Acceptable Use Policy

Status of this Policy
This AUP is Appendix A to the APImage Terms of Service and is incorporated into them by reference. It applies in addition to, and not instead of, the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy. Capitalized terms used here have the meaning given to them in §1 of the Terms of Service. Where this AUP and the Terms of Service conflict on a question of permitted use, the stricter rule applies.

Purpose
APImage provides AI-powered image generation, editing, enhancement, and analysis through a web interface and an API. These tools are powerful and can be misused. This Policy exists to keep the Service lawful, safe, and available for everyone, to protect the rights of third parties, and to protect our infrastructure and our model and infrastructure providers.

Scope
This Policy applies to:

• All content you upload, submit, prompt, generate, store, download, or share through the Service
• All use of the web application, the API, SDKs, MCP endpoints, integrations, and any other access method
• All accounts, including free, trial, paid, enterprise, and affiliate accounts
• Anyone acting under your account or API keys, including your employees, contractors, agents, and your own end users

Responsibility for Your Users
If you build a product on top of APImage, you are responsible for the conduct of your end users and must impose terms on them that are at least as protective as this Policy. Violations caused by your end users are treated as violations by you.

No Exhaustive List
The examples below are illustrative, not exhaustive. Conduct that is not expressly listed may still violate this Policy if it is illegal, harmful, abusive, deceptive, or otherwise objectionable. We interpret this Policy in good faith and apply it to the substance of your use, not only to its form.

Who May Use the Service

1. You must be at least 18 years old. APImage is an adults-only service. If you are under 18, you may not register for, access, or use the Service, or provide any information to us, and you may not use it under the supervision or account of a parent, guardian, or employer.
2. If you use the Service on behalf of an organization, you must be authorized to bind that organization to the Terms of Service and this Policy.
3. You may not use the Service if you are barred from doing so under applicable law, including applicable export control or sanctions law.
4. You may not use the Service if we have previously terminated your account for a violation of this Policy.

Account Rules

1. Provide accurate, current, and complete registration and billing information.
2. Maintain one account per user. Creating multiple accounts to obtain additional free credits, to evade limits, or to evade a suspension is prohibited.
3. Keep your credentials and API keys confidential. You are responsible for all activity under your account.
4. Do not sell, rent, lend, or share your account, credentials, or API keys with third parties.
5. Notify us immediately at ask@support.apimage.org if you suspect unauthorized access.

Age Verification
By creating an account or using the Service you represent and warrant that you are at least 18 years of age. We may require verification of age at any time and may suspend an account pending verification. If we become aware that a user is under 18, we will terminate the account and delete the associated personal data in accordance with the Privacy Policy. Misrepresenting your age is a violation of this Policy. If you believe a minor is using the Service, report it to ask@support.apimage.org.

Sanctions and Export Control
You may not access or use the Service from, or make it available to any person or entity in, a country or territory subject to comprehensive sanctions, or to any person on an applicable denied-party or sanctions list.

What the Service Is For
Subject to this Policy and the Terms of Service, you may use APImage to:

• Generate, edit, enhance, upscale, and restyle images for personal, commercial, editorial, and internal business purposes
• Remove or replace backgrounds and perform object detection, segmentation, and related transformations
• Run image-to-text analysis such as captioning, OCR, tagging, and semantic description
• Process images in batches and integrate the API into your own applications, workflows, and products
• Resell or redistribute the output you lawfully generate, as part of your own product or service, where you hold the necessary rights in the input

Rights You Must Hold
You are solely responsible for every input you submit. Before uploading or prompting, you must hold all rights, licenses, consents, and permissions necessary for us and our subprocessors to process that content, including:

1. Copyright and other intellectual property rights in the image and any depicted work
2. Trademark and design rights, where applicable
3. The documented consent of every identifiable person depicted, where required by applicable law, including the right to their image and likeness
4. A valid legal basis under applicable data protection law where the input contains personal data or biometric data

Output Is Not Guaranteed to Be Clearable
AI output may unintentionally resemble existing works, brands, or persons. You remain responsible for reviewing output before you publish, distribute, or commercialize it, and for clearing any rights required in your jurisdiction and use case.

General Prohibition
APImage strictly prohibits the upload, generation, storage, distribution, or sharing of any content that is illegal, harmful, or otherwise objectionable. This includes, but is not limited to, the categories set out in this section and in §5 through §9 below. Each category applies to inputs, prompts, outputs, filenames, metadata, account names, and anything else you submit to or generate with the Service.

