Questions, answered straight

CounterSign is a public registry for your terms. You write your terms once, publish them at a permanent web address, and cite that address in your email signature, quotes, invoices, contracts and web forms. Every version you publish is fingerprinted with SHA-256 and time-stamped, so anyone can check that the text they are reading is exactly the text you published, on the date we recorded.

It is a publication and proof tool. It is not a law firm and it does not give legal advice.

People who negotiate in writing and are tired of repeating the same conditions: independent consultants, freelancers, studios, photographers, authors, creators, landlords, coaches, and anyone who deals with platforms that impose their own terms.

Typical uses: a freelancer who wants late-payment terms attached to every quote, a photographer who wants licence terms attached to every image, a creator who wants an AI training opt-out on record, a professional who wants to answer a platform's terms with their own counter-terms.

You can, and for many people that is enough. A page on your own site has three weaknesses: it changes when you redesign, it disappears when you stop paying for hosting, and an archived copy is not authoritative because nobody can prove which version was live on which day.

CounterSign fixes that specific problem. The address stays stable, the versions stay online, and each version carries a fingerprint and a publication date that a third party can verify without trusting us.

No, but it does not replace one. The templates are starting points written in plain language, not legal advice for your situation. If the amount at stake is significant, have a lawyer review your wording once, then publish it here.

Constructive notice is legal shorthand for notice a reasonable party is expected to have found, as opposed to notice you personally handed them. Publishing terms at a public, citable address supports that argument, because the terms are discoverable and provably dated.

Whether a court accepts it depends on your jurisdiction, your relationship with the other party, and what was actually agreed. We record and publish. We do not decide the outcome, and any service that promises you it will is selling you something it cannot deliver.

Publish a version, then put your notice address wherever you already sign: email signature, quote footer, invoice, proposal, social bio, web form. Three ready-made formats are on your dashboard, including handle (Terms: cs.c2cz.com/u/handle).

The form guide shows how to attach the same notice to booking forms and marketplaces that only give you a name field.

Each publication creates a new immutable version: v1, v2, v3, in order, per document. Nothing is overwritten. Every past version stays reachable at its own address, for example /u/your-handle/default/v2, with its own fingerprint and date.

Visitors always land on the current version. The version history sits underneath, so a counterparty can see what changed and when.

No, and that is the point. Editing a published version would destroy the only thing the record is worth. If you published a mistake, publish a corrected version: the correction is visible, dated, and the mistake stays in the history where it belongs.

If a publication contains data that must be removed by law, contact us. We will handle it in writing and say so on the record.

Yes. Give each one a short name: default, freelance, booking, licence. Each document has its own version history and its own address, and your main address lists all of them.

Once per year. A citable address is only useful if it stays put, so the yearly limit is there to protect the citations you already handed out. Choose a neutral handle at signup: your name or your studio, not a campaign or a temporary project.

Anyone with the address. Public is the whole mechanism: a notice nobody can find is not a notice. Do not publish confidential information, client names, or anything you would not put on a shop window.

For each version: the full text you published, its SHA-256 fingerprint, the version number, the publication date, and the account handle. The fingerprint is computed from the exact text, byte for byte.

Fetch the public JSON and recompute the fingerprint. If the two values match, the text has not changed since publication.

python3 - <<'PY'
import hashlib, json, urllib.request
u = "https://cs.c2cz.com/api/terms/public/your-handle/default"
d = json.load(urllib.request.urlopen(u))
print(hashlib.sha256(d["latest"]["content"].encode()).hexdigest())
print(d["latest"]["hash"])          # must be identical
print(d["latest"]["created_at"])    # publication timestamp
PY

Any SHA-256 tool works: sha256sum, OpenSSL, a browser extension. The same JSON gives you every past version, so you can verify the whole history, not just the current page.

No, and the difference matters. A fingerprint proves the text has not changed since it was recorded. It does not, by itself, prove who wrote it. Today the link between you and the text is your account, your handle, and the publication history.

Cryptographic signing, where the version is signed with a key only you hold, is the next step on the roadmap. Until then we describe the record as tamper-evident, not as signed.

Not the way the word is usually sold. Every version published from October 2026 also stores its fingerprint in an append-only ledger we operate, and anyone can look that record up and check the block that contains it. The endpoint is public and documented.

