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Sargassum Check

Terms of use

The terms for using Sargassum Check: estimates are information, not safety advice; booking links lead to other companies; what you agree to when you send a photo.

Last updated

Version 2026-10-18. Effective on publication. These terms apply to sargassumcheck.com (including map.sargassumcheck.com), beachsignal.com and every page, map, planner, photo-contribution tool and data feed they serve (together, the "Service"). The current version is published at sargassumcheck.com/terms and beachsignal.com/terms and linked from every footer.

The short version

This summary helps you read the terms. The full text below is what binds us both.

1. Who we are and how to reach us

The Service is operated by Velkan Studio LLC, a Delaware limited liability company ("we", "us"), 2093 Philadelphia Pike, Ste 2073, Claymont, DE 19703, United States, under its Terra Continua and BeachSignal brands. Sargassum Check is the first module of BeachSignal, a Terra Continua product. Pages that say "operated by Velkan" refer to Velkan Studio LLC.

Contact: contact@sargassumcheck.com for questions, corrections, photo withdrawal and privacy requests, and for legal notices, copyright and takedown requests. Legal notices may also be served on our registered agent in Delaware as recorded with the Delaware Division of Corporations.

Velkan Studio LLC is also the data controller under the Privacy Policy.

2.1 Acceptance. These terms are a contract between you and us. You accept them by using the Service. If you do not agree, do not use it. No account exists, so there is nothing to sign; using the map, the planner, a booking link or the photo tool is the acceptance.

2.2 Age. The Service is made for adults planning travel. You must be at least 13 years old to use it, and at least 16 if you live in the European Economic Area, Switzerland or the United Kingdom (or your country's lower age for agreeing to online services, never below 13). You must be at least 18, or have a parent's or guardian's permission, to send us a photo or report.

2.3 Related documents. The Privacy Policy, the Affiliate Disclosure and the Image Credits and Takedown page are part of these terms. If they conflict, these terms win.

3. What the Service is, and is not

3.1 What it is. A free map, seasonal planner and hotel directory for beaches, starting with the Mexican Caribbean. For each beach we cover it shows a rough sargassum estimate with a confidence label, the age of its sources, seasonal tendencies, cleaner nearby alternatives, public webcam views where available, and hotels on or near the beach with links to book them elsewhere. How the estimates are made is explained on the "How it works" page; the sources are listed on "Data and sources".

3.2 Estimates are not observations. Every estimate is produced from dated regional satellite products, official bulletins, forecasts, webcams and contributed photos, combined by rules and automated analysis. Sources can be late, incomplete, wrong, or not about the particular beach you are looking at. A regional reading never confirms what is on one shoreline. Missing evidence is shown as unknown, never as clear. A "low confidence" label means what it says.

3.3 Not safety, health or official advice. THE SERVICE IS NOT A SAFETY SERVICE, A HEALTH SERVICE, A WATER-QUALITY REPORT, A WEATHER WARNING SERVICE OR AN OFFICIAL SOURCE OF ANY KIND. It says nothing about whether it is safe to swim, wade, surf, dive, boat, breathe the air near decomposing seaweed, or let children or animals near the water. Sargassum can carry marine life and debris; decomposing sargassum releases hydrogen sulphide and ammonia, which can irritate eyes, skin and airways and can be dangerous to people with respiratory conditions; beaches have rip currents, marine hazards, closures and local rules the Service cannot see. Always follow the flags, lifeguards, signage, closures and advice of local authorities, your hotel and medical professionals. If you have a health condition, ask a doctor before travelling. Nothing on the Service is medical, environmental, legal or professional advice, and you must not treat it as such.

3.4 Not a forecast we guarantee. Seasonal tendencies and outlooks describe the past and typical patterns. They are not a prediction for a particular day, and we do not warrant any of them.

3.5 Hotels and places. A hotel is listed because evidence puts it on or near a beach we cover. Listing is not a recommendation, a rating, a statement that the hotel is open, that it has a beach, that its beach is clean, or that any photo shows its current state. Prices, availability, policies and bookings are between you and the hotel or booking site.

3.6 Webcams. Where we show or link to a webcam, it is operated by someone else. We do not control it, cannot vouch for its position, time, or whether it is live, and may analyse its frames automatically for sargassum as the Privacy Policy explains.

3.7 Changes and availability. The Service is a public beta. We may change, pause, restrict or stop any part of it at any time, with or without notice, and we do not promise that it will be available, accurate, complete or uninterrupted.

3.8 Answers through AI assistants. Our free, read-only connector needs no sign-in and returns answers to assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT.

(a) The requested period. A date or month question receives an outlook for that period, not today's reading. Every date after today is a seasonal outlook, not a validated forecast. Sections 3.2 to 3.4, including the safety and official-advice limitations, apply to every answer.