4.1 Illegal Activities

• Any content or use that violates applicable local, national, or international law or regulation
• Planning, facilitating, promoting, or documenting criminal activity
• Trafficking in humans, persons, organs, protected wildlife, or stolen goods
• Money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion, or tax fraud
• Production or trade of illegal drugs, or illegal firearms, ammunition, or explosives
• Content that infringes the rights of any third party

4.2 Harmful or Dangerous Content

• Instructions, schematics, or depictions that facilitate the creation or use of weapons, explosives, or chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear materials
• Content promoting, glorifying, or providing instruction for self-harm, suicide, or eating disorders
• Content that incites, encourages, organizes, or glorifies violence, terrorism, or violent extremism
• Gratuitous gore, real depictions of death, serious injury, or the mistreatment of human beings or animals
• Content designed to cause physical, psychological, or financial harm to any person

4.3 Hate Speech and Extremism

• Content that attacks, degrades, dehumanizes, demeans, or promotes hatred against individuals or groups on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, religion, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, serious illness, or any other protected characteristic
• Hateful symbols, slogans, insignia, or propaganda, including the glorification of hate groups or their members
• Denial, distortion, or trivialization of genocide, the Holocaust, or other mass atrocities
• Content that supports, praises, or provides material assistance to terrorist or violent extremist organizations
• Content that is unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful under German law, including §§ 86, 86a, 130, 131 StGB

4.4 Adult Content and Sexual Material

• Pornography, sexually explicit imagery, and content created for the purpose of sexual gratification
• Nudity in a sexualized context, and the sexualization of any real, identifiable person
• Non-consensual intimate imagery, including “nudify”, undressing, or clothing-removal transformations applied to any image of a real person
• Sexual content depicting violence, coercion, bestiality, incest, or non-consent
• Advertising or promotion of commercial sexual services

Incidental non-sexual nudity in a clearly artistic, medical, scientific, or educational context may be permitted at our discretion, but we are under no obligation to allow it and may block it without notice.

4.5 Harassment and Bullying

• Content that targets, threatens, intimidates, stalks, shames, or humiliates a specific individual
• Doxxing, meaning the publication or compilation of private or identifying information about a person without their consent
• Coordinated or repeated abuse, brigading, or pile-ons
• Degrading edits, defamatory manipulations, or sexualized depictions of a real person
• Using the Service to create material intended to blackmail, extort, or coerce any person

4.6 Deceptive Practices

• Impersonating any person, company, brand, or public authority, or falsely stating or implying an affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement
• Fabricating or altering official documents, including identity documents, passports, driver’s licenses, visas, diplomas, certificates, licenses, invoices, bank statements, insurance documents, or government forms
• Creating counterfeit goods, packaging, labels, seals, watermarks, currency, stamps, or security features
• Fake reviews, fake testimonials, fake screenshots, fabricated evidence, and manufactured “proof” of events that did not occur
• Phishing pages, scam creatives, fraudulent advertising, deceptive financial or investment promotions, and pyramid or Ponzi schemes
• Political disinformation, fabricated news, manipulated media presented as authentic, and content designed to interfere with elections, referendums, or democratic processes
• Content that misrepresents AI-generated material as an authentic photograph or recording where that misrepresentation is likely to deceive and cause harm

4.7 Privacy and Personal Data

• Uploading personal data or special categories of data under Art. 9 GDPR without a valid legal basis and, where required, explicit consent
• Uploading medical images, identity documents, or other sensitive records belonging to third parties without authorization
• Building or enriching databases of individuals, or performing surveillance, tracking, profiling, or re-identification of persons
• Facial recognition, facial matching, emotion inference, or biometric categorization of individuals
• Scraping images of people from third-party services in violation of those services’ terms

4.8 Intellectual Property

• Processing or generating content that infringes copyright, trademark, design rights, patents, or trade secrets
• Creating derivative works from protected material without authorization from the rights holder
• Removing, obscuring, or altering copyright notices, watermarks, credits, or other proprietary markings
• Deliberately generating content in the style of a living artist in a way that is unlawful in the applicable jurisdiction, or that is presented as that artist’s own work
• Reproducing third-party brands, logos, or trade dress in a manner likely to confuse consumers

Copyright complaints can be submitted to ask@support.apimage.org. See §14 of the Terms of Service.

