Terms of Service

Last updated: September 23, 2026

Montage Engine is a hosted service operated by akineticzen LLC, a company registered in Massachusetts, United States. These terms are a binding agreement between you and akineticzen LLC covering your access to and use of Montage Engine (the "Service"). By creating an account you agree to them. If you don't agree, don't use the Service.

Who can use it

The Service is for people aged 18 or older. If you're under 18, you can't register or use it. If you're signing up for a company, you confirm you're authorized to bind that company to these terms.

The service

Montage Engine is a hosted studio for slideshow-carousel content. Each account gets a private workspace containing its own projects, themes, image library, and decks. The Service covers writing and editing slides, building reusable visual themes, storing and editing images, rendering decks to 1080×1350 images, and — for the social accounts you choose to connect — delivering drafts to a TikTok account's inbox, publishing carousels to an Instagram professional account, and reading back how those posts perform. Optional AI-assisted drafting is available and runs on an AI account you connect yourself. Your usage of OpenRouter, TikTok, Instagram, and Pexels content is additionally governed by their own terms and licenses.

Your account

You need an account to use the Service. Keep your credentials secure — you're responsible for what happens under your account. Everything you tell us at signup should be true and kept current. If it isn't, we may suspend or close the account.

The plan

One subscription, $5/month, billed by Stripe. Your subscription renews automatically each month until you cancel, and you authorize us to charge your payment method on that recurring basis without asking again each time. Prices are in US dollars, and sales tax is added where required. We may change the price, and we'll tell you before a change affects you.

Fair-use caps (published on the pricing page) apply to keep shared platform limits healthy; they're generous for real use and adjustable on request. Theme generation isn't one of those monthly caps — it runs on your own AI account — but an account may keep up to 1,000 themes at a time; deleting themes you no longer use frees space for new ones. That's an anti-excess ceiling, not a quota to track: no real workspace reaches it, and if yours does, tell us. If a payment fails your workspace becomes read-only until it's fixed.

Refunds and cancellation

Payments are non-refundable, including for partial billing periods. You can cancel any time from the Billing screen in your account — no email required, no retention gauntlet. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the month you've already paid for, and you keep full access until then.

After cancellation your workspace stays viewable and exportable for 30 days so you can get your work out, and is then permanently deleted along with your renders and connected accounts. You can also delete everything immediately from Settings.

If something went wrong, or the Service didn't do what you expected, email support@montageengine.com — we'd rather sort it out than have you feel stuck, and we handle refund requests case by case even though we're not obliged to.

Your content

What you make is yours. We claim no ownership of your ideas, scripts, decks, or renders. You're responsible for the content you create and publish, including having the rights to anything you upload (like theme screenshots) and using Pexels photos within their license (fine for posting; not for reselling photos as-is; be thoughtful with identifiable people and brands).

You grant us only the narrow permission we need to run the Service: to store, process, render, and transmit your content on your behalf — for example, sending a carousel to TikTok or Instagram when you ask us to. We don't use your content to train models, and we don't sell it.

Publishing to a platform happens only at your instruction, and under that platform's terms. We send or publish a carousel only when you press the button that does it, or at the time you scheduled; what you publish, and its compliance with the platform's rules, is yours.

Connecting TikTok

Montage Engine can send finished carousels to a TikTok account you connect. That connection is yours to grant and yours to revoke.

• You confirm you own or are authorized to manage the TikTok account you connect, and that connecting it doesn't breach your agreement with TikTok.
• Publishing is drafts-only by design. We send content to your TikTok inbox as a draft. Nothing goes public until you press post inside TikTok. What you ultimately publish, and its compliance with TikTok's rules, is yours.
• We read back public metrics for posts you made through the Service so we can show you how they performed.
• You can disconnect at any time from the Social page, which revokes our access tokens. Deleting your account does the same automatically.
• Your relationship with TikTok is governed solely by your agreement with TikTok. If TikTok changes, restricts, or terminates its API or your account, that's outside our control and we're not liable for the consequences.

Connecting Instagram

Montage Engine can publish finished carousels to an Instagram professional (business or creator) account you connect, and show you that account's insights. That connection is yours to grant and yours to revoke.

