Terms and Conditions

§ 1 Scope and provider

These terms and conditions apply to every contract for the use of the services simpler.website and de.simpler.website between

Marvin Thiel
Weinbergstraße 2
04179 Leipzig
Germany
Email: mail@marvinthiel.com

(“we” below) and you as the customer. The version that applies is the one published at /agb/ when the contract was concluded; the date at the foot of this page identifies the version in force.

Differing, conflicting or supplementary terms do not become part of the contract unless we expressly agree to them.

Where you are a consumer within the meaning of § 13 BGB, this is a consumer contract for digital products under §§ 327 ff. BGB. Your statutory rights, in particular your rights where a digital product is defective, are not restricted by these terms.

§ 2 What the service is

We provide you with a website on a subdomain of simpler.website. You edit the pages in your browser; what is published is static HTML with no JavaScript. The service covers text pages with headings, paragraphs, lists, quotes, tables, dividers and images, a menu, a footer, and image uploads of up to 5 MB per image and 200 MB of storage per website.

The Premium plan adds the use of your own domain and the removal of the “Hosted on simpler.website” note from the footer of your published pages. On the Basic plan every published page carries that note.

The service does not include: a blog, a shop, a contact or form system, visitor statistics, mailboxes, your own CSS, your own JavaScript, or uploading files other than images. If you use your own domain you contract with your registrar yourself; we do not sell domains.

§ 3 Registration and account

You need an account to use the service. Your email address is your login name; there is no separate username. One website per account is provided for.

You must confirm your email address using the link we send after registration. Without a confirmed address you can create and edit pages, but you cannot publish and cannot take out a subscription. That is not a formality: an address we cannot reach is an address we cannot warn when a payment fails, before your website goes offline.

Keep your credentials secret and tell us without delay if you suspect that someone else is using your account.

§ 4 How the contract is concluded

Registering and creating and editing pages are free of charge. Publishing is what costs money.

The presentation of the plans in your account is not an offer but an invitation for you to make one. You make your offer by choosing a plan and a billing period in your account at simpler.website/billing/ and pressing the button labelled „Zahlungspflichtig abonnieren“ (German for “order with an obligation to pay”). Immediately above it you are shown the essential characteristics of the service, the total price, the term and how to cancel. The contract is concluded when the first payment through our payment provider succeeds and we activate the subscription in response. Nothing is charged before that.

We do not store the contract text separately. You can retrieve, save and print these terms and the withdrawal notice at any time at /agb/ and /widerruf/. The contract language is German or English.

Above that button you may also declare that we should begin performing before your withdrawal period has expired. That declaration is optional and is not a condition of the contract: you can order just as well without it, and we publish your website at once either way. What each choice means if you do withdraw is set out in the withdrawal notice.

After activation we send you a confirmation of the contract by email. It carries your order, the total price, the term, your decision about performance beginning early in its own words, and the addresses of these terms and of the withdrawal notice.

§ 5 Prices and payment

All prices are final prices in euro. No VAT is charged (§ 19 UStG, small-business rule).

Billing is in advance for the period you chose, through the payment provider Mollie B.V., Keizersgracht 126, 1015 CW Amsterdam, the Netherlands. On yearly billing the price of 11 months is charged. With the first payment you give Mollie a mandate under which the following amounts are collected at the start of each period until the contract ends.

You enter your payment details only at Mollie; they never reach our servers. The privacy policy sets out the detail.

§ 6 Extra pages and changing plan

Beyond the pages included in your plan, each further page costs €1 per month or €11 per year. The page is available immediately; the changed amount applies from the next billing date. If you delete a page the amount likewise falls from the next billing date.

Neither case gives rise to a pro-rata charge or a pro-rata refund for the current billing period.

The Basic plan allows at most 3 pages. The Premium plan does not limit the number of pages.

Changing plan or billing interval during a running subscription is not technically possible. To change, you cancel the existing subscription and take out a new one once the period you have already paid for has ended. Within that period you can only resume the same plan on the same billing interval, free of charge; see § 7.

§ 7 Term and cancellation

The contract runs for an indefinite period. Either side may cancel it at any time, without giving reasons, with effect from the end of the current billing period. There is no minimum term.

You cancel using the cancellation button labelled “Verträge hier kündigen”, which sits in the footer of every page of simpler.website and leads, with no login, to the confirmation page at /kuendigen/ (section 312k of the German Civil Code). Alternatively you can cancel inside your account at simpler.website/billing/, or informally by email to mail@marvinthiel.com. No reason and no particular form is required.

