Last updated: May 24, 2026
These Terms govern your use of the Surfacer service (the "Service") provided by Justus Gotthardt & Lukas Gogol GbR (the "Provider", "we", "us"). By creating an account or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms.
Surfacer is offered business-to-business (B2B) only. The Service is not intended for consumers within the meaning of § 13 BGB. By registering, you confirm that you are acting in your trade, business, or professional capacity.
Justus Gotthardt & Lukas Gogol GbR, Birkenauer Str. 51, 68309 Mannheim, Germany. Represented by Justus Gotthardt and Lukas Gogol. "Surfacer" is a product and brand name operated by Justus Gotthardt & Lukas Gogol GbR. Contact: kontakt@jl-studios.de.
You must register with accurate information and keep it up to date. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your credentials and for all activity on your account. Notify us immediately of any unauthorised access. We may suspend or terminate accounts that provide false information, abuse the Service, or otherwise breach these Terms.
Surfacer provides company data extraction and B2B intelligence features, including URL discovery, pipeline analysis, company monitoring, lead scoring, contact enrichment, custom-signal subscriptions, CRM integration, dashboard visualisation, optional mailbox-based outreach, and paid subscription / credit features.
Significant portions of the Service depend on large language models (currently OpenAI). By using these features you accept that:
Beta status of AI features. The following AI-driven features are considered beta and offered on an experimental basis, even when they appear in production UI: company briefings, drift labels, hiring-intent classifications, lookalike scoring, the custom-signal LLM verifier, outreach drafting, and any other feature explicitly labelled "beta", "experimental", or "preview" in the interface. Beta features may change, regress in quality, or be discontinued at any time without notice. To the maximum extent permitted by law, liability for any defect, inaccuracy, or interruption of beta features is limited to cases of intent (Vorsatz), gross negligence (grobe Fahrlässigkeit), and the other mandatory carve-outs in §8.
When you save a company as a lead, Surfacer may automatically look up decision-maker contact information (name, email, phone, job title) using Hunter.io. This data is stored per-user and never shared with other users. See our Privacy Policy for details on data isolation and your rights.
You may optionally connect your CRM (e.g. HubSpot) via OAuth. When connected, saved leads are automatically pushed to your CRM as company and/or contact records. Surfacer reads company domains from your CRM to avoid showing duplicates and to compute a closed-won lookalike centroid for ranking. You can disconnect at any time from your settings. Surfacer does not modify or delete existing records in your CRM.
Surfacer offers an optional outreach feature that drafts B2B emails on your behalf and sends them through your own connected mailbox (e.g. Gmail) via OAuth. Each email is sent only after you click "Send" in the drafting interface — Surfacer does not send autonomously. The From: header on every outbound message is your authenticated mailbox address.
Sender responsibility. You are the legal sender for every email composed and sent through this feature. Liability for the content, the recipient list, the addressing of the right business contact, and any compliance posture (UWG § 7, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR / berechtigtes Interesse, applicable national e-privacy / anti-spam law) sits with you, not with the Provider. We provide the drafting and sending tooling; the legal responsibilities of an email sender are not delegated to us.
Impressum attestation. If you provide an Impressum URL in your outreach settings, you represent and warrant that the linked page is your own legitimate business identification page in compliance with § 5 TMG (or the equivalent in your jurisdiction), and that you are authorised to identify yourself with that page. We do not verify ownership of the Impressum URL — the truthful-attestation burden sits with you. We may decline to send if we have actual knowledge that the attestation is false.
Acceptable outreach. The outreach feature is for B2B contact with the appropriate business person at the receiving company, on the basis of a documented legitimate interest. You must not use it to send unsolicited bulk email, to contact private individuals (B2C) without a separate lawful basis, to obscure your sender identity, or to violate any applicable spam, e-privacy, or consumer-protection law.
Opt-out handling. Every email sent through the feature carries an opt-out line ("Reply STOP to opt out"). You are responsible for honouring opt-outs received in your own mailbox and for adding the corresponding domain or contact to the blocklist in your account.
You may compose custom signal rules that fire when extracted company data matches your saved conditions. Match events appear on your dashboard and may be delivered by email digest. Backfill of new rules against your historical corpus is dispatched asynchronously and typically completes within minutes. We do not guarantee a specific signal latency, completeness, or precision; signals are decision support, not contractual SLAs.
To make the verification duty in §3a concrete, you specifically agree that you — not the Provider — are responsible for:
Paid plans (e.g. Pro, Team) are sold by recurring subscription billed through Stripe. Subscription terms — price, billing period, applicable trial, and cancellation rules — are displayed during checkout and form part of the contract. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel.
You can cancel a subscription at any time from the billing portal linked in your account settings. Unless stated otherwise at checkout, cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period; you retain access to paid features until then. We do not refund partial billing periods.
Many features consume credits (a Quick scan, a Hunter enrichment lookup, a user-launched discovery task, a paid monitoring slot above your plan cap, etc.). Each credit-consuming action and the credits it costs are surfaced in the interface before you confirm.
Each account carries two credit balances:
Spending order is monthly-first, then rollover. Every charge is recorded in an append-only ledger that you can view in your billing settings.
Top-up packs are sold as one-off Stripe Checkout purchases (no recurring billing). Available packs and prices are shown on the pricing page. Once a top-up pack has been credited to your account it is non-refundable, subject to mandatory consumer-protection rights (where these would apply — see §11). Top-up credits do not expire while the account is active and remain redeemable across subscription tier changes.
