Terms of service

WhatSMD is operated by KAUDATA RAČUNALNIŠKO PROGRAMIRANJE D.O.O., a company registered in Slovenia. The full registration details, address and tax numbers are on the imprint page. In this document “we” and “us” mean that company, and “you” means the person or business using the service.

Using WhatSMD means you accept these terms. If you are using it for a business, you confirm you are allowed to accept them on that business’s behalf.

You upload photographs of an electronic component and describe the circuit it sits in. We search our marking database for parts that match, and an AI model ranks those candidates against your context, writes the reasoning for each one and proposes a measurement that distinguishes them.

The result is a ranked set of possibilities with a test attached. It is not a statement of fact about what is on your board. We do not warrant that any candidate is the correct part. Marking codes are not unique, are not standardised, and the same code is used by different manufacturers for unrelated devices. You must verify the part with the confirming test, or by another method you trust, before you fit anything, apply power, or return a board to a customer.

Where our sources contain nothing for a marking, the service may instead describe what the circuit requires the part to do. That output is labelled as inference and is explicitly not an identification.

Datasheets are linked, never hosted by us. What you find at those links is the manufacturer’s document and their terms apply to it.

You can use the free allowance without an account. An account keeps your history, holds any free months you have earned, and is required for a paid plan.

Sign-in is by a link sent to your email address, or through Google. We store no password. Keep control of the mailbox you sign in with: anyone who can read it can sign in as you. Tell us at [email protected] if you think someone else has access to your account.

One account is one person. The Shop plan is sold only to a business, for a team of up to 3 people, the buyer included.

Buying Shop makes a team, and the account that bought it owns it. The buyer confirms at checkout that the purchase is for a business and that they may accept these terms on its behalf, so section 7a does not apply to Shop. VAT is worked out as section 5 says.

The owner invites people by email address. An invitation stays open for 14 days and is accepted by signing in with the address it was sent to. A person is in one team at a time, and cannot join one while a paid plan of their own is set to renew.

While the owner's Shop plan runs, every member is on it. They share one monthly allowance of 600 identifications (section 8), and each can see, open and continue the identifications the others start in the team, with their photographs, notes and measurements, and see who started each one. Publishing a result to a link stays with whoever started it. What a member identified before joining is not shared, and each member's email address is visible to the rest of the team.

The owner can remove a member, and a member can leave. What they identified for the team stays in its history, and from then on they are on their own plan. If the owner's Shop plan ends, the team shares nothing until it is bought again, and each member is on their own plan.

A member who closes their account leaves the team at once; at erasure, what they identified is erased with the rest of their data, shared or not. If the owner closes theirs, the team takes no one new, and its plan runs to the end of the period already paid for, but no longer than until the owner's account is erased, 30 days after closing. At erasure the team is deleted, and what each member identified stays with them.

The team is managed on the website, from the account page. The mobile app shows the team but does not manage it.

The current plans, prices and monthly limits are on the pricing page and form part of these terms. In summary: Free gives 3 identifications a month and does not keep history. Tech gives 150 a month with full history. Shop gives 600 a month to a team of up to 3 people, who share that allowance and one another's identifications, as section 3 describes.

The identification itself is the same on every plan, including the substitute families it suggests when a code is not in our tables. We do not degrade a free answer.

In the iPhone and Android apps you can subscribe to Tech through the App Store or Google Play. For that purchase Apple or Google is the seller. Its own terms govern the payment, the renewal, the cancellation and any refund, and the price and its VAT are the ones the store shows you.

What you get is Tech as these terms describe it (sections 4 and 8 to 13), on the website and in the app, signed in to the WhatSMD account you bought it with. The purchase belongs to that account; restoring it while signed in to another account does not move it.

Cancel it in your App Store or Google Play account settings; the store ends it at the end of the period already paid for. Ask Apple or Google for a refund, under their rules: we can neither grant nor refuse one, and a refund the store grants ends your access from that moment.

If a renewal fails, you keep access while the store retries within its grace period, and lose it once that is over or the store has put the subscription on hold; it comes back when the store collects the payment.

Sections 5, 6, 7 and 7a apply to what you buy on this website, not to a purchase in the app: for that one we issue no invoice, the store gives you its receipt, and your rights as a consumer are exercised with the store as the seller.

