1. Acceptance of Terms
By creating an account or using PanelWave, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the service.
If you accept these Terms on behalf of a company, school, or other organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it, and "you" refers to that organisation.
PanelWave is operated from Munich, Germany. The service is offered to creators, teams, publishers, and educational institutions. Where you use it as a consumer, mandatory consumer protections under German and EU law apply and take precedence over anything in these Terms that would reduce them.
2. Description of Service
PanelWave has three layers, and they are licensed differently:
- The Format — an open JSON specification for interactive graphic novels, published under CC BY 4.0.
- The Player — an open-source renderer, MIT licensed, which anyone may embed or self-host.
- The CMS — the proprietary hosted service for authoring, publishing, and monetising works. This is the part these Terms govern.
Two separate commercial relationships run through PanelWave, and they should not be confused. The first is between you and us: you pay for the CMS through subscriptions, Work Passes, and metered usage. The second is between a creator and their readers: when a reader buys a work or chapter, they are buying from the creator, not from PanelWave.
In that second relationship PanelWave is not the seller and not a party to the contract. Payments are processed as direct charges to the creator's own connected payment account, the creator is the merchant of record, and PanelWave takes no share of that revenue — only the payment provider's own fees apply. Responsibility for the work, its description, its legal compliance, and any consumer duties toward the reader sits with the creator.
The service is under active development. Features may be added, changed, or withdrawn; anything marked beta, preview, or experimental is offered without any assurance that it will continue to exist.
3. Account Registration
You must provide accurate information and keep it current. You are responsible for everything done under your account and for keeping your credentials secure. Two-factor authentication is available and we recommend enabling it.
You must be at least 16 years old to hold an account. If you are younger than 18, you may need your guardian's consent for paid plans.
Teams and seats. An account may belong to a team. The team owner controls membership, roles, and billing, and can see and manage the works the team owns. Seat counts are part of the plan; a team may not share one seat between several people.
Support access. With your consent, or where necessary to resolve a support issue you have raised, a member of our team may temporarily sign in to your account. Such sessions are time-limited, cannot change your password, email address, security settings, or payment account, and are logged. You receive an email notification whenever it happens.
4. User Content and Ownership
You own your work. Creators retain all rights in the content they create and upload — artwork, text, audio, manifests, and everything else. PanelWave claims no ownership over any of it, and nothing here transfers copyright to us.
You grant PanelWave a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, transcode, and transmit your content solely in order to operate the service: rendering it in the editor, generating derived formats such as image variants and export files, delivering it to readers you have published it to, and taking backups. The licence lasts as long as you keep the content on the service and ends when you delete it, subject to backup rotation and any statutory retention. It does not permit us to sell your work, sublicense it, or use it to train machine-learning models.
Catalogue and promotion. Published works may appear in PanelWave's public catalogue and in curated collections; if you do not want a work listed there, tell us and we will remove it. Beyond the catalogue, we will ask before using your work in marketing materials or campaigns.
You are responsible for what you upload. You confirm that you hold the necessary rights to every asset in a work, including fonts, stock images, audio, and any third-party material, and that publishing it does not infringe anyone's rights.
Age ratings and content warnings. Works must carry an accurate age rating, and material rated 16+ requires a content warning. These are your responsibility as the author; we do not classify your work for you.
Moderation and takedown. We do not review works before publication. We do act on reports and on our own findings: a work that breaches these Terms or applicable law can be made private, delisted from the public catalogue, or removed, and we will tell you why. Rights holders can reach us at the address in section 15 to report an infringement. If your work is removed, you are told the reason and can contest it; a contested removal is reviewed and can be reversed.
Export. You can export your manifest and all assets at any time, on every plan including the free tier, and whether or not your account is in good standing. See section 12.
5. Acceptable Use
- No illegal content.
- No malware or scripts in uploads.
- No harassment, hate speech, or abuse via comments.
- No automated scraping or abuse of APIs.
- No pornographic or sexually explicit material published, distributed, or sold through PanelWave, in any medium or drawing style.
- Content warnings required for 16+ material.
5.1 What the sexual-content rule does and does not mean
The test is purpose, not age rating: material is prohibited when it exists to serve sexual gratification. Mature storytelling is a different thing, and it is welcome here.
