The agreement that governs your use of Airballoon and the conferences run on it.
These Terms of Service ("Terms") form a binding agreement between you and Lumvex Labs LLC, doing business as Airballoon. They govern your access to and use of airballoon.com, the Airballoon web and mobile applications, conference websites we host on your behalf, and the conference-management services (Submission & Review, Registration, Presentation, Social/Networking) and any related APIs (collectively, the "Services").
By creating an account, accessing the Services, signing a Platform Services Agreement, registering for a conference run on Airballoon, or otherwise using the Services, you agree to be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy. If you accept on behalf of an organization, you represent that you have authority to bind it.
You must be at least 16 years old (or the age of digital consent in your jurisdiction, whichever is higher). The Services are not intended for individuals barred from receiving them under U.S. or other applicable law.
You agree to provide accurate information and keep it up to date. You are responsible for safeguarding your password and for all activity under your account. Notify us immediately at support@airballoon.ai (mark it Attn: Security) if you suspect unauthorized access.
The Services are role-based. You agree to use the Services only within the role(s) granted to you and not to access data, features, or conferences for which you have not been granted access.
Airballoon is provided as a single platform that includes the full conference-management feature set; features are not gated behind paid service tiers. The platform is organized into packages:
Conferences created under earlier pricing keep their original terms. See §4.2 for fees.
Organizers pay the platform fees set out in their Platform Services Agreement, which currently are:
| Service | Fee |
|---|---|
| AirMaster (Conference management) | Free. Conference setup and management are included at no charge. |
| AirReview (Submission & Review) | Free. Paper submission, peer review, and AI-assisted review tooling are included at no charge. We may, in the future, charge a per-submission fee to unlock or download submissions; it is not currently charged and would be disclosed in advance in your Platform Services Agreement. |
| AirReg, full conference (Registration) | 2.9% + $0.99 once per transaction. |
| AirReg, standalone (Registration) | 3.0% + $0.99 per registration (registration run without the full conference platform). |
| AirCore, full conference (Shared participant identity and data) | Free on or before December 31, 2026; 3.0% after that date. |
| AirUp (Presentation system) | A one-time storage fee per presentation that stores materials: $5 per presentation for documents (paper / slides / abstract) plus $5 per 200 MB of video, summed across the Conference and billed to the Organizer once, at the end of the Conference. That charge covers three years of storage from the end of the Conference; after three years an additional fee may be required to continue storing the materials, and we will contact the Organizer before any further charge applies. |
| BalloonUp (Event app) | Free. The companion event / networking app is included at no additional charge. |
Airballoon's platform fees are pure platform revenue and do not include payment-processing costs. Stripe's processing fees (currently 2.9% + $0.30 per card transaction in the United States, plus international, cross-border, and currency-conversion fees where applicable) are borne by the Organizer, as are any processing fee Stripe does not return on a refund and any dispute or chargeback fees, in both the Organizer-direct and platform-facilitated payment configurations. Organizers authorize Airballoon to deduct registration platform fees from registration proceeds before disbursing the balance to the Organizer, and to charge the one-time AirUp storage fee to the Organizer's payment method on file at the end of the Conference. All platform fees are non-refundable, even where the Organizer refunds a registrant. Fee schedules are subject to change with notice as set out in the Platform Services Agreement.
Features identified as "preview" or "experimental" are provided as is, may be unstable or discontinued, and are excluded from any service-level commitments.
We use commercially reasonable efforts to keep the Services available. We may schedule maintenance and may suspend access without notice where required for security, legal, or operational reasons. We do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free operation.
Subject to your compliance with these Terms, Airballoon grants you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable license to access and use the Services for your internal use in running, participating in, or attending Conferences. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.
You agree not to, and not to permit anyone else to:
(a) Use the Services in violation of any law or third-party right (IP, privacy, anti-spam, export-control, sanctions); (b) Use the Services for fraud, money laundering, terrorist financing, or any activity prohibited by Stripe's Acceptable Use Policy; (c) Upload Content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, infringing, obscene, or contains malware; (d) Interfere with or disrupt the Services, gain unauthorized access, or evade rate limits; (e) Scrape or harvest data outside an Organizer's permitted use of their own Conference; (f) Send unsolicited bulk communications outside the legitimate operation of a Conference; (g) Copy, modify, or reverse-engineer the Services (except where applicable law requires); (h) Misuse the review system (submit reviews you didn't author, undermine peer review, violate blind-review rules); (i) Bypass blind-review, COI, eligibility, or paper-coverage controls.
We may suspend or remove Content or accounts that violate these rules and, where serious or repeated, terminate access.
