Terms of Service

What Changed on 29 October 2026

This version replaces the one dated 26 October 2026. In short:

• Your Asbern box has a paragraph of its own in section 6. It runs in Docker on your own machine, under your control, and creates game servers there only from a list of games we have checked. It asks your router to open a game's player ports only if you allowed that when you installed it, and only while that game server runs; section 6 says how to turn that off. You are responsible for the game servers you run with it, and for following each game's licence.
• Names that point at your home. Where a deployment has a names domain, a game server that friends outside can join gets a name that points at your home's internet address while it runs. Section 6 says what that means, and that the names are ours.
• Certificates for a watch party on your box. The box orders them from Let's Encrypt, and by switching the watch party on you accept Let's Encrypt's Subscriber Agreement (section 6).
• Acceptable use (section 4) now covers game servers and watch parties reached through Asbern and the names we give them, says where to report abuse, and says that over a report of abuse we may take a server's names down until we lift that.
• Copyright notices (section 14) now cover watch parties and game servers, and say what we do with a notice, how a server's administrators can answer one, and how we deal with repeat infringers on watch parties.
• Where game servers run. Section 6 now says that the game-server controls start and stop servers on the machine of the server's administrator, through their Asbern box. It used to say "the operator's own machine".

If you last read the version dated 19 October 2026, the version dated 26 October 2026 changed this too:

• Section 7 now opens by saying when it applies. Where Asbern is offered free, no subscription, trial or lifetime purchase can be started, and section 7 governs only a subscription started before Asbern was free and any paid plan offered later, with notice. The price and everything else in section 7 are unchanged.
• Nothing else changed. Every other section reads as it did in the version dated 19 October 2026.

If you last read the version dated 15 October 2026, the version dated 19 October 2026 changed this too:

• Two features in section 7 have new names: Send to AFK and Access. Send to AFK now moves people into Discord's own AFK channel. Setting that channel up is part of the administrative console, which is free.

If you last read the version dated 8 October 2026, the version dated 15 October 2026 changed this too:

• The headings are capitalised as titles. Each section heading now capitalises its main words, for example "5. The In-Server Currency and the Games". Only capital letters changed: no heading was re-worded, and no section was added, removed or moved.
• The live tour is now the Asbern Demo, on the home page. Section 2 calls it by that name. What it does is unchanged: it runs the real bot on a throwaway demo server that is deleted after use.

If you last read the version dated 29 September 2026, the version dated 8 October 2026 changed this too:

• When Asbern is offered free, these terms say so. A short section ahead of section 7 appears on any deployment that offers Asbern free of charge: while it is free nothing new is charged and no subscription, trial or lifetime purchase can be started; section 7 still applies to a subscription started before; and if paid plans are introduced we will give notice before they apply, and nothing is charged unless you choose a plan.

1. Agreement

By adding Asbern to a Discord server, or by using it in a server where somebody else has added it, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use it. These terms are between you and Asbern LLC ("we", "us").

You must also comply with Discord's own Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. Nothing here overrides them.

Age and capacity. Asbern runs inside Discord and is not directed at children. You must meet Discord's own minimum age for your country — 13 in most places and higher in some — and you must have the legal capacity where you live to agree to terms like these. If you do not, you may not use Asbern. Whoever starts a subscription is additionally confirming that they are of full age and have the capacity to enter into it, or that a parent or guardian has done so on their behalf. We do not ask anybody's age and we hold no age verification, so this is your statement rather than something we have checked.

2. What Asbern Is

Asbern is community-management software for Discord servers. It provides activity levels and ranks, an in-server virtual economy, casino and idle games, the Pokémon adventure, a shared watch-party "screening room" for media the server owner already possesses, controls for game servers that run on the server owner's own machine, long-run server statistics, moderation tools and an administrative console — all driven from a single /menu command.

That paragraph describes the main features and is not a complete list. Asbern also carries the counting game, support tickets, giveaways, polls, a feedback inbox, a starboard, birthday and reminder features, social-media alerts and screening-room requests, and features are added and removed between versions. Which of them exist in any one server is that server's administrators' choice, and the Privacy Policy describes what each one keeps.

There is also a website. It shows you what the bot already holds about the servers you are in, and it handles sign-in and, where a subscription applies, billing. Nothing on it can change your levels, your balance or anything else you have earned. The Asbern Demo on its home page runs the real bot on a throwaway demo server that is deleted after use, so nothing you press there touches anybody's data. It can also keep two anonymous counters about its own traffic, which whoever runs this deployment may switch on; the Privacy Policy sets out exactly what those hold, which is nothing that identifies anybody.

