Terms of Service
Last updated: 17 July 2026 Operator: Envestis SA, Via Pretorio 13A, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland Business Identification Number (UID): CHE-339.253.743 Legal contact: legal@ciaopost.com
1. Introduction and Acceptance
1.1. These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of the ciaopost application, website, and related services (together, the “Service”), operated by Envestis SA, a company incorporated in Switzerland, with registered office at Via Pretorio 13A, 6900 Lugano (“ciaopost”, “we”, “us”, “our”).
1.2. By creating an account, accessing, or using the Service, you (“you”, the “Business”, the “User”) agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.
1.3. If you use the Service on behalf of a company or other legal entity, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity, and “you” refers to that entity.
1.4. You must be at least 18 years old and legally capable of entering into a binding contract to use the Service.
2. Definitions
- “Business” / “User” — the merchant, company, or professional who subscribes to and operates a ciaopost account.
- “Team Member” — an additional person the Business invites to capture content on its behalf, within the limits of the Business’s plan.
- “End Customer” — a customer of the Business who records or provides a testimonial (video, voice, photo, or text) through the Service.
- “Testimonial Content” — content created by or featuring an End Customer, captured through the Service with the End Customer’s consent.
- “Business Content” — content the Business creates itself (e.g. its own videos, photos, text posts, listing-based posts), which does not feature an End Customer and does not require End Customer consent.
- “User Content” — Testimonial Content and Business Content together.
- “Connected Accounts” — the third-party social media accounts (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn) the Business connects to the Service for publishing.
- “Consent Record” — the record captured through the Service documenting an End Customer’s authorisation, including name, relevant identifiers, and signature.
3. The Service
3.1. ciaopost is a tool that enables a Business to (a) collect testimonials from its End Customers in video, voice, photo, or text form; (b) enrich that content with AI-generated captions, hashtags, and subtitles; and (c) publish it to the Business’s own Connected Accounts.
3.2. ciaopost is not a hosting platform, publisher, editor, or certifier of content. All content is published to the Business’s own social media accounts. ciaopost provides production and distribution functionality only.
3.3. AI enrichment. The Service uses artificial intelligence to generate captions, hashtags, and to transcribe speech into subtitles. AI-generated text (captions, hashtags) is content authored by the Service on the Business’s behalf. The subtitle text reproduces the End Customer’s own words verbatim; the Service does not rewrite, embellish, or alter what a person said. The Business is responsible for reviewing all content before publication.
3.4. No guarantee of results. The Service does not guarantee any level of social media reach, engagement, followers, sales, or business outcome. Any figures shown in marketing materials are illustrative.
3.5. The Service is provided on a subscription basis with daily posting limits, optional extra-post packs, and an optional social-account setup service, as described at the point of sale and subject to change per Section 8.
4. Accounts, Team Members, and Security
4.1. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials and for all activity under your account.
4.2. You may invite Team Members up to the limit of your plan. You are fully responsible for the actions of your Team Members, including any content they capture, publish, or cause to be published through your account.
4.3. You must ensure that every Team Member complies with these Terms, and in particular with the consent obligations in Section 6.
4.4. You must notify us promptly of any unauthorised use of your account.
4.5. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms, per Section 11.
5. Responsibility for Content — The Core Boundary
5.1. The Business is solely responsible for all User Content it captures, creates, or publishes through the Service, including its truthfulness, accuracy, legality, and the rights necessary to publish it.
5.2. ciaopost does not verify, and cannot verify, whether any testimonial is genuine, accurate, or truthful. The truthfulness of any content is the sole responsibility of the Business that produces it. ciaopost is a production and distribution tool, not an editor or certifier of content.
5.3. You represent and warrant that, for all User Content you publish through the Service: (a) you have all rights, licences, and consents necessary; (b) it does not infringe any third party’s intellectual property, privacy, publicity, or other rights; (c) it is not false, misleading, defamatory, obscene, hateful, harassing, or otherwise unlawful; (d) it complies with the terms and policies of the relevant Connected Accounts and social media platforms; (e) it complies with all applicable advertising, consumer-protection, and unfair-competition laws (including rules on disclosing incentivised or sponsored content).
