Terms of use and general terms of business

§ 1 Scope and contracting parties

These terms apply to the use of this website, to receiving the newsletter, to the free short analysis, to the purchase of the AI Readiness Check and, unless agreed otherwise, to project and advisory work.

The contracting parties are you and Cristian-Stefan Lascu, Kairox Consulting, Glatzer Str. 16, 45768 Marl, Germany. This is a sole proprietorship. The full details are in the Impressum.

Terms of the contracting party that differ from these do not become part of the contract unless we agree to them expressly and in text form.

§ 2 Subject matter

Newsletter. A free email newsletter. No costs arise and there is no entitlement to any particular publication schedule.

Free short analysis. A machine-generated assessment of a website you name. It is free of charge, non-binding, and does not replace advice.

AI Readiness Check. A paid report on a website you name, supplied digitally. It is not delivered on a tangible medium but as a file and as an address at which it can be retrieved.

Project and advisory work. Scope, period and remuneration follow from the respective offer. These terms apply in addition.

§ 3 Conclusion of contract

The presentation of services on this website is not a binding offer but an invitation to order.

For the AI Readiness Check you select the service on this website and are forwarded to the payment page of our payment service provider. There you enter the required details and complete the order. The contract comes into existence when the payment is confirmed.

For the newsletter the contract comes into existence on sign-up. For project and advisory work it comes into existence on acceptance of the respective offer.

We confirm the conclusion of the contract by email without delay. That confirmation contains the contract terms, including these terms and the withdrawal instruction.

The order itself is completed on the payment service provider’s page, and the button that concludes it is that provider’s. It is configured to state the payment obligation, as § 312j Abs. 3 BGB requires for orders placed by consumers. The button on this website leads to that page and does not itself conclude the order.

§ 4 Contract language and contract text

English reference version

thesovereigntechnologist.com/terms

We conclude the contract in the language of the version you order in: German, English or Romanian.

English is our reference version. The German and Romanian texts are translations kept identical in meaning; should they ever differ, the English text prevails, and you can read it at any time on the English terms page named above.

We store the data of your order for ten years under § 147 Abs. 3 AO. The terms in force at the time of your order are linked in your order confirmation email; the current version is always available on this page, and you can save or print it. Beyond that, we do not store the contract text in a form you can access later.

§ 5 Prices and payment

The AI Readiness Check costs €29. Towards consumers all prices are total prices including statutory VAT and all price components, as § 3 Abs. 1 of the Preisangabenverordnung requires. No further costs arise.

Remuneration for project and advisory work follows from the respective offer. Offers made to traders are, unless stated otherwise, exclusive of statutory VAT.

Payment for the AI Readiness Check is handled by Stripe under an arrangement in which Stripe acts as merchant of record: Stripe concludes the payment transaction in its own name, shows and remits the value-added tax due in your country, and issues the invoice and the receipt, which are made available to you by email. The analysis itself is produced and delivered by us. Your statutory rights as a consumer are unaffected by that division and may be exercised against us.

§ 6 Right of withdrawal

Consumers have a statutory right of withdrawal. The details are in the withdrawal instruction, which is published as a document of its own. The model withdrawal form is there too. The instruction appears in the language you are reading this website in; the English version is the reference text.

For digital content not supplied on a tangible medium, the right of withdrawal ends early only under the narrow conditions of § 356 Abs. 6 BGB. Those conditions are not currently obtained. The right of withdrawal therefore does not end early, even where the report has already been produced and sent.

A consumer within the meaning of § 13 BGB is any natural person who enters into a legal transaction for purposes that are predominantly outside their trade, business or profession.

§ 7 Scope of performance and delivery

The report is produced by machine, on the basis of the publicly retrievable content of the website you name. It is generally provided on the day of purchase, usually within a few hours. Delivery is by email, with a file and an address at which it can be retrieved.

The report is an assessment, not an assurance of any particular outcome. It does not replace legal, tax or financial advice.

If the website named is technically unreachable, or built in such a way that no meaningful analysis is possible, we get in touch and refund the purchase price where no remedy is possible.

For project and advisory work, the scope described in the offer applies. Deliverables and acceptance criteria are recorded there in writing.

§ 8 Emails and calls, and how to end them

Where this website asks for your details there are two boxes. The first is optional: tick it only if you want the weekly newsletter and our emails about our products and services, and calls from us about them on the telephone number you gave us. On the newsletter sign-up form that box is the reason for the form; everywhere else, leaving it empty changes nothing about what you asked for. The second box is required: it is your agreement to these terms and to the privacy notice.

None of this costs anything. There are no hidden costs.

What you give: your email address, your telephone number where a form asks for it, and the confirmation that you are at least 16 years old. It is stored in our own database, with the date, the page you gave it on, and the exact wording of each box you ticked.