3. Who Is Responsible for What

• The server owner installs Asbern, chooses which features are switched on, decides which channels it uses, holds the files it writes, and is responsible for how it is used in their server.
• We provide the software and run this deployment of it.
• You are responsible for your own conduct in the server.

4. Acceptable Use

You may not:

• use Asbern to break Discord's Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, or any law that applies to you;
• exploit, manipulate or automate the economy or the games — including with alternate accounts, scripts, or by abusing a bug instead of reporting it;
• attempt to gain administrative access to the bot or to the machine it runs on;
• interfere with its operation for other members, including by flooding, spamming or deliberately triggering rate limits;
• use the watch-party feature with material you do not have the right to play to the people you are playing it to;
• serve anything through a game server or watch party reached through Asbern, or under a name we give it, other than that server's own game or watch party — no phishing, no collecting visitors' addresses or sign-ins, no other website or service, and no malware;
• use a game server created through Asbern, or the connection to it, to attack, probe, scan, flood or spam anything else on the internet, or to disguise where traffic comes from;
• use a name we give a server to pass yourself off as somebody else.

We, or the server's own administrators, may restrict or remove your access at any time for breaching these terms. Over a report of abuse we may also take down a server's names: they come down within minutes and stay down until we lift that, however often its game servers are started again, though the game servers themselves keep running. We may also switch a server's watch party off, which takes its watch-party names down within minutes, or restrict or remove Asbern's access to that server.

To report abuse — phishing, malware, an attack coming from a game server, or anything else served through Asbern that breaks this section — email support@asbern.gg with the subject line Abuse, and say what you saw and the name or address involved.

5. The In-Server Currency and the Games

The currency and the casino games are entertainment features inside a Discord server. Specifically, and without exception:

• the currency has no real-world value;
• it cannot be purchased with real money — there is no purchase path in the software, and a subscription buys features, never currency;
• it cannot be exchanged, redeemed, cashed out or transferred for anything of real-world value;
• it is not a security, a token, a deposit or a payment instrument;
• balances, items and progress may be adjusted, reset or lost as a result of bugs, moderation, data loss or changes to the software, and no compensation of any kind is owed if that happens.

The games are games of chance played for entertainment with a valueless currency. They are not gambling services.

6. Media, Game Servers and Third-Party Services

The screening room plays media from a library the server owner already operates on their own hardware. We supply no media, host none, index none and distribute none. What is played, and whether it may lawfully be played to that audience, is entirely the server owner's responsibility.

Asbern does integrate with request and library tooling a server owner may already run, and it is better that you read that here than discover it later. Two features exist, both off until the operator configures them, and both acting only on services the operator installed and holds the credentials for:

• Requesting a title. If you search the screening room for something the library does not have, Asbern can offer the closest matches Plex's own catalogue knows about. Choosing one adds that title to the server owner's own Plex watchlist and notes that you asked, so you can be told if it turns up. Asbern's whole part in that is the watchlist entry: it runs no search of any index, contacts no tracker, and downloads nothing. Whatever the owner has connected behind their watchlist is theirs, configured by them, on their hardware, under its own terms.
• Seeing where a request has got to. If the owner runs Radarr or Sonarr and puts their addresses and API keys into the bot's environment, Asbern can read those services' queues so a member sees "downloading, 40 minutes left", "importing", "stalled" or "not out yet" instead of silence. It reads. It does not add, search, grab, retry or acquire, and with no API key set it never contacts them at all.

So the honest statement is that Asbern is a client of tooling the operator already runs, not a source of media. It ships no content, no indexer, no tracker list and no download client, and it obtains nothing itself. Everything those services do, and everything they are pointed at, is the operator's own doing and the operator's own responsibility.

• The game-server controls create, start and stop servers on the machine of the server's administrator, through their Asbern box below. Those games are governed by their own publishers' terms.
• Asbern can talk to third-party services the operator configures — a media server, a download queue, a statistics provider, a game server, a fantasy-league feed. Those services have their own terms and we are not responsible for them.

Your Asbern box. An Asbern box is a set of Asbern programs that a server's administrator installs in Docker on a machine they own, and links to their server with a one-time code. Through it, Asbern creates game servers on that machine, starts and stops them, reaches the media server on it and runs the server's watch party there.