5.4. Incentivised testimonials. Where the Business offers an End Customer any discount or benefit in exchange for a testimonial, the Business is solely responsible for any disclosure required by applicable law (e.g. marketing and consumer-protection rules). ciaopost provides the mechanism, not legal compliance for its use.
5.5. Listings you import by link. Where the Service builds a post from a URL you give it, you represent and warrant that the listing at that URL is your own — published by you or by your Business, or published with the express authorisation of the Business on whose behalf you act — and that the text and images it contains are yours to republish. You may not import a listing published by anyone else.
5.6. What we check before we build the post. We do not take your word for it and leave it there. When you give us the URL of a listing, the Service reads the name of the advertiser shown on that listing and compares it with the name of your Business as registered with us. Where the two do not match, we say so and we do not publish. The post is not built and nothing is sent to your channels.
5.7. Why that check cannot carry the weight, and you can. The comparison is a fuzzy match between two pieces of text. It is a genuine control and we run it on every link, but it is not proof of anything and it can fail in both directions: it can pass a listing that is not yours (two businesses with similar names; a name we read wrongly; a listing that names no advertiser at all), and it can stop a listing that is yours (you trade under a different name from the one on the marketplace; the marketplace shows a group or a dealer network rather than you). It tells us that two strings look alike. It cannot tell us who owns a photograph.
5.8. Your declaration, which is where the responsibility sits. Because no check we can run establishes ownership, the Service also requires you to confirm, before it builds the post and in the words it puts in front of you, that you own the content, images, and information in the listing and take full responsibility for republishing them. That confirmation is required for every post built from a link — including every listing that passed the name check, because passing it proves nothing — and the Service does not proceed without it.
The division is deliberate and it is total. We do what can be done by a machine: we check the advertiser name, we stop the ones that do not match, we take only the page you point us at and nothing else, and we do not go looking for content anywhere on our own. What cannot be done by a machine, you do: you assert that the material is yours. Neither the check nor its silence is our approval of your rights, an opinion on them, or a defence for you. Responsibility for what you import and publish is yours, wholly and without division, and a declaration you know to be false is a breach of these Terms with the consequences in Section 11.
5.9. The marketplace’s rules still apply to you. You remain bound by the terms of the marketplace or platform on which your listing is published, including any rule it imposes on reusing the content of a listing, on automated access to its pages, or on publishing that content elsewhere. Nothing in these Terms grants you a right you do not already have there, and we do not override its rules — see Section 12.5.
5.10. Content we may decline to distribute. ciaopost applies automated checks to content before publication and may refuse to publish, or may remove after publication, any content that is violent, sexual, hateful, harassing, illegal, or that otherwise violates these Terms or the policies of the Connected Accounts and platforms. This is a decision not to distribute the content, never a decision to change it: consistent with the boundary above, ciaopost does not edit or alter the words of a testimonial — it either publishes them as they are, or declines to publish them. These checks are a safeguard, not a guarantee: they give ciaopost the power to decline, not an undertaking to review, screen, or catch all such content, and responsibility for content remains the Business’s under this Section.
6. End Customer Consent — Testimonial Content
6.1. Testimonial Content features a real, identifiable person (the End Customer). Before any Testimonial Content is published, the Business must obtain the End Customer’s consent through the consent mechanism provided by the Service, which captures the End Customer’s name, relevant identifiers, and signature (the “Consent Record”).
6.2. The Business is the party responsible for obtaining valid consent. ciaopost provides the tool to record consent; it does not obtain consent on the Business’s behalf and does not warrant that any given consent is legally sufficient for the Business’s purposes or jurisdiction.
6.3. The Business must not publish Testimonial Content of any person who has not given consent through the Service, and must not use the Service to capture content from minors or from any person unable to give valid consent.