We confirm the content of your declaration, the date and time it reached us, and the date on which the contract is to end, to you at once by email in text form.

Your website stays reachable and your account stays usable until the end of the period you have already paid for. The fee for the current period is not refunded.

Within that period you can resume the subscription at any time without paying again, but only on the same plan and the same billing interval you paid for. A different plan is a new, chargeable contract and is only possible once the paid period has ended.

The right of either side to terminate for good cause (§ 314 BGB) remains unaffected.

§ 8 Failed payment

If a payment fails, your website stays reachable at first. We tell you by email and name the date by which the payment must be settled; shortly before that date we remind you a second time.

14 days after the failed payment, publication is paused. A short notice then appears at your address saying that the site is paused. While a site is paused the Premium features (your own domain and a footer without the note) are not available.

Your content is kept in full. It stays visible in your account, editable, and exportable at any time (§ 15). We do not delete your pages or your images because a payment failed. When you pay again, exactly the website that was there before comes back.

Changing your payment method while a payment is outstanding is not provided for in the account. If your bank or card details have changed, cancel the subscription and take it out again; that is what sets up a new mandate.

The statutory rules on default (§§ 286, 288 BGB) remain unaffected.

§ 9 Your obligations and permitted content

You are responsible for the content of your website. You confirm that you hold the necessary rights in everything you publish and that the content complies with applicable law.

The following are not permitted:

• infringing the rights of others, in particular copyright, trade mark, personality or data protection rights;
• publishing criminal content, in particular content that endangers children and young people or depicts sexualised violence against them;
• sending or advertising unsolicited messages, and distributing malware, phishing pages or deceptive offers;
• attempting to interfere with the operation of the service, its security measures or other customers' websites, and any use that circumvents the agreed limits on pages and storage.

We do not monitor your content and are under no obligation to do so (Art. 8 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, the DSA). Running a website of your own brings statutory duties of your own, in particular your own imprint under § 5 DDG and your own privacy policy.

§ 10 Rights in your content

All rights in your texts, images and other content remain yours. We acquire no ownership and no exclusive rights in them.

You grant us only the non-exclusive, territorially unlimited right to store your content, reproduce it technically, adapt it as far as delivery requires (such as converting and resizing images), and make it publicly available. That right serves only the performance of this contract and ends with the contract.

We do not use your content for advertising, do not pass it to third parties, and do not use it to train artificial intelligence systems.

§ 11 Availability

We operate the service with the care of a prudent business and aim to keep it continuously reachable. We do not promise you any particular availability figure, and we run no status page: a number nobody measures would be a promise we could not keep.

Maintenance, faults, and outages at the data centre and payment providers we use can cause temporary interruptions. We schedule planned maintenance at quiet times where we can.

Your statutory rights where the digital product is defective (§§ 327 ff. BGB) remain unaffected. This paragraph neither excludes nor limits them.

§ 12 Liability

We are liable without limitation for intent and gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, for fraudulent concealment of a defect, to the extent of any guarantee we have given, and under the Produkthaftungsgesetz (German Product Liability Act).

For ordinary negligence we are liable only for breach of a material contractual obligation (an obligation whose fulfilment makes the proper performance of the contract possible in the first place and on whose observance you may regularly rely), and limited in amount to the damage that was foreseeable and typical for this kind of contract at the time the contract was concluded. Any further liability is excluded.

These limitations also apply to the personal liability of the people we engage to perform the contract.

We are liable for loss of data on the terms above; the cost of restoring it is recoverable only to the extent it would also have arisen had you backed your data up properly and regularly. You can back up your content yourself at any time (§ 15).

§ 13 Unlawful content and notices

If you consider content hosted with us to be unlawful, you can report it to us at any time by email to mail@marvinthiel.com (Art. 16 DSA). Please state the address of the content as precisely as you can, the reason for your report, and how we can reach you. The same address is our single point of contact under Art. 11 and 12 DSA; it is also given, with the languages available, in the imprint.

We confirm receipt, examine the report, and decide promptly and on the merits. Where we obtain knowledge of unlawful content we block or remove it without delay. We inform the affected customer of the measure and its reasons; they can object to us against it.

§ 14 Blocking and termination by us

Where § 9 is breached we can block the content concerned or publication as a whole. Before blocking we ask you to stop the breach and give you a reasonable period to do so, unless the content is manifestly unlawful, significant harm is imminent, or an authority requires immediate action. We lift a block as soon as its reason has fallen away.