• It runs on your machine, under your control. It creates only games from a list we have checked, with the options that list allows, and it starts and stops only those and the containers you linked to it. You can unlink it from Discord, or take it off the machine, at any time.
• What it does to your router. If you allowed it when you installed the box, then while a game server runs with Friends outside can join switched on, the box asks your router to forward that game's player ports to your machine, and asks it to stop when the server stops. It never asks for any other port, and it keeps the game servers themselves from asking your router for anything; on a machine where it cannot do that, it opens nothing. A forward it could not withdraw — because the machine switched off first, say — lapses by itself within an hour. On Windows, the installer adds a Windows Firewall rule for the game ports only after saying what it does, and Windows asks you first.
• How to turn it off. On the machine, docker exec -it asbern-agent asbern ports off closes every port the box opened and stops it asking again; only the machine can turn it back on, with docker exec -it asbern-agent asbern ports on. For one game server, switch Friends outside off; for every one at once, press Close all now on the Router ports row of the box's status in the admin console. Remove, under Box or under Media, closes them too, if the box is connected when you press it.
• Names. Where this deployment has a names domain, each game server friends outside can join gets a name under it, which points at your home's internet address while that server runs. Everyone who joins sees that address, and a name can be found without being shared; the Privacy Policy says what is kept and what we cannot erase. The names are ours and come with the service: we choose the domain, and if it changes the names change with it; no other server can have a name you let go until it has rested for 30 days.
• Certificates. For a watch party on your box, the box orders a certificate from Let's Encrypt. By switching the watch party on you accept the Let's Encrypt Subscriber Agreement, which the box agrees to on your behalf when it orders one; it gives Let's Encrypt no contact address.
• You are responsible for the game servers you run with it: for the server software and the machine it runs on, for who you let connect, and for following each game's own licence and end-user licence agreement. For example, Minecraft's EULA is accepted by you, with your own press in Discord, when you create the server. We accept no game's licence on your behalf.
• A game server that friends outside can join is reachable from the internet like any server you host yourself, and so are the flaws in its own software.
• A PC linked with the earlier Asbern Companion app keeps working. That app opens router ports, or adds a Windows Firewall rule, only when you choose that for a particular game server on its own page, and asks your router to close those ports when that server stops; if the computer switches off first, the router's own time limit, or the app's next start, closes them.
• Sections 9 and 10 apply to it as they do to the rest of Asbern.

Asbern Is Free

Asbern is free: every feature is included in every server, and nothing new is charged. While it is free, no subscription, trial or lifetime purchase can be started. If we introduce paid plans, we will give notice before they apply — in these terms and on this website — and nothing is charged unless you choose a plan. Section 7 applies to a subscription started before Asbern was free, which is charged until it is cancelled, and to paid plans if they are offered.

7. Subscription, Trial and Payment

• When this section applies. Where this deployment offers Asbern free — the section above says so when it does — no subscription, trial or lifetime purchase can be started, and this section governs only a subscription started before Asbern was free and any paid plan offered later, with notice.
• The subscription is called Premium. Its price is $8.99 per Discord server per month, in USD, plus any sales tax that applies. That monthly price is the standard rate. Checkout sends the payment processor exactly one price, and no annual or alternative plan is on sale as this version ships.
• What Premium does NOT include, and this is a carve-out rather than a footnote. The casino games and the Pokémon adventure are free to everyone, in every server, whether or not anybody subscribes. They are not sold, they are not part of Premium or of any plan, they are not withheld when a subscription lapses, and no payment of any kind unlocks, extends or improves either of them. Paying us buys the rest; it buys nothing in those two.
• There are two tiers and this is all of them. The free tier is the casino games and their daily claim, the Pokémon adventure and importing a server's history from StatBot. Premium, the paid tier, is everything else Asbern does — activity levels and ranks, statistics, automod and anti-raid, verification, support tickets, staff logs, appeals, Send to AFK and Access, the screening room and Live TV, game-server control and the in-server economy. The administrative console itself is free, and so are the moderation actions and the member and channel reports inside it — warning, timing out, voice-banning, kicking and banning a member, locking the server down and purging a channel. Every server can open the console, subscription or not, and so is /menu. History imported from StatBot is shown on the Premium statistics screens, so a server can bring its history across without paying and see it once it subscribes.
• Who may start a subscription, and who may manage it. Anyone who can add a bot to a server — in Discord, that is the Manage Server permission, which Administrator includes — may start that server's subscription. Only the Discord account that started it can manage or cancel it; another administrator of the same server cannot.
• Promotional prices. From time to time a promotional price may be offered for a limited period — for example a lower price for a server's first few monthly charges. The pricing page describes a promotion before it can be bought: the promotional price, how many monthly charges it covers, which servers qualify and the last day it can be started. The checkout page shows the promotional price and the total before you pay, plus any sales tax that applies. A promotion is applied automatically to a server that qualifies — there is no code to enter. It may be limited to servers that have never subscribed before and to a fixed number of servers, and it ends when its last day passes or its places are taken, whichever comes first. When the promotional charges have been taken, the subscription continues at the standard monthly price above until you cancel. A promotion never changes the price of a period already paid for, and it cannot be combined with another one.
• Sales tax. Prices on this site do not include sales tax. Where it applies, it is worked out at checkout from your billing address, added to the price shown, and included in the total the checkout page shows before you pay.
• One free trial per server. A server that has never subscribed may start one 30-day free trial. A payment card is required to start it and nothing is charged during it. If you cancel before the trial ends, you are not charged. A server that has had a subscription before, or has been given Premium with a complimentary code, does not get a second trial: subscribing again starts a paid month straight away.
• Payments are processed by Stripe. Card details are entered on Stripe's pages and never reach us. Where the checkout page says the sale is "Sold through Link", the seller of record is Link, Stripe's payment service: Link collects and pays the sales tax on the sale, the receipt comes from Link, your card statement shows the charge beginning LINK.COM* followed by the seller's statement name (LINK.COM* ASBERN for the hosted Asbern service), and you can also manage or cancel the subscription at link.com.
• Watch parties and game servers run on hardware you already own — your own homelab, linked to the bot. A subscription does not include media hosting or game hosting, and it does not supply either. Everything else works with no hardware of your own.