(b) The assistant's presentation. Its provider decides whether to call us, what inputs to send and how to present the result. It may rephrase, shorten, translate or combine the answer with other material. Our connector's returned answer is our content; the provider's additions or changes are not. The provider's own terms and privacy policy govern your use of its assistant.

(c) Hotel questions and links. hotel_beach_status answers only about a hotel you name and returns no links or suggestions. No tool returns hotel listings, hotel photos, prices or affiliate links. Other tools may link to pages of this Service or, outside our coverage, to the University of South Florida's Sargassum Watch System. Any commission arises only from links on our site under section 4.

(d) Acceptable use and availability. Section 7 applies. Do not bypass rate limits, copy the data in bulk or rebuild a competing dataset through the connector. We may restrict or withdraw tools under section 3.7. Our content remains subject to section 8; no broader licence is created by receiving it through an assistant. The Privacy Policy explains request processing and retention, and Support gives our contact and connection addresses.

4.1 Other companies' sites. Hotel, booking, map and source links take you to sites we do not control (hotel websites, Expedia, Hotels.com, Vrbo, Booking.com, Google Maps and others). Their terms and privacy policies apply once you are there. We are not a party to any booking, payment or stay, and we never receive your payment details.

4.2 Commission. Some links are, or may become, affiliate links. If you book through one, the travel company may pay us a commission at no extra cost to you. Our Affiliate Disclosure says how this works. Commission never changes a beach's condition, its confidence label, its alternatives, or the order in which beaches or hotels appear. We do not accept payment to change a beach's condition or ranking.

4.3 Notice beside the links. A short notice appears beside every group of booking links. Where a link is tagged with an affiliate identity, it is marked as sponsored for search engines.

5. Photos and reports you send us

5.1 What you can send. Where the Service offers it, you may send a photo of a beach you are at, with the capture time and location your device reports or a map point you confirm, and the beach you selected; and you may send a short condition report. No account is needed. The tool shows the exact consent text before you send, and we keep the version you accepted together with your receipt number.

5.2 What you confirm. By sending a photo or report you confirm that:

  1. you took the photo yourself, at the place and time it indicates, or the report describes what you saw yourself;
  2. it shows no identifiable people, children, vehicle plates, private property interiors or anything else that would need someone else's permission;
  3. you have the right to give us the permission in 5.3, and nobody else's rights (copyright, privacy, confidentiality) are infringed by it;
  4. it is not false, misleading, abusive, unlawful or sent to manipulate an estimate; and
  5. you are at least 18, or have a parent's or guardian's permission.

5.3 The permission you give us. You keep your copyright and every other right in what you send. You give Velkan Studio LLC a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable (only to the service providers named in the Privacy Policy, and only so they can process it for us) permission to: store the photo or report privately; moderate and review it; analyse it, including with automated and AI tools, to read beach conditions; create a privacy-processed version with metadata removed and any face or plate obscured; display that privacy-processed version on the Service with the beach, date and condition reading, without your name unless you ask us to show it; and use the condition reading in our estimates and their history. We will not publish your original file, sell it, license it to others for their own use, or use it to train AI models. This permission lasts as long as we keep the photo or report; the Privacy Policy says how to have it deleted, after which only the condition reading and the record that a photo existed remain in our estimate history.

5.4 No payment, no obligation to use. We pay nothing for contributions, and we may decline, hold, or delete any contribution without giving a reason. A photo you send does not create an observation or a "clear" claim until we have reviewed it.

5.5 Your responsibility. If you are not a consumer, you will defend, indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from a contribution that breaches 5.2. If you are a consumer, you are responsible under the law that applies to you for the damage a breach of 5.2 causes, and nothing more.

5.6 Reports about contributions. Anyone who believes a contribution infringes their rights or shows them without permission can use the routes in section 9.

6. Operators and partners

Hotels, beach clubs and other operators who take part in an operator programme (sending photos, reviewing their listing, receiving briefs) do so under the separate terms shown to them when they join. Where none are shown, these terms apply, and section 5 applies to anything they send. An operator's participation is never disclosed on the Service as an endorsement, and an operator's photos are labelled as the operator's.

7. Acceptable use

Do not:

  1. copy, crawl, scrape or bulk-download the Service, its estimates, its hotel catalogue or its data, by hand or by machine, beyond what a normal visit needs, or build a competing dataset from it (the public data endpoints we document may be used under the terms stated beside them);
  2. republish our estimates or condition labels as your own, or present them as confirmed observations, safety information or official data;
  3. send false, misleading, infringing, abusive or unlawful photos or reports, or send a photo you did not take;
  4. try to manipulate an estimate, a confidence label or a ranking, or to abuse the photo tool (for example, by circumventing its rate limits or cookie);
  5. probe, overload, attack or interfere with the Service, our hosting, our data stores or other users;
  6. remove or alter any credit, notice, source attribution or watermark;
  7. use the Service for any purpose that breaks the law where you are or where we are.

