Terms of Service

Who We Are

These terms govern your use of early.tools and every service on it, including the website, accounts, paid products and the MCP connector for AI assistants. early.tools is operated by:

Operator

Neuklick GmbH, which runs early.tools

Registered office

1090 Vienna, Austria

Company register

FN 647595x, Commercial Court Vienna (Handelsgericht Wien)

VAT ID

ATU82110948

Managing director

Julian Paul Svoboda

Supervisory authority

Magistrat der Stadt Wien, MBA 9/17

Chamber

Vienna Economic Chamber (WKO Wien)

Trade rules

Austrian Trade Regulation Act (Gewerbeordnung), at ris.bka.gv.at

Email

julian@early.tools

“We” and “us” mean the operator above. “You” means anyone using early.tools. A consumer is someone acting mainly outside their trade, business or profession; where these terms give consumers extra rights, those rights cannot be taken away by anything else in them.

By using early.tools you agree to these terms. If you buy something, the version of these terms shown when you bought it applies to that purchase.

Your Account

You sign in with a link sent to your email address. Keep access to that inbox secure: anyone who can read it can sign in as you. Give accurate information, one account per person, and tell us if you think someone else has used your account.

You can delete your account at any time by emailing us. Our Privacy Policy explains what happens to your data.

Our Services and Paid Products

Browsing early.tools and using a free account cost nothing. The paid products are:

• Listings and featured weeks: a permanent listing of your product, and placement at the top of the directory for the weeks you choose. One-off payment.
• Membership: access to member features (the full backlog, founder details, the founder watchlist, premium resources and their member perks) for as long as early.tools offers them. One-off payment, no renewal.
• Sponsorship: a sponsor placement across the site. Monthly subscription that renews until cancelled.
• Newsletter presenting slot: a placement in a named newsletter edition. One-off payment.

What each product includes, its price and its duration are shown before you pay. Prices are final prices and include any VAT that applies.

Payment is taken by Stripe when you order. A contract is formed when your payment succeeds and we confirm it by email. We may decline or remove a listing that breaks these terms or is not an early-stage product, and refund you if we do so before it goes live.

Right of Withdrawal (Consumers in the EU)

If you are a consumer, you can withdraw from a purchase within 14 days of the contract being formed, without giving a reason. To withdraw, send us a clear statement, for example by email to julian@early.tools. You may use the model form below, but you do not have to. Sending it before the 14 days end is enough.

If you withdraw, we refund all payments received from you without undue delay and at the latest within 14 days of receiving your withdrawal, using the same payment method unless you agree otherwise. You are not charged for the refund.

Services that start straight away. If you ask us to start a service during the withdrawal period (for example, to begin a featured week or open member access immediately), you pay a proportionate amount for what was provided up to your withdrawal. Once a service has been fully provided at your express request, and you acknowledged that you would then lose your right of withdrawal, the right ends. For digital content supplied immediately with your express consent and acknowledgement, the right of withdrawal ends when supply begins.

Model withdrawal form

To Neuklick GmbH, julian@early.tools: I hereby give notice that I withdraw from my contract for the following service: [ ]. Ordered on [ ]. Name: [ ]. Address: [ ]. Date: [ ].

Refunds and Cancellation

Beyond your legal rights, we refund any purchase you ask us to within 24 hours of buying it, no questions asked.

A sponsorship renews monthly until you cancel it. Cancel at any time from your account's billing page; it ends at the end of the month already paid for, and you are not charged again. Your statutory rights, including the right of withdrawal above and warranty rights, are not affected by anything in this section.

Listings and Content You Submit

You keep ownership of what you submit. You confirm you have the right to submit it and that it is accurate and lawful. You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, display, adapt (for example resize or excerpt) and promote it on early.tools and in our newsletter and social channels, for as long as it is listed and for a reasonable time afterwards in content already published.

We may edit listings for accuracy, format and our directory's standards, and remove content that breaks these terms or the law.

Connected Apps (MCP)

You can connect an AI assistant to your account through our MCP server. The connection acts on your behalf with the access you approved, and you are responsible for what it does. When you use it:

• use it for your own research and work, and do not share access with others;
• do not use it to copy the catalogue in bulk, rebuild or resell it, or build a competing database;
• respect the usage limits, and do not try to get around them, for example with several accounts;
• do not try to reach data your plan does not include.

We may suspend a connection or an account that breaks these rules, and we may change the connector, its tools and its limits as the service develops.

Founder Contact Details

Members can request a founder's business contact details, one founder at a time. These are personal data. If you request them, you become responsible for how you use them, and you agree to:

• contact that founder individually, about something relevant to their product or work;
• follow data protection and anti-spam law, including the GDPR and rules on unsolicited messages; in particular, no bulk or automated outreach;
• not sell, share or publish them, or add them to a mailing list without the founder's consent;
• stop contacting a founder who asks you to, and delete their details on request.

Acceptable Use

Do not use early.tools to:

• scrape, copy or mirror the site or its data, other than through features we provide for that;
• disrupt, overload or try to break into our systems;
• publish anything unlawful, misleading, harassing or infringing;
• send spam or collect other users' data without their consent;
• break any law, or anyone else's rights.

Intellectual Property

early.tools, its design, its curation and its content (apart from what users submit) belong to us or our licensors. You may view and share links to it, and use what you read for your own purposes. Anything beyond that needs our written permission.

Availability and Accuracy

We work to keep early.tools available and accurate, but we cannot guarantee it is always available, error-free, or that listings, founder details and resources are complete or current: much of it describes products that are still changing. Check anything important with the source before relying on it. Nothing on early.tools is investment, legal or financial advice.

Liability

We are liable without limitation for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, and where the law does not allow liability to be limited.

For slight negligence, we are liable only if we breach an obligation essential to the contract, and then only for the typical damage that was foreseeable when the contract was made. We are not liable for slight negligence in any other case.

If you are a consumer, your statutory warranty rights for paid products are not limited by these terms.

Ending the Agreement

You can stop using early.tools and delete your account at any time. We can suspend or end your access if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, with notice unless the breach makes that unreasonable. If we end access without cause, we refund the unused part of anything you paid for.

Changes to These Terms

We may update these terms. For changes that matter, we email registered users at least 30 days before they take effect. If you do not agree, you can delete your account before then; a purchase you have already made keeps the terms that applied when you made it.

Law, Courts and Disputes

These terms are governed by Austrian law, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer, you also keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live, and you can bring proceedings in the courts there. For businesses, the courts competent for our registered office have jurisdiction.

We are neither obliged nor willing to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board. If something goes wrong, email us first: most problems are fixed quickly that way.

If any part of these terms is invalid, the rest remains in force.