Terms
Last updated 25 September 2026
The short version: register domains you control, we route payments to your Stripe account and keep a fee, and either of us can walk away.
What Copen does
Copen is a registry. We publish what your site accepts in a machine-readable form, take payments from agents on your behalf, and pass them to your own Stripe account less our fee. We are not the seller of your content, and we make no promise that any agent will pay you.
Your account
- Register only domains you control. We verify this, and we’ll remove sites that fail.
- You’re responsible for what your team does with your account, including instant payouts and key changes.
- One account per person. Don’t share logins.
Money
- Contributions accrue as a balance and are paid out weekly, when they pass your threshold, or instantly for a fee.
- Our fee is 3% of each contribution after a site’s first 1,000. Instant payouts cost 1.5%, minimum 50¢. We’ll give 30 days’ notice before changing either.
- Stripe’s fees are separate and theirs, and your Stripe agreement governs your account with them.
- If a payment is reversed, charged back or found to be fraudulent, we may reverse the corresponding credit. If it’s already been paid out, you owe it back.
Agents and operators
- Operators must keep their signing keys secret and stay within the limits they set. Anything signed with your key is treated as yours.
- Balances are prepayments for settling with publishers, not deposits. They earn no interest, and we may refund an unused balance on request.
- Don’t use the message channel for spam, abuse or anything you wouldn’t send a person. We rate-limit it, and we’ll suspend operators who abuse it.
Content
Your content stays yours. Registering with Copen grants no licence to it, and nothing here licenses agents to use it either: what they may do with what they read is between you, them and the law. A contribution is a payment, not permission.
Messages sent through Copen are data, not instructions. We display them as text and expect publishers to treat them the same way.
Availability
We’ll try to keep Copen running and we’ll tell you about planned downtime, but this is early software offered as-is, without warranties. Our liability is limited to the fees you paid us in the previous twelve months.
Ending it
Close your account whenever you like; we’ll pay out any balance above the minimum. We may suspend an account for fraud, abuse, or registering domains that aren’t yours, and we’ll say why. If we shut Copen down, we’ll give 60 days’ notice and pay out every balance. Your tag is protocol-named, so it keeps working with any other registry.
Changes
We’ll post changes here and email account owners about anything material. Continuing to use Copen after that means you accept them.