We may block, rate-limit or disable access, or remove a contribution, for a breach of these rules or when a law, court or hosting provider requires it. Where reasonable and safe, we tell you the reason and give you a chance to respond by email.

8. Our content and your use of it

8.1 Ours. The Service's text, design, code, estimates, condition labels, data compilations, catalogue, the Terra Continua, BeachSignal and Sargassum Check names and marks, and the photographs we own are the property of Velkan Studio LLC or its licensors. All rights are reserved. The source code is proprietary and is not licensed by publication of the site.

8.2 Yours to do. You may view the Service, link to any page, share pages for personal non-commercial use, and quote short extracts with a link and credit. You may use the public data endpoints we document only as their accompanying notice allows.

8.3 Others'. Map geography is © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Satellite, bulletin and forecast data come from the agencies credited on "Data and sources", under their own terms. Hotel photographs are reproduced with their source credited and remain the property of their owners; they may not be copied from the Service.

8.4 Feedback. If you send us ideas or corrections, we may use them freely without owing you anything.

We respond to copyright notices under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to removal requests from image rights holders, and to reports of illegal content under the laws that apply to us. The Image Credits and Takedown page is part of these terms: it says what a notice must contain, how we act on it, how counter-notices work, and how we handle other reports. Send copyright notices, image removal requests, other reports and reports about people in a contributed photo to contact@sargassumcheck.com. An image rights holder who objects to the use of their image does not need a formal notice: an email identifying the image is enough, and we remove it within 24 hours.

Repeat infringers. We block contributors who repeatedly send infringing material, and we may block after a single serious case.

10. Disclaimer of warranties

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT THE LAW ALLOWS, THE SERVICE AND EVERYTHING ON IT — ESTIMATES, CONFIDENCE LABELS, SEASONAL TENDENCIES, ALTERNATIVES, WEBCAM VIEWS, HOTEL LISTINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, LINKS AND DATA — ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. We disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, timeliness, title and non-infringement. We do not warrant that any estimate is correct, that any beach, water or air is safe or unsafe, that any hotel listing or photo is current, that any link works or leads to the price shown, or that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free.

Consumers: some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions. If you are a consumer in the EU, the UK or another place whose law gives you non-waivable rights, those rights are unaffected, and section 11.4 applies.

11. Limitation of liability

11.1 No indirect damages. To the fullest extent the law allows, Velkan Studio LLC, its member, managers, employees, contractors, licensors and providers are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost bookings, travel costs, lost data, or the cost of substitute services, arising from or related to these terms or the Service — including a trip taken or not taken, a hotel chosen or avoided, or a beach visited or avoided because of anything on the Service — however caused and under any theory of liability, even if we were told such damages were possible.

11.2 Cap. To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability for all claims arising from or related to these terms or the Service is limited to US $100, which reflects that the Service is free.

11.3 Basis of the bargain. The Service is free and informational because of these limits; they are an essential part of our agreement.

11.4 What these limits never exclude. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for our intentional misconduct or gross negligence where the law does not allow it to be excluded, or for anything else that the law that applies to you does not allow to be excluded or limited. If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, these limits apply only to the extent your national law permits; in particular we remain liable without limit for intent and gross negligence and for breach of essential contractual obligations to the extent of the foreseeable damage typical for a free information service, and your statutory rights are unaffected.

11.5 Your own judgement. You accept that decisions about where to travel, stay, swim or walk are yours, made with local information the Service does not have, and that the Service is one input among many.

12. Indemnity

If you are not a consumer, you will defend, indemnify and hold harmless Velkan Studio LLC and its member, managers, employees and agents from claims, liabilities, damages, losses and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your contributions, your use of the Service, or your breach of these terms or the law. If you are a consumer, you are responsible under the law that applies to you for damage you cause by breaching these terms, and nothing more.

13. Governing law and disputes

13.1 Governing law. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, and by the U.S. Federal Arbitration Act, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If you are a consumer in the EU, the UK, Mexico or another place whose mandatory consumer-protection law applies regardless of this choice, that law protects you too, and nothing here takes it away.

13.2 Talk to us first. Before starting any formal proceeding, email contact@sargassumcheck.com with your name, your email, a description of the problem and what you want. We will do the same by emailing you. Both of us will try in good faith to resolve it within 60 days. Limitation periods are paused during those 60 days.

13.3 For users in the United States: binding individual arbitration.

PLEASE READ THIS CAREFULLY. IT AFFECTS YOUR RIGHTS, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO GO TO COURT AND TO A JURY.

