Legal · Website terms
Terms of Use
The terms on which you may use Pivotal-Hub and the applets on it. They are free, they run in your browser, and we ask very little of you — but the disclaimers below matter, so please read section 6 properly.
Last updated 16 July 2026
01 — Scope and acceptance
These Terms of Use govern your access to and use of Pivotal-Hub (the Site) and the browser-based utilities published on it (each an Applet). The Site is operated by Hayward Zhu Ltd, a company incorporated in England and Wales under company number 12231837, whose registered office is 14 Hollybank Estate, CV9 3ET, trading as Pivotal Hub (we, us, our).
By accessing the Site or using any Applet you accept these Terms of Use. If you do not accept them, please do not use the Site.
These are not our consultancy terms. Hayward Zhu Ltd also trades as Pivotal Pathway — Digital Pathfinders, and paid consultancy engagements are governed by a separate contract published at pivotalpath.co.uk/terms ↗. Nothing on this page varies that contract, and nothing in that contract applies to your free use of the Applets. Where you are both a consultancy client and a Site visitor, the two operate independently.
02 — Definitions
- Applet — any single-purpose utility published on the Site, whether it runs in your browser, is offered as a downloadable or self-hostable component, or is documented on the Site as a guide.
- Your Content — any file, text, image, token, key or other material you load into, paste into, or open with an Applet.
- Output — anything an Applet produces from Your Content, such as a converted file, a stripped image, a generated password or a redacted document.
- Site — the Pivotal-Hub website, including all Applets, guide pages and supporting material.
03 — Your licence to use the applets
The Applets are provided free of charge. We grant you a non-exclusive, revocable, non-transferable licence to use them for any lawful purpose, personal or commercial, without payment, registration or attribution.
You may use the Output for any purpose. We assert no rights over it and charge no royalty on it. You do not need our permission to use an Applet in the course of a business, including a business that competes with ours.
This licence does not entitle you to redistribute the Site itself, to present the Applets as your own product, or to remove or obscure any notice identifying us as their author.
04 — Your content stays yours
You retain all rights in Your Content. We claim no ownership of it, no licence over it, and no right to use it.
The Applets are designed so that Your Content is processed entirely within your own browser and is not transmitted to us. We do not receive it, we cannot read it, and we do not store it. This is an architectural property of how the Applets are built rather than a promise about our conduct: there is no server-side component that could receive Your Content, so there is nothing for us to misuse. When you close the tab, Your Content is gone.
Where any Applet ever departs from this — for example a future component that performs work on a server — the Applet will say so plainly, on the Applet itself, before you give it anything.
The Applets also load no third-party code: every library they need is served from this site rather than from a public content delivery network, so opening one does not disclose your IP address to anyone but our host. Our Privacy Notice explains why we build it that way.
05 — Acceptable use
You must not use the Site or any Applet:
- in breach of any applicable law or regulation, or to facilitate any unlawful act;
- to process material you have no right to process, including personal data you have no lawful basis to handle and material that infringes another person's intellectual property;
- to attempt to gain unauthorised access to the Site, its hosting infrastructure, or any network or system connected to it;
- to introduce malware, or to knowingly transmit any material designed to harm the Site or its visitors;
- in any way that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionate load on our infrastructure, including automated bulk requests that degrade the Site for other users; or
- to misrepresent your relationship with us, or to hold out an Applet as evidence of a certification, audit or endorsement by us.
We may withdraw your access to the Site where we reasonably consider that you have breached this section. Because the Applets require no account, this is a limited remedy and we say so honestly: it is a statement of what is permitted, not a claim to police it comprehensively.
06 — No warranty, and no reliance
The Applets are provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law we exclude all warranties, conditions and representations, whether express or implied, including any implied warranty of satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.
We do not warrant that any Applet is free from defect, that its Output is accurate or complete, or that it will meet your requirements.
Please read this part. Several Applets touch outcomes that matter — stripping metadata from an image, redacting personal data from a document, generating a password, decoding a token, checking a colour contrast ratio for accessibility compliance. These are useful tools and we build them carefully, but they are not a compliance control and must not be your only safeguard.
