Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of costdown.org. By creating an account or using the service you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

costdown.org is operated by an individual based in Vietnam, not by a registered company. There is no public email address; all contact goes through the contact form.

1. What the service is

costdown.org is a shared library of manufacturing cost-reduction case studies. Members publish what they changed, what it cost, and what it saved; other members compare those figures against their own, within the same country.

It is a place to record and compare figures. It is not engineering advice, financial advice, or a substitute for your own testing. Decisions you take from what you read here are yours.

2. Your account

• You must be at least 16 years old to register.
• Give a real name and a real email address; accounts that exist to impersonate someone else are removed.
• One person, one account. Keep your password to yourself — anything done through your account is treated as done by you.
• Tell us through the contact form if you believe your account has been used by someone else.

3. What you may not do

• Publish figures you know to be false, or invent savings that did not happen. This is the one rule the whole platform rests on.
• Publish an employer's or customer's confidential information without their permission. You are responsible for having that permission.
• Copy other members' case studies and present them as your own.
• Scrape the site in bulk, try to get round rate limits, or attempt to reach data belonging to accounts other than yours.
• Upload malware, or post content that is unlawful, harassing, or discriminatory.

Accounts that break these rules may be suspended. Where content is provably fabricated, it is removed, because a single fabricated benchmark damages every honest figure it is compared against.

4. Content you publish

You keep ownership of what you write. By publishing it on costdown.org you grant a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to display it on the site, to translate it, and to include its figures in aggregate benchmark comparisons — for as long as you leave it published.

Delete your content and it stops being displayed. Two things survive, and you should know this before you publish:

• Figures already absorbed into aggregate benchmark statistics may remain in that aggregate form, where no individual case study can be identified.
• The change log of savings, investment, verification and status figures cannot be edited or deleted early. This is enforced by the database itself. Without it, no number on this platform would be worth reading.

You are responsible for the accuracy of your own figures. A verification by another member records that the other party confirmed the result; it is not a guarantee by costdown.org that the figure is correct.

5. Availability

The service is provided as it is, with no uptime guarantee. There is no service level agreement. It may be unavailable for maintenance, and features may change or be withdrawn.

Encrypted backups are taken hourly and restoring from them is tested rather than assumed — but you should keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. See the Privacy Policy for retention periods.

6. Limits of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, the operator is not liable for indirect or consequential loss — including lost profit, lost production, or loss of data — arising from your use of the service or from decisions you take based on figures published here.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

7. Ending your use

You may stop using the service and ask for your account to be deleted at any time through the contact form. The operator may suspend or close an account that breaks section 3, and will say why unless prevented by law.

8. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Vietnam. If you are a consumer resident in the EU or EEA, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer law of your country of residence, and you may bring proceedings there.

9. Changes to these terms

The date at the top changes whenever this document does. Material changes are notified to registered users by email. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the revised terms.