Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (the terms) govern your use of Stratos and the services provided by Skyvex Software Pty Ltd (ABN 21 693 871 019, ACN 693 871 019), a company based in Queensland, Australia (Skyvex Software, we, us, our). By creating an account, connecting a client, or otherwise using the service, you agree to these terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you have the authority to bind that organisation to these terms.

1. Definitions

In these terms, the following words have the following meanings.

• Stratos — the ACARS and telemetry client built by Skyvex Software, together with the Stratos service, the relay, the published schema, the public API, and the plugin surface.
• The relay — the authenticated transport over which the Stratos client sends simulator telemetry and flight data to a backend.
• The Stratos client — the Stratos desktop application that pilots install to track flights from their simulator.
• The Stratos service — the hosted service operated by Skyvex Software that supports the Stratos client: the relay, telemetry storage, the airline configuration and administration tools, plugin distribution, support, and live tracking. The Stratos service does not include a VA backend.
• VA backend — the backend a virtual airline runs itself, such as a phpVMS installation or a custom system, which it connects to Stratos. Skyvex Software does not host or operate the VA backend.
• Airline or VA — a virtual airline that uses Stratos to track and manage the flights of its pilots.
• Pilot — a person who tracks flights through an airline using the Stratos client.
• AnonymousPilot — the per-airline pilot record that Stratos creates to attribute flight activity to a pilot within an airline. A pilot is represented by an AnonymousPilot whether or not they also hold a Stratos account.
• Account — a Stratos login account held by a person, such as a VA owner, a staff member, or a pilot who has signed up directly.
• Distribution Licence — the developer distribution licence a plugin author will need to distribute plugins commercially to airlines other than their own, as set out in the Plugin Terms & Conditions.

2. Eligibility and accounts

You may register for an account if you are old enough to enter a binding contract in your jurisdiction — at least 18 where the law requires it — and you are not barred from using the service under any applicable law. You may register on behalf of an organisation if you are authorised to do so.

You agree to provide accurate, current, and complete information when you register and to keep that information up to date. You are responsible for the security of your account, including your credentials and any two-factor authentication method. You must notify us promptly if you believe your account has been accessed without your authorisation.

Each person may hold one account. There is no limit on the number of airlines you associate with it. You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account.

3. The service

The Stratos client is free for every pilot and every airline, forever. Pilots never pay to install or use the client.

Stratos is an ACARS and telemetry client. A VA owner or administrator signs up to Skyvex Software to configure and operate their airline's use of Stratos: they register the airline, connect the backend they already run, manage plugins, scope pilots, and handle support. Stratos connects to the backend the airline runs; it does not replace it, and Skyvex Software does not host a VA backend.

The airline always runs its own backend. For phpVMS, Skyvex Software publishes official Stratos modules that the airline installs; for a custom backend, the airline implements the open, published Stratos API in its own stack. The schema and API are free to implement, and we provide reference implementations as a starting point.

We develop the service continuously. We may add, change, or remove features over time. Where a change materially reduces the functionality you rely on, we will give reasonable notice.

4. Plans and billing

Stratos has a free plan and paid plans for airlines, and may offer optional paid extras for pilots. What each plan includes, its limits, and its price are published on our pricing page at skyvexsoftware.com/pricing and shown to you before you buy. Tracking and filing flights in the Stratos client is free for pilots and always will be.

The free plan. The free plan has usage limits, set out on our pricing page. We let the account owner know as an airline approaches them. Once they are reached, new flights may not start until the limits reset or the airline moves to a paid plan. A flight already in progress always finishes and files.

Paid plans. Paid plans and paid extras are subscriptions, billed in advance through our payment provider, Stripe, until you cancel. You can cancel at any time, and you keep what you have paid for until the end of the period. We tell you before a price increase applies to you.

Refunds. You can cancel a new subscription within 14 days of starting it for a full refund. After that, if you are not happy with a paid plan, contact us and we will refund you. Nothing here limits your rights under the Australian Consumer Law.