If you accept a reviewer, area-chair, or PC role, you agree that submissions, reviewer identities (where blind), reviews, scores, discussions, and decisions are confidential and that you will use them only to perform your duties for the Conference. You will not disclose, copy, or retain such materials beyond what the Organizer authorizes, and you will follow the Conference's COI rules.
By submitting a Submission you represent and warrant that:
(a) You have the right to submit the work and to grant the license in §6; (b) The work does not infringe any third party's IP, privacy, or publicity rights; (c) Co-authors are accurately listed and have authorized the submission; (d) You have disclosed conflicts of interest where required by the Conference; (e) The work complies with the Conference's policies on plagiarism, dual submission, and AI-assisted authorship.
(a) Comply with the Platform Services Agreement and these Terms; (b) Provide accurate Conference information and use the Services only for legitimate conferences; (c) Maintain a valid Stripe account in good standing if using the Registration service; (d) Establish and publish your own registration, refund, code-of-conduct, and accessibility policies, and apply them consistently; (e) Obtain and honor all necessary consents from authors, reviewers, and attendees; (f) Comply with applicable privacy laws (GDPR, UK GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, etc.) as controller of Conference data; (g) Not use the Services for events promoting violence, discrimination, illegal content, or any activity prohibited by Stripe's Acceptable Use Policy.
You retain ownership of Content you submit. By submitting Content, you grant Airballoon a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable license to host, store, copy, transmit, display, adapt (including format conversion), and otherwise process the Content solely as necessary to provide the Services to you and to the relevant Conference. The license ends when the Content is deleted, except for backups retained per the Privacy Policy and Content already shared with third parties (e.g., co-authors, reviewers).
As between Airballoon and the Organizer, Conference data belongs to the Organizer or its respective users. Between an Organizer and its users, ownership and licensing of Submissions are governed by the Conference's published policies (e.g., copyright transfer, Creative Commons, ACM/IEEE policies), not by these Terms.
We may create and use aggregated, de-identified data that does not identify you or any Conference for product improvement, security, benchmarking, and reporting. We will not attempt to re-identify it and will not disclose Conference-identifying analytics without the Organizer's consent.
Suggestions, ideas, or feedback you give us may be used by us without restriction or compensation.
The Services and all related software, design, text, graphics, logos, and trademarks belong to Airballoon, Lumvex Labs LLC, or our licensors. "Airballoon" and the Airballoon logo are our trademarks. Nothing in these Terms grants you a right to use them without our prior written consent.
We respond to DMCA-compliant notices. Send notices to support@airballoon.ai (mark it Attn: DMCA), including the information required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3). Repeat infringers' accounts may be terminated.
Some features use AI services for review summaries, keyword suggestions, translation, and similar tasks. You acknowledge that:
(a) AI output may be inaccurate, biased, or incomplete; you remain responsible for any decision you make using it; (b) AI features are intended to assist, not replace, human judgment in peer review and other consequential workflows; (c) Conferences may have policies restricting or requiring disclosure of AI-assisted authorship or reviewing; you must follow those policies; (d) We do not use your Content to train general-purpose models, and we contractually require AI sub-processors to use your Content only to return a result for your request.
Misuse of AI features, for example generating reviews you did not meaningfully author or violating a Conference's AI-disclosure rules, is a breach of these Terms.
The Services integrate with third-party providers, including Stripe (payments), AWS (hosting and platform services), Zoom / Microsoft Teams / Google Meet / Cisco Webex (live sessions, where the Organizer connects their own account), ORCID, institutional SSO, and others. Your use of those services is governed by their own terms and privacy policies. Airballoon is not responsible for third-party services, and a failure or change in a third-party service is not a breach by us.
Except as expressly stated, the Services are provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory. Airballoon disclaims all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.
Airballoon does not warrant that the Services will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or free of malicious code, or that any data will be complete or accurate. Airballoon is not a party to the contract between an Organizer and its registrants, authors, or reviewers, and does not guarantee the quality, safety, or legality of any Conference.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties; in those jurisdictions, the exclusions apply to the maximum extent permitted by law.
The exclusions and limits in this Section 10 apply to every claim between us arising out of or relating to these Terms or your use of the Services, whatever legal theory or form of action it is brought under, whether contract, negligence, statute, or otherwise. They apply to each of us and to our affiliates and personnel, including Lumvex Labs LLC and our officers, directors, employees, and agents; they survive termination of these Terms; and they continue to apply even if a remedy set out elsewhere in these Terms fails of its essential purpose.
Except where §10.4 says otherwise, neither of us is responsible to the other for indirect, incidental, special, or punitive losses, or for lost revenue, lost profits, lost goodwill, reputational harm, business interruption, or lost or corrupted data, whether or not those losses were foreseeable and whether or not we were told they were possible.