(a) Agreement to arbitrate. You and Velkan Studio LLC agree that any dispute, claim or controversy arising out of or relating to these terms or the Service — including its formation, existence, breach, termination, enforcement, interpretation, validity, and the scope of this clause — will be resolved by binding arbitration on an individual basis, except as stated in (b). The arbitrator, not a court, decides whether a dispute is covered, except that only a court may decide the enforceability of the class-action waiver in (e).

(b) Exceptions. Either of us may (i) bring an individual claim in small-claims court if it qualifies there, and (ii) seek an injunction or other equitable relief from a court to stop infringement or misuse of intellectual property or unauthorised access to systems. Claims for public injunctive relief under California law, where that right cannot be waived, are decided by a court after the arbitration of the individual claims.

(c) Rules and process. Arbitration is run by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules in force when the claim is filed (www.adr.org), as modified here. If the AAA will not administer the arbitration, another nationally recognised provider is chosen by agreement or by a court. The arbitrator applies these terms and the governing law, may award the same individual relief a court could, and must give a written decision. Hearings are by video or telephone, or in the county where you live if you prefer. Fees are allocated by the AAA rules; where those rules require us to pay, we pay, and we will not seek to recover our fees from you unless the arbitrator finds your claim frivolous. Each side pays its own attorneys' fees unless the law or the arbitrator provides otherwise.

(d) Mass arbitration. If 25 or more similar demands are filed against us by the same or coordinated counsel, (i) the AAA's Mass Arbitration Supplementary Rules apply; (ii) demands are decided in batches of 25, each by its own arbitrator, with the first batch chosen half by each side; (iii) fees for later batches are not due until the earlier batch is decided; and (iv) between batches both sides take part in a global mediation. Limitation periods are paused for claims waiting their batch.

(e) Class-action and jury waiver. You and Velkan Studio LLC each waive the right to a jury trial and the right to bring or take part in a class, collective, consolidated, representative or private-attorney-general action. The arbitrator may not join claims of different people or award relief to anyone but the individual claimant. If this waiver is found unenforceable for a particular claim, that claim must be decided in court, not in arbitration, and the rest of this section still applies to every other claim.

(f) 30-day opt-out. You can reject this arbitration agreement by emailing contact@sargassumcheck.com with the subject "Arbitration opt-out" and your name within 30 days of first using the Service. Opting out does not affect anything else in these terms. If you opt out, 13.5 applies.

(g) Changes. If we change this section after you accept it, you may reject the change by emailing us within 30 days of the change; the version you accepted will then continue to apply to disputes that arose before the change.

(h) Severability of this section. Except as (e) states, if any part of this section is unenforceable, the rest remains in force.

13.4 For consumers in the EU, the UK and elsewhere. If you are a consumer in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, or another country whose mandatory law gives you the right to sue at home, section 13.3 does not apply to you. You may bring claims in the courts of the country where you live, and we will bring claims against you only there. Mandatory consumer law of your country applies. Alternative dispute resolution: we are not obliged to take part in, and do not take part in, dispute-resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration body; you may still contact a consumer organisation or your national ADR scheme for information.

13.5 Everyone else, and opt-outs. Any dispute not subject to arbitration, and any dispute with someone who opted out, is brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Delaware, and you and we consent to their jurisdiction — except that consumers may use the courts of their residence where the law gives them that right.

13.6 Time limit. Where the law allows, any claim against us must be started within one year after it arose.

14. General

14.1 Changes to these terms. We may change these terms. For material changes we show a notice on the Service at least 30 days before they take effect; smaller changes, such as wording or a new feature's section, take effect when posted with an updated date. If you do not agree, stop using the Service before the change takes effect. Using the Service after the effective date means you accept the new terms. Changes to section 13.3 follow 13.3(g). Earlier versions are available on request.

14.2 Entire agreement; severability; waiver. These terms and the documents in 2.3 are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service, and replace all earlier ones (including any earlier page that said the Service earns no commission). If a provision is unenforceable, it is enforced to the extent allowed and the rest stays in force. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver.

14.3 Assignment. You may not transfer these terms. We may transfer them to an affiliate or to a successor in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, and will say so on the Service.

14.4 No third-party beneficiaries.

14.5 Notices. We notify you on the Service or, where you have written to us, by email. You notify us at the addresses in section 1.

14.6 Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for failing to perform because of events beyond reasonable control — including the failure of a satellite product, an agency feed, a webcam or a hosting provider.

14.7 Language. These terms are written in English. A translation is for convenience; where the law does not require otherwise, the English text governs.

14.8 Survival. Sections 5.3–5.5, 8, 9, 10–13 and 14 survive the end of your use of the Service.

Velkan Studio LLC · 2093 Philadelphia Pike, Ste 2073, Claymont, DE 19703, United States · contact@sargassumcheck.com