4.9 Regulated and Restricted Subject Matter

• Unlicensed promotion of firearms, ammunition, explosives, or weapon modifications
• Promotion of illegal drugs, controlled substances, or unapproved pharmaceuticals
• Unlicensed gambling, betting, or lottery promotion
• Medical, legal, or financial claims presented as professional advice without appropriate qualification or disclaimer
• Tobacco, vaping, and alcohol marketing directed at minors

Absolute Prohibition
We operate a zero-tolerance policy for any content involving minors in a sexual, exploitative, or endangering context. The following is absolutely prohibited, without exception and regardless of claimed artistic, fictional, satirical, research, or educational intent:

1. Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in any form, whether photographic, illustrated, rendered, cartoon, anime, or AI-generated
2. Sexualization of minors, including suggestive posing, framing, captioning, or prompting
3. Applying age-reduction, de-aging, or child-likeness transformations to sexual or suggestive content
4. Applying face swap, likeness transfer, or body modification to any image of a minor
5. Nudity or partial nudity involving minors
6. Content that grooms, solicits, endangers, or facilitates the abuse, exploitation, or trafficking of minors
7. Content that normalizes, promotes, or trivializes the sexual abuse or exploitation of minors

Our Response
Suspected CSAM results in immediate and permanent account termination without notice, without refund, and without any right of appeal. We preserve the relevant data as required by law and report to the competent law enforcement authorities and, where applicable, to child protection organizations such as NCMEC and the Bundeskriminalamt. No credit balance, subscription, or affiliate commission survives such a termination.

Minimum Age of Depicted Persons
You represent and warrant that every identifiable person depicted in any image you upload or generate was at least 18 years of age at the time the underlying image was created, unless the content is plainly non-sexual, lawful, and you hold the documented consent of the minor’s parent or legal guardian. No likeness, identity, or age manipulation may ever be applied to an image of a minor, with or without such consent. See §6.

Reporting
Report suspected child exploitation immediately to ask@support.apimage.org with the subject line “URGENT — Child Safety”. Reports of this nature are prioritized above all other queues.

Face Swap Is Forbidden Without Exception
APImage does not offer a face swap feature, and using the Service to perform one is strictly prohibited. You may not use the Service, or any model, workflow, prompt, integration, or combination of operations available through it, to swap, transfer, graft, merge, substitute, reconstruct, or otherwise transplant the face, head, or facial identity of any person onto another body, image, video frame, or scene.

This prohibition is absolute. It applies:

• Regardless of whether the depicted person has consented, including where you hold written consent
• Regardless of whether the depicted person is you
• Regardless of whether the face is real, synthetic, composite, or AI-generated
• Regardless of whether the result is labeled as AI-generated
• Regardless of purpose, including artistic, satirical, comedic, research, testing, educational, or personal use
• Regardless of whether the output is published, shared, or kept private
• Whether performed in one operation or assembled across several operations, accounts, or tools

Consent is not a defense to a violation of this section. Do not ask us for an exemption; none is available.

Why This Is Absolute
Facial imagery is biometric data and enjoys heightened protection under Art. 9 GDPR and comparable laws. Face swapping cannot be reliably distinguished at scale from identity fraud, non-consensual intimate imagery, and political deepfakes, and consent to it cannot be verified by us at the point of processing. We therefore prohibit the operation itself rather than attempt to police its purpose.

Also Strictly Prohibited

1. Deepfakes and synthetic impersonation. Creating or altering imagery to depict a real person doing or saying something they did not do or say, including public figures, politicians, celebrities, journalists, executives, and private individuals.
2. Sexual or intimate manipulation. Any sexual, nude, intimate, or suggestive depiction of a real person created or altered without their explicit consent, and any such depiction produced by identity transfer at all. See also §4.4.
3. Any likeness manipulation involving a minor. See §5.
4. Identity and verification fraud. Producing or altering facial imagery for use in identity documents, KYC or age-verification flows, biometric authentication, liveness checks, or any system intended to verify who a person is.
5. Defamatory or degrading manipulation. Placing a real person in a false, criminal, humiliating, hateful, extremist, or compromising context.
6. Facial recognition and biometric analysis. Identifying, matching, clustering, tracking, or categorizing individuals by face, or inferring emotion, health, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political opinion, religious belief, or other protected attributes from facial imagery.
7. Building face databases. Assembling, enriching, or training on datasets of facial images of identifiable individuals, including by scraping.
8. Age manipulation of real people. De-aging, aging, or child-likeness transformations applied to an identifiable person.
9. Circumvention. Chaining operations, splitting a swap across requests or accounts, using masks, overlays, inpainting, or external tooling, or any other technique intended to achieve a prohibited result indirectly.

What Remains Permitted
Ordinary image work on portraits is unaffected, provided it does not transfer or alter facial identity and you hold the rights and consents required under §3. This includes:

• Retouching, color correction, lighting, sharpening, denoising, and upscaling
• Background removal and replacement behind a subject
• Cropping, resizing, format conversion, and non-identity-altering restyling
• Blurring, pixelating, masking, or otherwise anonymizing faces
• Generating entirely synthetic people who are not designed to resemble, and do not resemble, any identifiable real person

If an edit changes who a person appears to be, it is a prohibited identity manipulation rather than a permitted enhancement.