- Permitted — violence, dark or disturbing themes, drug use, strong language, non-sexual nudity in a narrative context, and romance or implied sexual activity without explicit depiction. A graphic novel rated 18+ for violence is not an adult-content case.
- Prohibited — explicit sexual depiction as an end in itself, however well drawn, and whether or not it is framed by a story.
This restriction reflects the rules of our payment providers, which prohibit pornographic content in every medium — illustration and AI-generated work included. PanelWave is accountable for what is published and sold through the platform, so works in breach are removed and payouts may be withheld. It applies to published works, previews, cover art, and profile imagery alike.
5.2 If your work falls outside this policy
The restriction attaches to publishing, distribution, and sale through PanelWave — not to what you are allowed to draw. Because the PanelWave format is open (CC BY 4.0) and the player is MIT-licensed, a work you author here can be exported in full and hosted anywhere, on your own infrastructure and with a payment provider that accepts adult content (specialist high-risk processors such as CCBill exist for exactly this). See the open format.
Two limits on that route. First, PanelWave storage and hosting are not a staging area for material we would not publish: we may remove such content from our infrastructure whether or not it was ever published. Second, self-hosting does not remove your own legal obligations — distributing pornography in Germany requires a closed user group with age verification under the JMStV, and equivalent rules apply elsewhere. Those obligations are yours, not ours.
6. Intellectual Property
Three licences, deliberately different:
- The PanelWave Format is published under CC BY 4.0. Anyone may implement it, build tools for it, or fork it, with attribution. We cannot revoke that for versions already published.
- The Player is MIT licensed. You may embed it, modify it, and self-host it, including commercially.
- The CMS is proprietary. Its source is not published, and you may not copy, decompile, or resell it. You get a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use it for as long as your plan is active.
The name PanelWave, the logo, and our other marks remain ours. Nothing in the open licences above grants trademark rights, and the free tier and open components do not entitle anyone to present a service as being PanelWave.
The CMS includes third-party open-source components under their own licences; those licences govern those components.
Feedback. If you send us suggestions, we may act on them freely and without obligation. This does not affect any rights in content you upload.
7. Pricing and Payment
Prices are listed in EUR on the pricing page, which forms part of these Terms. Where required, tax is calculated and shown at checkout. Payments are processed by Stripe; we do not see or store your card details.
Two purchase models. Recurring subscriptions (monthly or annual) and one-time Work Passes. They are priced for different things: a subscription buys continuing value — allowances that refill every month, team seats, a staging environment, review workflows, longer analytics retention — while a Work Pass buys a one-off: the tooling to author and publish one work.
Work Pass. A one-time purchase that unlocks one additional publication for the lifetime of the account, subject to the fair-use hosting quota published on the pricing page. It carries no recurring charge and no renewal, and the publication it unlocks is licensed independently of any subscription taken later: a Work Pass work does not count toward a plan's publication limit and does not become read-only if you later downgrade. Passes stack.
Subscriptions renew automatically for the same period until cancelled. Annual plans are charged in advance at the discounted annual rate. Changing plan mid-period takes effect immediately, with the difference prorated.
Metered usage. Storage, bandwidth, exports, and voice generation beyond your plan's allowance are billed in arrears at the published overage rates. We show usage in the app and notify you before you cross a limit. Fair-use hosting quotas may be adjusted with 30 days' notice; a Work Pass publication already created remains accessible and exportable regardless.
Failed payments. If a payment fails we will retry and contact you. If it remains unpaid, the account moves to the free tier limits rather than being deleted — your content stays, and content above the free limits becomes read-only until the balance is settled (section 8).
Price changes are notified at least 30 days in advance and never apply to a period already paid for. If you do not accept a change, you may cancel before it takes effect.
Reader purchases are not covered by this section. Money a reader pays for a creator's work goes to the creator, not to us (section 2).
8. Free Tier
The free tier is a real, indefinite plan, not a trial. It includes one publication with up to 500 panels, 500 MB of asset storage, two locales, basic monetisation, and watermarked exports. No credit card is required and it does not expire.
What happens when you exceed a limit. Nothing is deleted and nothing is held hostage. Creating something beyond your plan's limits is refused with an explanation. If you move to a smaller plan — or a subscription lapses — content above the new limits becomes read-only rather than disappearing: the most recently edited works within your allowance stay editable, and the rest can still be read, exported, and restored to editing by upgrading, by buying a Work Pass, or by archiving a work you no longer edit to free the slot. Work Pass publications are never made read-only this way.
