Legal Terms & Policies
Developer-first legal agreements, software terms of use, privacy practices, and AI data disclosures. Documented without obfuscating jargon.
Terms of Service
TL;DR DEVELOPER SUMMARY
DevCastle is a developer community and builder workbench. You own the content and code you post. Treat fellow builders with respect. Don’t abuse our APIs or scrapers. We provide this service as-is and commit to never holding your work hostage.
1. Acceptance of Agreement
By accessing or authenticating into DevCastle (“devcastle.dev” or any associated services), you agree to abide by these Terms of Service. If you are operating on behalf of a legal entity or organization, you confirm you have authority to bind that entity.
2. User Accounts & Authentication
Authentication is handled securely via NextAuth supporting GitHub OAuth, Google, and verified magic email sessions. You are responsible for maintaining the integrity of your session keys and authorized client tokens. You must immediately notify maintainers of unauthorized account access.
3. Content Ownership & Intellectual Property
You retain all rights, ownership, and copyright of content, thoughts, articles, and product listings you publish to DevCastle. By publishing publicly, you grant DevCastle a non-exclusive license to syndicate, index, and format your post for platform users and RSS feeds.
4. Availability & Modifications
DevCastle evolves continuously. We reserve the right to deploy updates, refactor database schemas, or deprecate sub-features with prior community notice. We are not liable for transient downtime during upstream provider maintenance.
Privacy & Telemetry Policy
DATA MINIMIZATION PRINCIPLE
We believe in zero surveillance capitalism. We do not load Google Analytics, Facebook Pixels, or sell user profile information to data brokers. We store only what is required to keep your account signed in and your bookmarks synced.
What We Collect:
- Authentication profile: Your email address, avatar, and GitHub/Google username provided by OAuth providers.
- Builder activity: Posts, comments, bookmarks, product submissions, and upvotes you deliberately initiate.
- Session cookies: Strict HTTP-only session tokens necessary for authenticated requests.
Sub-Processors & Infrastructure Providers:
Account Deletion & Data Export
You may request complete purging of your personal records and posts at any time from your user settings or by contacting maintainers. Purges remove all identifying user records from active databases within 48 hours.
Software License & Intellectual Property
DevCastle Platform Proprietary Notice
Copyright (c) 2024-2026 Lalit Sharma. All rights reserved.
The DevCastle web application, APIs, user interface, brand assets, and proprietary algorithms (including but not limited to the Reddit Market Intel ingestion engines and vector similarity pipelines) are proprietary intellectual property owned and operated by Lalit Sharma.
Users and organizations are granted a revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to access and use DevCastle through standard web and API interfaces in accordance with these Terms of Service. Reverse engineering, unauthorized automated bulk extraction, and redistribution of proprietary services are strictly prohibited.
THE PLATFORM IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
Acceptable Use & Scraping Ethics
To safeguard community integrity and ensure fair access to platform compute resources, the following activities are strictly prohibited:
No Automated Sybil Attacks
Creating multiple puppet accounts to artificially manipulate Launchpad upvotes or community rankings.
No Denial of Service
Flooding the AI agent orchestrator or search indexes with concurrent automated stress scripts.
Respectful Discourse
Harassment, hate speech, malicious doxxing, or distributing unverified pirated software.
Scraper Rate Limits
When accessing DevCastle programmatic feeds, adhere to standard HTTP rate headers and robots.txt.
AI Transparency & Model Disclosures
DevCastle incorporates AI models (LLaMA-3 via Groq, Gemini Pro via Google Vertex) to power market trend synthesis and the platform assistant.
OUR COMMITMENT ON USER QUERIES
- Zero Model Training: Your private questions and chat interactions are NOT used to train foundation models.
- Ephemeral Processing: Queries sent to AI inference providers are processed statelessly in-memory and discarded.
- Attribution: All synthesized market insights cite original public sources (Reddit thread links, HN comments, G2 benchmarks).