To cancel, the account that started the subscription opens the Your servers page on this website (/servers) and presses Manage or cancel on that server — or Cancel or manage, on a server the bot has been removed from. A subscription sold through Link can also be cancelled at link.com. If neither is open to you, write to support@asbern.gg. Cancelling stops future charges; the subscription runs to the end of the period already paid for, and keeps every paid feature until then.

There are no refunds. Cancelling does not refund a period already paid for, in whole or in part, and neither does removing the bot or leaving the paid features unused. If you believe you were charged by mistake, write to support@asbern.gg.

If you live in the European Union or the United Kingdom, the law there normally gives a consumer 14 days to withdraw from an online purchase without giving a reason. Premium starts working the moment a subscription starts — during a free trial as well — so by starting a subscription you ask for Premium to be supplied straight away, within those 14 days, and you acknowledge that you lose the right to withdraw once Premium has started. The purchase terms shown before you pay say the same. Nothing is charged during a free trial, so cancelling within the trial costs nothing. Where the law of the country you live in gives you a right that these terms cannot take away, nothing here takes it from you.

Removing the bot does not cancel the subscription. A subscription belongs to a server, and it keeps renewing until the account that started it cancels it, whether or not the bot is still in that server. If the bot is added back while the subscription is still paid for, the paid features come back with it.

Removing the bot deletes nothing either. The server's data, its subscription record included, is kept until somebody asks for it to be deleted, and even then the subscription record is kept while the subscription is still running, as the Privacy Policy describes. That is also why removing the bot and adding it back never earns a server a second free trial.

What a Failed Payment Actually Does

The bot does not leave your server, and nothing is deleted. Each failed charge moves the server exactly one step along this ladder, and a failed charge never skips a step:

Step	What changes
Active	Everything works.
Grace — after the first failed charge	Nothing changes. The charge is retried.
Read-only — after the second	Nothing changes yet either. The software records the state; it withholds nothing.
Lapsed — after the third	The paid features pause and say so where you would have opened them.

Read-only does not withhold anything today, and we would rather say so than let the name imply a restriction you are not under. The name describes what that rung is meant for; nothing in the software acts on it.

At Lapsed, the menu still opens. What pauses is the paid tier: those buttons grey out and say that the subscription has lapsed and that renewing brings them back. The free tier keeps working exactly as it did — the casino games and the Pokémon adventure are unaffected in every respect. Nothing is hidden that you were not paying for.

The steps are counted in failed charges, not in days. How long a server spends on each rung is Stripe's retry schedule and the operator's Stripe settings, so this page will not promise you a date.

Even at the last step the casino and the Pokémon adventure keep working, levelling, statistics and the counting game carry on being recorded, every file is retained, and the bot stays in the server — so when the paid tier comes back, its history has no gap in it.