Free trials. We may offer a free trial of a paid plan or extra. A trial doesn't need a card and never turns into a paid subscription on its own: to keep the plan, you choose it at checkout. When a trial ends, you go back to the plan you were on before, and nothing is deleted.

If a payment fails. If a payment can't be taken, the account moves to the free plan. Nothing is deleted, and features above the free plan come back as soon as a paid plan is active again.

5. Acceptable use

When you use the service, you agree that you will not:

• use the service for any unlawful purpose, or in breach of any applicable law or regulation;
• interfere with, disrupt, or degrade the service, or interfere with another tenant's use of the service;
• reverse-engineer, decompile, or disassemble any part of the service, except to the extent the open, published schema expressly permits, or to the extent applicable law prohibits that restriction;
• abuse, overload, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to the relay or the APIs, including by probing, scanning, or testing the vulnerability of the service without our authorisation;
• circumvent, or attempt to circumvent, any tier limit, quota, or access control;
• submit unlawful, infringing, or malicious content through support tickets or any other channel of the service.

6. Your responsibilities as a virtual airline

If you operate an airline on Stratos, you authenticate your own pilots. You are the controller of your pilots' personal data, and Stratos processes that data on your behalf as your processor.

You warrant that you have a lawful basis for your pilots' personal data to be processed by Stratos on your behalf, and that you have given your pilots any notice and obtained any consent that applicable law requires.

If any of your pilots is under 18, you are responsible, as part of your controller obligations, for ensuring that appropriate parental or guardian consent is in place. Skyvex Software does not collect that consent and relies on you to obtain and hold it.

You are responsible for the conduct of your pilots within your airline and for your own VA backend, including its security, availability, and compliance with applicable law.

Your pilots are your users: they contact you for support, and Skyvex Software's relationship is with you, the account holder. Where an issue is caused by Stratos itself, we will help. Plugin authors support their own plugins through their own channels.

7. Your data

Your data is yours. We do not claim ownership of the flight, telemetry, or operational data that you and your pilots generate through the service.

Your VA backend is yours and stays yours; Stratos connects to it but does not contain it. The API and schema between the Stratos client and a backend are open and published on our docs site, so you are not locked into Skyvex Software for the integration. The limited data we hold can be exported on request.

There is no lock-in: the connection API is open, any paid subscription is cancellable, and you can export the data we hold on request.

As your processor, we handle pilot personal data only to operate the service for you. We will tell you without undue delay if we become aware of a breach affecting your pilots' personal data, and we use only the sub-processors listed in our Privacy & Data Collection Policy to do so. They are currently DigitalOcean and Vultr (hosting, in Australia), Cloudflare (content delivery and DNS), Postmark (email), Stripe (payments), Sentry (error reports from the Stratos app), and Expo, Apple and Google (push notifications for the Stratos mobile app). When your account ends, we handle and delete pilot data as set out in clause 13 and that policy.

Where a breach is likely to result in serious harm to a pilot, we will also assess and meet our own notification obligations under the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, including notifying the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner where required.

How we collect, use, store, and share personal data — and the respective roles of Skyvex Software and your airline as processor and controller — is set out in our Privacy & Data Collection Policy.

8. Plugins

Plugins extend the Stratos client. The terms that govern building and distributing plugins are set out in the Plugin Terms & Conditions, which include when a Distribution Licence is required. Those terms are published at skyvexsoftware.com/legal/plugin-terms and form part of these terms; by accepting these terms, you also accept them to the extent they apply to you.

Airlines install third-party plugins at their own discretion. Skyvex Software reviews and signs plugins before they are published, and plugins declare the permissions they use, but beyond those review and signing controls we are not responsible for the behaviour of a third-party plugin or for any arrangement between an airline and a plugin author.

9. Intellectual property

Stratos, the Skyvex Software name and marks, and the platform are owned by Skyvex Software Pty Ltd and are protected by intellectual property laws. Nothing in these terms transfers any of those rights to you.

We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the service in accordance with these terms. We license the service to you for that purpose only.

