Terms of Use
Last updated: August 12, 2026
By using vvault, you agree to these Terms of Use. If you do not agree, do not use the service.
1. Who We Are and Scope
vvault is operated from Belgium by Tom Nsengiyumva, acting as a sole proprietor and not as a company, enterprise number BE 1022.549.155, registered office Minderbroedersstraat 10, 8000 Brugge, Belgium ("vvault", "we"). These Terms govern your use of the vvault web app, desktop app, iOS app, public pages, and related services.
vvault is a one-person business and qualifies as a micro-enterprise within the meaning of Recommendation 2003/361/EC. Where that status changes what the law requires of us, we say so in the section concerned rather than leaving it implied.
You must be at least 16 years old to use vvault. We do not knowingly create accounts for anyone below that age, and we close accounts we find to be under it.
Where these Terms distinguish between a consumer and a business user, "consumer" means a natural person acting outside their trade, business, craft or profession, and "business user" means anyone using vvault in a professional capacity, including everyone who lists or sells on the marketplace.
2. Points of Contact
Under Articles 11 and 12 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (the Digital Services Act) we publish a single electronic point of contact. For users, authorities, the European Commission and the European Board for Digital Services alike, that address is legal@vvault.app.
We accept and answer communications at that address in English, French or Dutch. Messages are read by a person; we do not rely solely on automated tools to communicate with you.
vvault is established in Belgium, so no legal representative in the Union is required or appointed. Data protection matters go to privacy@vvault.app, and infringement notices to copyright@vvault.app, as set out below.
3. Accounts
You are responsible for your credentials and for activity under your account. Keep your login secure and tell us promptly about any unauthorized use. One person or entity per account unless a team feature says otherwise.
We recommend enabling two-factor authentication if your account carries sales, payouts or a mailing list. Some sensitive actions may require you to confirm your identity again before they take effect.
4. Your Content and Licence to Us
You keep all rights to the music and content you upload. You must hold the rights to everything you upload, share, sell, or send through vvault, including samples and collaborations.
You grant vvault a worldwide, non-exclusive licence to host, store, process, transmit, and display your content solely as needed to operate, secure, and improve the service (for example creating previews, waveforms, or serving your shared links). This licence ends when the content is deleted, subject to backups and legal retention.
We do not acquire ownership of your work, we do not ask you to give up your moral rights, and we do not licence your work to anyone other than the buyers you choose to sell to and the recipients you choose to share with.
5. Acceptable Use
No unlawful conduct, infringement, spam, malware, scraping, automated abuse, circumventing plan limits or access controls, or behavior that harms the service or other users. We may throttle, limit, or disable features to protect the platform.
Do not attempt to download, redistribute or resell audio you have not purchased or been given access to, and do not share purchase links, download tokens or licence documents in a way that defeats a seller's paywall.
6. Prohibited Content
The following content is not allowed anywhere on vvault - in uploads, cover art, profile pictures and banners, video thumbnails, images used in emails, bios, titles, tags, messages, or any other field: (a) nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit material; (b) any sexualized depiction of a minor, without exception; (c) illegal drugs, drug use, or drug paraphernalia, or content promoting their sale; (d) gore or graphic real-world violence; (e) symbols or content promoting hatred or violence against people based on protected characteristics; (f) content that depicts, promotes, or facilitates illegal activity, including counterfeiting, fraud, weapons trafficking, or human exploitation; and (g) malicious or deliberately deceptive content.
We do not condone this content in any form. Where content appears to involve the sexual exploitation of minors or another serious crime, we preserve relevant material and report it to the competent authorities, as the law requires or permits, including under Article 18 of the Digital Services Act.
Everyday music-culture imagery (money, jewelry, dark or edgy artwork, artistic themes) is fine. If you are unsure whether something crosses a line, it probably does - choose different artwork or ask us first.