If you pay for the same plan on this website and in a store at once, both run and neither ends the other. You can cancel the website's from your account page, and write to us if you want it refunded.

Deleting your WhatSMD account does not cancel a subscription bought in the app. Cancel it in the store first.

Prices shown are net of VAT. VAT is added at checkout at the rate of your country of residence or establishment. If you are a business elsewhere in the European Union and give us a VAT identification number that validates against VIES, the supply is reverse charged and we invoice you without VAT. We store the validation response as evidence.

We issue an invoice for every payment made on this website, with a sequential number, and make it available on your account page and by email. It is written in the language you bought in, which is recorded with your order. All amounts are in euros.

We may change prices. A change never applies to a period you have already paid for, and we will tell you before a renewal at a new price.

A paid plan bought on this website renews automatically at the end of each period, for the same period again, using the payment method you saved. We charge on the day the period ends.

If a renewal charge fails, we retry it 1, 3, 7 days after the first failure and email you each time with a link to fix it. You keep full access while we are retrying, because a card that expired is far more common than a customer who left. After 4 failed attempts the subscription is cancelled and access stops. Nothing is carried over as a debt.

Some banks require you to confirm a charge in person. When that happens we email you a link to complete it. If you do not, the charge counts as a failed attempt.

You can cancel a subscription bought on this website at any time from your account page. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. Access continues until that date and nothing is prorated. We do not refund a part-used period, and we do not charge for one either. If you are a consumer, section 7a comes first and overrides this paragraph for the first 14 days.

If you change your mind before the period ends, you can resume and nothing is interrupted.

Ending a subscription does not delete your identifications. Deleting your data is a separate, self-service action described in the privacy policy.

This section applies only if you are buying as a consumer (outside any trade, business or profession). If you are buying for a repair business it does not apply to you, and section 7 is the whole of the position.

You have 14 days from the day the contract is concluded to withdraw from it, without giving a reason. Tell us at [email protected] in any clear statement. There is no form you have to use.

WhatSMD is useful on the first identification, so we start performing straight away. You are asked to request that expressly when you pay. Two things follow, and the second is the one most services get wrong:

• Because you asked us to begin during the withdrawal period, you owe us a proportionate amount for what you actually had if you then withdraw. We refund the rest.
• Asking us to begin does not take the right away. A subscription is a service supplied over its whole period, and the rule that ends the withdrawal right on request applies to a service that has been fully performed. A month that has just started has not been.

TODO(founder): confirm this analysis with a Slovenian consumer lawyer before the first consumer sale It is a considered reading of Directive 2011/83/EU as implemented by ZVPot-1 and not a settled one, and it points the opposite way from the assumption the earlier draft of this page carried. Two things turn on it: whether what we sell is a digital service or digital content not supplied on a tangible medium, which are different articles with different consequences, and whether a monthly subscription can ever be “fully performed” inside the withdrawal period. If the answer is the other one, this section gets shorter; it must not be shortened before the answer arrives.

When you pay as a consumer, the checkout asks for two things before it sends you to payment: your express request that we begin immediately, and your acknowledgement of what that costs you if you then withdraw. Once the payment has gone through, we confirm both on a durable medium, by email. Until that email has been sent, a consumer who withdraws owes nothing at all. A withdrawal is worked out and refunded by hand: write to us and we will do it.

The monthly count on each plan is a fair-use limit, not a balance. It resets at the start of each calendar month in UTC. It does not roll over and it cannot be topped up. When it is used up, the next identification is refused until the month rolls over or you move to a larger plan.

On Shop the monthly count is the team's: one allowance for all its members, and once it is used up the next identification is refused to each of them until the month rolls over. The daily cap stays per person.

There is also a daily cap on processing, sized so that a normal bench day never reaches it. It exists to stop a script from spending a month of capacity in an hour. If you hit it during genuine work, tell us and we will raise it.

You agree not to:

• query the service automatically, in bulk, or through anything other than the interface we provide;
• extract, copy or re-publish our marking data, our candidate sets or our reasoning in order to build or train a competing database or model;
• resell access, or share one seat between several people;
• upload photographs you have no right to take or share, or that contain personal data you have no basis to give us;
• attempt to make the service return a part number that did not come from our database, or otherwise probe it in ways that would degrade it for other people.