• You confirm you own or are authorized to manage the Instagram account you connect, and that connecting it doesn't breach your agreement with Instagram or Meta.
• Publishing on Instagram is live. Instagram has no draft step: when you press Publish now, or when a publish you scheduled comes due, the carousel goes live on that account. You can cancel a scheduled publish until it runs. What you publish, and its compliance with Instagram's Terms of Use and Community Guidelines, is yours.
• We read that account's profile, its posts and their insights so we can show you how they performed. We use that data for nothing else.
• You can disconnect at any time from the Social page, which deletes our access token and the account's data. Removing Montage Engine in Instagram's own settings does the same, and deleting your account does it automatically.
• Your relationship with Instagram is governed solely by your agreement with Instagram and Meta. If Meta changes, restricts, or terminates its API or your account, that's outside our control and we're not liable for the consequences.

AI features

Idea, script, and theme generation are optional AI-assisted drafting steps, and they work differently here than in most products: you connect your own OpenRouter account and pick your own model. Your prompts and generated content are sent to OpenRouter under your own OpenRouter agreement, and you pay OpenRouter's providers directly. We don't resell tokens or mark them up, and we're not the AI provider.

• AI output is provided "as is", with no warranty of accuracy, originality, completeness, or fitness for any purpose. Models make things up. You are solely responsible for reviewing and verifying anything you publish.
• We don't guarantee any particular level of availability, latency, or output quality for AI features. They depend on third parties and may be interrupted, degraded, or discontinued.
• Your use of OpenRouter and the underlying model providers is governed by their terms. Don't use the Service in a way that violates them.
• We may impose or adjust limits on AI-assisted features — request rates, input and output length, generation volume — to keep the Service healthy.
• Disclosing AI-assisted content is your responsibility. Drafting assists produce a starting point that you review and edit before anything is published. Where a platform you post to requires AI-generated or AI-edited content to be labelled — as TikTok does — labelling it correctly is yours to do, on the post you publish.
• Don't use the drafting assists to mass-produce content you haven't read, to impersonate a real person, or to generate misleading claims presented as fact.

Acceptable use

Don't use Montage Engine for spam, deception, scams, harassment, impersonation, or anything illegal. More specifically, don't:

• Work around, or attempt to work around, the fair-use caps or any rate limiting.
• Use bots, scripts, or automation to generate excessive requests to AI or render features, or craft inputs designed to consume disproportionate resources.
• Attempt prompt injection, jailbreaking, or other techniques intended to bypass safety measures or system instructions.
• Resell, redistribute, or provide third-party access to the Service or its features, or use it to build a competing product.
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or scrape the Service, except where applicable law says you may.
• Generate or publish content that infringes someone's rights, sexualizes minors, or violates applicable law.

Every customer publishes through shared TikTok platform limits, so abuse degrades the Service for everyone.

Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate a workspace that breaks these terms. We work reactively — we don't pre-review your content — and for anything ambiguous we'll reach out before acting where we reasonably can. Serious or repeated violations may mean immediate termination without refund. You can stop using the Service and delete your account at any time.

Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We aim for boring reliability but don't guarantee uninterrupted or error-free availability. Third-party platforms (TikTok, Instagram, OpenRouter, Pexels, Stripe, Clerk) may change or restrict their services in ways beyond our control.

You're responsible for your own data. We run routine backups, but you should keep your own copies of anything you can't afford to lose — the export tools are there for exactly this.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we're not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, including lost profits, lost revenue, or lost data, even if we've been advised such damages are possible. Our total liability for any claim, whatever its form, is capped at the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose.

Some jurisdictions don't allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

Indemnification

You agree to defend and indemnify akineticzen LLC against third-party claims, losses, and reasonable legal fees arising from your content, your use of the Service, your breach of these terms, or your violation of someone else's rights.

Governing law and disputes

These terms and your use of the Service are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, without regard to its conflict-of-law principles. Any legal action must be brought in the state or federal courts located in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and both parties consent to jurisdiction and venue there. The UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and UCITA don't apply. Any claim related to the Service must be brought within one (1) year after it arises.

Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains what we store, why, and who processes it on our behalf. It's incorporated into these terms. The Service is hosted in the United States; using it means your data is transferred there.

Changes

We may update these terms; material changes get announced in the app or by email before they take effect. Continuing to use the Service after that means you accept the updated terms. If any provision turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

Contact

Questions, complaints, or anything else about the Service: