Terms of service

Pharos is a research service. You describe something you want to buy, Pharos weighs suitability, quality and value across several sources, and returns a recommendation with citations and a confidence indicator. Pharos does not sell the goods it recommends, does not hold your order, and is not a party to any purchase you make from a seller.

Recommendations are research, not advice, and not a guarantee. Prices, availability and seller behaviour change after a run finishes. Check the seller page before you buy.

You are responsible for the accuracy of the information associated with your account, for maintaining the security of your credentials, and for activities that occur under your account. Tell us at once if you believe somebody else has your password. One person or organisation per account: do not share credentials.

You must be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and the email address on the account must be one you actually control, because that address is how Pharos verifies the account and recovers it.

Research is paid for in prepaid research units, bought in blocks through Stripe. A run debits units from your balance when it starts. Units do not expire. The term named on a block is sizing guidance for how long a block tends to last at an ordinary pace, not a deadline on the units you bought.

Tracking an item costs units too: a scheduled refresh is a full run and is billed as one. Opening a run you have already paid for reads the stored result and costs nothing. If your balance reaches zero, paid research stops until you buy more. Discount codes are redeemed inside Pharos, on your usage page, and not at checkout.

Prices are shown in US dollars. Pharos charges for access to the research service rather than selling the goods it recommends. Card details are entered on Stripe’s own checkout page: Stella Viae LLC never receives and never stores your card number.

Refunds are governed by the refund policy, which forms part of these terms. Any refund is at the Company’s discretion unless a law that applies to you says otherwise.

Where a refund is approved, the amount of money returned is what drives the number of units removed from the account, in proportion to the cumulative amount refunded for that purchase. The account keeps one aggregate balance with no per-purchase unit accounting, so nothing here is a promise to refund unused units as a separate calculation. If prior use makes the balance negative, paid research pauses until later credits restore a positive balance. Disputes freeze the account pending review.

Pharos scores candidates deterministically and may use AI-assisted summarisation on top of that. AI-assisted outputs, generated content, and similar platform outputs may be incomplete, outdated or incorrect. You are responsible for reviewing and independently verifying a recommendation, and for checking the seller page and the cited sources, before relying on it.

What you type stays yours. You give Stella Viae LLC permission to use it to run your research and to operate the service for you. We do not sell it and we do not publish it.

The service, its interface, its scoring and its wording are ours. The evidence a run cites belongs to whoever published it, and Pharos links to the source rather than reproducing it.

The platform is not guaranteed to be free from interruption, corruption, deletion or data loss. Keep your own copy of anything you rely on, and do not treat your Pharos research history as your only record of it.

You may not use Pharos for illegal, abusive, infringing, fraudulent or exploitative activity, and you may not interfere with the platform, attempt unauthorized access, or misuse the service in a way that harms others or the system itself. In particular, you agree not to:

• resell, rebrand or redistribute Pharos output as your own research product;
• automate access to Pharos outside any interface it offers for that purpose, or run it at a volume plainly intended to exhaust the service rather than to research a purchase;
• probe, scrape or interfere with the service, its rate limits, its billing, or another account;
• use Pharos to research anything you are not lawfully allowed to buy where you live;
• submit anything unlawful, or anything that would put Pharos in breach of a source site’s terms.

Pharos may rate limit, pause or refuse work that looks like abuse, and will say so rather than failing silently.

Pharos is provided on an as-is and as-available basis. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Stella Viae LLC disclaims implied warranties, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement, and does not warrant that a recommendation is correct, that a price or a link is still valid, that a source is available, or that the service is uninterrupted or error free.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Stella Viae LLC will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or exemplary damages, for lost profit or lost opportunity, or for any purchase you make from a seller on the strength of a recommendation. Total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid the Company in the twelve months before the claim.

Nothing here excludes a liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusions above, in which case they apply to you only as far as the law allows.

You may stop using Pharos at any time and ask for your account to be closed. We may suspend or terminate access if these terms are violated, if the account is the subject of a payment dispute, if the law requires it, or if continued access creates security, operational or legal risk. A payment problem freezes paid work; it does not destroy your research history.

If the Company closes your account without cause, it may at its discretion refund part or all of a purchase you have made. Any refund follows the refund policy: the amount refunded is what drives the units removed from your balance, and no separate calculation is made against units you have not spent. If your account is closed for a breach, unused units may be forfeited.

These terms may change as the service does. The effective date at the top says when the current version took effect. Material changes are announced by email to the address on your account before they take effect, and continuing to use Pharos after that date means you accept the new version.

Unless another written agreement says otherwise, these Terms are governed by the laws of Kansas, without regard to conflict-of-law principles.