Where breaches are serious or repeated we can terminate the contract for good cause without notice (§ 314 BGB). In that case we do not refund the fee for the unused remainder of the current billing period to the extent you are responsible for the ground of termination; otherwise we refund it pro rata.

Before deleting your content we allow you at least 30 days to export your data under § 15, unless a law or an official order requires us to delete it immediately.

§ 15 Data export

You can download your content at any time in your account at simpler.website/panel/export/ as a ZIP archive. It contains a site.json file with your website's settings, all pages and their content, and every image you have uploaded.

The export is subject to no condition. It is available to you whatever your payment state, including while a site is paused under § 8, and after a cancellation, for as long as your account exists. The moment you most need your content is the moment you have stopped paying for it; that is exactly when this route is meant to be open. For operational reasons one export per minute is possible.

The export contains the content of your website, not your account and payment data. Send a request for access under Art. 15 GDPR informally to the address given in the privacy policy.

§ 16 Processing on your behalf

Where the content of your website contains personal data of other people (in your own imprint, in references, or in photographs), you are the controller within the meaning of Art. 4 No. 7 GDPR and we process that data on your behalf. This paragraph is the contract on processing required by Art. 28 (3) GDPR; no separate document is required for it and none is concluded.

Subject matter, duration, nature and purpose: hosting and delivering your website under § 2, for the term of this contract. Type of data: all personal data you place in your pages, images and menus. Categories of data subjects: the people you decide to publish data about.

• We process that data only on your documented instructions. You give those instructions by using the functions of the service; any further instruction should be sent in text form to mail@marvinthiel.com. No transfer to a third country takes place. If we consider an instruction unlawful we will tell you.
• People bound to confidentiality: the service is operated by a single person, who is bound to confidentiality. Any further person is placed under the same obligation before being given access.
• We take the technical and organisational measures required by Art. 32 GDPR. In place are: access only over encrypted connections (HTTPS, enforced with HSTS), storage of passwords only as a cryptographic hash, separation of files per website, delivery without third-party content, scripts or cookies, and the removal of all metadata from uploaded images.
• You give us general authorisation to engage further processors. Currently engaged are netcup GmbH, Emmy-Noether-Straße 10, 76131 Karlsruhe (servers in Germany) and Heinlein Hosting GmbH, Schwedter Straße 8/9A, 10119 Berlin (email delivery, mailbox.org). We will tell you of a change by email at least four weeks in advance; you can object within that period and, if you do, terminate the contract with effect from the date the change takes effect. Payment processing by Mollie is not processing on your behalf; Mollie is an independent controller in that respect.
• We support you as far as we can in answering requests from data subjects under Art. 12 to 23 GDPR, and pass on to you without delay any request that reaches us and concerns your website.
• We support you in complying with Art. 32 to 36 GDPR and report a personal data breach to you without delay after becoming aware of it.
• After the contract ends we delete the data once the website and the account are deleted. Return takes place through the export under § 15, which you can perform at any time until then. Statutory retention duties remain unaffected; they concern invoicing data (§ 147 AO), not the content of your website.
• We make available to you the information needed to demonstrate compliance with these obligations and allow inspections on reasonable prior notice.

§ 17 Changes to these terms

We can change these terms where that is necessary to adapt them to changed law or case law, to changed technical conditions, or to a changed scope of service. We do not use this route to change the balance between what is provided and what is paid.

We will tell you of a change by email in text form at least six weeks before it takes effect. The notice will name the provisions being changed, the date they take effect, your right to object, and what happens if you object.

If you object before the change takes effect, the contract ends at the end of the current billing period; until then the previous terms continue to apply unchanged.

Continuing to use the service is not treated by us as agreement to changed terms. The procedure in the paragraphs above is the only one that applies.

A price change affects only billing periods that begin after it takes effect. We claim nothing further for a period already paid for.

§ 18 Right of withdrawal

If you are a consumer you have a statutory right of withdrawal. The detail, the periods and the model form are in the withdrawal notice at /widerruf/. That notice takes precedence over this paragraph.

§ 19 Governing law and dispute resolution

The law of the Federal Republic of Germany applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods and the choice-of-law rules of private international law. If you are a consumer habitually resident in another state, the mandatory consumer protection provisions of that state remain unaffected.

We are neither willing nor obliged to participate in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board (§ 36 VSBG).

Should a provision of these terms be invalid, the contract remains effective in all other respects. The statutory provisions take the place of the invalid one.

§ 20 Language versions

These terms exist in German and in English. The German version is the operative one and shall prevail in case of any discrepancy; the English version is a translation provided for convenience.