Legal

The short version: your designs are yours, you check results before you coat, and when you leave we delete your data.

Effective 1 October 2026.

Your designs are yours

Everything you create in Thin Film Forge belongs to you: designs, stacks, materials, measured data, run sheets, reports and every revision. We claim no ownership of it and no license to it beyond running the service for you. We do not use your designs to train models, share them with other customers, or publish them. Every account is covered the same way, whatever its plan. The software, documentation and the literature presets we ship stay ours (or their authors').

Money-back guarantee

Education, Pro and Team subscriptions can be refunded in full within 30 days of purchase: ask in the app under Settings › Account. Each request is reviewed by a person, and one refund is given per customer. A refund ends the subscription at once. Your designs stay yours and are not deleted: they stay in your account, read-only, and can be opened and exported. Team On-Prem and Enterprise: the first year's license fee is refunded in full on a request made within 30 days of go-live (the day the installation is running on the customer's server, not the order date); setup fees and server hardware are not refunded. The license then ends, and the designs stay on the customer's server.

No liability for results

Thin Film Forge is a calculation tool. Its engine is validated against closed-form results, independent codes and published designs (see Validation), but the service and its results are provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind. A validated engine is not a guarantee that a coating will perform, be manufacturable, or meet a specification.

You are responsible for checking designs against your own measurements and processes before you build, release or sell anything made from them. To the fullest extent the law allows, Thin Film Forge and its owner accept no liability for any loss, cost or damage arising from the use of, or reliance on, the software, its results or its material data, including lost production, scrapped parts, product failures and lost profit.

Deleting your account deletes your data

You can delete your account yourself: sign in, open the History tab and choose Delete account. We then delete the data associated with it: every design you own with its revision history, releases, production runs and webhooks, plus your sessions, API tokens, sign-in links, password and display name. Copies in backups are removed as the backups rotate out, which takes at most 14 days. Export what you want to keep first: deletion cannot be undone, and designs you shared with a team are deleted for the team too. An active subscription must be canceled first.

We keep your email address, marked inactive: it cannot sign in and receives no email. We also keep the records in other people’s designs that name you and that must stay intact for their design control: revisions you authored there, release signatures and review comments. Payment records are kept as the law requires. Anonymous usage statistics that cannot identify you are deleted on their normal retention schedule (90 days by default). You can sign up again with the same email at any time: we send a confirmation code to the address, you choose a new password, and the account reopens empty. To have the email address itself erased as well, email support@thinfilmforge.com.

Product analytics

On the hosted site, for Free, Education and Pro accounts and for visitors who are not signed in, the app reports how it is used to PostHog, our analytics provider: page loads, which views you open, and the names of commands you run (such as “Save” or a download), under your account id and plan. It never sends your designs, what you type, clicks, page text, query strings or recordings of your screen, and it sets no cookies. Browsers with Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track on send nothing. Team, Lab, Enterprise, dedicated and on-premises installations send nothing to PostHog. To have this data erased, email support@thinfilmforge.com.

Compliance

Dedicated Team hosting

Team can run on a dedicated server hosted by us: one deployment for your organization only, with your own database and no other customer’s data on it. Design control is built in for quality systems such as AS9100 §8.3: every change is a revision with its author and time, releases go through review and electronic signatures, and any past result reproduces from its frozen material data. Access is by individual named account, with an audit log of who did what. Data is encrypted in transit.

Dedicated hosting is not for export-controlled data. Designs controlled under ITAR or EAR belong on an Enterprise on-premises install, where they never leave your network.

Enterprise on-premises

Enterprise runs on your own servers, on your intranet or air-gapped, with offline licensing. Your designs and user data stay inside your network, under your controls, in your jurisdiction. The deployment includes single sign-on (OIDC and SAML), SCIM provisioning, roles, session and sign-in policy, an audit log you can forward to your SIEM, and no calls to our servers. It is built to fit NIST SP 800-171 and CMMC environments and ITAR / EAR handling. Installation, security and operations are in the Enterprise documentation.

On-premises, you operate the environment, so you are responsible for its physical and network security, access control, backups and for your own certification or accreditation. We help with the configuration and the evidence that comes from the product; we do not certify your installation.

Contact

Questions and deletion requests: support@thinfilmforge.com. A copy of our terms for your procurement team: dave@thinfilmforge.com.