But we run that ledger, its transactions are unsigned, and a single operator can rewrite its own history. So it is corroboration, not proof. It is useful because it is a second copy, timestamped, that a counterparty can inspect without asking us for permission. It is not a substitute for an independent witness.

The independent witness we are adding is an RFC 3161 timestamp token from a qualified authority, verifiable offline with standard tools such as openssl ts -verify. Versions published before October 2026 were recorded on an earlier version of the ledger that stored a reference but not the fingerprint itself. For those, the SHA-256 fingerprint and the publication date remain the evidence.

The fingerprints stay valid forever, because they are just maths over your text. What you lose is the hosting and the date attestation.

So keep your own copy: print the notice page, or save the JSON. One-click export of a signed archive is on the roadmap. Until it ships, the JSON API returns everything you have published.

You should not believe them; you should check them. Every proof claim in this product is designed to be verified with standard tools, and where we cannot prove something yet, this page says so instead of dressing it up. That is a deliberate choice: a legal tool that overstates its evidence is worse than no tool at all.

It makes them public, dated, and provable. Whether they bind a specific person is a different question, decided by notice, consent, clarity, fairness, and the mandatory rules of the relevant law.

CounterSign strengthens the notice and proof side of that equation. It cannot manufacture consent from someone who never agreed, and no publication tool can.

It gives you a clean record to put in front of a lawyer, a regulator, or a court: here is the text, here is when it was published, here is the fingerprint, verify it yourself. That is often the part that is hardest to reconstruct months later.

Silence is not acceptance. Do not expect a notice alone to win a dispute; expect it to remove the argument about what your terms said and when they existed.

The mechanics are jurisdiction-neutral: a public address, a hash, a date. Enforceability is local, and consumer protection rules in particular can override terms regardless of where they are published. If your counterparties are consumers, get local advice.

Not yet. It records and publishes terms and versions. A qualified electronic signature under eIDAS is a separate, regulated service with identity verification and audit obligations, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

A signature layer, where you sign a version with a key held on your device, is on the roadmap and is one of the reasons the Android app is being built.

Yes. One account, unlimited documents, unlimited versions, permanent public addresses, fingerprints and version history. No card, no trial clock, no feature that quietly expires.

€1 per user per month. It unlocks the premium template library: drafted clauses for freelancers, photographers, authors, creators, software work, labels, and platform counter-terms, maintained as living documents. It also gets priority support.

By email and bank transfer. You write to info@c2cz.com, we send an invoice, and we activate the months on your account manually. It is deliberately unglamorous: it keeps the beta honest and keeps card data out of the picture.

Your account drops back to the free plan. Nothing you published is deleted, and every notice keeps resolving at the same address with the same fingerprints. Downgrading costs you the premium templates, not your record.

The free plan stays free for existing accounts. Paid pricing is a beta price and may move as the product matures; any change is announced on this page and by email before it applies to you.

Your email, your handle, a hashed password (PBKDF2, never the password itself), the terms you publish, the publication dates, and session records. No advertising identifiers, no third-party analytics, no tracking pixels, no data sold or shared for marketing.

Account deletion is handled by email while self-service export and deletion are being built. Write to us and we action it in writing.

One honest caveat: published versions are permanent by design, because a notice that can be erased is not evidence. If you need a publication removed for a legal reason, tell us and we will handle it explicitly, on the record.

The application runs on Cloudflare's edge network. The database is hosted with Turso (SQLite). Everything is served over TLS. The full detail is in the privacy notice.

One cookie, strictly necessary: your session. It is HTTP-only, secure, and cannot be read by JavaScript. The cookie policy covers it.

In development, and the website comes first on purpose. The app is only worth building once the web product is stable: a documented API, signed versions, offline verification, and a clean publication flow.

The app will do three things a browser cannot do properly: sign a version with a key stored on your device, verify a notice offline, and share one in two taps.

Yes, for reading. Public endpoints return your documents, the current version, and any past version as JSON, which is what makes independent verification possible. Write access is session-based today; a token API for integrations is planned.

Email info@c2cz.com with the address of the notice and what you expected to happen. Bug reports from people who actually publish are the most useful thing you can send during a beta.