Terms of Service

Last updated: May 24, 2026

These Terms of Service govern your access to and use of BibGenie, including the BibGenie website, account system, payment features, Zotero plugin, managed AI model access, usage credits, and related services.

By accessing or using BibGenie, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

1. What BibGenie Does

BibGenie is an AI research assistant for Zotero. It helps users work with papers, notes, metadata, citations, selected text, reader context, AI chat, custom models, managed models, and related research workflows.

BibGenie is local-first for Zotero data. Your Zotero library, PDFs, notes, local semantic indexes, local chat history, custom model settings, and BYOK API keys are stored locally in your Zotero environment unless a feature necessarily sends selected content to your chosen AI provider or a BibGenie-managed model proxy to fulfill your request.

BibGenie is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Zotero, Corporation for Digital Scholarship, Stripe, OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, GitHub, or any other third-party platform unless expressly stated.

2. Your Account

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials and for activity under your account.

You must provide accurate account and billing information. You must not create accounts or use BibGenie to bypass service limits, commit fraud, abuse the service, or violate law.

We may suspend, restrict, or terminate access if we believe your account violates these Terms, threatens service security, causes operational harm, or is required to comply with law.

3. Your Content and Zotero Data

You keep ownership of your Zotero library, PDFs, notes, metadata, annotations, prompts, outputs, and other content.

You are responsible for ensuring that you have the rights and permissions needed to process any content you use with BibGenie, including copyrighted, licensed, paywalled, embargoed, institutional, or confidential materials.

When you ask BibGenie to process content with an AI provider, you authorize the content necessary for that request to be sent to the provider or service path you selected. This may include selected text, paper metadata, excerpts, notes, images, screenshots, or other context that you add to chat or use with a feature.

BibGenie does not store your Zotero library, PDFs, notes, BYOK API keys, or Zotero plugin chat history on BibGenie servers.

4. AI Models, Managed Models, and BYOK

BibGenie supports multiple model paths:

Custom or BYOK models: You configure a provider, base URL, model, and optional API key. Requests are sent from your device to the provider you choose. BibGenie does not upload or store your BYOK API key.
Local providers: You may configure local services such as Ollama or compatible endpoints. You are responsible for securing and operating those endpoints.
BibGenie-managed models: BibGenie may route eligible requests through its service to a third-party AI provider. Request content is transmitted as needed to generate the response.

Third-party provider terms and privacy practices apply to AI requests handled by those providers. If you use BYOK, you are responsible for provider charges, quotas, retention settings, and account configuration.

AI outputs may be inaccurate, incomplete, non-unique, or unsuitable for your purpose. You are responsible for reviewing outputs, citations, metadata edits, summaries, translations, and any generated content before relying on them.

5. Credits and Usage Limits

BibGenie may use credits to measure and limit access to managed AI features, web tools, or other paid functionality. Credits are service units only. They are not currency, cash, stored value, gift cards, securities, or a financial product.

Credits may be included with free, subscription, lifetime, or promotional plans, or may be offered as paid packages. Credit amounts, expiration rules, plan limits, model availability, and consumption rates may change.

BibGenie may record limited usage-metering metadata, including token counts, model identifiers, provider identifiers, timestamps, credit amounts, processing status, and related account identifiers, to calculate credits, show usage, prevent abuse, and operate billing systems.

We may throttle, limit, pause, or deny requests that exceed available credits, violate limits, trigger abuse controls, or threaten service reliability.

6. Plans, Subscriptions, Lifetime Access, and Payments

BibGenie may offer free plans, paid subscriptions, lifetime purchases, credit packages, trials, discounts, or promotions.

Paid subscriptions renew automatically until canceled. By purchasing a subscription, you authorize Stripe or another payment processor to charge your payment method at the applicable recurring interval.

Lifetime purchases provide access to the lifetime plan features offered by BibGenie for the product's supported lifetime. Lifetime access does not guarantee that every third-party provider, model, quota, integration, or future feature will remain available forever.

Prices, plan features, credits, promotions, and supported models may change. The price shown on the pricing page and Stripe Checkout at purchase is the applicable purchase price.

Payments are processed by Stripe. You agree to provide accurate billing information and to comply with Stripe's applicable terms.

Refunds and cancellations are governed by our Refund Policy.

7. Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

Violate law, third-party rights, privacy rights, intellectual property rights, or institutional policies
Use BibGenie to process content you are not authorized to use
Upload, generate, or distribute malware or harmful code
Abuse, overload, scrape, reverse engineer, or interfere with BibGenie or its providers
Circumvent authentication, credit limits, payment systems, usage restrictions, or security controls
Share account access in a way that bypasses plan limits
Use BibGenie to build a competing service by automated extraction, scraping, or misuse of the product
Misrepresent AI outputs as verified facts, citations, or metadata without review

8. Privacy and Data Handling

Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle account data, payment data, local Zotero plugin data, BYOK keys, managed AI requests, and usage-metering records.

At a high level:

Your Zotero library, PDFs, notes, local chat history, local indexes, and BYOK API keys are not stored on BibGenie servers.
Account, session, payment, subscription, credit, and limited usage-metering records are stored as needed to operate BibGenie.
Managed AI requests are transmitted through our service path only as needed to fulfill your request.
Custom/BYOK model requests are sent from your device to the provider you choose.

9. Third-Party Services

BibGenie relies on third-party services for hosting, authentication support, email, payments, managed model routing, and related operations.

Third-party services may change, become unavailable, modify their terms, change pricing, or impose limits. BibGenie is not responsible for third-party services outside our control.

10. Software Changes and Availability

BibGenie is under active development. Features may be added, changed, limited, suspended, deprecated, or removed.

We aim to keep the service reliable, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted availability, error-free operation, continued support for every provider, or permanent availability of every model or integration.

11. Intellectual Property

BibGenie, including its website, software, branding, design, documentation, and service infrastructure, is owned by BibGenie or its licensors and is protected by applicable intellectual property laws.

These Terms do not transfer ownership of BibGenie's intellectual property to you. You may use BibGenie only as permitted by these Terms and applicable licenses.

12. Disclaimers

BibGenie is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, availability, and reliability.

BibGenie does not provide legal, medical, financial, academic integrity, publication, or professional advice. You are responsible for independently verifying AI outputs, citations, metadata, summaries, and recommendations.

13. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, BibGenie will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, including lost profits, lost data, lost research work, business interruption, provider charges, or inability to use the service.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, BibGenie's total liability for any claim related to the service is limited to the greater of USD $100 or the amount you paid BibGenie in the three months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so some limits may not apply to you.

14. Indemnity

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold BibGenie harmless from claims, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses arising from your content, your use of BibGenie, your provider configurations, your violation of these Terms, or your violation of law or third-party rights.

15. Termination

You may stop using BibGenie at any time. You may delete local plugin data from your Zotero environment and request account deletion by contacting us.

We may suspend or terminate access if you violate these Terms, fail to pay, abuse the service, create security risk, or if continued service is unlawful or impractical.

After termination, provisions that by their nature should survive will remain in effect, including ownership, payment obligations, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnity, and dispute provisions.