7. Reporting Illegal Content: Notice and Action
This section is our notice-and-action mechanism under Article 16 of the Digital Services Act. Anyone, whether or not they have a vvault account, can use it to tell us that specific content on vvault is illegal.
Send the notice to legal@vvault.app, or to copyright@vvault.app if it concerns copyright or neighbouring rights. To let us act on it, include: a sufficiently substantiated explanation of why you consider the content illegal; the exact location of the content, normally the URL or the share link; your name and email address, except for notices concerning offences under Articles 3 to 7 of Directive 2011/93/EU, where you may stay anonymous; and a statement that you believe in good faith that the information in the notice is accurate and complete.
We confirm receipt without undue delay, review the notice, and tell you what we decided and why, together with the redress options available to you. A notice containing all of the elements above gives us actual knowledge of the content concerned. Notices sent in bad faith, and repeated manifestly unfounded notices, may lead us to suspend the handling of further notices from the same source, after a warning.
The dedicated page below explains the copyright process in detail, including counter-notices and how we treat repeat infringers.
8. Content Moderation, Reasons and Appeals
We may use automated tools and manual review to detect content that violates Section 6 or the law, and we act on the notices we receive under Section 7. We are under no general obligation to monitor everything, and moderation decisions can involve mistakes in either direction.
We may refuse, remove, block, restrict, demote or disable monetisation of any content, and suspend or terminate any account, where we reasonably believe these Terms or the law are being violated - without owing you compensation for content that is refused or removed.
When we restrict something you posted, we give you a statement of reasons in line with Article 17 of the Digital Services Act: what exactly was restricted and for how long, the facts and circumstances we relied on, whether automated means were used in the detection or the decision, the legal ground or the clause of these Terms we applied, and how you can contest the decision. We give that statement unless the law prevents us, or unless the content is manifestly illegal commercial spam.
As a micro-enterprise, we are exempt under Article 19 of the Digital Services Act from Sections 3 and 4 of its Chapter III, which means we are not required to operate a formal internal complaint-handling system, to engage certified out-of-court dispute settlement bodies, or to run a trader traceability programme. We keep the appeal process below anyway, because it is more useful than the exemption, and every seller is in any event verified through Stripe onboarding before receiving a payout.
If you believe a moderation decision was wrong, write to legal@vvault.app within six months of the decision. A human re-reviews it in good faith, and we explain the outcome. If we were wrong, we reinstate the content or the account. Repeated or serious violations lead to account termination.
9. Sharing and Access
You control visibility, tokenized links, expiry and usage limits, and custom domains. You are responsible for who receives access through links you create. We may remove content or revoke access to protect the service, users, rights holders, or to comply with law.
10. Email Campaigns
You are responsible for recipient consent and for complying with anti-spam and marketing laws that apply to your sends (including the GDPR and ePrivacy rules for EU recipients). Connected accounts such as Gmail remain subject to their provider's terms. We may throttle, limit, or disable sending to prevent abuse or protect deliverability.
When you use vvault to reach contacts you chose, you decide the purposes and the means of that processing: you are the controller and we are your processor. Our Data Processing Agreement applies automatically, without separate signature, and forms part of these Terms.
11. Data Protection and Sub-Processors
How we handle personal data for which we are ourselves the controller - your account, authentication, billing, orders, security and product analytics - is described in our Privacy Policy at vvault.app/homepage/privacy.
The companies we rely on to run vvault, what each of them does, where it processes data and the transfer mechanism relied upon, are listed and kept up to date on the Sub-Processors page. That list forms part of the Data Processing Agreement, and we give at least thirty days' notice before adding or replacing a sub-processor.
Advertising and analytics tools that are not strictly necessary run only where you have given the corresponding consent, and stop for every path, including server-side measurement, when you decline or withdraw it.
12. Marketplace: Who Sells and Who Collects Payment
Every marketplace sale is a contract between the buyer and the seller. The seller chooses what to list, sets the price and the licence terms, and is responsible for holding the rights they licence. The licence in the music is granted directly by the seller to the buyer. vvault is not the licensor, does not acquire the rights, does not resell them, and is not a party to that contract.
