Terms of Service — Hype Star

Your agreement with Hype Star.

By accessing or using Hype Star, you agree to these Terms and our Privacy Policy. If you use Hype Star for a company or another organization, you confirm that you are authorized to accept these Terms for it. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

You must be legally able to enter this agreement where you live. The service is not directed to children under 13. Additional terms shown at checkout or for a specific promotion form part of these Terms for that transaction or promotion. If they conflict, the more specific terms control.

A curated directory, not an endorsement.

Hype Star publishes editorial and community project profiles, categories, and direct links. We may create unclaimed seed profiles from publicly available business information. A profile, category position, badge, summary, or link is not an endorsement, certification, investment recommendation, or guarantee about a listed project.

We may accept, edit, label, recategorize, decline, unpublish, or remove a profile to protect quality, accuracy, rights, safety, or the integrity of the directory. Project owners and rights holders may request ownership review, a correction, asset replacement, or removal at hello@hypestar.org.

A removal request is a manual review process, not an unrestricted delete control. We may verify the requester’s authority or rights before acting. When a request is accepted, we remove the affected profile or asset from Hype Star’s public pages, API, sitemap, and feeds; search-engine caches and copies already shared by others may remain outside our control.

We may review visible information on a project's official public pages and publish concise source-dated paraphrases about audience, use cases, features, pricing, integrations, or supported platforms. We may correct, replace, omit, expire, or retire a complete detail section when evidence changes or cannot be reverified. These facts and citations are informational: they are not endorsements, certifications, warranties, professional advice, or guarantees that a third-party product remains available or unchanged. A source-dated pricing fact is not an offer by Hype Star; verify current price, availability, and terms on the project's official site before purchasing.

Weekly spotlights are dated editorial collections of 3–5 reviewed public profiles. Their positions are reading order, not scores or performance claims. Editorial placement cannot be purchased; active paid homepage features are excluded when an issue is published, and payment, supporter links, traffic, and votes do not choose or reorder an issue. If a selected profile later becomes nonpublic, we may withhold the complete issue rather than alter its historical order.

You keep your work and permit us to display it.

You retain ownership of material you submit. You give Hype Star a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, copy, format, resize, display, and distribute that material only as reasonably needed to review, operate, promote, and share your Hype Star listing and the service. This license ends when the material is removed, except for reasonable backup, legal, and already-shared promotional copies.

You may suggest a public project URL without claiming ownership. You must have authority for any nonpublic text, marks, images, or assets you separately provide.
Your submission must be accurate and must not infringe, mislead, impersonate, or violate law.
You are responsible for keeping claimed profile information current.
Feedback about Hype Star may be used without restriction or payment to you.

The analyzer produces a private source draft from one public project page. Homepage metadata may seed that draft, but it does not become public until Hype Star completes an accuracy and safety review. Anonymous submission creates no account and conveys no ownership or editing rights. A separately verified manager is responsible for later owner-controlled profile changes. After editorial review, we may display a limited screenshot of the submitted public homepage as an independent directory preview without waiting for an ownership claim. We prefer owner-supplied logos and brand kits; company representatives and rights holders can request screenshot correction, replacement, or removal.

Accepted projects receive permanent basic directory inclusion.

Anyone may browse the directory without payment. Creating a project submission is also free, private, and marked noindex during review. One accepted canonical project receives one basic public profile without an expiry. No registration, contact email, supporter link, payment, or ownership claim is required to submit. Hype Star may separately publish reviewed editorial profiles from public facts.

Basic inclusion requires no payment information and creates no Stripe Customer, Checkout Session, or order. It has no renewal. A reviewed basic profile remains public unless paused, removed, rejected, or made unavailable under these rules; promotion or payment expiry alone does not hide it. Duplicate-profile eligibility is determined server-side.

A basic profile or paid enhancement does not promise traffic, leads, search-engine indexing, particular link treatment by search engines, rank, or any SEO result. See the current directory rules before submitting.

Payment is optional, gated, and buys only a defined enhancement.

Hype Star may offer optional fixed-term enhancements and labeled web visibility. New inventory is available only when enabled by Hype Star server-side and shown at purchase. Prices, timing, labels, SKU rules, and material limits shown there apply. Prices are flat: there are no auctions, bids, or automatic rebids.

