include links to, or load content from, third-party websites and services. Those third parties are independent of UtiliForge and are not under our control. We are not responsible for the content, privacy practices, security or accuracy of any third-party site, and a link from the Service to a third party is not an endorsement. Your use of any third-party site or service is at your own risk and is governed by that third party's own terms and policies.

12. Advertising

The Service does not display third-party advertising at the time these Terms were last updated. We may introduce advertising in the future (for example, through Mediavine or a comparable network). When we do, advertising will be clearly identifiable as such, will not affect the underlying functionality of any tool, and will be subject to the disclosures we make in our Privacy Policy. Advertisers and ad networks are independent third parties; UtiliForge is not responsible for the products, services or content advertised, and inclusion of an advertisement does not imply endorsement.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

The Service, including every tool, feature, blog post, output and piece of content, is provided "as is" and "as available", with all faults and without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied, statutory or otherwise.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, UtiliForge expressly disclaims all warranties, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, completeness, reliability, security, uninterrupted access, freedom from errors or viruses, or that the Service will meet your requirements. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, we do not warrant that:

• any tool will produce correct or complete output for every input;
• the Service will be available at any given time, in any given location, or to any given user;
• the Service is suitable for any particular use, including production, regulatory, safety-critical, financial, medical or legal use;
• defects will be corrected, or that the Service is free of viruses, malicious code or other harmful components;
• information published on the Service (including blog posts, FAQs, and explanatory copy) is current, accurate or applicable to your circumstances.

You should always independently verify Tool Output, especially before using it in any system, decision or workflow that has legal, financial, security or safety significance. The Service is a convenience for general technical work, not professional advice.

14. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, in no event will UtiliForge, its operator, contributors, licensors, suppliers, or service providers be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, revenue, data, business, goodwill, or other intangible losses, arising out of or in connection with your use of, or inability to use, the Service, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages and even if a remedy fails of its essential purpose.

In no event will the aggregate liability of UtiliForge to you for all claims arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability or any other theory, exceed the greater of (a) one hundred United States dollars (US$100), or (b) the total amount you have paid to UtiliForge in the twelve months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, which, because the Service is free, will typically be zero.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages, or the exclusion of certain warranties; in those jurisdictions, the exclusions and limitations in Sections 13 and 14 will apply only to the extent permitted, and our liability will be limited to the smallest amount allowed by law. Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes any liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law, including liability for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

15. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless UtiliForge, its operator, contributors, licensors, and service providers from and against any and all claims, damages, losses, liabilities, costs and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or relating to: (a) Your Content, (b) your use of the Service, (c) your violation of these Terms, (d) your violation of any law or any rights of a third party, or (e) your negligent or wilful misconduct. We reserve the right, at our own expense, to assume the exclusive defence and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you, and you will cooperate with our defence of those claims. You will not settle any claim covered by this section without our prior written consent.

16. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service, in whole or in part, at any time, with or without notice, including (without limitation) if we reasonably believe that you have violated these Terms, that your use poses a risk to us or to other users, or that we are required to do so by law or by our service providers. You may stop using the Service at any time. The provisions of Sections 5 (Licence), 8 (Your content), 9 (Our content), 13 (Disclaimer), 14 (Limitation of liability), 15 (Indemnification), 19 (Governing law), 20 (Dispute resolution) and 22 (General provisions) survive any termination.

17. Export controls and sanctions

The Service is operated from the country in which the site operator resides and may not be lawful in every jurisdiction. You agree to comply with all applicable export, re-export and trade-sanctions laws, including those of the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union. You will not access or use the Service if doing so would violate such laws, and you represent that you are not a party that is restricted from receiving the Service under those laws.

18. Automated access, scraping and AI training

You may not use any automated means (including bots, crawlers, scrapers, or large-language-model agents) to copy or systematically harvest content from the Service, except: (a) general-purpose web search-engine crawlers that respect our robots.txt and that index the Service for the purpose of returning links to it in search results; and (b) accessibility tools used by an individual end user. In particular, you may not use the Service or any portion of its content (including blog posts, FAQs, supporting copy or implementation patterns) to train, fine-tune or evaluate any machine-learning model, including generative-AI models, without our prior written consent.