Some components of Stratos are open and are governed by their own licences, including the plugin SDK, the published schema, and the reference backend implementation. Your use of those components is governed by the licence that accompanies each of them, not by this section.

10. Availability and changes

This version of the service is provided without an uptime guarantee or service-level commitment. Where we operate a status page, it is the source of truth for the current operational state of the service.

We may modify, suspend, or discontinue any feature of the service. Where a change materially affects the functionality you rely on, we will give reasonable notice through the account or another channel we consider appropriate.

11. Warranties and disclaimers

The service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, to the extent permitted by law. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for any particular purpose.

Telemetry is captured as-is from the simulator and is not a certified flight record. It is intended for virtual airline operations within Stratos and must not be relied upon for any real-world aviation, safety, navigation, or certification purpose.

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts, or modifies any guarantee, right, or remedy that applies to you under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that cannot lawfully be excluded.

12. Limitation of liability

Stratos is a small product and we keep this simple. To the extent permitted by law, Skyvex Software is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential loss, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or anticipated savings, arising out of or in connection with the service or these terms. In particular, we are not liable for loss caused by a third-party plugin, by your own VA backend, or by another tenant's conduct — these are outside our control.

If something we are responsible for goes wrong, contact us. We will always try to put it right, and the practical remedy will usually be a refund or a credit. We would rather sort it out with you than argue about it.

Nothing in this clause limits or excludes any liability that the law does not permit to be limited or excluded, including liability for a breach of a consumer guarantee under the Australian Consumer Law. Whether you use the service for free or pay for it doesn't reduce that liability. Where the Australian Consumer Law or another law applies a guarantee that cannot be excluded, and our liability for breaching that guarantee can be limited, our liability is limited to re-supplying the service or paying the cost of having it re-supplied.

13. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the service at any time. You may cancel a paid subscription at any time; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period unless we agree otherwise.

We may suspend or terminate your access to the service, in whole or in part, if you breach these terms, if your use puts the service or other tenants at risk, or if we are required to do so by law. Where practical and lawful, we will give you notice and an opportunity to remedy a breach before we terminate.

On termination, we will provide a window of at least 30 days during which you can export your data. After that window closes, your data is deleted in accordance with our Privacy & Data Collection Policy.

14. Indemnity

To the extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify Skyvex Software, its officers, employees, and contractors against any third-party claim brought against them, and any loss, liability, cost, or expense (including reasonable legal costs) they reasonably incur in connection with such a claim, to the extent the claim arises out of your unlawful use of the service, your breach of these terms, or your breach of the warranty that you have a lawful basis for your pilots' personal data to be processed by Stratos on your behalf. This indemnity does not apply to the extent the claim is caused by Skyvex Software's own act or omission.

15. Force majeure

Neither party is liable for a failure or delay in performing its obligations under these terms to the extent the failure or delay is caused by something beyond its reasonable control — for example, infrastructure or network outages, acts of government, natural disasters, or industrial action. This clause does not apply to an obligation to pay money.

16. Dispute resolution

If a dispute arises out of or in connection with these terms, the parties will first try to resolve it in good faith. Before starting court proceedings, a party must give the other written notice of the dispute and allow at least 30 days for the parties to resolve it by negotiation. This clause does not prevent a party from seeking urgent interlocutory relief, and it does not limit our right to suspend or terminate under clause 13.

This clause does not apply to a claim you bring under the Australian Consumer Law.

17. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Queensland, Australia, and you submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of that State. The Plugin Terms & Conditions govern disputes between Skyvex Software and plugin developers. Nothing in these terms or the Plugin Terms limits your rights under the Australian Consumer Law.

18. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. When we do, we post the updated terms on this page and revise the "Last updated" date at the top. Where a change is material — for example, a change to pricing, to how we handle personal data, or to core functionality — we communicate it to account holders through the account or another channel we consider appropriate. Your continued use of the service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms.

19. Contact

These terms are provided by Skyvex Software Pty Ltd (ABN 21 693 871 019), Queensland, Australia. If you have any questions about these terms, contact us at legal@skyvexsoftware.com.