Terms of use

Effective date: 27 September 2026.

1. Who these terms are between#

These terms of use govern your use of the Velorki mobile app, the Velorki website at velorki.com and the services the app reaches over the network (the routing server, the relay, the assistant, share links). The provider is Steffen Roemer, trading as "Orkitec", Straße der Pariser Kommune 27, 10243 Berlin, Germany — the full details are on the imprint page. "We" and "us" mean Orkitec; "you" means the person using Velorki.

By installing or using Velorki you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the app.

Velorki has no user account. You do not register, and we have no way to identify you. Everything below therefore attaches to your use of the software, not to an account.

Velorki is not directed at children. If you are under 16, use it only with the agreement of a parent or guardian; a Velorki Plus subscription may only be bought by someone who can enter into a contract, which is also what the app stores require.

2. What Velorki is, and what it is not#

Velorki plans bicycle routes, generates loops, searches places, guides you with turn instructions and records rides. It is built on OpenStreetMap data.

Velorki is a planning aid, not a safety system. Map data, routing data, elevation data and place data come from open sources and can be out of date, incomplete or wrong. A route may cross a closed road, a private track, a ford, a path that is not legal or not safe to cycle, or a road that has changed since the data was collected.

You are responsible for how you ride. Watch the road, obey traffic law and signs, judge for yourself whether a road or a path is safe and permitted, and do not operate the phone while riding in a way that endangers you or others. Do not rely on Velorki in situations where a wrong turn or a missing road would be dangerous, and take a fallback (a paper map, a charged phone, a known way home) on remote rides. Ride recording and navigation depend on your phone's GPS, battery, storage and operating system, none of which we control.

3. Licence to use the app#

Velorki is free software. The source code of the app, the relay and the website is published under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 only. The copy you install from the App Store or Google Play is covered by the same open-source licence, and nothing in these terms takes a right away from you that the licence grants.

Third-party components ship with their own licences. The full list is in the app under Settings → About → Open-source licences.

Map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL). Routing uses BRouter and data derived from OpenStreetMap. Attribution must stay visible; do not remove it from screenshots you publish or from anything you build on the exported data.

"Velorki", the Velorki logo and the Velorki app icon are trademarks of Orkitec and are not covered by the open-source licences. If you build and publish your own version of the code you must rebrand it and point it at your own servers. The trademark policy is binding.

4. Velorki Plus#

Everything that runs on your phone is free and stays free: planning, smart loops, offline maps and offline routing, place search, turn-by-turn navigation, recording, ride statistics, and GPX, FIT and TCX import and export.

Velorki Plus is an optional subscription for the features that need our servers or an account with another service: the Strava connection, the Ride with GPS connection, the assistant, and share links.

4.1 How it is bought#

Velorki Plus is sold through the App Store (Apple) or Google Play (Google), not by us directly. The purchase is a contract between you and the store, subject to that store's terms. We receive confirmation that a subscription is active; we never see your payment details.

Prices are shown in the app before you buy, in your local currency, including tax where the store shows it that way.

4.2 Trial, renewal and cancellation#

A subscription may start with a free trial. The length of the trial is shown in the app before you subscribe.

The subscription renews automatically at the end of each period at the price then shown by the store, unless it is cancelled at least 24 hours before the period ends. A free trial that is not cancelled before it runs out becomes a paid subscription.

You cancel through the store, not through us: on iOS in your Apple Account subscription settings, on Android in Google Play under Subscriptions. The app's Manage button in Settings → Subscription opens that page for you. Cancelling stops the next renewal; Plus stays active until the end of the period you already paid for.

4.3 Refunds#

Refunds are handled by the store, under Apple's or Google's own refund policy. We cannot issue a refund for a purchase we did not take payment for. Your statutory rights as a consumer are not affected by this.

4.4 Restoring a purchase#

Because there is no account, an active subscription is restored through the store: Restore purchases in the app asks the store whether the Apple ID or Google account signed in on the device owns a Velorki Plus subscription. A subscription bought on one store cannot be restored on the other.

4.5 If a Plus feature stops working#

We may change, suspend or discontinue a Plus feature, for example if a partner API closes or an AI provider becomes unavailable. If we permanently remove a substantial part of what Plus offers, you may cancel; the store's refund and proration rules then apply. Everything free keeps working regardless, including offline, and your routes and rides remain on your phone and exportable.

4.6 Right of withdrawal#

You buy Velorki Plus from Apple or Google, not from us: the seller is the store, and a statutory right of withdrawal for a digital subscription is exercised there, under the store's own terms and within the period they state. Apple's purchases are handled by Apple Distribution International Ltd in Ireland, and Google's by Google Ireland Ltd, both of which give consumers in the EU a way to request a refund from the store directly. We cannot grant or refuse one, but write to [email protected] if a store refuses a request that looks to us like it should have been granted, and we will support it as far as we can.

5. Acceptable use#

Use Velorki lawfully and considerately. In particular, do not:

• use the app or the services in a way that breaks the law, infringes someone else's rights, or endangers anyone;
• attack, overload or probe our servers, circumvent rate limits, or automate requests to the relay, the routing server or the assistant beyond ordinary use from the app;
• use the assistant to generate content that is illegal, harmful, hateful, harassing, sexual involving minors, or intended to deceive; or to extract the underlying model, its prompts, or bulk data;
• upload to a share link anything you do not have the right to publish, or anything illegal, or personal data about other people without their consent;
• use the app, the shared data or the exported files to track, stalk or profile another person;
• resell access to the services, or use them as a backend for another product;
• point a fork of the code at our official servers (see the trademark policy).