Consent Records
If you process images of identifiable persons, you must retain records of consent and produce them to us on request within a reasonable period. Failure to produce consent records when asked is itself a violation of this Policy and may result in suspension. Consent records do not authorize any operation prohibited above.

Enforcement
Face swap, deepfake, and likeness-manipulation violations are treated as severe. They result in immediate suspension or permanent termination without refund and forfeiture of remaining credits, and, where a real person is depicted in a sexual, fraudulent, or defamatory context, in referral to the competent authorities. See §12.

Notice and Takedown for Depicted Persons
If you appear in content processed through the Service without your consent, contact ask@support.apimage.org. We will act on credible reports promptly, and in the case of intimate imagery, on an expedited basis.

Prohibited Technical Conduct

1. Uploading or transmitting viruses, malware, ransomware, worms, trojans, or other harmful code
2. Attempting to gain unauthorized access to the Service, other accounts, our infrastructure, or connected systems
3. Probing, scanning, or testing the vulnerability of the Service without our prior written authorization
4. Circumventing, disabling, or interfering with authentication, rate limits, quotas, credit metering, billing, watermarking, safety filters, or content moderation
5. Reverse engineering, decompiling, or disassembling the Service, or attempting to extract, distill, or reconstruct the underlying models, weights, prompts, or training data
6. Using the output of the Service to train, fine-tune, or improve a competing AI model or service
7. Scraping, crawling, or harvesting the Service or its content by automated means outside the documented API
8. Denial-of-service attacks, traffic floods, or any activity that degrades performance or availability for other users
9. Framing, mirroring, or white-labeling the Service in a way that misrepresents its origin
10. Reselling, sublicensing, or providing access to the raw Service or to your API keys as a standalone product substantially similar to APImage

Responsible Disclosure
If you discover a security vulnerability, report it to ask@support.apimage.org before disclosing it publicly. Do not access, modify, or exfiltrate data belonging to other users while investigating. Good-faith research reported this way will not be pursued by us as a violation of this Policy.

Rate Limits

• Basic, Pro, and Business plans allow up to 60 API requests per minute.
• Enterprise plans support configurable rate limits on request.
• Additional per-endpoint, concurrency, upload-size, and batch-size limits are documented in the API documentation and may change as the Service evolves.

Credits

• Operations consume AI Credits according to their computational cost, as described in §6 of the Terms of Service and on the pricing page.
• Credits included in a subscription are valid for the current billing cycle only and do not roll over. Separately purchased credits expire 12 months from purchase.
• Credits are consumed when processing begins and are not refundable once processing has started.

Fair Use
Plans described as high-volume or unmetered are intended for normal commercial use by a single account holder. The following are not fair use and may be throttled, capped, suspended, or charged at overage rates:

• Automated request loops, retry storms, or traffic that serves no legitimate processing purpose
• Sharing one account, plan, or API key across multiple organizations or customers in order to avoid per-seat or per-plan pricing
• Using the Service primarily as a storage, CDN, bandwidth, or general compute provider
• Sustained load that materially degrades the Service for other users or breaches the terms of our upstream model providers
• Systematic generation intended to exhaust free tiers, trial credits, or promotional allowances across multiple accounts

Technical Good Practice

• Implement exponential backoff and respect 429 and Retry-After responses
• Cache results rather than re-requesting identical operations
• Rotate API keys periodically and never embed them in client-side code or public repositories
• Queue batch work rather than issuing it as a single burst

If You Need More
If your workload exceeds the published limits, contact ask@support.apimage.org to arrange an enterprise plan rather than working around the limits. Circumventing limits is a violation of §7.

Your Obligations

1. Where you publish or distribute synthetic or substantially manipulated imagery of real people, places, events, or objects, you must disclose that it is AI-generated or AI-modified where required by applicable law, including Art. 50 of the EU AI Act.
2. You may not remove, obscure, or falsify any provenance metadata, watermark, or content credential that the Service attaches to output.
3. You may not present AI output as an authentic photograph, journalistic record, or evidentiary document where doing so is likely to mislead.

Our Practices
We may attach provenance signals, watermarks, or metadata to generated output, and may log generation events for safety, abuse-prevention, and legal-compliance purposes. See the Privacy Policy for details on what is stored and for how long.

