Legal FAQ

What is Contentful?

Contentful is a cloud-based content management platform. Our typical customer can be an online publisher using Contentful to create an iPhone mobile app for serving sports news. Contentful helps the customer with the underlying technical infrastructure, so that:

• Editors from your organization, partner agencies, and freelance contributors can create and edit the content in our web-based application (e.g. write articles about games, upload images, define relevant URLs)
• Developers from your organization, partner agencies, and freelance developers can write code in a way that enables your new iPhone app - the so-called “presentation layer” - to load the content produced by your editors directly from the Contentful platform.

The structure of your content is completely flexible and can be defined by a member of your team in accordance with the requirements of your project (e.g. articles, FAQs, product information, hotel reviews, landing pages, promotional in-app material and so on).

Similarly, your development team is free to integrate content into any application, device type or platform, as long as these endpoints support displaying content. For example, content can be loaded into a website, mobile apps, smart watches, car navigation systems, digital signage, ATMs, map overlays, chat bots, or smart TVs.

A non-technical overview of Contentful’s service is available at: https://www.contentful.com/not-a-developer/.

What kind of content is stored in Contentful?

Contentful is a content management system, not a generic database. Your editorial team can use Contentful to create, store and manage a variety of content formats - from text and images to location data and structured item lists. As a rule, all this content is intended for the wider public and is freely accessible through your websites, mobile apps, digital kiosks, etc. The public nature of editorial content means it is not subject to confidentiality or privacy policies.

Since Contentful was built from the ground up to serve editorial content and that has certain legal and technical implications for the type of content you deliver through our platform. You should be fine storing typical editorial content which includes:

• News articles (e.g. politics, sports, fashion)
• Blog posts for your website
• Product information (e.g. product descriptions for an e-commerce store)
• Store locations and hours
• Photo galleries and short videos
• In-app notifications

We strongly discourage you from storing any sensitive, regulated, or ephemeral content on our platform, including:

• Any user-generated content such as comments, posts, images, peer-to-peer messaging
• Any sensitive data such as user accounts, email addresses, payment details, private keys
• Any sensor-produced data such as GPS waypoints, temperature readings, electricity consumption, traffic and weather conditions
• Any real-time data such as sports scores, exchange rates, trading orders, flight tracking data
• Any personally identifiable information (PII) such as ID numbers, Social Security numbers, patient information and more

Why would my organization want to use Contentful?

Contentful provides the ready-to-use infrastructure for powering your content-driven applications. Thanks to our service, your development team can channel its efforts to building out modules providing high business value and launching new projects quickly, instead of building, scaling and maintaining the underlying plumbing.

By focusing on developing, managing and scaling content infrastructure for thousands of customers, Contentful can ensure that your content is delivered faster, stays more secure, and is always accessible. All this, at a fraction of the cost it takes to achieve similar performance levels with the in-house team.

How does Contentful deliver its services?

Contentful is a cloud-based web application with programming interfaces for developers and additional tooling for specific programming languages. Contentful develops and operates its software service in a multi-tenant hosting environment.

This means that your organization does not need to run any software (besides the presentation layer in which content is displayed) on your servers, but instead is granted access to the content stored in the Contentful cloud-based backend.

Due to its cloud-based architecture, Contentful does not ship installation CDs with proprietary software. Contentful is solely used as a cloud service, all intellectual property rights of the Contentful platform stay with Contentful.

How reliable is Contentful?

Contentful hosts and delivers content for the world’s largest organizations during on a routine day and during the high-traffic events like Black Friday or the Super Bowl. We make an effort to provide a reliable service.

• Our uptime history is available on https://www.contentfulstatus.com/ Our enterprise SLAs enterprise SLAs guarantee our customers service levels for service availability and support.
• We take security seriously (https://www.contentful.com/security/) and include our security standards in our enterprise contract

Contentful has been highlighted as a top vendor by industry analysts such as Gartner and Forrester. To date, Contentful has received about $20m in funding from some of the world’s most recognized investors.

Can we pay by check, wire transfer or PayPal?

Our self-service tier is built for the highest degree of automation, which permits us to offer self-service plans at low prices.

Adding custom payment terms or payment methods would result in high running costs and make the current plan prices untenable.

For this reason, we only accept payments by credit card on the self-service tier. Get in touch with our sales team for the improved enterprise version of Contentful, where we also support purchase orders, wire transfers (ACH, SEPA) and checks.

Can we change or amend the terms of service?

Just as for payment methods, offering custom legal terms would incur a lot of additional costs making it unsustainable for us to offer self-service plans at the current price levels.

For this reason, we do not support any changes to our online terms nor signing of any additional agreements nor carrying out of custom security audits on our self-service tier.

If you require more flexibility, contact our sales team to find out about the premium enterprise version of Contentful, where we offer more room for custom agreements.