6.4. Withdrawal of consent. If an End Customer withdraws consent, the Business must promptly cease using the relevant Testimonial Content and remove it where it is able to. The Business is responsible for handling End Customer requests regarding their content and personal data (see Section 9).
6.5. The consent captured through the Service covers the use of the End Customer’s voice, image, and/or the content they provide, for publication on the Business’s social media channels.
7. Business Content and AI
7.1. Business Content (the Business’s own posts, including posts built from a listing link) does not feature an End Customer and does not require End Customer consent. The Business remains fully responsible for it under Section 5.
7.2. Where the Business creates a post from a third-party listing link, the Business represents that it has the right to use the underlying listing, images, and information.
7.3. AI-generated captions and hashtags are provided as a convenience. The Business must review them before publication and is responsible for their content. ciaopost does not warrant that AI-generated text is accurate, appropriate, or free of error, and is not liable for it once the Business has reviewed and published.
8. Subscriptions, Payment, Trials, and Cancellation
8.1. Plans. The Service is offered under subscription plans with different daily posting limits and team-member allowances, as described at the point of sale.
8.2. Free trial. New Businesses may be offered a free trial of 7 days. We reserve the right to limit the trial to one per Business, and to use fraud-prevention measures to detect repeated trial sign-ups.
8.3. Billing. Subscriptions are billed in advance on a recurring monthly or annual basis through our payment processor Stripe. By subscribing, you authorise recurring charges until you cancel.
8.4. Extra packs. Optional extra-post packs may be purchased. Extra packs have a 30-day expiry and are consumed after the daily allowance.
8.5. Social-account setup service. Where the Business lacks a required social account, ciaopost may create it manually as a separate, optional service, subject to separate terms and fees. This is not part of the subscription.
8.6. Price changes. We may change prices and plan features on prospective notice. Changes take effect at the next renewal.
8.7. Cancellation. You may cancel at any time. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period; the Service remains available until then. No pro-rata refunds are provided except where required by law.
8.8. Failed payment. On a failed renewal, we provide a grace period of 48 to 72 hours before the account is suspended. We do not delete data on non-payment; data is retained per Section 9 and the Privacy Policy.
8.9. Chargebacks. If a payment is charged back or disputed, we may suspend the account and revoke any unused post credits. Content already published to your social accounts is not affected. Reactivation requires the dispute to be resolved or payment by other means.
9. Data Protection and Privacy
9.1. Two roles. ciaopost processes personal data in two distinct capacities: (a) as a data controller for the personal data of the Business and its Team Members (account data, billing data); (b) as a data processor on behalf of the Business, for the personal data of End Customers contained in Testimonial Content and Consent Records. In this respect the Business is the data controller and ciaopost is the processor, acting on the Business’s instructions.
9.2. The Business’s controller obligations. As controller of End Customer data, the Business is responsible for having a lawful basis (consent) to collect and publish Testimonial Content, for informing End Customers, and for handling End Customer rights requests (access, deletion, withdrawal of consent). ciaopost will provide reasonable assistance as processor.
9.3. Applicable law. The Service is operated from Switzerland and is designed to comply with the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (nLPD/FADP) and, where applicable, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
9.4. Consent Records. Consent Records are stored as evidence of the authorisation obtained.
9.5. Fraud-prevention data. For the purpose of preventing repeated free-trial abuse, we retain a minimal record (a hashed identifier derived from the connected social account, a flag indicating a trial was used, and a date) that survives account deletion. This record is kept on the basis of our legitimate interest in preventing fraud, is not used for any other purpose, and is described in the Privacy Policy.
9.6. Sub-processors. We use third-party sub-processors to provide the Service (e.g. cloud hosting, payment processing via Stripe, email delivery via Brevo, AI processing via OpenRouter, transcription). A current list is available on request or in the Privacy Policy.
9.7. Data location and transfers.
9.8. Full details of how we process personal data are set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms.
10. Intellectual Property
10.1. Your content. You retain all rights in your User Content. You grant ciaopost a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide licence to host, process, reproduce, adapt (e.g. add subtitles and captions, reformat per channel), and transmit your User Content solely for the purpose of providing the Service (i.e. producing and publishing it to your Connected Accounts). This licence ends when the content is deleted, subject to Section 9 retention.
