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, not by a registered company. There is no general email address; all contact goes through the Contact. The single exception is the address for reporting security vulnerabilities, published at /.well-known/security.txt.

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 email address — it is the only way to reach you, and to recover your account. You are not asked for your real name: the system gives you a short account code instead, and that code is your identity here.
• Do not use your account code, your bio, or your published content to impersonate another person or company. Accounts that do 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. Sharing what you learned, and the one limit on it

costdown.org exists so that an improvement made in one factory can be used in another. A method, a technique, a sequence of steps, a measured result — none of these belong to anyone. Copyright protects the expression of an idea, never the idea itself. Nobody can own “replace the hardware counter with a macro programme”, and nobody needs permission to do it somewhere else. Write up what you learned, in your own words, with your own numbers. That is the whole point of this place.

The one limit is narrow: do not paste in someone else’s document. A supplier manual page, a customer’s drawing, a photograph taken by someone else, a table lifted whole out of a standard — those are a particular person’s work, and copying them is a different act from sharing what you learned. Describe the drawing instead of reproducing it; the description is what your reader needs anyway.

If a rights holder believes something here reproduces their work, they can say so through the Contact under “Copyright complaint”, and we remove that specific item. This channel exists because without it the operator carries the liability for whatever a member pastes in — it is not here to police what you share, and it will not be used to stop a method or a number from spreading.

6. Working directly with another member

Some case studies let you invite their author to carry out the same change at your own site. That creates a joint project on costdown.org, visible only to the two of you, where you discuss the work, record the real result, and confirm it together.

Read this before you use it:

• costdown.org is not a party to your agreement. The invitation, the discussion and the confirmed figures are recorded here; the work itself — its scope, its schedule and its price — is agreed directly between you and the other member.
• No money passes through this site. costdown.org does not hold funds, does not process payments, and does not currently take any commission. The "contract value" shown is simply monthly savings multiplied by the number of months you chose: a shared reference number for your discussion, not an invoice and not a sum owed to anyone.
• The site does not vet members. An account code, a published history and a verified badge are the only signals offered. Check who you are dealing with before you commit to anything.
• Disputes are between you. Either side may cancel the joint project, and the recorded figures remain as evidence of what was agreed. Beyond that, costdown.org cannot arbitrate, recover money, or enforce anything.
• Confirming a result is a statement of fact. When both sides confirm the actual figure, that case reaches the highest trust level on the platform. Confirming a figure you know to be untrue falls under section 3.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. Governing law

These terms do not name a single governing law, because costdown.org is run by one individual rather than a company established in a particular place. If you are a consumer resident in the EU or EEA, the mandatory consumer law of your country of residence applies and you may bring proceedings there. For anyone else, the applicable law and competent court are whatever the ordinary rules of private international law determine.

11. 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.