Terms of Service

These Terms govern the relationship between you (“Client”) and the operator of the Tessera Optimize Layer (“Tessera,” “we,” “us”). They cover use of tesseraai.io (the public landing), ledger.tesseraai.io (the operator and sponsor dashboard), and the Tessera proxy infrastructure that sits in your LLM request path.

By creating a Tessera account or routing production traffic through the Tessera proxy, you accept these Terms in full. There is no separate engagement contract to sign for the Annual tier — these Terms plus the DPA are the entire agreement. Enterprise customers (defined in §4) may execute a custom MSA in addition to these Terms.

Tessera is the trade name of Fintechagency OÜ, a private limited company incorporated in the Republic of Estonia (registry code 16638667, registered office Vesivärava tn 50-301, 10152 Tallinn). All invoices, money flows, and contractual remedies reference Fintechagency OÜ. Full corporate details on the Imprint.

The Tessera Optimize Layer is a substrate proxy that sits between your application and your LLM provider. On every request we apply four moves:

• · Auto-route — when a cheaper model passes your golden-set eval, we route to it. Five percent of routed requests are canary-sampled against the original model.
• · Auto-cache — identical requests within your cache TTL return cached responses.
• · Auto-compress — when LLMLingua-2 compression preserves quality on your eval, we send a tighter prompt upstream.
• · Auto-batch — when a workload is tagged batch-eligible, we queue and fire as a batch.

Savings are measured directly from Tessera proxy logs — not inferred from your upstream billing CSV. Every dollar attributed to Tessera traces to a specific request and a specific pricing-catalog snapshot version.

• · Annual — 25% of measured savings. Self-serve signup with prepaid balance billing (Stripe Checkout, $100 minimum top-up) or invoice billing on request. Fees accrue in real time against your account balance; a daily roll-up debit deducts the running total. No fixed term, no early-exit fee, no floor — if measured savings are zero in a given window, no fee accrues in that window.
• · Enterprise — 15% of measured savings. For Clients whose proxy-measured savings exceed five hundred thousand US dollars per calendar month. Invoice billing (NET-30/45/60), custom SLA, and a custom MSA that supplements these Terms.
• · Universal free trial — every Client receives a seven-day fee-free trial that begins on the first request routed through the Tessera proxy. During the trial window measured savings are tracked normally for display but no Performance Fee accrues. After the trial ends, the standard Annual rate (or Enterprise rate, as applicable) applies on measured savings. The trial is non-renewable and applies once per Client.
• · Founding Pilot rate lock— the first five Annual activations have their performance-fee rate permanently locked at twenty-five percent of measured savings. If Tessera revises the Annual rate upward (e.g., to thirty or thirty-five percent), the locked rate survives indefinitely — across cohort closure, contract renewal, and pricing-policy revisions. The lock is recorded in the contract addendum at signup and on the Client's account in the clients table. It survives ownership transfer. The universal seven-day free trial above applies to all Clients independently; the rate lock is the cohort-only benefit.

Your Tessera account holds a prepaid balance funded by you. Performance Fee is accrued per-request in real time and debited from the balance once per day as a single roll-up entry visible in the dashboard transaction log. You receive informational emails when balance crosses 80%, 50%, 10%, and 0% of your last top-up amount. A monthly invoice PDF is generated automatically for your accounting records.

At zero balance, the proxy auto-pauses to passthrough mode — your requests continue forwarding to your upstream provider unaltered, but Tessera applies no optimizations and no fee accrues. Optimizations resume automatically on next top-up via Stripe webhook. There is no service interruption to your end users at any point.

You may withdraw any unspent balance at any time on request to contact@tesseraai.io. Refunds are issued to the original payment method within ten business days.

For each request that gets routed, cached, compressed, or batched, Tessera records both the actual incurred cost and the counterfactual cost (the cost if Tessera had passed the request through unaltered). Measured Savings on that request equal the difference. Aggregate Measured Savings in a window equal the sum across all in-scope workloads in that window.

• · Cost calculations use the pricing-catalog row active at the moment of the request — never client-side defaults, never Tessera memory.
• · Workloads tagged regulated (HIPAA, PCI-DSS, SOC 2 in-scope) never auto-route. Compliance gate is enforced at the code level.
• · Provider price moves, unrelated workload shrinkage, and seasonal volume effects do not enter the Performance Fee calculation — only the actual vs. counterfactual delta per request.
• · Monthly Joint Readings record the pricing-snapshot version identifiers active during the period so historical computations remain reproducible.

