Terms of Service

Effective May 4, 2026 (updated May 4, 2026 — added the self-service /account export and /account delete commands)

1. Preamble

Welcome to PodiumBot.

PodiumBot is a Discord bot that lets communities run contests with zero hassle: members submit entries (typically images — best burger, best cat, best meme, you name it), the community rates them from 1 to 5 stars, and the bot automatically publishes a gold / silver / bronze podium when voting closes.

The Service is operated by Klamath Studio, a French SAS (société par actions simplifiée) with a share capital of €500.00, registered with the Trade and Companies Register of Lyon under number 102 311 636, with its registered office at 254 rue Vendôme, 69003 Lyon, France (referred to as "we", "us", "the Operator" or "PodiumBot").

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") govern your use of the bot, the website at podiumbot.app, and all related services (the "Service"). By adding the bot to a Discord server or otherwise interacting with it, you expressly agree to these Terms. If you don't agree with something here, please don't use the Service — it's that simple.

PodiumBot is intended for Discord server administrators (community managers, content creators, Twitch teams, clubs, associations, etc.) and for the members who participate in the contests they run.

2. Definitions

For clarity, the following terms have the meaning set out below:

  • Bot: the PodiumBot Discord application, identified by its Discord Application ID.
  • Discord Account: a user's personal account on the Discord platform, provided by Discord Inc.
  • Discord Server (or "guild"): a Discord server on which the Bot has been installed by an administrator.
  • Administrator: the natural person holding the Discord permissions required to add, configure, or remove the Bot from a Discord Server.
  • Contest: an event created through the Bot during which members submit entries and then vote.
  • Submission: an entry submitted by a member to a Contest, typically including an image and a caption.
  • Vote: a 1-to-5 score given by a member to a Submission during the voting phase.
  • Podium: the automatic publication of the top three Submissions when a Contest closes.
  • Free Plan: the free tier of the Service, limited to one (1) concurrent active Contest per Discord Server.
  • Pro Plan: the paid tier of the Service, unlocking unlimited concurrent active Contests and related features.
  • Discord App Subscriptions: the subscription mechanism built into Discord through which Discord collects payments related to the Pro Plan.

3. Eligibility

3.1 Discord Account

You need a valid Discord Account to use the Service. The creation and management of that account are governed by Discord's own terms of service (https://discord.com/terms) — please read them. We incorporate them by reference for everything related to your access to Discord itself.

3.2 Minimum age

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service, in line with Discord's terms. In some jurisdictions Discord enforces a higher minimum age (e.g. 16 in parts of the EEA) — the local rule prevails. If you are a minor, you must additionally have permission from a parent or legal guardian.

3.3 Fair use of the OAuth flow

When you add the Bot, Discord will ask you to grant certain permissions. You agree not to bypass, automate abusively, or otherwise misuse this authorization flow (for example, by creating multiple accounts to work around the Free Plan limits).

4. Subscription and pricing

4.1 Free Plan

The Free Plan is, and will remain, free of charge. It allows you to run one (1) active Contest at a time per Discord Server. No payment method is required.

4.2 Pro Plan

The Pro Plan is billed at €3.99 per month per Discord Server, all taxes included. It unlocks unlimited concurrent active Contests as well as the features marked Pro on the website.

4.3 Discord App Subscriptions — merchant of record

The Pro Plan is sold exclusively through Discord App Subscriptions. In practice this means:

  • Discord acts as the merchant of record. Discord collects your payment, manages payment methods, issues receipts, applies VAT according to your jurisdiction, and then remits to us our share after deducting its commission.
  • You subscribe to, view, and manage your subscription directly from your Discord client, in the subscription settings of the PodiumBot application.
  • Discord's subscription-related terms (https://discord.com/terms and the Discord Premium App Subscriptions Policy) apply to the entire payment relationship.

4.4 Automatic renewal

Unless you cancel, the Pro Plan automatically renews each month for a new one-month period. Pricing may change; any change will be notified to you at least 30 days before it takes effect, giving you time to cancel before the next renewal.

4.5 Failed payments

If a payment fails (expired card, insufficient funds, etc.), Discord may retry the charge under its own rules. If the subscription ultimately can't be honored, the affected Discord Server is automatically downgraded to the Free Plan, without affecting Contests that have already closed.

5. Cancellation and refunds

5.1 Cancel anytime

You can cancel your Pro subscription at any time, free of charge and without giving a reason, from Discord's subscription management interface. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current monthly period: you keep access to Pro features until then, with no further charge afterwards.

