1. The basics
These terms govern your use of Araluma (the “service”), reachable at araluma.com. By using the service you agree to these terms. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the service.
Araluma is a personal project. The service is provided as-is, free of charge, with no warranty of any kind. We aim to keep the tools working and useful, but we can’t promise uptime, error-free behavior, or that any specific result will work for your use case.
2. What you can do
You may use every tool on Araluma for any lawful purpose — personal or commercial — free of charge. We don’t claim any rights over the images you process. Whatever license you have on the source image, you keep on the result.
Two tools (Circle Crop and the Compress preview/edit step) run entirely in your browser and work offline after the initial page load. Two tools (the Compress final download and Remove Background) make a single network request to our infrastructure per operation — see §4 for the exact data flow — and therefore require a connection to complete a download.
3. What you can’t do
Some uses are off the table:
- Don’t use the service to process images you don’t have the right to process. If you don’t own the image, make sure you have permission.
- Don’t use the service to create content that’s illegal where you live or where the affected people live — for example, content that’s defamatory, infringes copyright, sexualizes minors, or is otherwise unlawful.
- Don’t try to break the service. No automated scraping at a rate that affects other users, no attempting to bypass security or rate limits, no probing for vulnerabilities outside a responsible-disclosure context.
- Don’t exceed the rate limits on tools that route through our infrastructure. Remove Background is capped at 5 MB per upload and 30 requests per IP per day; the Compress download service rate-limits per-tenant. Both limits exist to keep the free tools sustainable for everyone.
- Don’t redistribute Araluma as your own product. The site, its design, its branding, and its source code are not in the public domain.
4. Your content and the data flow
What happens to a file you process depends on which tool you use. We describe the full detail in the privacy policy; the short legal version is:
- Circle Crop and the Compress preview/edit step run entirely in your browser via
<canvas>. We never receive these images. There is nothing for us to license, sell, or publish, because we never had it in the first place. - The Compress final download sends your image once to
api.araluma.com(a Fastify service on a VPS in Germany operated by Hostinger), re-encodes it withsharp+libvips, and streams the result back. We do not retain your image beyond a short tenant-isolated cache TTL, do not log it, do not use it to train any model, and do not make it available to anyone outside the encoding service. - Remove Background uploads your image once to a Cloudflare Worker, stages it in a private R2 bucket that is automatically purged within one hour, processes it via Cloudflare’s
cf.image.segment(which runs the BiRefNet model), and streams the cutout back. If our Worker is unreachable, the tool falls back to an in-browser WebAssembly model with no upload at all.
In all four cases, we do not claim any ownership of your images, do not use them to train models, and do not share them with any third party beyond the named sub-processor that performs the encode or segmentation. The output of any tool is yours. Araluma does not watermark exports and does not embed identifying metadata in the result.
5. Service availability and changes
We may add tools, remove tools, change how an existing tool works, change the URL
structure of the site, or take the service offline temporarily for maintenance.
The infrastructure paths described in §4 (api.araluma.com, the Remove
Background Worker, the R2 bucket) may also be replaced with equivalent providers in
the future — when we do, we update §4 and the privacy policy in the same commit.
When we make a meaningful change to a tool’s capability or to these terms, we’ll update the relevant page. Significant policy changes will be announced on the home page.
We don’t guarantee that any specific tool, format, feature, or hosted endpoint will remain available forever, although we try not to remove things people rely on.
6. Premium tier (when launched)
We plan to introduce an optional paid “Araluma Pro” tier in the future, processed through Lemon Squeezy as merchant of record. Until that tier launches, the entire service is free with no exceptions.
When Pro launches, the additional terms covering billing, refunds, and license validity will be added here in the same commit that activates the tier. Free tools that exist today will remain free indefinitely — Pro adds capability, it doesn’t gate what’s already shipped.
7. Advertising
Araluma displays a single AdSense unit served by Google on tool pages. The home page, satellite pages, and legal pages remain ad-free, and Pro subscribers (when the tier launches) will not see ads at all.
We have no control over the specific ads served by AdSense, although Google operates AdSense under its own content policies. If you see an ad you believe violates Google’s policies, you can report it through Google’s tools.
8. Ownership and third-party names
The site’s design, copy, branding, and custom illustrations belong to the project. The site’s source code is private.
Third-party names, logos, and trademarks mentioned on the site (e.g. “Discord”, “LinkedIn”, “Instagram”, “iPhone”, “HEIC”, “Cloudflare”, “Hostinger”, “sharp”, “BiRefNet”) belong to their respective owners and are referenced only descriptively, to explain what the tools do and which providers power them.
9. Disclaimer of warranties
The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied. We don’t guarantee that the tools will produce a specific result, that they will work in every browser, that they will be available at any specific time, or that they will be error-free. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we disclaim all implied warranties — fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, non-infringement, accuracy.
10. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Araluma and its operator are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising out of your use of the service — including loss of data, lost profits, or business interruption — even if we’ve been advised of the possibility of such damages.
Our total cumulative liability arising from these terms is limited to USD 100, or the amount you’ve paid us in the past twelve months for the Pro tier (whichever is greater). For free use, our cumulative liability is limited to USD 100.
11. Indemnity
You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, damages, or costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your use of the service in violation of these terms — for example, processing content you don’t have the right to process, or using the service for an illegal purpose.
12. Privacy
How we handle data is described in detail in our privacy policy. The summary: two tools run entirely on your device with zero upload; two tools (Compress download and Remove Background) route a single request through our infrastructure, do not retain your image, and do not use it for training.
13. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of Brazil, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. If a dispute arises that we can’t resolve informally, the courts of São Paulo, Brazil will have exclusive jurisdiction, except where local consumer-protection law gives you the right to bring a claim in your own jurisdiction.
14. Contact
Questions about these terms? Email support@araluma.com.