Stripe is contacted only after a verified owner explicitly starts checkout for currently available inventory; basic inclusion never enters Stripe.
Stripe processes paid checkout; Hype Star retains transaction references rather than full card numbers.
You authorize the displayed charge and are responsible for applicable taxes or fees identified at checkout.
A compliant paid enhancement or feature already delivered is non-refundable except where law or checkout terms require otherwise.
Listing and boost activation take effect only after payment is verified via webhook. No auctions or automatic rebids.
Enhancements are fixed-term purchases, not automatically renewing subscriptions. Each purchase is a new, explicit checkout.
Pausing a public listing does not pause, refund, or extend its paid term.
An enhancement ending, being refunded, or being disputed never removes an accepted basic profile.
Payment may buy a clearly labeled web feature. It never changes category, search, API, MCP, agent recommendation, related-project, or editorial order.
A separate listing enhancement neither purchases nor bars spotlight consideration, but a project with an active paid homepage feature is excluded from a newly published spotlight so paid and editorial placement remain separate.
Existing grants and paid orders remain honored if Hype Star later closes new inventory.

The detailed pricing rules are incorporated into these Terms.

New free listings need a Hype Star badge. Paid listings do not.

For a new free listing, add the existing Hype Star badge HTML to any public page on your site. It does not have to be the homepage. We first check the submitted page, the homepage, and a few common paths; if the badge is somewhere else, you can share that exact page URL. Paid listings do not need a backlink. Listings already approved stay listed without a badge and are not unpublished. The badge does not purchase praise, guarantee placement or organic ranking, change outbound-link treatment, or affect promotion eligibility or later ownership verification. Qualified links using nofollow, ugc, or sponsored are accepted.

Any statement you make about Hype Star must remain accurate and must disclose a material connection when applicable. Deceptive claims, purchased engagement, referral manipulation, or automated abuse may lead to removal.

Organic ranking and counters are transparent estimates.

Directory browse and permanent basic inclusion are free; commercial enhancements and features are separate and optional. Featured web positions are labeled, time-boxed, and kept separate from organic category, search, API, MCP, and agent recommendation order. Traffic and outbound-click counts are estimates that may exclude bots, previews, prefetches, duplicates, suspicious traffic, and technical failures. We may correct measurement errors or invalidate manipulated activity.

Counters and rankings are provided for discovery and basic reporting, not as audited analytics, billing records, or a promise of commercial performance.

Use the service without harming it or others.

Do not submit unlawful, infringing, fraudulent, deceptive, malicious, or adult content.
Do not impersonate an owner, manipulate counts, buy fake engagement, or evade verification and rate limits.
Do not probe, disrupt, overload, reverse engineer, or gain unauthorized access to Hype Star, its data, or another person’s account.
Do not use the service or API to distribute malware, spam, mass solicitations, or harvested personal information.
Respect API documentation, robots instructions, technical limits, and third-party rights.

We may limit access, reject requests, suspend future accounts, or remove content when reasonably necessary to enforce these Terms, comply with law, or protect the service and its users.

Third-party sites remain third-party sites.

Profiles link to websites and services Hype Star does not control. Their content, availability, security, products, terms, and privacy practices are their responsibility. Third-party names, logos, and marks belong to their respective owners; their appearance does not imply sponsorship or endorsement of Hype Star.

If you believe content on Hype Star violates your copyright, trademark, privacy, or other rights, send enough detail for us to identify and assess it to hello@hypestar.org.

The service will change as it launches.

Hype Star may add, change, pause, or discontinue features, API routes, categories, prices, promotions, or the service itself. We may impose reasonable limits to protect security and reliability. Customer accounts use passwordless email verification and secure server-side sessions. You are responsible for access to your email account and must notify us promptly about suspected unauthorized use.

We aim to operate Hype Star carefully, but do not promise that it will always be available, uninterrupted, secure, or error-free. You should keep copies of material you submit.

Reasonable limits on responsibility.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Hype Star is provided “as is” and “as available,” without implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or any guarantee of ranking, traffic, revenue, or results.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Hype Star will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, data, goodwill, or business opportunities. Hype Star’s total liability arising from the service will not exceed the greater of US $100 or the amount you paid Hype Star in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim. These limits do not apply where applicable law does not permit them.

If permitted by law, you will defend and indemnify Hype Star from third-party claims caused by material you submit, your business or promotion, or your violation of these Terms or another person’s rights. Nothing in these Terms limits non-waivable consumer rights.

Updates, separation, and contact.

We may update these Terms as the service changes. We will post the revised version and effective date, and provide additional notice when required by law. Continued use after the new effective date means the updated Terms apply; if you do not agree, stop using the service.

If a provision cannot be enforced, it will be limited to the minimum extent necessary and the rest will remain in effect. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and applicable specific offer terms, are the entire agreement about the service.

Questions, disputes, correction requests, and rights notices: hello@hypestar.org.

Clear terms for open discovery and optional visibility.