Automated and Human Moderation
To keep the platform safe and lawful, APImage operates moderation systems across uploads, prompts, and outputs. These include:

1. Automated Scanning: Uploads and generated outputs are screened by automated classifiers and hash-matching systems for prohibited material.
2. Prompt Filtering: Prompts and parameters are analyzed and may be blocked before any processing is performed.
3. Human Review: Flagged material may be reviewed by trained personnel, subject to strict access controls and confidentiality obligations.
4. Signals and Patterns: We analyze account, billing, and usage signals to detect evasion, multi-accounting, and coordinated abuse.

What We May Do

• Block or refuse a request before processing, without consuming credits where technically possible
• Withhold, quarantine, or delete output and stored files
• Restrict specific features or models for an account
• Preserve and disclose content and account data where required by law or to protect life

Limits of Moderation
No moderation system is perfect. We do not pre-screen all content, and we are not obligated to monitor. False positives and false negatives occur. Our filters are a safety measure, not a legal clearance, and their operation does not transfer responsibility for your content from you to us. Blocking is not an endorsement of anything that is not blocked.

Privacy of Review
Moderation is carried out on the legal bases described in the Privacy Policy, in particular Art. 6(1)(c) and 6(1)(f) GDPR. Access to reviewed material is limited to what is strictly necessary.

How to Report
If you encounter content or conduct that violates this Policy, report it to ask@support.apimage.org.

To help us act quickly, please include:

1. A description of the content or conduct and why you believe it violates this Policy
2. Any URL, file reference, generation ID, or account identifier you have
3. Your relationship to the matter, for example rights holder, depicted person, or third-party observer
4. Your contact details for follow-up

Priority Handling
Reports concerning child safety, non-consensual intimate imagery, credible threats of violence, or imminent risk to life are handled with the highest priority. Use the subject line “URGENT” for these.

Response Times
We typically acknowledge reports within 24–48 hours on business days (Monday–Friday, 9:00 AM–6:00 PM CET). Urgent safety reports are triaged outside these hours where possible.

Bad-Faith Reports
Submitting knowingly false or abusive reports, or using the reporting channel to harass another user, is itself a violation of this Policy.

Measures We May Take
Depending on the severity, frequency, and intent of the violation, we may take one or more of the following actions, with or without prior notice:

1. Issue a warning and require corrective action
2. Block, remove, or quarantine specific content
3. Disable specific features, models, or API keys
4. Reduce rate limits or impose additional quotas
5. Suspend the account temporarily
6. Terminate the account permanently and forfeit all remaining credits
7. Withhold or claw back affiliate commissions
8. Refuse future service to you and to any affiliated accounts or entities
9. Report the matter to law enforcement or other competent authorities
10. Pursue civil claims for damages and seek indemnification under §13 of the Terms of Service

No Refund on Termination for Cause
Termination for a violation of this Policy does not entitle you to a refund of subscription fees or the value of unused credits, except where a refund is mandatory under applicable law. See §8 and §11 of the Terms of Service.

Immediate Termination
Violations of §5 (Minors), the prohibition on face swap and identity manipulation in §6, the prohibitions on non-consensual intimate imagery in §4.4 and §6, and conduct creating an imminent risk to life or safety result in immediate permanent termination without notice. Appeals are unavailable for §5 violations and for sexual, fraudulent, or defamatory identity manipulation.

Appeals
If you believe an enforcement decision was made in error, you may appeal by writing to ask@support.apimage.org within 30 days, stating your account details, the decision you are appealing, and the grounds. We will review the decision and respond in writing. Appeals are unavailable for the categories listed under “Immediate Termination” above.

Evasion
Creating a new account, using a different payment method, or otherwise attempting to circumvent a suspension or termination is a separate and independent violation of this Policy.

Updates
We may update this Policy to reflect changes in the law, in the capabilities of the Service, in our model providers’ requirements, or in the abuse patterns we observe. The “Last updated” date at the top of this page indicates the current version.

Notice
We will announce material changes through the Service interface or by email to the address associated with your account. Changes required to address an urgent legal or safety risk may take effect immediately.

Your Acceptance
Your continued use of the Service after a change takes effect constitutes acceptance of the updated Policy. If you do not agree, you must stop using the Service.

Relationship to the Terms of Service
This Policy is Appendix A to the Terms of Service. Amendments to this Policy follow the process set out in §12 of the Terms of Service.

Questions and Reports
Email: ask@support.apimage.org
Response Time: We typically respond to all inquiries within 24–48 hours during business days (Monday–Friday, 9:00 AM–6:00 PM CET).

Postal Address
APImage
Ole Nepomuk Mai
Goethestr. 70
10625 Berlin
Federal Republic of Germany

Related Documents

• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Imprint