Each plan includes a monthly monitoring-slot allowance (Free: 5, Pro: 100, Team: 500). You may add monitored companies beyond your allowance; each overage slot is billed at 1 credit per slot per billing cycle. Overage billing is processed on the Stripe invoice.paid event. If your credit balance is insufficient to cover all overage slots at the next billing event, we will charge what you can afford and automatically pause the oldest overage slots (plan-included slots are never paused).
Invoices are issued by the Provider via Stripe in EUR. VAT is shown separately where applicable. You are responsible for providing accurate billing details (including any VAT identification number) at checkout and keeping them up to date.
You retain ownership of all data you submit and all results generated for your account. We do not claim any intellectual property rights over your data. Enrichment results, CRM-sync data, custom-signal definitions, and outreach content are yours — we are a processor, not an owner. We may use aggregated, de-identified usage signals (e.g. which atom types are most commonly composed, average pipeline duration per industry) to improve the Service; these signals contain no personal data and cannot be traced to your account.
You agree not to:
We may suspend or terminate accounts that breach this clause, with or without notice depending on severity.
We aim for high availability but do not warrant uninterrupted, error-free, or fault-tolerant operation of the Service. We may schedule maintenance windows and may push updates that change or remove features when reasonable. Material adverse changes to a paid plan's scope are notified at least 30 days in advance, and you may cancel without penalty during that notice period.
8.1 Mandatory carve-outs. Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits any liability that cannot legally be excluded — in particular liability for intent (Vorsatz), gross negligence (grobe Fahrlässigkeit), for injury to life, body, or health, under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz), for fraudulently concealed defects, or where the Provider has issued an express guarantee (Beschaffenheitsgarantie).
8.2 Simple negligence — essential duties. For breach of essential contractual duties whose fulfilment is what makes proper performance of the contract possible in the first place and on whose observance you regularly rely (so-called Kardinalpflichten), the Provider is liable for simple negligence only up to the contract-typical, foreseeable damage.
8.3 Simple negligence — non-essential duties. For breach of duties that are not essential within the meaning of 8.2, liability for simple negligence is, to the maximum extent permitted by law, excluded.
8.4 Aggregate cap. Subject to 8.1, the Provider's aggregate liability for any and all claims arising out of or in connection with the Service is capped at the fees you actually paid the Provider in the twelve (12) months immediately preceding the event giving rise to the claim. Where no fees were paid (e.g. free-tier accounts, trial accounts) the cap is EUR 100.
8.5 Excluded damage types. Subject to 8.1, the Provider is in no event liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages, for lost profits, lost revenue, lost goodwill, lost data, business interruption, or reputational harm, whether arising in contract, tort, statute, or otherwise, and whether or not the Provider was advised of the possibility of such damages.
8.6 No accuracy warranty. The Provider does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or fitness for purpose of enriched contact data, AI-generated briefings, signal matches, extracted company information, or any other Service output. You acknowledge §3a and §3f and accept that verifying outputs before commercial action is your responsibility.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, you shall indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the Provider, its partners, employees, contractors, and successors from and against any and all third-party claims, damages, fines, settlement amounts, and reasonable attorneys' fees arising out of or related to:
The Provider will notify you promptly of any claim covered by this indemnity, give you reasonable control over the defence, and reasonably cooperate at your expense. The Provider may participate with counsel of its own choice. You shall not settle any claim in a way that imposes obligations on the Provider without the Provider's prior written consent.
Claims by you against the Provider arising out of or in connection with the Service become time-barred after one (1) year from the date on which the claim arose and you became aware (or, with gross negligence, should have become aware) of the circumstances giving rise to it. This shortened limitation period does not apply to:
For the excluded categories, the statutory limitation periods (typically three years under § 195 BGB) apply.
You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time from Settings. Upon account deletion, your enrichment data, CRM tokens, mailbox tokens, custom signals, and outreach configuration are deleted within 30 days. Billing- and credit-ledger records are retained for the statutory period (see Privacy Policy §10). Unused subscription days are not refunded; rollover credits are forfeited on account deletion.
We may suspend or terminate accounts for serious violations of these Terms, repeated abuse, or legal requirements. Where reasonable we will notify you and provide a window to remedy; in cases of clear harm (fraud, illegal content, sustained anti-spam violations) we may act immediately.
For business customers acting as data controllers under the GDPR, we make a Data Processing Addendum (DPA) available on request. Contact kontakt@jl-studios.de with the legal entity name and signing contact.
The Service is offered B2B-only and is not intended for consumers. Where, despite this restriction, mandatory consumer-protection law applies (e.g. you contracted as a consumer in breach of §0 above), the consumer-protection provisions of applicable law (including, where relevant, the 14-day right of withdrawal under §§ 312g, 355 BGB for distance contracts) apply on top of these Terms and prevail over any conflicting provision. Where you expressly consent to immediate performance of a digital service (e.g. by purchasing a top-up pack and using it before the 14-day window expires) the right of withdrawal lapses pursuant to § 356(4) BGB.
We may update these Terms to reflect changes to the Service, applicable law, or our operations. Material changes are notified by email to active users and announced on the dashboard at least 30 days before they take effect. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes acceptance. If you do not accept the changes, you may terminate your subscription with effect at the end of the current billing period.
If any provision of these Terms is held invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full force and effect. The invalid provision is replaced by a valid provision that most closely reflects the economic purpose of the invalid one.
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). Where you are a merchant (Kaufmann), legal person under public law, or special public-law fund, the exclusive place of jurisdiction for all disputes arising out of or in connection with these Terms is Mannheim, Germany. Mandatory consumer-protection venues remain unaffected.
For contractual or billing questions: kontakt@jl-studios.de