We may block a request, a device or an IP address that breaks these rules, and we may remove shared content, without notice where the breach is clear.

Velorki is not directed at children, and the store's own age requirements apply. If you are a minor, use Velorki only with the agreement of a parent or guardian.

6. Your content and share links#

Your routes, your rides and your files stay yours. We claim no ownership of them. They stay on your phone unless you send them somewhere yourself.

When you create a share link (a Plus feature) the route or ride you shared, with its track, its name and its statistics, is copied to our server so that the link can be opened in a browser. That grants us the limited right to store and display that content for the purpose of serving the link, and nothing else.

A share link is a capability URL: it carries no password, and anyone who has the link can see the content, including where the track starts and ends. Treat a link as public. Do not share a ride that starts at your home address unless you are content for that to be visible.

A shared item is deleted automatically one year after it was created. There is currently no way to withdraw a link before then from inside the app, so treat a link you hand out as public for that year; write to us if one has to come down sooner.

If a share link points at content that infringes your rights or exposes your personal data, write to [email protected] with the link itself and what the problem is. We have no account to look the content up by, so the link is what we need. We remove content that is clearly unlawful or infringing, usually within a few working days.

7. The assistant#

The assistant is off until you enable it, and it asks for your consent before anything leaves the phone. What is sent is described in the privacy policy: your text, optionally a starting position rounded to about a kilometre, your language and unit settings, and, for a route description, a short summary of the route.

The assistant runs on a large language model operated by a third party. Its answers can be wrong, incomplete or nonsensical, and it may suggest a place that does not exist or a distance it cannot deliver. Everything it returns is a suggestion to be checked, not advice to be followed. The route itself is computed on your phone, not by the model.

Fair use applies: the assistant is rate-limited, and heavy automated use may be blocked. We may cap or pause the assistant if provider costs or abuse make that necessary.

There is a Report AI output item in Settings → AI assistant for an answer that was wrong or inappropriate, and we would like to hear about those.

8. Third-party services#

Velorki uses services run by other people. Using them means their terms and their privacy policies apply to that part of the traffic, and we are not responsible for how they behave or whether they stay available:

Service	What it does
OpenStreetMap	the map data everything is built from (ODbL)
OpenFreeMap	the vector map tiles the map is drawn from
CyclOSM	the optional cycling overlay
BRouter	the routing engine and the routing data
Photon	online place search
Strava	ride upload and route import, if you connect it
Ride with GPS	routes and trips, if you connect it
the AI provider	the model behind the assistant (named in the privacy policy)
Apple, Google	the stores, payment and subscription management
RevenueCat	checking whether a subscription is active

Connecting Strava or Ride with GPS also means you keep to their terms. What you upload to them is governed by their policies, not by ours.

9. Availability#

The free, on-device part of Velorki works without us. The server-backed parts (routing outside downloaded tiles, online search, the assistant, the integrations, share links, the tile and search downloads) are provided as they are, without any promise of uptime. We may take them down for maintenance, change their addresses, or discontinue them. We will give notice of a permanent shutdown of a paid feature where we reasonably can.

10. No warranty#

Velorki is provided free of charge, and Velorki Plus gives access to services we operate on a best-effort basis. Beyond the statutory rights of a consumer, we give no warranty that the app or the services are free of defects, fit for a particular purpose, uninterrupted, accurate, or that the map, routing, elevation or place data is correct or current.

Nothing in this section limits liability where liability cannot be limited by law.

11. Liability#

We are liable without limitation for damages caused intentionally or by gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz), and where we have given a guarantee.

For slight negligence we are liable only where a duty has been breached whose fulfilment makes the proper performance of this agreement possible in the first place and on whose fulfilment you may regularly rely (a "cardinal obligation"). In that case liability is limited to the damage typical for this kind of agreement and foreseeable when it was concluded.

Any further liability for slight negligence is excluded. This applies equally to our legal representatives, employees and agents.

Because the free part of Velorki is provided free of charge, our liability for it is limited to intent and gross negligence to the extent the law allows (§ 521, § 599 BGB apply analogously).

Loss of data: back up what matters to you. Export your routes and rides as GPX, FIT or TCX files. We are liable for loss of data only up to the effort of restoring it from a backup you kept properly.

12. Changes to these terms#

We may change these terms, for example when a feature changes, a partner changes, or the law changes. The current version is always at velorki.com/terms with its effective date.

If a change affects a running subscription to your disadvantage, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect, and you may cancel through the store before then. Continuing to use Velorki after a change takes effect counts as agreement to the changed terms.

13. Ending it#

You can stop using Velorki at any time by uninstalling the app; uninstalling removes everything the app stored on your phone. Share links you created are not removed by uninstalling, so delete them first if you want them gone.

We may end your use of the server-backed services if you materially breach these terms, in particular section 5.

14. Governing law and jurisdiction#

These terms are governed by the law of the Federal Republic of Germany, with the exception of the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

If you are a consumer, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of the country in which you have your habitual residence, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of that country.

If you are a merchant, a legal entity under public law or a special fund under public law, the place of jurisdiction is Berlin, our place of business.

Online dispute resolution#

The European Commission provides a platform for online dispute resolution at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr. We are neither obliged nor willing to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.

15. Severability#

If a provision of these terms is or becomes invalid, the rest stays in force.

16. Contact#

Steffen Roemer, trading as "Orkitec", Straße der Pariser Kommune 27, 10243 Berlin, Germany, [email protected]. The rest of the provider details are on the imprint page. For security reports see SECURITY.md in the source repository.

Related: Privacy policy · Imprint