The seller is identified to the buyer at every step: their name appears on the checkout page, on the card statement for the payment, on the transaction record and invoice we generate, and in the licence document. Where a sale involves several rightsholders, each of them is identified.
Payment is processed through Stripe Connect and is settled on the seller's own connected account: the seller is the settlement merchant for the transaction. vvault does not buy the content and does not resell it. Our role is to operate the platform, to present the seller's listing, and to run the technical steps of the sale on the seller's behalf. Where the platform fee for the seller's plan is greater than zero, that fee is our own separate supply of intermediation services to the seller, invoiced to the seller, and it is the only revenue we take from a marketplace sale.
Delivery is automatic and is not a decision we make. The seller decides what is offered and on what terms by publishing the listing; the buyer's payment triggers the download. Our systems execute that outcome on the seller's instructions and apply no discretion of their own: we do not choose whether a given buyer receives a given licence.
For VAT, each seller is responsible for their own supply to the buyer, including determining whether they must charge VAT and at what rate in the buyer's country, and for their own reporting and registration obligations. vvault does not collect VAT on the seller's supply and does not give tax advice. vvault accounts for VAT on its own platform fee where one applies.
None of this makes vvault responsible for the substance of what a seller licences. If a seller did not hold the rights they sold, that is the seller's breach, and Section 23 applies. Payouts are handled through Stripe and may be subject to identity, tax and anti-money-laundering verification before they are released.
13. Prices, VAT and Invoices
Prices shown on the marketplace are the total amount payable, inclusive of any VAT the seller must account for. There are no separate fees added at checkout for buyers.
For each marketplace order we generate, on the seller's behalf, a transaction record carrying a sequential invoice number and naming the seller as the supplier, together with a licence document where a licence is issued. Both are emailed to you at the time of the sale and, if you bought while signed in, stay available from the order in your account. If you checked out as a guest, the emailed copy is the copy to keep; write to legal@vvault.app with the order number if you lose it and we will re-send it.
The seller receives the price less the platform fee applicable to their plan, as published on the pricing page. Sellers are responsible for their own income tax and for any VAT due on their supply to the buyer, including registering and reporting in the countries where that VAT is due; we do not give tax advice.
If a price is displayed that is obviously wrong - a manifest pricing error - we may cancel the order and refund it in full rather than deliver at that price, and we will tell you promptly when we do.
14. Right of Withdrawal for Consumers
If you are a consumer in the EU, you normally have fourteen days to withdraw from a distance contract without giving a reason. Digital content and digital services are subject to specific rules, set out in Article 16 of Directive 2011/83/EU and transposed in Article VI.53 of the Belgian Code of Economic Law. Those rules are explained below rather than hidden behind a reference.
One-off purchases of digital content - beats, sound kits, plug-ins, licences and any other download. The right of withdrawal ends once we begin supplying the content, but only if all three of the following are true: you gave your express prior consent to the supply beginning before the fourteen days expire; you acknowledged that you would lose your right of withdrawal as a result; and we gave you confirmation of that consent and acknowledgement on a durable medium. At checkout, before you pay, you are asked to confirm both points explicitly. We record that confirmation and repeat it in your order confirmation email, which is your durable-medium copy.
If those confirmations were not obtained, the right of withdrawal is not lost. In that case you keep the full fourteen days, even if you have already downloaded the files, and we will refund you on request. We would rather state that plainly than rely on a buyer not knowing it.
Subscriptions and other services. If you asked us to start the service immediately and you withdraw within the fourteen days, you pay a proportionate amount for what was actually supplied up to the moment you told us, and we refund the rest. Once a billing period has been fully performed, the right of withdrawal no longer applies to that period. Cancelling future renewals remains available to you at any time and is not subject to any deadline.