10.2. Our platform. ciaopost, the ciaopost name, logo, and all software, design, and materials of the Service are owned by Envestis SA and protected by intellectual property law. You receive a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service per these Terms. You may not copy, modify, reverse-engineer, resell, or create derivative works of the Service.
10.3. Feedback. If you provide feedback or suggestions, we may use them without obligation to you.
10.4. Third-party names and trademarks. The names, logos, and trademarks of the marketplaces, e-commerce platforms, and social networks referred to on our website or in the Service — including AutoScout24, Mobile.de, Subito, AutoScout, AutoTrader, Idealista, Homegate, Immoscout24, Immobiliare.it, Flatfox, Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google — are the property of their respective owners. We use them descriptively only, to identify where a Business’s own listing is published or where its post can be sent. We claim no rights in them, and their use does not imply any affiliation, partnership, endorsement, sponsorship, or approval.
11. Acceptable Use, Suspension, and Termination
11.1. You must not use the Service to: (a) publish content that is unlawful, infringing, defamatory, hateful, harassing, deceptive, obscene, or that sexualises or endangers minors; (b) publish a testimonial of a person without valid consent; (c) impersonate any person or misrepresent an affiliation; (d) violate the terms of any Connected Account or social platform; (e) import, or declare as your own under Section 5.8, a listing or any material published by someone else; (f) violate the terms of a marketplace or shop platform you import a listing from; (g) attempt to bypass usage limits, security, or billing controls; (h) interfere with, disrupt, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to the Service; (i) use the Service for unsolicited bulk messaging or spam.
11.2. Suspension/termination by us. We may suspend or terminate your access, with or without notice, if you breach these Terms, if required by law, on chargeback or non-payment, or to protect the Service or third parties. Short of that, ciaopost may also refuse to publish, or remove, any content that falls within 11.1 or Section 5.10 — a decision not to distribute the content, never to edit it (Section 5.10) — and doing so does not oblige ciaopost to detect every such content.
11.3. Termination by you. You may terminate by cancelling your subscription and closing your account.
11.4. Effect of termination. On termination, your right to use the Service ends. We retain and delete data per Section 9 and the Privacy Policy. Content already published to your social accounts is not affected and remains under your control.
12. Third-Party Platforms and Marketplaces
12.1. The Service publishes to third-party social media platforms via their official APIs, and ciaopost itself operates the Service in accordance with each platform’s developer terms and platform policies. Your use of those platforms is governed by their terms, not ours. By connecting an account you agree to that platform’s terms as well as to these, and where the two differ for anything happening on the platform, theirs govern there:
| Platform | Its terms |
|---|---|
| YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/t/terms |
| Google (privacy) | https://policies.google.com/privacy |
| Facebook / Instagram | https://www.facebook.com/terms.php |
| TikTok | https://www.tiktok.com/legal/terms-of-service |
| https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement | |
| X | https://x.com/en/tos |
| https://policy.pinterest.com/terms-of-service |
YouTube in particular. ciaopost uses YouTube API Services. By connecting a YouTube channel you agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service (https://www.youtube.com/t/terms), and Google’s handling of your data is governed by the Google Privacy Policy (https://policies.google.com/privacy). You may revoke ciaopost’s access to your Google data at any time via the Google security settings page (https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions). How we handle data from a connected channel is set out in our Privacy Policy, Section 7.
12.2. We do not control and are not responsible for third-party platforms. We do not guarantee that any platform will remain available, that publishing will always succeed, or that a platform will not change, restrict, or remove access, content, or API functionality.
12.3. Publishing is best-effort. Publication to a given channel may partially or wholly fail for reasons outside our control (platform outages, revoked permissions, policy rejections). The Service reflects the actual per-channel outcome; a successful capture does not guarantee successful publication to every channel.
