Terms of service

What this is

Watchtower ("we", "us") reads a public web page you nominate, extracts the part you asked for, and tells you whether it differs from a baseline you supply. You may also ask us to repeat that on a schedule and notify you when it changes. You ("you", "the customer") pay per check at the rates published on our pricing page. We are an independent Ounie product.

Billing

There is no subscription. Checks are billed in Ounie credits (1 credit = 1¢) from your shared Ounie wallet at 3credits per check, and a monitor pass is billed at the same rate because it is the same work. Credits are reserved when a check starts and settled on a real answer — including “no change”, which is the answer the service exists to give. A check where the page yielded nothing at all, or that fails upstream, refunds the reservation in full and automatically. If your wallet cannot cover a monitor pass, that pass is skipped rather than run and charged. Credits are purchased and managed on ounie.com; your past checks stay readable regardless of your balance.

Keyless x402 calls are paid per call in USDC. A request we can see is invalid is refused before any price is quoted. Otherwise the payment is verified before the check runs and settled only once there is a real result, so a check with nothing behind it is refused rather than charged. A settled x402 payment is final. The keyless rail sells a single check; recurring monitors require an Ounie account.

What this is not — read this one

This is best-effort observation, not a guarantee of notification, and it is not a legal or compliance record. A page is read at intervals you choose, at the moment we read it. A change that appears and is reverted between two passes will not be reported. A page can also be unreachable, geo-varied, personalised, behind a bot defence, or served differently to us than to you, and a renderer can fail. Do not use a Watchtower alert — or its absence — as evidence of what a third party published at a given time.

“Changed” means changed after normalisation. Before comparing, we discard values that regenerate on their own — timestamps, relative times, tokens and cache-busting parameters — and, in the default scope, page chrome removed by the renderer. The exact policy is published at /docs, is machine-readable, and every class can be turned off. A result of “no change” means nothing changed that we count.

Acceptable use

Watch pages you are entitled to read. Do not use the service to reach systems that are not publicly addressable — non-public addresses are refused, and attempting to route around that refusal is a violation. Do not use it to harass or build dossiers on private individuals, to circumvent a site's access controls or terms, or to poll a page at a rate that burdens its operator. Do not present a Watchtower result as a compliance record or a legal opinion. Do not attempt to discover endpoints we have not documented, bypass rate limits, or resell raw access to the service.

Attribution

Page content belongs to its publisher. We reproduce short extracts of the page you nominated so you can see what moved, and a snapshot image of it, to you alone. If you republish any of it, keep the source with it and follow the terms of the site you are quoting.

Availability

The service depends on a page-rendering provider and a capture service, both of which may refuse or throttle requests under their own policies. When the rendering engine is refusing, we say so up front and charge nothing rather than quoting a price for work we already know we cannot deliver. Scheduled passes are best-effort and may be delayed or skipped. We cannot guarantee uninterrupted availability, and we do not guarantee that any particular change will be detected or delivered.

No warranty

The service is provided as-is, without warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

Refunds

Checks that yield nothing, and failed checks, refund automatically — the credit reservation is reversed to the exact pools it was drawn from. A skipped monitor pass is never charged in the first place. For anything else, open a support ticket.

Liability

Our liability is capped at the amount you paid us in the prior 12 months. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including any loss arising from a change we did not detect, an alert that was delayed or not delivered, or your reliance on a result.

Termination

Either party can terminate at any time. You keep access to checks you have already paid for and can export them before closing your account. We may suspend accounts for material violations of these terms with notice.

Contact

/contact · routed to ounie@ounie.com