CookiePal plugin - Terms of Service

There is no account and nothing to click. You accept these terms by using the CookiePal MCP server, which the plugin contacts every time you run a check. If you do not accept them, do not install or use the plugin.

These terms cover the hosted service however you reach it. Almost everyone reaches it through the plugin, which is what the rest of this page assumes, but the server speaks a public protocol and can be called directly. If you call it directly you accept these terms in the same way, and the protections the plugin applies on your machine - stripping the query string before sending, refusing to send an address that still has one - are then yours to apply, not ours.

We may change these terms. The date at the top says when they last changed, and continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the new version. The version in force when you run a check governs that check, and changes apply from the day they are published rather than backwards over something already done.

Several documents sit alongside each other and cover different things. These terms cover your use of the hosted service. The CookiePal plugin privacy notice describes what we do with personal data and forms part of these terms by reference. The MIT licence covers the plugin's source code, and nothing here limits the rights it gives you. Anthropic's own terms cover your use of Claude Code.

The plugin and the hosted service behind it are free. There is no account, no payment and no trial that ends.

It is provided without any uptime or service-level commitment. Subject to these terms and to applicable law, we may change how the check works, change what the server returns, or stop offering it entirely, at any time. We will give notice in the repository and the release notes where we reasonably can.

There is no service level, no uptime commitment and no support obligation. We do read support@cookiepal.io and we do answer.

The hosted service is throttled so that a burst from one place cannot take it down for everyone else. There is no published per-user quota, and we would rather not need one.

If your use makes the service worse for other people, we may throttle it, block it, or require you to stop. We may also take technical measures to protect the service from abuse, including temporarily blocking sources of abusive traffic. We will try to tell you why first where that is practical.

Nothing the plugin produces is legal advice. It is a technical observation, and we are not your lawyers.

A check looks at one page, loaded once, from one country, at one moment. Sites behave differently by region, by visitor, by device and by day. What the law requires also depends on the jurisdiction, on who is processing the data and why, and on facts a check cannot observe. A page can pass a check and still breach the law, and it can fail one for something perfectly lawful in context.

For that reason the plugin never tells you that a site is compliant or non-compliant, and neither do we. It tells you what was found and what each law asks for. Deciding what that means for your site is your responsibility, and a question for your own legal advisers.

We do not guarantee that a check is accurate, complete or up to date. Banner detection, cookie categorisation and the legal wording are all best efforts that we improve over time.

The plugin loads whatever page you point it at, from your machine, over your network connection. You are responsible for what you check.

Only check pages you own, operate, or are otherwise entitled to test. By submitting a URL you represent that you are authorised to run the check on that page and that doing so breaks no law and no obligation you are under. Loading a page is an ordinary request any browser could make, and the check presses at most one consent button, but automated testing of someone else's site may still be restricted by their terms, by your contract with them, or by local law.

The check removes crawl=true and cookiepal-crawl=true from the address you give it. These are CookiePal's own crawl-control parameters: our banner treats them as an instruction to accept everything, so a check run with them attached would measure nothing useful. The fragment is removed as well, and only the origin and path are ever sent to us; the rest of what you type stays on your machine.

Do not script, automate or otherwise drive the service in a way designed to overload it, evade its limits, or run at a volume it is not meant for.

Do not inflate our counts. The service counts checks and, for people who opted in, unique installs. Submitting checks you did not run, rotating install IDs, or otherwise manufacturing activity to distort those numbers is not allowed, whatever the reason. Running genuine checks is never a breach of this, however many you run and whatever client you run them from.

Do not use the service to attack, probe or disrupt anyone else's systems, or to collect data about people. Do not attempt to break the server, work around its validation, or reach parts of it that are not offered to you.

Do not present the results as a compliance certification, as an audit, or as legal advice from CookiePal, to your customers or to anyone else.

If you break these rules we may block your access without notice.

The plugin's own code is open source under the MIT licence, and that licence is what governs the code: you may read it, modify it, fork it and redistribute it on those terms.

The MIT licence does not cover the hosted service. The CookiePal MCP server is ours, is not open source, and is offered to you under these terms. A fork of the plugin is free to exist, but it has no right to our server, and we may refuse or block any client we choose.

CookiePal and its logo are our trademarks, and the MIT licence gives you no right to use them. You must not use them in a way that falsely suggests a fork is the official CookiePal product, or that it is endorsed or sponsored by us.

Except for rights and warranties that cannot be excluded under applicable law, the service is provided as is and as available, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy or non-infringement.

We strive to provide an accurate and reliable service. We are not responsible for loss, damage or liability resulting from interruptions or downtime, from your reliance on any information or output the service produces, or from your use of the service on a page you were not entitled to check.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, nor for lost profits, lost revenue or lost data. Our liability is limited to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability under applicable data protection law, liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, liability for fraud, and any liability that mandatory consumer protection law in your country reserves to you.

You remain responsible for your own site's compliance. Running a check does not transfer any of that to us.

The service is provided by CookiePal Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 15835702, with its registered address at 10 Orange Street, London WC2H 7DQ, United Kingdom. "CookiePal", "we" and "us" in these terms mean that company.

These terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the United Kingdom, without regard to conflict of law principles, except where mandatory consumer protection law in your country of residence gives you rights you cannot be deprived of.

Questions about these terms go to support@cookiepal.io.