Tessera guarantees that quality preservation (canary-measured) stays at or above 0.90 across in-scope workloads. A three-consecutive-day breach triggers automatic disabling of auto-routing on the affected workload plus a 10% fee credit applied to your account balance for the period of the breach. You are notified by email and the breach is recorded in the audit log.

You have an always-available kill-switch in the operator dashboard, both account-wide and per-workload. When engaged, the proxy bypasses all four optimizations and forwards requests as pure passthrough. Performance Fee does not accrue on paused traffic. Pause is reversible at any time without notice or fee. This right is irrevocable and survives any other provision of these Terms.

You agree not to use the Tessera proxy for any unlawful purpose, to circumvent any upstream provider's acceptable-use policy, to send prompts or receive completions that violate applicable law, or to attempt to reverse-engineer the proxy infrastructure. Tessera may suspend service if it has reasonable belief that your usage materially breaches this clause, with at least 24 hours' written notice except where immediate suspension is required by law or by the upstream provider.

Tessera receives no affiliate revenue, referral fees, kickbacks, sponsorships, or any other compensation from any AI provider, gateway vendor, observability platform, or other third party we may recommend in the course of operating the proxy. Client fees are our only income. If this ever changes, we will disclose it in writing in advance and allow affected Clients to terminate without penalty and withdraw unspent balance.

All Client-provided data, workload metadata, prompts forwarded through the proxy, and findings produced for you are confidential. We do not republish, share, or use Client data outside the scope of operating the proxy and computing your fee. Anonymised aggregate insights may be referenced in our public writing only after removing all Client identifiers, workload names, prompt content, and proprietary configuration.

The Tessera brand, the proxy software, the recommendation engine, the pricing-catalog methodology, and proprietary templates remain the property of Fintechagency OÜ. Findings, baselines, readings, and recommendations delivered to you may be used internally by your team for any purpose without further licence. Republishing Tessera-prepared documents externally without prior written permission is prohibited.

Aggregate Tessera liability under these Terms is limited to the fees actually paid by you to Fintechagency OÜ in the twelve months preceding the claim, with no minimum or floor. We are not liable for indirect, consequential, or business-decision damages. You retain sole responsibility for evaluating recommendations before implementation and for testing routed traffic against your own quality criteria. Nothing in this clause limits liability for fraud, wilful misconduct, or any liability that may not be excluded by applicable law.

Processing of personal data is governed by the Tessera Privacy Policy and the Tessera Data Processing Agreement, which forms an integral part of these Terms and is incorporated by reference. By accepting these Terms, you also accept the DPA.

These Terms remain in force while you maintain a Tessera account. There is no fixed term, no minimum commitment, and no early-exit fee on the Annual tier. Either party may terminate at any time by closing the account (you) or by giving thirty days' written notice (us, save where immediate termination is required by acceptable-use breach, law, or regulator order).

On termination: outstanding fees up to the termination effective date are debited from your remaining balance; the balance net of those fees is refunded to your original payment method; the proxy continues passthrough mode for a thirty-day wind-down so you can swap back to direct provider calls without service disruption.

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes (anything affecting your fee structure, kill-switch right, quality SLA, refund mechanism, or data processing) are notified by email to the account owner at least thirty days before taking effect. Continued use of the proxy after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms. If you do not accept, you may terminate per §15 and withdraw the remaining balance.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Estonia, save where mandatory provisions of the Client's jurisdiction apply. Disputes are first resolved through good-faith negotiation between authorised representatives — write to contact@tesseraai.io within fifteen calendar days of the issue arising. If negotiation fails, disputes are resolved by arbitration in Tallinn, Estonia, under the rules of the Arbitration Court of the Estonian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, conducted in English. The prevailing party is entitled to recover reasonable legal fees and arbitration costs.

Each Monthly Joint Reading records the Measured Savings figure and the Performance Fee derived from it for the period. You have fifteen calendar days from issuance to dispute the figure in writing to contact@tesseraai.io. During the dispute window, the disputed portion is withheld from balance debit; undisputed portion is debited per §5. Resolution targets ten business days from receipt of dispute, extendable by mutual agreement.

Questions about these Terms, your account, or the practice: write to contact@tesseraai.io.