Terms of use

1. Safety — read this one

BikeOtter is a riding aid. It is not a substitute for your attention, your judgement, or the rules of the road. You remain fully responsible for how you ride, at every moment, whatever the app or your bike computer is showing.

• Look at the road, not the screen. Turn cues, weather alerts, rules, reminders and messages all arrive while you are moving. Do not read, tap or configure anything while riding in a situation that needs your eyes. Stop somewhere safe first.
• Obey traffic law and signage over the app. A suggested route may be closed, one-way, private, unpaved, unsafe, unsuitable for your bike, or illegal for cycling. Map data is contributed by volunteers and can be wrong or out of date. If the route and reality disagree, reality wins.
• Weather forecasts and alerts are predictions. Rain onset, wind, temperature drops and gusts are projected from third-party forecast data along an estimated schedule. They can be late, early or wrong. Do not treat their absence as an assurance that conditions are safe.
• The health-related features are not medical advice. Heart-rate zone warnings, hydration and fuelling reminders, and the sunscreen model are convenience heuristics, not diagnostics or medical guidance. The sunscreen reminder in particular is a rough estimate and is no guarantee against sunburn or skin damage. If you have any medical condition, or before starting demanding exercise, talk to a doctor rather than an app.
• Live tracking is not an emergency service. It can fail: your phone may lose signal, run out of battery, lose the Bluetooth link, or the service may be unavailable. Nobody is monitoring your link on our end. Never rely on it as a safety net for a ride you would not otherwise take alone, and never as a substitute for calling emergency services.
• Voice control is hands-free, not attention-free. Speaking to the app still takes concentration. Use it only when it is safe to do so.
• Do not modify your bike computer's mounting or handling to see the phone. Both devices should be secured so they cannot interfere with control of the bicycle.

2. Independence and trademarks

BikeOtter is an independent, third-party application. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, certified by or supported by Wahoo Fitness LLC, Garmin Ltd. or any of their subsidiaries or affiliates. No commercial or technical relationship exists between us and either company.

What follows from that, practically:

• Neither Wahoo nor Garmin provides support for BikeOtter. Do not contact them about it — contact support@bikeotter.app.
• Using BikeOtter with your bike computer is at your own risk, and may not be envisaged by the manufacturer's own terms or warranty. Whether it affects your warranty is a matter between you and the manufacturer; we make no representation about it.
• Compatibility can end without notice. A firmware update from either manufacturer may change or remove behaviour BikeOtter relies on, and we cannot promise to restore it.
• Neither company is responsible for BikeOtter, and BikeOtter is not responsible for their products, firmware, apps or services.

Wahoo, ELEMNT, BOLT, ROAM and ACE are trademarks of Wahoo Fitness LLC. Garmin, Edge and Garmin Connect are trademarks of Garmin Ltd. or its subsidiaries. Strava is a trademark of Strava, Inc. Komoot is a trademark of komoot GmbH. Apple and App Store are trademarks of Apple Inc.; Google Play is a trademark of Google LLC. All trademarks, product names and company names are the property of their respective owners, and are used on this site and in the app purely descriptively — to identify compatibility — not to claim any association or approval.

3. What these terms cover

These terms govern your use of the BikeOtter mobile app, the website at bikeotter.app, and the shared live-tracking pages at bikeotter.app/r/… and /g/… — together, “the service”. By installing or using the app, or by opening a shared ride link, you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

How we handle personal data is described separately in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

You must be at least 16 years old to use the service.

4. Your licence to use the app

You get a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use BikeOtter on devices you own or control, for your own non-commercial riding. That is a licence to use it, not a transfer of ownership: all rights in the app remain ours.

The app currently costs nothing. If that changes, it will not change retroactively for a ride already underway, and you will be told before anything is charged.

5. How you may use it

Please do not:

• use the service unlawfully, or in a way that endangers you or anyone else;
• reverse engineer, decompile or modify the app except where law expressly permits it regardless of this clause;
• attack, overload, probe or circumvent the backend, its rate limits or its access controls, or try to reach sessions, links or accounts that are not yours;
• scrape or bulk-collect live-tracking pages, or automate access to them;
• use the notification e-mails to send anything unsolicited, or add e-mail addresses of people who would not expect to hear from you;
• send other riders abusive, harassing or unlawful messages through live sharing;
• resell or commercially redistribute the service or its output.

We may suspend or terminate access that breaks these rules or endangers the service for others.

6. Live sharing and other people

Live sharing publishes your position to anyone holding the link. A share link is a credential: whoever has it can watch, without an account. Share it only with people you want watching, be aware that it can be forwarded on beyond them, and end the share when you are done.

When you add contacts for ride notifications, you are asking us to e-mail people who have no relationship with us. You confirm that you are entitled to give us those addresses and that the recipients would expect to hear from you. Every notification carries a working unsubscribe link.