How to withdraw. Send an unambiguous statement to legal@vvault.app, or use the model withdrawal form annexed to Directive 2011/83/EU; a message in your own words is equally valid. We confirm receipt and reimburse you within fourteen days of being informed, using the same means of payment you used, at no cost to you. In-app purchases made through Apple are refunded by Apple under Apple's own rules, and we will point you to the right place if you write to us instead.
15. Refunds and Payment Disputes
Because vvault collects the payment, refund requests come to us, not to the seller: write to legal@vvault.app with the order number. This is in addition to, and never in place of, your statutory rights of withdrawal and of conformity.
Outside the cases where the law requires a refund, refunds are discretionary. We generally refund duplicate charges, failed or corrupted downloads we cannot fix, and orders cancelled for a manifest pricing error.
If you think something went wrong with a payment, contact us before opening a chargeback; a chargeback freezes the funds and usually takes longer than simply asking us. Where an order is refunded, reversed or charged back, the seller's share of that order is recovered from the seller - by reversing the transfer where that is possible, by offsetting it against future payouts, or by invoicing the seller for the amount. Sellers agree to that recovery as a condition of selling on vvault.
Fraudulent purchases, coordinated self-buying, and refund abuse lead to the reversal of the transactions concerned and to account suspension.
16. Subscriptions and Billing
Paid plans renew automatically until cancelled. You can cancel at any time from Settings; cancelling stops the next renewal and you keep access until the end of the paid period. Prices are shown before you pay; we give advance notice of price changes affecting an active subscription, and you can cancel before the new price takes effect.
Subscription prices are shown as the total amount payable. Any VAT due on your subscription is included in that amount, and where it applies it is itemised at checkout and on the invoice we issue for the payment. Unlike a marketplace sale, a subscription is our own supply to you: vvault is the supplier and accounts for it.
Payments are processed by Stripe, or by Apple for iOS in-app purchases. A subscription bought through Apple is billed and cancelled through your Apple account, not through vvault, and deleting your vvault account does not by itself stop that billing.
If a renewal payment fails we may retry it and may restrict paid features until it succeeds. Downgrading or cancelling does not delete your content, but features tied to the higher plan stop working, and limits that your account exceeds may need to be brought back into range.
17. Ranking and Discovery
This section describes the main parameters determining ranking on the vvault marketplace and their relative importance, as required by Article 5 of Regulation (EU) 2019/1150. We publish it for everyone, buyers included, not only for sellers.
Filters come first. Any filter you apply - item type, tags, price range, seller - determines which items are eligible at all; nothing outranks a filter. Within the eligible set, a text search matches on title, seller name and tags, and only matching items are ranked.
The eligible items are then ordered by the sort you choose. "Latest", the default, orders by publication date, most recent first. "Popular" orders by measured engagement: for tracks, the number of plays; for sound kits, packs and plug-ins, the number of downloads, weighted more heavily than a play because a download is a stronger and rarer signal. Ties are broken by publication date, most recent first. "Price, low to high" and "Price, high to low" order by price, with items that have no price shown last.
No seller can pay for a higher position in browse results or in search results. There is one disclosed exception, and it is the only place where remuneration influences placement: the "Featured" carousel on the marketplace home draws only from sound kits and plug-ins published by creators on the Ultra plan, and the selection among them is randomised, so it changes on each refresh. Being on the Ultra plan therefore affects placement in that carousel and nowhere else. This is also the only differentiated treatment we apply between sellers, for the purposes of Article 7 of that Regulation, alongside the plan limits published on the pricing page.
Ranking does not take into account any payment other than the Ultra plan described above, and it does not favour items we have any interest in beyond the ordinary platform fee, which is the same percentage regardless of position. We give sellers at least fifteen days' notice before a change to these main parameters that would adversely affect them.