How it comes back depends on whether the subscription is still live. While Stripe is still trying the card, paying what is owed — usually by updating the card — restores everything immediately and completely, from any step. Starting a second subscription beside it is refused, because that would charge the same server twice. Once a subscription has ended — at the end of the paid period after it was cancelled, or if Stripe ends it after its retries have run out — the server goes straight to Lapsed rather than walking the ladder, and paying an invoice left over from the ended subscription does not restart it: subscribing again is the way back, with no second free trial, and the server finds its history unbroken.

Changing the price. We may change the price. If we raise it, we will email the account that started each existing subscription, at the address given at checkout, at least 30 days before the new price applies to that subscription. It then applies from that subscription's first renewal after those 30 days — never to a period already paid for — and you can cancel before it does. A lower price may apply sooner.

8. Availability

Asbern is provided as is and as available. It is online only when the machine running it is online. We do not guarantee availability, uptime, data preservation, or that any feature will continue to exist. In particular, opening router ports depends on your router, and we do not promise that it works with every router; and a name depends on DNS services we do not run.

9. No Warranty

To the maximum extent the law allows, Asbern is provided without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

10. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent the law allows, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or exemplary damages, or for any loss of data, progress, virtual currency, profits or server availability, arising from your use of Asbern. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount paid for the subscription in the twelve months before the claim.

11. Termination

You may stop using Asbern at any time. A server owner may remove it at any time. Removing it deletes nothing: the server's data is kept until somebody asks for it to be deleted, and the Privacy Policy says how to ask. We may discontinue it, or any feature of it, at any time.

12. Changes to These Terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top changes when they do, the list at the top says what changed, and they are kept in the same version control as the software so their history is reviewable. Continuing to use Asbern after a change means you accept it.

13. Governing Law, and Where a Dispute Is Heard

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of Asbern, are governed by the law of the State of Texas, United States of America, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules — so the law named here applies wherever you happen to be reading this.

Any such dispute is to be brought only in the courts of that same jurisdiction, and both you and we agree to submit to them. If the law where you live gives you a right to bring a claim somewhere else that you cannot agree away, this clause does not take it from you.

14. Copyright Notices

Asbern stores and distributes no media of its own: the screening room plays from a library a server owner runs on their own hardware, and a watch party on an Asbern box is served from that box (section 6). If you believe something reachable through Asbern infringes your copyright — including a notice under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act — email support@asbern.gg with the subject line Copyright notice, and include:

• your name and how to reach you;
• the work you say is being infringed;
• where the material is — the Discord server, and the channel or screen, or the name a watch party or game server was reached at — in enough detail for us to find it;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by you, your agent or the law;
• a statement that the information in the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you own the right or are authorised to act for the person who does;
• your signature, which may be typed.

What we do with a notice. We read every notice we receive, and act on a complete one promptly. Material held on a server owner's own hardware is theirs to remove, so we pass the notice on to that server's administrators where we can reach them. Where the material is reached through a watch party, we may switch that server's watch party off: its names are taken down within minutes, so it can no longer be reached at them, and from Discord it cannot be switched back on and no new screening can start. The programs on the server owner's box are theirs, and switching it off does not stop them. We may also restrict or remove Asbern's access to that server (section 4).

If you think a notice was a mistake. If you run a server whose watch party was switched off over a notice, and you believe in good faith that the material was removed by mistake or misidentified, you may email a counter-notice to the same address with the subject line Counter-notice. Include your name, address and telephone number; what was switched off and where it appeared; a statement, under penalty of perjury, that you believe in good faith it was removed by mistake or misidentification; a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the judicial district in which your address is located (or, if your address is outside the United States, of any judicial district in which we may be found), and that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the notice or their agent; and your signature. We pass a complete counter-notice to the person who sent the notice, telling them we will lift the switch in ten business days. We then lift it, so that the server's administrators can turn the watch party back on, no less than ten and no more than fourteen business days after we receive the counter-notice, unless the person who sent the notice first tells us they have filed a court action to stop it.

Repeat infringers. We keep a record of each time a server's watch party is switched off over a notice, and of each time it is switched back on — the newest 50 for each server — and we keep it when Watch comes back. Where a server — or the people who run it — are the subject of repeated valid notices for a watch party, we will in appropriate circumstances switch its watch party off for good and end Asbern's service to that server and to those accounts.

15. Contact

Email support@asbern.gg.

By post: Asbern LLC, 32418 Poplar Grove Ln, Oak Ridge North, TX 77386, USA.