Free tier limits may be changed with 90 days' notice. We may suspend free accounts that are dormant for an extended period, after notifying you in time to export.
9. Cancellation and Refunds
Cancellation. Cancel at any time in account settings. Access continues to the end of the period you have paid for; we do not charge a cancellation fee and there is no minimum term beyond the period you chose.
Statutory right of withdrawal (consumers in the EU). If you are a consumer you generally have 14 days to withdraw from a contract for digital content. Because access is provided immediately, you will be asked at checkout to consent to performance beginning at once and to acknowledge that this ends the right of withdrawal once delivery has begun. Where you have not given that consent, the statutory right applies unchanged.
Beyond the statutory right we offer: a pro-rata refund on annual plans within the first 30 days, and a refund of a Work Pass that has not yet been used to create a publication. A Work Pass that has been consumed has been delivered — the publication it unlocked is permanent — and is not refundable. Metered overages already incurred are not refundable.
Refund requests go to the address in section 15. If you believe you were charged in error, contact us before raising a chargeback; a chargeback may suspend the account while it is resolved.
Reader refunds for content purchases are the creator's responsibility, since the creator is the seller (section 2).
10. Availability and Support
We aim for 99.9% monthly availability and publish incidents when they happen. That is a target, not a contractual guarantee— a binding service level with remedies is available only under an Enterprise agreement.
Planned maintenance is announced in advance where it is likely to be disruptive. Emergency maintenance may happen without notice. Causes outside our control — your connectivity, third-party providers, force majeure — are not counted against the target.
Support is provided by email at the level your plan includes. Published works are served from infrastructure in the EU; see the Privacy Policy for where data is processed.
11. Limitation of Liability
Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law — including liability for intent and gross negligence, for injury to life, body, or health, under the German Product Liability Act, or under any guarantee we have expressly given.
For slight negligence we are liable only where an obligation essential to the purpose of the contract is breached, and then only for the foreseeable damage typical of this kind of contract. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, for lost profits, or for lost content where you could have exported it.
Keep your own copies. We take backups, but they are for our operational recovery and are not a substitute for yours. The export function exists so that you never depend on us for a copy of your work.
We are not liable for the content creators publish, nor for the contract between a creator and a reader.
12. Termination
By you. Cancel your subscription at any time, or delete your account entirely in account settings. Deletion has a 30-day grace period during which you can undo it via support; after that the account is anonymised and cannot be recovered. Export first — after the grace period we cannot retrieve your work for you.
By us. We may suspend or terminate an account for material breach of these Terms, for unlawful content, for non-payment after notice, or where required by law. Except for serious or repeated breach, we will give notice and, where the problem can be fixed, a reasonable opportunity to fix it.
Suspension keeps your content readable. A suspended account cannot make changes, but reading and export stay available, so you can always take your work with you. That is deliberate: our no lock-in commitment does not switch off during a dispute.
On termination, published works are unpublished and the licence in section 4 ends. Retention periods after deletion are set out in the Privacy Policy; invoices are kept for as long as tax law requires. Sections 4 (ownership), 6, 11, 14, and any accrued payment obligations survive termination.
13. Changes to Terms
We may change these Terms as the service develops or the law requires. Material changes are notified by email or a prominent in-app notice at least 30 days before they take effect, and the last-updated date at the top always reflects the current version.
If you do not accept a material change, you may cancel before it takes effect; continuing to use the service afterwards means you accept it. We will not apply a change retroactively to a period you have already paid for.
14. Governing Law and Jurisdiction
These Terms are governed by the laws of Germany, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.
For merchants, legal entities under public law, and special funds under public law, the place of jurisdiction is Munich. If you are a consumer, this does not affect your right to bring proceedings at your own place of residence, nor the protection of mandatory law in your country of residence.
We are neither obliged nor willing to participate in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board (§ 36 VSBG).
If any provision of these Terms is invalid, the rest remains in force.
15. Contact
Legal and contractual matters: legal@panelwave.org
Support, refunds, and account issues: support@panelwave.org
Privacy and data protection requests: privacy@panelwave.org
Operator details are in the imprint. See also the Privacy Policy and, for customers processing personal data through PanelWave, the Data Processing Agreement.