Except where §10.4 says otherwise, the total amount either of us can owe the other for everything arising out of these Terms is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the three (3) months before the first event giving rise to the claim, or fifty U.S. dollars (US$50). This is one cumulative limit covering all claims together, not a fresh limit for each claim. It does not include amounts that merely passed through us, such as Stripe's processing fees or registration proceeds paid to an Organizer, because those are not fees we earned.
Nothing in §10.2 or §10.3 limits responsibility for:
(a) fraud, gross negligence, or deliberate misconduct; (b) misuse of the Services in breach of the restrictions in these Terms, including using another conference's data; (c) breaking the confidentiality obligations that protect unpublished submissions, reviews, and reviewer identities; (d) the amounts you agreed to cover under §11; (e) infringing the other's intellectual property, including authors' and reviewers' work handled through the Services; (f) anything the law does not permit us to limit or exclude.
Some jurisdictions do not allow certain losses to be limited. Where that is so, this section applies only as far as the law allows and the rest of these Terms continues in effect.
You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Airballoon, Lumvex Labs LLC, and our officers, directors, employees, and agents from third-party claims, damages, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or relating to:
(a) Your breach of these Terms or the Platform Services Agreement; (b) Your Content or your use of the Services; (c) Your violation of any law or third-party right (including IP and privacy); (d) A Conference you organize, including registrant disputes, refund claims, and on-site incidents; (e) Your negligence or willful misconduct.
These Terms apply from the date you first access the Services and continue while you use them.
You may stop using the Services at any time, and may close your account through your account settings or by contacting support@airballoon.ai.
We may suspend or terminate your access if:
(a) You breach these Terms or the Platform Services Agreement, including fee non-payment; (b) Your account or your Stripe account is suspended, terminated, or under fraud investigation; (c) Your use poses a security, legal, or operational risk; (d) We are required to do so by law or regulatory authority; (e) We discontinue the Services (with reasonable notice).
On termination, access ceases and we will provide reasonable data-export assistance for a limited period before deleting Conference data, subject to legal-hold and backup retention. Any payment or settlement obligations are governed by the Platform Services Agreement. Sections that by their nature should survive will survive.
We may update these Terms. For material changes we will update the "Last Updated" date and post notice in-product or by email at least 30 days before they take effect (shorter notice may apply for legal or security reasons). Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance.
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. The U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply. If you reside outside the United States, nothing in these Terms deprives you of the protection of any mandatory consumer-protection provisions of the law of your country of residence.
Before filing a claim, contact support@airballoon.ai (mark it Attn: Legal) with a written description of the claim and the relief sought. We will try to resolve the dispute within 60 days of receipt.
If informal resolution fails, any dispute will be resolved by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Commercial Arbitration Rules (or, for consumer disputes, the AAA Consumer Arbitration Rules), before a single arbitrator, seated in the Commonwealth of Virginia or conducted by remote means. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction. Filing, administration, and arbitrator fees are allocated under the applicable AAA rules; where those rules would leave you paying more than it would cost to file the same claim in court, Airballoon will pay the difference.
You and Airballoon agree that each may bring claims against the other only in an individual capacity and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims or preside over any class or representative proceeding.
This waiver is an essential part of the agreement to arbitrate. If it is held unenforceable as to a particular claim or request for relief, that claim or request will be severed and heard in a court of competent jurisdiction while the remaining claims proceed in arbitration. If it is held unenforceable in its entirety, then §14.3 does not apply and all disputes will be resolved in court.
Either party may bring an individual action in small-claims court within its jurisdiction, and either party may seek injunctive or equitable relief in court for IP infringement, confidentiality breaches, or unauthorized access.
You may opt out of arbitration by sending written notice to support@airballoon.ai (mark it Attn: Legal) within 30 days of first accepting these Terms. Opting out does not affect any other provision of these Terms. If you opt out, disputes will be resolved by the state and federal courts located in the Commonwealth of Virginia, subject to §14.5 and to any mandatory rights you have under the law of your country of residence.
(a) Entire agreement: These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and (for Organizers) the Platform Services Agreement, together with any policies incorporated by reference, are the entire agreement between the parties on this subject and supersede all prior agreements and understandings; (b) No waiver: Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver; (c) Severability: If a provision is unenforceable, the rest remain in force; (d) Assignment: You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign in connection with a merger, financing, or sale of assets, or to an affiliate, on notice; (e) Force majeure: Neither party is liable for delays caused by events beyond reasonable control; (f) Notices: We may give notices via the Services, by email, or by website posting. Legal notices to us go to support@airballoon.ai (Attn: Legal).
Lumvex Labs LLC, doing business as Airballoon. All inquiries: support@airballoon.ai.