Sharing a result page is fine and is the point of it. Quoting a result in a forum thread, with or without attribution, is also fine.

If you break this section we may suspend or close the account. Where the breach is minor and fixable we will ask first.

Your photographs and the circuit context you type stay yours. You give us the permission we need to store them, process them, send them to the AI provider named in the privacy policy, and produce and display your result. Nothing wider than that.

You confirm you are entitled to give us what you upload. If a board belongs to your customer, that is between you and them, and we handle what you send as our own controller rather than on your instructions. The privacy policy explains what that means. Keep names, serial numbers, tickets and anything else that points at a person out of the frame and out of the text boxes. There is no data processing agreement between us unless we have signed one.

We do not use your photographs to train models, and we do not use them for anything beyond your identification and its confirmation record, unless you turn that on yourself in your account settings. It is off by default and turning it off again applies from that moment forward.

If you publish a result page, that page and the photographs on it become readable by anyone with the link. Stop sharing on the result page withdraws the link and it stops working. Board photographs often show a customer’s property, so consider what is in frame before you publish.

After an identification we ask whether it fixed the board. Answering is optional. If you confirm a fix and name the part, we record the marking, the package, the board and the context together with that part number, and we may add that pair to our marking database so other technicians get a better answer.

Confirmations earn free months on a paid plan. We are buying data, and we would rather say that plainly than call it a reward. A confirmation you submit is ours to use for that purpose; it contains no personal data beyond the account it came from, and we do not publish who submitted what.

In a team, any member can record whether an identification the team shares fixed the board, and a month it earns goes to the owner's account, whose subscription pays for the team.

Months earned while your plan is billed by Apple or Google are kept on your account and spent on a subscription paid on this website, at its renewal. We cannot shorten a subscription the store bills, so they are not spent on it.

We aim to keep the service running and we do not promise it will be. We may change how it works, add and remove features, and take it down for maintenance. If we discontinue the service entirely we will give notice and refund the unused part of any period paid in advance, which is the one case where we do prorate.

The service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.

We are not liable for a damaged board, a damaged device, lost work, lost profit or a lost customer arising from a part fitted on the strength of an identification without the confirming test. That is the risk the confirming test exists to remove, and running it is your responsibility.

TODO(founder): liability cap The intended cap is the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, with the usual carve-outs for death, personal injury, fraud and anything else that cannot be limited by law. A lawyer needs to confirm the figure and the wording, and check how it reads against Slovenian consumer law for a non-business customer.

We may change these terms. If a change materially affects you, we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and you can cancel before then if you do not accept it. The date at the top of this page always shows when it last changed.

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of Slovenia. If we cannot resolve something between us, the courts of Ljubljana have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory law of the country you live in, and you may bring a claim in the courts there.

TODO(founder): out-of-court dispute resolution The EU online dispute resolution platform closed in July 2025, so the old boilerplate link is wrong and must not be reinstated. A lawyer needs to confirm what a Slovenian trader is now required to state about alternative dispute resolution bodies, whether we must recognise one, and to name it here if we do. Saying nothing is a position that has to be taken deliberately, not by omission.

These terms are published in Slovenian and in English, and so is the rest of the site. The two versions say the same thing, clause for clause. The language of the page you buy from is recorded with your order, and the invoices for that purchase and its renewals are written in it.

We are a Slovenian trader, and Slovenian law requires a trader to deal with consumers in Slovenia in Slovenian (ZVPot-1, Article 7). So if you are a consumer in Slovenia, the Slovenian version of these terms is the one you contract on, whichever language you read the site in, and the English version is a translation of it.

If the two versions ever differ, a consumer may rely on whichever is more favourable to them.

TODO(founder): have a lawyer confirm this clause and the Slovenian text ZVPot-1 requires us to deal with consumers in Slovenia in Slovenian, but it does not say which version of a contract in two languages binds, so the rule above is ours, chosen because it protects the consumer. A lawyer should confirm it before the first consumer sale.

Write to [email protected] about anything in this document. Billing goes to [email protected]. Our postal address and registration numbers are on the imprint page.