12.4. We are independent. No affiliation. ciaopost is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, certified by, or in partnership with any marketplace, e-commerce platform, or social network named on our website or in the Service, unless we state otherwise in writing. Nothing on our website or in the Service should be read as a claim of any such relationship, and no such relationship is implied by our naming a platform, describing it, or supporting it.
12.5. Marketplaces you import from. The Service can build a post from a URL you give it, pointing at a listing you have published on a third-party marketplace or shop platform. It reads the page at that URL in order to do so. Your relationship with that marketplace is governed by its terms, not ours, and you remain responsible for complying with them — see Section 5.9. If a marketplace prohibits or restricts what you may do with your own listing, its rules apply to you and we do not override them.
12.6. We are not a scraper, and we are built not to be one. The Service reads one page: the single URL you hand it, for the listing you have told us is yours. It does not crawl a marketplace, browse it, follow its links, search it, index it, harvest listings, build a copy of any part of it, or keep its pages. It does not run unless a Business asks it to, for one listing at a time. We take what is needed to build that one post and nothing else, and we do not collect, store, or reuse a marketplace’s data for any other purpose — not for our own catalogue, not for analytics, not to train models. Every control we can place on this, we have placed: the name check in Section 5.6, the block on mismatch, the declaration in Section 5.8, and suspension under Section 11.1 for anyone who imports what is not theirs.
12.7. If you are a marketplace and you think we are wrong. Write to
legal@ciaopost.com. We will answer, and where a rule of yours restricts what a Businessmay do with its own listing on your site, we will work with you rather than argue about it.
12.8. Import is best-effort. A marketplace may change its pages, restrict automated access, or remove a listing at any time, and we do not control any of this. An import may fail, return incomplete data, or stop working for a given site without notice.
13. Disclaimers and Warranties
13.1. THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, whether express, implied, or statutory, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law.
13.2. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or that AI-generated output (captions, hashtags, transcriptions) will be accurate or appropriate.
13.3. We do not warrant any business, marketing, reach, or revenue outcome from use of the Service.
14. Limitation of Liability
14.1. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, ciaopost, its directors, employees, and suppliers shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or business, arising out of or relating to the Service, whether in contract, tort, or otherwise, even if advised of the possibility.
14.2. In particular, and without limitation, ciaopost is not liable for: (a) the truthfulness, accuracy, or legality of any User Content (Section 5); (b) any claim by an End Customer or third party arising from content the Business published, including claims of missing, invalid, or exceeded consent; (c) any consequence of AI-generated captions or hashtags the Business reviewed and published; (d) failure, delay, change, or removal by any third-party social platform (Section 12); (e) any use of content by a social platform or the public after publication.
14.3. To the maximum extent permitted by law, ciaopost’s total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the Service shall not exceed the greater of (i) the total fees you paid to ciaopost in the twelve (12) months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or (ii) CHF 100.
15. Indemnification
15.1. You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless ciaopost, its directors, employees, and suppliers from and against any claims, damages, losses, liabilities, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or relating to: (a) your User Content; (b) your breach of these Terms, including the consent obligations in Section 6 and the warranties in Section 5; (c) your violation of any law or third-party right; (d) content published by your Team Members through your account.
16. Changes to the Terms
16.1. We may modify these Terms. We will provide notice of material changes by email and in-app notice. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance. If you do not agree, you must stop using the Service and may cancel.
17. Governing Law and Jurisdiction
17.1. These Terms are governed by the laws of Switzerland, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.
17.2. The exclusive place of jurisdiction is Lugano, Switzerland, subject to any mandatory place of jurisdiction available to consumers under applicable law.
18. Miscellaneous
18.1. Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, the DPA (where applicable), and any plan-specific terms constitute the entire agreement between you and ciaopost.
18.2. Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest remains in effect and the unenforceable provision is limited to the minimum extent necessary.
18.3. No waiver. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver.
18.4. Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
18.5. Force majeure. We are not liable for failure or delay due to events beyond our reasonable control.
18.6. Language. These Terms may be provided in multiple languages.
18.7. Contact. Questions about these Terms: legal@ciaopost.com.