18. Additional Terms for Business Users
This section applies if you use vvault in a professional capacity, including as a seller, and implements Regulation (EU) 2019/1150 on fairness and transparency for business users of online intermediation services. It applies in addition to the rest of these Terms, and prevails over them for business users where the two differ.
Changes to these Terms. We give at least fifteen days' notice of any change, on a durable medium, and longer where the change requires you to make technical or commercial adaptations. You may terminate before the change takes effect, and you may waive the notice period by a clear affirmative statement. The notice period does not apply where a legal or regulatory obligation requires us to change the Terms immediately, or where an immediate change is needed to address an unforeseen and imminent danger to the service, its users or third parties.
Restriction and suspension. If we restrict or suspend your listings or your account, we give you a statement of reasons on a durable medium before the measure takes effect or, where that is not possible, at the latest when it takes effect. Where a legal obligation prevents us from doing so, we provide the statement without undue delay afterwards.
Termination. If we terminate your access, we give you at least thirty days' notice on a durable medium, with reasons. We may terminate without that notice period where we are under a legal or regulatory obligation, where an overriding reason of public law requires it, or where you have repeatedly breached these Terms.
No exclusivity, no retroactive change. You may sell the same works on other platforms or directly, at any price you choose, and you may stop using vvault at any time. We do not apply retroactive changes to these Terms, except where required by law or where a change corrects a manifest error in your favour.
Access to data. You have access in the product to your listings, your orders and the buyer details attached to them, your engagement metrics and your payout records, and you can export them at any time in a machine-readable format. We do not sell your data or your buyers' data to third parties, and we do not use your sales data to compete with you.
Complaints and mediation. As a sole proprietor, vvault is a small enterprise within the meaning of the Annex to Recommendation 2003/361/EC and is therefore exempt, under Articles 11(5) and 12(5) of that Regulation, from operating a formal internal complaint-handling system and from designating mediators. We nonetheless handle complaints from business users at legal@vvault.app and answer within a reasonable time. This does not affect your right to bring proceedings before the competent Belgian courts, or the right of representative organisations to act under Article 14 of that Regulation.
19. Suspension, Restriction and Termination
You can stop using vvault and delete your account at any time. We may suspend, restrict or terminate access where these Terms or the law are being violated, where an account presents a risk to the service, to other users or to rights holders, where required by a competent authority, or where payment obligations are not met. Where reasonable we warn you first.
The reasons and notice periods in Sections 8 and 18 apply to those measures: a statement of reasons in every case, and, for business users, at least thirty days' notice before termination unless one of the listed exceptions applies.
Provisions that by their nature survive termination survive it: licences already granted to buyers, accrued payment obligations, liability limits, the retention rules in Section 20, and governing law.
20. Deleting Your Account, Getting Your Data Out, and What We Keep
You can delete your account from Settings. Before you do, export what you want to keep: audio, cover art, contacts, listings, orders and licence documents can all be exported from the product. Because deletion is irreversible, we may ask you to confirm your identity again before it runs.
Reversibility. Under Article 16(4) of Directive (EU) 2019/770, at your request and free of charge, we make available to you within a reasonable time and in a commonly used, machine-readable format any content you provided or created through vvault that is not personal data, and we do not hinder you in retrieving it. This does not extend to content that has no utility outside vvault, that relates only to your own use of the service, that we have aggregated with other data and cannot disaggregate without disproportionate effort, or that you generated jointly with others who continue to use the service. After termination we stop using your content, save in those same cases.
What we keep, and why. Records of transactions concluded through vvault - orders, invoices, payout records and issued licence documents - are retained for the periods imposed by Belgian accounting and tax law, currently seven years for accounting records and ten years for VAT records. This retention rests on Article 6(1)(c) GDPR and is expressly preserved by Article 17(3)(b). It is limited to what those obligations require, the records are not used for any other purpose, and identifiers are reduced to what the obligation itself needs.
