Terms
What we promise,
and what we ask.
Siparu is a small service with a short contract. These terms cover the hosted service that lets you watch your boat from ashore. The software on the boat is free and open source, and it keeps working whether or not you ever pay us anything.
Last updated 1 September 2026
Who you are dealing with
Siparu is run by Siparu Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17429552, whose registered office is at 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom. Write to support@siparu.app about anything here, and a person answers. You can also telephone 020 3951 5422; if nobody picks up, leave a message and we call or write back.
Our order process is conducted by our online reseller Paddle.com. Paddle.com is the Merchant of Record for all our orders. Paddle provides all customer service inquiries and handles returns. That is Paddle's own wording, and in practice it means the money: billing, invoices, tax, and paying a refund back are Paddle's, and your purchase contract is with Paddle under its checkout terms. Anything about the service itself is ours, at support@siparu.app.
What the service is
Siparu shows you, from ashore, what your boat's own instruments are reporting: her position, speed, heading, wind, depth, her engines and tanks if she reports them, her voyages and her logbook. The reading is one-way. Siparu never sends a command to the boat, and there is nothing in it that could.
Her history lives on board, on her own storage, and it is yours. We do not keep it ashore. When you ask for last month's voyage, the question travels to the boat and she answers it herself. This has an honest consequence, written here so it never surprises you: when the boat is off or offline, there is no history to read, because there is nowhere ashore it could come from. The app on a phone keeps the answers she has already given it and shows the date they were taken. A browser keeps none: close the tab and the answer goes with it.
On the boat's own network, watching her is free, needs no account, and sends nothing about her to us. The chart is the one exception: unless charts are stored on the boat, the map screen fetches its tiles over the internet, from us and from OpenFreeMap, and a tile request shows the area being looked at. The membership pays for one thing: reaching her from ashore.
Not a safety system
Siparu is not a navigation, safety or alarm system, and it is not a substitute for seamanship, a watchkeeper, or physically checking your boat. Data and any notification travel over networks that can and do fail, starting with the boat's own uplink. Absence of an alert never means the boat is fine. Do not rely on Siparu to protect life or property; that is what insurance, and looking after your boat, are for.
If your insurance policy requires a monitoring or tracking system to be active, keeping that condition satisfied is your responsibility, not ours, and we cannot know what your policy requires. A lapsed membership ends remote watching, and we do not promise to warn you before it does: if your cover depends on the watching, keep the renewal date yourself. The screen says why it stopped, but only once it has. She goes on recording either way, and what she has recorded stays hers.
Your account, and the screens she seals to
An account holds the least it can: who you are, which boats are yours, and whether a membership is running. What the boat reports is encrypted on board to the screens you have authorised, and to nothing else. The service carries her reports without being able to read them. We consider this the point of the product, and it binds us too: we cannot see your boat's data, so we can never show it, sell it, or hand it over. This is true of a boat sealing to her screens, which is every boat on version 0.2.0 or later with a screen authorised. A boat on an older version reports in the clear until she is updated, and the privacy policy says so in the same words.
The same design has edges you should know about. A boat seals to at most five screens, and each authorised device holds one of those five places; the limits, and how to free a place, are described on the limits page. And because the keys live on your devices and never reach us, we cannot recover what a lost device could read. Losing a phone or clearing a browser does not lose your history, which is on the boat, but it does mean authorising a replacement from a screen you still hold. Losing every screen at once is the one case with no shortcut: nothing we hold can approve a new screen on your behalf, and the way back is to pair again at the boat. There is no master key, on purpose.
You are responsible for what happens under your sign-in, so keep your password to yourself. A forgotten password is yours to reset, from the sign-in page. But if you think someone else has it, tell us as well as changing it: we can lock the account while you take it back, which matters on an account that decides which screens your boat seals to.
Availability
We run the service with reasonable care and skill, and we keep it simple precisely so there is little to break. But we are a small operation and we promise no uptime figure. The chain from her instruments to your screen includes her power, her uplink, and networks belonging to neither of us; any link can fail, and some of them are weather. When something on our side breaks, we fix it as fast as we honestly can.
Paying, renewing, cancelling
Memberships are sold yearly: no add-ons, no fees we add later. Where the law requires it, Paddle emails you a reminder before a renewal is charged; that is not everywhere, so do not rely on it arriving. Your Account page shows the renewal date. If the price is to change, it changes only at renewal, never inside a period you have already paid for, and we email you at least 30 days before that renewal, while cancelling is still free.
You can cancel at any time, online, without asking us, from your Account page or the link in any Paddle receipt. Cancelling stops the renewal; the service runs to the end of what you paid for, and then remote watching ends. Your boat keeps recording, and your history stays with her, whole. Come back a year later and it is all still there, because it never left her.
The refund policy is on the refunds page, and it fits in three sentences.
Founding crew
A few early crews were promised, in writing, that remote watching on their account would never be charged. That promise stands for as long as the service exists, and nothing else in these terms can take it away.
Our responsibility to you
If we fail you, we answer for it. But the service is priced as a way of watching a boat, not as insurance on her value, and our liability reflects that: for any claim arising from the service, our total liability is limited to the amount paid for your membership in the twelve months before the event. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss that follows from relying on Siparu for the things Not a safety system above says it is not.
Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit. Your statutory rights as a consumer are untouched by everything here.
Ending things
You can close your account at any time, from your Account page, with nobody to ask. Closing it deletes the account and its boats from our side; your boat and her records are yours and stay aboard.
We can suspend or close an account that attacks the service, breaks the law with it, or uses another person's boat or sign-in. Where it is fair to warn first, we warn first.
If we ever retire the service, we give at least ninety days' notice, and the unused part of anything you have paid comes back to you. The software on your boat keeps working without us.
The software on the boat
The plugin and its webapp are open source under the Apache 2.0 licence, and their terms are in the licence, not here. They are free, they need no account, and they send nothing about your boat anywhere until you switch remote watching on. The map screen is the exception noted above: it fetches chart tiles over the internet unless charts are stored on board.
Changes
If these terms change in a way that matters, we tell you before the change takes effect, and a change never applies backwards into a period you have already paid for. The founding promise above cannot be changed at all.
Law, and where disputes go
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you live in a country whose law gives you mandatory consumer protections, you keep them, and nothing here takes them away. Disputes can be brought in the courts of England and Wales; if you are a consumer in the EU or EEA, you may instead use the courts of the country you live in, and if we ever had to bring a claim against you as a consumer, we would do it there and nowhere else.