An Applet may miss something. A PII scrubber may not catch every identifier; an EXIF stripper may not remove every embedded field in every format; a contrast checker reports a calculation, not a legal opinion on accessibility. If the consequence of a miss is serious — a data breach, a regulatory finding, a disclosed identity — you must independently verify the Output before you rely on it. Do not paste live production secrets, real customer data, or anything whose exposure would harm someone into a free tool — ours or anyone else's — without understanding what it does and checking what it produced.
You are responsible for deciding whether an Applet is appropriate for your purpose and for verifying its Output. Nothing on the Site is legal, security, accessibility, financial or professional advice.
07 — Liability
What we do not exclude
Nothing in these Terms of Use excludes or limits our liability for: death or personal injury caused by our negligence; fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; or any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. If you are a consumer, nothing here affects your statutory rights, and these terms do not require you to give up any right you have under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 or other consumer protection law.
What we do exclude
Subject to the paragraph above, and to the fullest extent permitted by law, we shall not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of, or inability to use, the Site or any Applet, including: loss of profit, revenue, business, contracts or anticipated savings; loss of or corruption of data or files; loss of goodwill or reputation; regulatory fines or penalties; or any indirect or consequential loss, in each case however arising and whether or not foreseeable.
In particular, and without limiting the above, we are not liable for any loss arising from your reliance on the Output of an Applet without the independent verification described in section 06.
Cap
Subject to the "What we do not exclude" paragraph above, our total aggregate liability to you arising out of or in connection with the Site and the Applets, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty or otherwise, shall not exceed one hundred pounds (£100).
We consider this reasonable, and we would rather be plain about the reasoning than bury it: the Applets are supplied free, with no account and no payment, and you are free to stop using them at any moment. We take no fee against which to price the risk of your use of them.
08 — Intellectual property
All intellectual property rights in the Site — including the Applets' source code, the Pivotal-Hub and Pivotal Path names and logos, the page designs, and the written content — are owned by or licensed to Hayward Zhu Ltd. Except as expressly permitted in section 03, no rights are granted to you.
You may link to the Site, and you may quote reasonable extracts of our written content with attribution. You may not copy the Site wholesale, republish it, or use our name or logos in a way that suggests endorsement or partnership without our written consent.
Where an Applet or component is published by us under an open-source licence, that licence governs your use of that code and prevails over this section to the extent of any conflict.
09 — Third parties and links
Several Applets are built on third-party open-source libraries. We serve copies of those libraries from this site rather than loading them from a public content delivery network, so using an Applet involves no request to any third party — see our Privacy Notice.
Those libraries remain the work of their own authors and are used under their own licences, which we do not control. To the extent permitted by law we accept no liability for a defect in a third-party library, or for any consequence of one.
The Site links to third-party websites, including our own consultancy site and public code repositories. Those links are provided for convenience. We do not control and are not responsible for the content, availability or privacy practices of any site we link to, and a link is not an endorsement.
10 — Availability and changes
We make no promise that the Site will be available uninterrupted or error-free. We may suspend, withdraw, modify or discontinue any Applet, or the Site as a whole, at any time and without notice. We do not guarantee that an Applet will remain available, keep its current behaviour, or be maintained.
Our intention — stated as intention, not as a contractual commitment — is that these Applets remain free and keep working. They are static pages, which makes them cheap to leave running, and we would rather leave one up than take it down. Please do not build anything critical on the assumption that a free tool with no support contract will be there tomorrow.
11 — Privacy and data protection
How we handle personal data is set out in our Privacy Notice, which forms part of these Terms of Use. In short: we set no cookies, run no analytics, operate no accounts, and receive none of Your Content.
Where you use an Applet to process personal data belonging to other people, you are the controller of that data and we are not a processor of it, because it never reaches us. Your obligations under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 in respect of that data remain entirely yours.
12 — Changes to these terms
We may revise these Terms of Use from time to time. The version published on this page at the moment you use the Site is the version that applies to that use. The "last updated" date at the top of this page tells you when it last changed. Where a change is material we will make reasonable efforts to flag it on the Site rather than quietly amend the page.
13 — Law and jurisdiction
These Terms of Use, and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them, their subject matter or their formation (including non-contractual disputes or claims), shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales.
The parties irrevocably agree that the courts of England and Wales shall have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom, you may also bring proceedings in the courts of the part of the UK in which you live, and nothing in this section deprives you of the protection of the mandatory law of your place of residence.