Terms of Service

Agreement to Terms

By using Shellcaster, you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, don't use Shellcaster. Shellcaster is operated by TextJam, Inc., a Delaware corporation based in California.

What's Shellcaster?

Shellcaster is a macOS workspace for driving AI coding agents. It brings your terminal, your browser, and your editor into one window so you can see what your agents are doing, annotate it, delegate work, and share live sessions with others — privately with end-to-end encryption, or publicly when you choose.

"Shellcaster" in these terms means the Mac app, the shellcaster.com website and account services, session sharing and community features, and related services we provide.

Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old to use Shellcaster. By using it, you represent that you meet this requirement and have the authority to enter into this agreement.

Your Account

You sign in with Google or GitHub — your account is your provider-verified email address, and we never operate passwords. You're responsible for your account and for what happens under it, including keeping the devices you've registered secure. You can review and revoke your devices in account settings.

You agree to provide accurate profile information and keep it updated.

Your Content and Intellectual Property

Your Ownership

Everything you create and share through Shellcaster — your code, files, annotations, comments, and screenshots — is yours. We claim no ownership of your content.

License to Us

To operate the service, you grant us a limited license to store, transmit, and display your content as needed to provide Shellcaster: relaying session content to the people you've shared with, storing it for catch-up and replay, displaying public content you choose to publish, and keeping backups. For private sessions, what we store and relay is ciphertext we cannot read — this license doesn't change that, and nothing in these terms gives us the ability or the right to decrypt your private content.

Your Responsibility

Sharing a file shares its contents — initially and continuously, as it changes. You're responsible for having the rights to share what you share, whether it's your employer's code, a client's project, or content generated by an AI agent. You agree to indemnify us from claims arising from content you share.

AI Agents Run on Your Machine

Shellcaster is a cockpit for AI coding agents — tools like Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI that you install separately and use under your own accounts and agreements with their providers. Your use of those agents, including their pricing, availability, and data handling, is between you and their providers.

Agents can execute commands and modify files on your machine. You decide which agents to run, what to ask them, and what access to grant them. We're not responsible for what an agent does on your machine or produces in your project.

AI output can be wrong — inaccurate, insecure, or unsuitable. Review agent work before you rely on it or ship it.

Sharing Sessions

Private Sessions

Private sessions are end-to-end encrypted to the people on the roster. Understand what that means:

• Inviting someone is an act of trust — everyone you admit can read everything shared in that session, and can keep or copy what they saw while they had access
• As host, you can invite new collaborators at any time; to remove someone's access, you end the session and re-share it without them — the new session gets a fresh key, which protects everything shared from then on; it cannot unshare the past
• The keys exist only on participants' devices. If you lose access to all of your devices, we cannot recover your private session content — there is no backdoor, escrow, or reset

Public Sessions

Public sessions are not encrypted, and anyone who is signed in and has the link can view them. They're unlisted unless you opt into a community listing or we feature them. A session's visibility is fixed when it starts — private can never become public, and going public is a choice you make explicitly.

Your Call

You control who you invite and what you publish, and you're responsible for those choices. Think before you cast.

Community

If you submit links, comments, or sessions to community features, you grant us a license to display that content publicly within Shellcaster, attributed to the name you provided. Poll votes are different: we never publicly display who voted for what — only aggregate results across users. We may curate, feature, or remove community content at our discretion. Please don't post content you don't have the right to share.

Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

• Violate laws or regulations, or infringe others' intellectual property
• Upload or distribute malicious code, or use Shellcaster to attack other systems
• Harass, abuse, or harm others, including through shared sessions or community features
• Attempt to access sessions or accounts you weren't invited to, or probe, scrape, or enumerate the service
• Circumvent usage limits, resell access, or abuse free credits
• Misrepresent who you are when sharing or submitting content

Good-faith security research against your own accounts and sessions is welcome — see the disclosure policy in our security whitepaper and report findings to security@shellcaster.com.

Plans, Credits, and Billing

Plans and Share Credits

Shellcaster offers a free plan and paid subscriptions, with sharing metered by share credits. A credit is spent when a collaborator first joins a session you host; rejoining the same session is free. Subscription credits reset each month; add-on pack credits never expire. Current plans, prices, and credit amounts are on our pricing page.

Billing and Cancellation

Subscriptions are billed through Stripe. You can cancel anytime and keep access through the end of your billing period. We don't refund partial periods except where the law requires it.

Price Changes

We may change pricing, features, or limits. We'll give you at least 7 days' notice before a change affects your existing subscription, so you can cancel first if you prefer.

Beta Software and Updates

Shellcaster is in beta. Features may change, break, or be removed as the product evolves, and the app updates itself automatically through its built-in updater. We work hard to keep your data safe through changes, but you should expect rough edges from beta software.

Third-Party Services

Shellcaster relies on third parties: Google and GitHub for sign-in, AWS for storage, Ably for realtime delivery, Stripe for payments, and Postmark for email. Their availability affects ours, and we're not responsible for their outages. The AI agent tools you drive through Shellcaster are governed by their own providers' terms, not these.

Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and what we can and cannot see — including the honest accounting of session metadata. The security whitepaper documents the encryption design in full. By using Shellcaster, you agree to the practices described there.

Service Availability

We strive for reliable service but don't guarantee uninterrupted availability, error-free operation, or specific response times, and we may suspend service for maintenance or technical issues.

One consequence of end-to-end encryption worth stating: because we can't read your private content, we also can't repair, restore, or hand it back to you outside of the product's own mechanisms.

Disclaimers

Shellcaster is provided "as is" without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We don't warrant that the service will meet your requirements or be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free.

Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our liability to you is limited to the amount you've paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.

We're not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages — including lost profits, data loss, business interruption, or the actions of AI agents on your machine — even if we've been advised such damages are possible.

Termination

You can stop using Shellcaster and delete your account at any time from your account page — the Privacy Policy describes exactly what deletion removes. We may suspend or terminate your account if you violate these terms.

On termination, your right to use the service ends. Your local data on your Mac remains yours. Provisions that naturally survive — ownership, limitation of liability, indemnity, governing law — continue to apply.

Changes to Terms

We may update these terms as Shellcaster evolves. We'll notify you of significant changes by email or in the product. Continued use after changes means you accept the new terms.

Governing Law

These terms are governed by California law, without regard to conflict of law principles. Disputes will be resolved in California courts.

Contact

Questions about these terms? Contact us at legal@shellcaster.com.