Licences survive account deletion. Deleting a seller account does not revoke, cancel or shorten any licence already granted to a buyer. Licences already issued, and the invoice and licence documents evidencing them, remain valid and remain retrievable - from the buyer's account, or, for a guest purchase, from the copy emailed at the time of the sale, which we can re-send on request. The same holds in the other direction: deleting a buyer account does not erase the seller's record of that sale, which we are required to keep and which the seller needs for their own accounts.
Live systems are purged on deletion; encrypted backups age out within thirty days. Deleting your vvault account does not cancel a subscription billed by Apple - cancel that in the App Store first.
21. Conformity, Availability and Warranties
If you are a consumer, you have statutory rights where the digital content or digital service is not in conformity with the contract, under Directive (EU) 2019/770 as transposed in Belgian law. Those remedies - bringing the content into conformity, a price reduction, or termination with a refund - are free of charge for you and are not affected by anything in these Terms. Start by writing to legal@vvault.app; we would rather fix it than argue about it.
Beyond those rights, and to the maximum extent permitted by law, vvault is provided "as is" and "as available". We do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free service, and engagement analytics depend on recipient mail clients and networks, so figures can be approximate. Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded under Belgian law, including our liability for fraud or gross negligence, or consumers' statutory rights.
22. Limitation of Liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, vvault is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, or for loss of profits, data, or business opportunities. Our aggregate liability is limited to the amounts you paid for the service in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, except where mandatory law provides otherwise.
That limit does not apply to liability for death or personal injury, for fraud or gross negligence, to a consumer's statutory conformity and withdrawal rights, or to our obligation to refund amounts you are entitled to have back.
23. Your Responsibility for Your Content
You are responsible for the content you upload, share, sell, or send through vvault and for having the rights to do so. If a third party brings a claim against vvault because of your content or your breach of these Terms (for example an infringement claim over artwork or audio you uploaded, or a claim by a buyer over rights you did not hold), you will, to the extent permitted by applicable law, compensate us for the damages and reasonable costs that result. This does not limit any mandatory rights you have as a consumer.
24. Changes to These Terms
We may update these Terms. For material changes we give at least thirty days' notice, in-app or by email, before they take effect, and we update the date at the top of this page. That period also satisfies the minimum fifteen days required for business users by Article 3(2) of Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, and the shorter-notice exceptions described in Section 18 apply equally here.
Continued use after the effective date means you accept the revised Terms. If you do not agree, stop using the service and cancel any subscription before renewal; sellers may terminate before the change takes effect, and pending payouts are unaffected.
25. Governing Law, Disputes and Mediation
These Terms are governed by Belgian law. Disputes go to the competent courts of Belgium, except that consumers in the EU keep the mandatory protections of the law of their country of residence and may bring or defend proceedings in the courts of that country. Nothing in these Terms requires you to arbitrate, to give up a collective action available to you, or to litigate outside the EU.
We encourage you to contact us first at legal@vvault.app; most issues are resolved directly and quickly.
Consumers may also refer a dispute to the Belgian Consumer Mediation Service (Service de Médiation pour le Consommateur / Consumentenombudsdienst), Boulevard du Roi Albert II 8, 1000 Brussels, whose contact details and procedure are published on its own website. The European Commission's online dispute resolution platform ceased operating on 20 July 2025, so there is no longer a link to give you for it.
26. Apple EULA
For iOS app usage, the Apple Standard Licensed Application End User License Agreement (EULA) may also apply where required:
27. Contact
legal@vvault.app - these Terms, moderation appeals, withdrawal and refund requests, business-user complaints, and our single point of contact under the Digital Services Act. privacy@vvault.app - data protection, the Data Processing Agreement, and requests to exercise your rights. copyright@vvault.app - copyright and neighbouring-rights infringement notices and counter-notices.
Postal address: Tom Nsengiyumva, Minderbroedersstraat 10, 8000 Brugge, Belgium. Enterprise number BE 1022.549.155. For anything else, the in-app Support page is the fastest route.