5.2 7-day money-back guarantee

We offer a 7-day money-back guarantee on the first month of any new Pro subscription. If you're not satisfied, email us at contact@podiumbot.app within 7 days of the first charge and we will refund the first month in full (the refund is processed via Discord, since Discord collected the payment). This guarantee does not apply to subscriptions that have already been refunded once on the same Discord Server.

5.3 Right of withdrawal and immediate performance

Under Articles L. 221-18 et seq. of the French Consumer Code, EU consumers normally benefit from a 14-day statutory withdrawal period for distance contracts.

However, the Service consists of the supply of digital content not delivered on a tangible medium, the performance of which begins immediately upon activation of the Pro Plan. By activating the Pro Plan, you expressly request that performance of the Service begins before the withdrawal period expires, and you acknowledge that you lose your right of withdrawal once the Service has been fully supplied, in accordance with Article L. 221-28, 13° of the French Consumer Code.

Our 7-day money-back guarantee (Section 5.2) is offered on a commercial basis and is in addition to your statutory rights — it does not replace them.

6. Acceptable use

The Service is offered to help you run friendly community contests. By using PodiumBot, you agree not to:

  • Submit, vote on, or distribute through the Bot any content that is unlawful, pornographic, sexually exploitative of minors, hateful, racist, defamatory, violent, or that violates human dignity;
  • Submit content you don't have the right to use (in particular, third-party copyrighted images without permission);
  • Use the Bot to harass, dox, threaten, or intimidate anyone;
  • Spam, flood, or attempt to manipulate Contest results through technical means (multi-accounts, vote bots, exploiting bugs);
  • Use the Service for fraudulent activities, money laundering, or any violation of French law or of the law of the country from which you access the Service;
  • Attempt to disrupt the Bot's infrastructure (denial-of-service, hostile reverse engineering, exploitation of vulnerabilities).

You also agree to comply with Discord's Terms of Service and Community Guidelines (https://discord.com/guidelines) and with the internal rules of any Discord Server on which you use the Bot. Server Administrators remain responsible for moderating their own Server.

Automated image moderation. Every image submitted via the Bot is automatically scanned before storage by a content classification service (AWS Rekognition) to detect the prohibited content listed above. If the image is classified as violating these rules, the submission is rejected and the image is not retained. This scan is disabled for submissions received in a Discord channel marked NSFW by the Server Administrator (the Administrator having thereby explicitly authorised adult content in that channel). Child sexual abuse material remains detected and blocked in all cases, including in NSFW channels, via the Cloudflare CSAM Scanning Tool (PhotoDNA / NCMEC hashes), which may result in automatic reporting to the competent authorities.

Any violation may result in immediate suspension of access to the Service (see Section 10).

7. Intellectual property

7.1 Your content

You retain ownership of the content you submit through the Bot (text, images, votes). We claim no ownership over your Submissions.

7.2 License grant

So that the Service can actually function — display Submissions, run voting, publish podiums, and preserve the history of past contests — when you submit a Submission, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license, transferable to our technical subprocessors (hosting provider, CDN, S3-compatible object storage), to host, reproduce, display, and re-publish your Submission through the Bot, on any Discord Server where it is shared, and on podiumbot.app where necessary to showcase or archive the Contest.

This license is granted for the duration of the Contest and beyond, so that past podiums and shared links keep working after a Contest closes. You can end this license at any time by deleting your data: the /account delete command, run on any server where PodiumBot is present, immediately and permanently deletes all of your Submissions (and the associated images on Cloudflare R2) after interactive confirmation. If you cannot reach the command for some reason, email us at contact@podiumbot.app; we will action such requests within a reasonable timeframe, subject to any legal retention obligations. See the Privacy Policy (§8.3) for the full breakdown.

7.3 Our brand and code

The "PodiumBot" name and brand, the logo, the domain name, the Bot's source code, the website's interface, and the documentation are our exclusive property (or that of our licensors) and are protected by copyright, trademark law, and database rights. Nothing in these Terms transfers any right in those assets to you.

8. Service availability

We use commercially reasonable efforts to keep the Service available 24/7. That said:

  • We make no service-level commitment (SLA), neither on the Free Plan nor on the €3.99/month Pro Plan;
  • Outages may occur for maintenance, updates, incident remediation, or for reasons beyond our control (Discord outages, third-party provider failures, force majeure);
  • No compensation, subscription extension, or indemnity is owed in case of unavailability, except in clearly disproportionate cases that we would address on a goodwill basis.

We try to announce planned interruptions via a banner on podiumbot.app or a Bot message whenever technically practical.

9. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law:

  • The Service is provided "as is". We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for any specific purpose beyond the functional description provided.
  • Our liability is strictly limited to direct damages. We exclude all liability for indirect damages, loss of data (beyond statutory obligations), reputational harm, lost business opportunity, lost members, or contest-related revenue.
  • The aggregate cap of our liability, all damages combined, is limited to the total amount you have actually paid us for the Service over the twelve (12) months preceding the triggering event. For Free Plan users, this cap is by nature equal to zero.
  • We accept no responsibility for the content of Submissions posted by members: moderation of a Server remains the responsibility of its Administrator.
  • We accept no responsibility for failures attributable to Discord, a third-party provider (hosting, CDN, ISP), or a force majeure event within the meaning of Article 1218 of the French Civil Code.

These limitations do not apply in cases of gross negligence, willful misconduct, or where limiting liability is prohibited by law (statutory warranty of conformity, personal injury, etc.).

10. Suspension and termination

10.1 Termination by you

You can stop using the Service at any time:

  • By canceling your Pro subscription through Discord (the Free Plan stays available);
  • And/or by removing the Bot from your Discord Server (right-click the Bot → "Kick").

Nothing else is required from you.

10.2 Suspension or termination by us

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate your access to the Service, in whole or in part, without prior notice and without compensation, in case of:

  • Breach of these Terms, in particular Section 6 (acceptable use);
  • Reasonable suspicion of payment fraud, abusive chargeback, or misuse of the Service;
  • A request from a competent judicial or administrative authority.

We will notify you by email (at the address linked to your Discord Account when accessible to us) or through a Bot message, except in cases of urgency or technical impossibility. In case of termination for material breach, no refund — even pro-rata — is owed.

10.3 Effects of termination

On termination, access to the Bot on the affected Server stops. Associated data is retained or deleted in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Submissions that were already published in closed podiums may remain accessible in the Bot's history under the license granted in Section 7.2.

11. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms to reflect changes in the Service, legal obligations, or commercial decisions. When that happens:

  • Minor changes (wording clarifications, typos, contact updates): the new version is published at podiumbot.app/legal/terms with a new effective date. No individual notification.
  • Material changes (pricing, term length, scope of rights, liability provisions): we will notify you at least 30 days in advance, by email (to the address linked to your Discord Account or your Discord billing address) and/or through a banner in the Bot or website interface.

If you don't accept a material change, you can cancel your subscription before it takes effect (Section 10.1). Continuing to use the Service after the effective date of a material change constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

12. Personal data

The processing of personal data through the Service is described in our Privacy Policy, available at podiumbot.app/legal/privacy. That policy details the data we collect (Discord identifiers, Submission content, technical metadata), the purposes, the retention periods, our subprocessors, and how to exercise your rights under the GDPR and the French Data Protection Act.

13. Governing law and jurisdiction

13.1 Governing law

These Terms are governed by French law.

13.2 Amicable dispute resolution

Disputes about Pro subscription payment

As stated in Section 4.3, Discord acts as the merchant of record for all Pro Plan subscriptions. Disputes relating to payment, billing, refunds or VAT application therefore fall under Discord's responsibility, not Klamath Studio's. For such disputes, please contact Discord support directly at https://support.discord.com/.

Disputes about the Service itself

For any dispute relating to the Bot's operation, the quality of the Service, or these Terms (excluding payment), you can contact us directly at contact@podiumbot.app — we commit to replying within a reasonable timeframe and to seeking an amicable solution.

European Online Dispute Resolution platform

As a consumer residing in the European Union, you may also use the European Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform at https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr.

Consumer mediator

Article L. 612-1 of the French Consumer Code normally requires a business to designate a consumer mediator. PodiumBot is a fully dematerialized digital service sold through Discord App Subscriptions (where Discord is the merchant of record), so the consumer payment contract is held by Discord, which operates its own dispute-resolution scheme. For this reason, and for as long as this distribution model remains in place, PodiumBot does not designate a separate consumer mediator. If the commercial organisation of the Service were to change (e.g. direct billing by Klamath Studio), this clause would be updated to designate an accredited mediator.

13.3 Jurisdiction

Failing an amicable resolution, and subject to mandatory consumer-protection rules (in particular jurisdiction rules under the French Consumer Code and Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012), any dispute arising from these Terms shall be brought before the Tribunal de commerce de Lyon for business users, and before the courts having jurisdiction under ordinary law for consumers.

14. Contact

A question, a request, a report?

Email: contact@podiumbot.app Postal address: Klamath Studio — 254 rue Vendôme, 69003 Lyon, France