If we detect or reasonably suspect access that violates this section, we may take any technical or legal action we consider appropriate, including blocking access at the network level, issuing a take-down notice to your hosting provider, or pursuing damages and injunctive relief.

19. Governing law

These Terms, and any dispute or claim (including non-contractual disputes or claims) arising out of or in connection with them or their subject matter or formation, are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the jurisdiction in which the UtiliForge site operator is established, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules and excluding the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. Where applicable, mandatory consumer-protection laws of the jurisdiction in which you reside are not displaced by this provision.

20. Dispute resolution and arbitration

20.1 Informal resolution first

Before initiating any formal dispute, you and UtiliForge agree to first try to resolve the matter informally for at least 30 days. To start the informal-resolution period, you must send a written notice describing the dispute and the relief you seek to contact@utiliforge.com.

20.2 Binding arbitration (US users)

If you are a resident of the United States, then to the fullest extent permitted by law, any dispute that is not resolved informally will be resolved by final, binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, rather than in court. The arbitrator's decision will be enforceable in any court with jurisdiction. Either party may bring a small-claims-court action in lieu of arbitration if the claim qualifies. Class-action waiver: all disputes will be resolved on an individual basis only; you and UtiliForge waive any right to participate in a class, collective or representative action. If a court determines that the class-action waiver is unenforceable for a particular claim, that claim (and only that claim) will be severed from this arbitration agreement and proceed in court.

20.3 Court jurisdiction (other users)

If you are not subject to Section 20.2 — for example, because you reside in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, or another jurisdiction in which mandatory consumer-protection law gives you the right to bring proceedings in your local courts — you may bring proceedings in the courts of the place where you reside, and we may bring proceedings in those courts as well. Otherwise, any dispute that is not subject to Section 20.2 will be brought exclusively in the competent courts of the jurisdiction whose law governs these Terms under Section 19.

21. Consumer rights

If you are a consumer in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland or another jurisdiction whose law gives you statutory rights as a consumer (including rights under the EU Consumer Rights Directive, the UK Consumer Rights Act 2015, the Australian Consumer Law and similar regimes), nothing in these Terms is intended to exclude or restrict those rights, and they apply in addition to the other provisions of these Terms. Where any provision of these Terms is inconsistent with such mandatory rights, that provision is superseded only to the extent of the inconsistency, and the remainder of the Terms remains in force.

EU consumers may use the European Commission's Online Dispute Resolution platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr as an additional route for resolving disputes, although we are not obliged to participate in any specific consumer-arbitration scheme.

22. General provisions

Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any notice posted on the Service, constitute the entire agreement between you and UtiliForge concerning the Service, and supersede any prior or contemporaneous agreement, understanding or representation on the same subject.

No waiver. Our failure to enforce any right or provision of these Terms does not waive that right or provision. Any waiver must be in writing and signed on our behalf.

Severability. If a court or arbitrator with proper jurisdiction holds any provision of these Terms to be invalid, illegal or unenforceable, that provision will be enforced to the maximum extent permitted, the remainder of these Terms will remain in full force and effect, and the parties will substitute a valid, enforceable provision that most closely reflects the original intent.

Assignment. You may not assign these Terms or any rights or obligations under them without our prior written consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a sale, merger, reorganization, or change of control of the UtiliForge project, provided that the assignee is bound by terms substantially equivalent to these.

Force majeure. We are not liable for any failure or delay in performance to the extent caused by an event beyond our reasonable control, including acts of God, war, terrorism, riots, civil unrest, government action, labour disputes, fire, flood, earthquake, pandemic, internet outage, or denial-of-service attack.

No agency. Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, joint venture, employment, agency or franchise relationship between you and UtiliForge.

Headings. Section headings are for convenience only and do not affect interpretation.

Language. These Terms are written in English. Any translation is provided for convenience only; in the event of any inconsistency, the English version prevails.

Notices. We may give you notice through the Service, by email if you have provided one, or by posting an updated version of these Terms. You may give us notice by email to contact@utiliforge.com.

23. Contact

For legal notices and questions about these Terms, contact:

Email: contact@utiliforge.com
Postal address: available on request to the email address above.

See also: Privacy Policy