In a group ride, other riders in the group can see the positions you are sharing. Join groups you trust.

Content you send through the service — messages, route names, contact names — is yours; you keep it, and you are responsible for it being lawful. You grant us only the permission technically needed to store and deliver it for as long as the feature requires, as set out in the privacy policy.

7. Data, backups and third-party accounts

Your routes and ride files live on your phone. We do not hold a backup of them. If you lose, wipe or replace your phone, or delete the app, they are gone unless you exported them yourself. Export anything you would be sad to lose.

Live-tracking data is deleted automatically on the schedule in the privacy policy — position points 24 hours after a ride ends, the session record 7 days after that. It is not an archive and is not intended as one.

Linking a Strava account brings Strava's own terms and privacy policy into play between you and Strava. We are not responsible for their service, and a change on their side can break the integration at any time.

8. Availability and ongoing development

BikeOtter is software under active development. Features may be added, changed or removed; behaviour verified on one device may not hold on another; and some features are marked in the app as not yet verified on real hardware. Take those marks seriously.

The service is offered as-available. There is no uptime commitment, no guarantee that live tracking or the backend will be reachable when you want them, and maintenance may interrupt them without notice.

9. Warranty

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind — express or implied — including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure against every attack, compatible with any particular bike computer or firmware version, or that its routes, forecasts, alerts, distances, elevations or ETAs will be accurate.

Mandatory statutory rights of consumers under German and EU law are not affected by this section.

10. Liability

We are fully liable for damages arising from injury to life, body or health, for damages caused intentionally or through gross negligence, under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz), and where we have given a guarantee. Nothing in these terms limits any of that.

For slight negligence, we are liable only where an obligation essential to the purpose of this agreement (a Kardinalpflicht) has been breached, and then only for foreseeable damage typical of this kind of agreement. All further liability for slight negligence is excluded.

Within those limits, and to the extent the law allows: we are not liable for accidents, injuries, traffic offences, wrong turns, missed connections, exposure to weather, sunburn, health consequences, lost or corrupted ride files, or damage to a bike computer, arising from your use of or reliance on the service. Riding is your responsibility.

11. Intellectual property and attribution

The BikeOtter app, this website, their design, text and the BikeOtter name and logo are owned by OpenBikeControl UG (haftungsbeschränkt) and protected by copyright. You may not copy or reuse them beyond what the law permits without permission.

Map data and imagery are © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL). Routing uses BRouter; weather data comes from Open-Meteo; place search uses the Overpass API, Photon and Nominatim. Those services are operated by third parties under their own terms, and we thank them for running them.

12. If you installed from an app store

These terms are between you and us, not between you and Apple or Google. The store is not responsible for the app, its content, its support, or any claim about it, and has no obligation to provide maintenance or support. Where the store's own rules give you rights that conflict with these terms, the store's rules prevail for that point. Apple Inc. and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms with respect to the iOS app and may enforce them against you.

You confirm you are not located in a country subject to an embargo that would prohibit your use of the app, and that you are not on a prohibited-party list.

13. Plus and purchases

BikeOtter is free to use. Some features are part of BikeOtter Plus, sold as a yearly subscription, a monthly subscription, or a one-time lifetime purchase, and only through the App Store and Google Play. The store is the seller: it takes the payment, and its terms govern billing, renewal, cancellation, refunds and any statutory right of withdrawal. Manage or cancel a subscription in your store account; ask the store for a refund.

A subscription renews automatically until you cancel it. Cancelling stops the next renewal; Plus stays on until the end of the period already paid for. Where the yearly plan starts with a free trial, cancelling during the trial means you are not charged.

Lifetime means one payment with no renewal, for as long as we operate BikeOtter and its Plus features (see section 8).

When Plus ends, nothing you made is deleted. Routes, rides and settings stay and keep working; only the Plus features lock again. Most Plus features can be tried a few times free before buying.

14. Ending it

You can stop at any time: delete the app, and write to support@bikeotter.app if you also want your account and its data removed. We may suspend or end your access if you break section 5, if we are required to by law, or if we discontinue the service. Sections 9, 10 and 11 survive the end of this agreement.

15. Governing law and changes

These terms are governed by the law of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer resident in the EU, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your own country of residence, and you may bring proceedings in your own courts.

The European Commission provides an online dispute resolution platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. We are neither obliged nor willing to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.

We may update these terms as the app develops. The version and date at the top will change, and material changes will be pointed out in the app rather than slipped in quietly. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the new version; if you do not, stop using it.

If any provision here turns out to be invalid, the rest stays in force.

16. Contact

OpenBikeControl UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · support@bikeotter.app · full details on the imprint page.