• The mail you asked for, sent through Loops: a report, a file, a confirmation of a booking or a receipt, and the short follow-up sequence after it. It comes whether or not you ticked the optional box. Each of those mails carries its own unsubscribe link, and one click on it ends all of them.
• Only if you ticked the optional box: the weekly newsletter, sent through Beehiiv, our emails about our products and services, sent through Loops, and calls from us about our products and services. Beehiiv’s unsubscribe link at the end of every issue ends the newsletter and the calls. The unsubscribe link in our emails about our products and services ends all of these emails and the calls. On a call, telling us is enough.

Since 25 September 2026 the optional box also covers calls. A box ticked before that date covers email only, and we call no one on the strength of it.

Ending the newsletter, our emails about our products and services or the calls never stops the mail you asked for.

Or simply write. An informal email to hello@thesovereigntechnologist.com is enough: say what you want to end and we do it by hand. Requests to end emails or calls are handled within 48 hours in any case.

§ 9 Service providers and processors

We use a manageable number of service providers to run this offering. By using the website and by giving your agreement you take note of their involvement. This list is the reason the website asks for one agreement rather than several: everything that touches your details is in one place that can be read, instead of spread across a row of boxes.

• Hetzner Online GmbH, Germany: servers and database.
• Cloudflare: delivery, encryption of the connection, and abuse protection in front of the forms.
• Stripe: processing the payment and issuing the invoice. Card details never reach this website.
• Beehiiv: sending the newsletter.
• Loops: sending the mail this website itself produces, that is the report, the file, the confirmation, the receipt and the short follow-up sequences.
• Zeeg: booking calls.
• OpenRouter and the model providers behind it: machine analysis of the website being checked.
• DataForSEO: retrieval of public search results for the visibility analysis.
• Google Analytics 4, PostHog and Microsoft Clarity: reach and product analytics, only after your consent.

Purpose, data categories, legal basis, retention and transfer basis are stated for each of these services individually in the privacy notice. Analytics and advertising services are loaded only after your consent.

Beyond that we do not pass your details on and we do not sell them.

§ 10 Your obligations to cooperate

You give accurate details, in particular a valid email address and the address of the website to be checked.

You make sure that you are entitled to commission the check of the website you name.

For project and advisory work you provide the agreed access, contacts and information in good time. Delays arising from a failure to do so are not at our expense.

§ 11 Rights of use and copyright

The content of this website and the reports we produce are protected by copyright.

For the report produced for you, you receive a simple right of use within your own business, unrestricted in time and territory. Passing it to third parties for the purpose of resale, or publishing it as your own work, is not permitted.

For project deliverables: you receive the rights to the results, accounts and data produced for you, as recorded in the respective offer.

You may read, link to and quote short extracts of this website’s content with attribution. Reproducing whole articles or issues of the newsletter requires our consent.

§ 12 Permitted use

You may use this offering only within the applicable law. Prohibited in particular are: sending unwanted or harmful content, attempts to disrupt the website or to gain unauthorised access to it, automated retrieval of content on a scale that impairs operation, and impersonating somebody else.

In case of serious or repeated breaches we may block access.

Use of this offering requires that you are at least 16 years old.

§ 13 Warranty and liability

The statutory provisions apply. For digital products supplied to consumers, §§ 327 ff. BGB apply in addition.

For damage arising from injury to life, body or health, and in cases of intent and gross negligence, we are liable without limitation under the statutory provisions. Otherwise liability follows the statutory provisions.

The content of this website and the free short analysis are for information. They are not legal, tax or financial advice, and they are not an assurance of any particular commercial outcome.

The providers of linked third-party websites are responsible for their content.

§ 14 Term and termination

The newsletter can be ended at any time, without notice and without giving reasons, through the unsubscribe link or informally by email.

The purchase of the report is a one-off transaction with no term and no subscription.

For project and advisory work, the terms and notice periods agreed in the respective offer apply. The right to terminate for good cause remains unaffected on both sides.

Provisions which by their nature are to continue in effect, in particular on rights of use, liability and data protection, survive termination.

§ 15 Data protection

How personal data is processed, which recipients are involved, how long it is stored and what rights you have is set out in the privacy notice. It is part of the information, not part of the contract, and is reachable from every page of this website.

§ 16 Changes to these terms

We may change these terms if the offering, the service providers or the legal position change. For contracts already concluded, the version agreed at the time of conclusion applies.

For material changes to continuing obligations we give at least 30 days’ notice by email. If you do not object before the change takes effect, the new version is deemed accepted. We point this consequence out separately in the notification.

§ 17 Final provisions

The law of the Federal Republic of Germany applies. For consumers this choice of law applies only in so far as it does not remove the protection granted by mandatory provisions of the law of the state in which the consumer has their habitual residence.

Should any provision be ineffective, the effectiveness of the remaining provisions is unaffected.

We are neither obliged nor willing to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.

These terms contain no agreement on jurisdiction. The statutory rules on venue therefore apply, which for a consumer generally means the court where they live.