These Terms of Service (“Terms”) are a legal agreement between you (“you”) and Sageview Software, LLC, a Texas limited liability company (“Sageview,” “we,” “us,” or “our”). They cover two things: the Italics desktop application (“Italics” or “the App”) and the website at useitalics.com (“the Site”). Together we call them “the Service.”
If you are using Italics on behalf of a company or other organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization to these Terms, and “you” refers to both you personally and that organization.
1. What Italics Is
Italics is a desktop application for Microsoft Windows that opens, edits, and saves Markdown (.md) files in a formatted, what-you-see-is-what-you-get view. It runs on your computer.
Italics is not an online service, and it is not a place where you store anything. There are no accounts. There is no sign-up, no password, and no server holding your work. Your documents are read from and written to storage that you control, and they stay there. This distinction shapes most of what follows: many provisions you would expect in a software agreement — content licenses, data retention, account termination — are simply absent here, because there is nothing on our side for them to apply to.
The App connects to the internet for a small number of specific purposes, described in Section 6 and in our Privacy Policy. It does not transmit the contents of your files under any circumstance.
2. Who May Use Italics
2.1 Age
There is no minimum age to use Italics. The App collects no personal information and requires no account, so we have nothing to gate.
You must be at least 13 years old to purchase a license or to give us your email address, and if you are under 18 you must have your parent or guardian’s permission to do either.
2.2 Where you may use it
You represent that you are not located in, under the control of, or a national or resident of any country subject to U.S. embargo, and that you are not on any U.S. government list of prohibited or restricted parties. You agree to comply with all applicable export control and sanctions laws.
3. Your License to Use Italics
Italics is licensed, not sold. This Section is the license agreement between you and Sageview. Subject to your compliance with these Terms, we grant you the rights described below.
3.1 The free Viewer
You may download, install, and use Italics as a Viewer free of charge, permanently, with no purchase and no account. In Viewer mode you may open, read, print, and export your Markdown files. Editing and saving are not available.
3.2 The trial
New installations include a time-limited trial of the full editing experience. The length of the trial is stated on the download page at useitalics.com at the time you download Italics, and may differ between releases and offers. When the trial period ends, the App does not stop working and does not lock you out of anything — it simply returns to Viewer mode until you purchase a license.
3.3 The Pro license
Purchasing a Pro license unlocks editing and saving. The Pro license is:
- Perpetual. It does not expire, and there is nothing to renew or cancel. Once purchased, your right to use the version of Italics you have received continues indefinitely.
- Personal to you. You may install and use Italics on any computer you own or primarily use, provided you are the only person using it under that license.
- Non-exclusive, non-transferable, and non-sublicensable, and revocable only as described in Section 13.
The Pro license grants you the right to use Italics. It does not transfer ownership of any part of the software to you.
3.4 Updates
Your license includes software updates for the period stated at the time of your purchase (the “Update Period”). Update Periods vary between offers, so the terms of your purchase govern.
When an Update Period ends, your license does not. You keep the most recent version you received and may continue using it for as long as you like. You simply stop receiving new versions unless you obtain a new Update Period.
Where we describe an Update Period as “lifetime,” we mean the lifetime of the product, not the lifetime of the purchaser: we will provide updates for as long as we continue to develop and release them for Italics. We may discontinue Italics, or any version of it, at any time, which ends every Update Period then running. We do not commit to releasing any particular number of updates, or any update at all, during an Update Period.
3.5 License keys
Your license is represented by a license key. You agree not to publish, share, resell, forge, or attempt to generate license keys, and not to use a key you did not obtain legitimately from us or from our authorized payment provider. We may invalidate any key we determine to have been forged, shared publicly, obtained fraudulently, or issued in connection with a payment that was reversed or charged back.
3.6 The attribution credit
Output produced in Viewer mode — printed pages, exported PDF files, and exported HTML files — carries a small credit line identifying Italics. Removing, obscuring, or suppressing that credit without a valid Pro license is a breach of this license. Output produced under a valid Pro license carries no attribution.
3.7 What you may not do
You may not:
- Circumvent the licensing. Do not disable, bypass, tamper with, or otherwise defeat the trial period, the license verification, or the separation between Viewer and Pro features — including by manipulating your system clock to extend a trial.
- Traffic in keys. See Section 3.5.
- Reverse engineer. Do not decompile, disassemble, or reverse engineer the App, or attempt to derive its source code, except to the extent that this restriction is prohibited by applicable law — including where local law grants you rights to obtain interoperability information.
- Redistribute. Do not resell, rent, lease, sublicense, white-label, or distribute Italics or any modified version of it without a written agreement with us. You may freely tell people where to download it.
- Strip our notices. Do not remove or alter copyright notices, trademarks, or other proprietary markings, including the attribution credit described in Section 3.6.
- Build a competitor from it. Do not use Italics, or information obtained from it, to design, develop, or train a competing product.
- Break the law with it. Do not use Italics to create, store, or distribute material you have no legal right to possess or distribute, or for any unlawful purpose.
3.8 Reservation of rights
Sageview reserves all rights not expressly granted in these Terms.
4. Purchases, Refunds, and Taxes
4.1 How purchases work
Pro licenses are sold through a third-party payment provider that acts as the merchant of record for the transaction. That provider — not Sageview — is the seller for tax purposes, collects and remits any applicable sales tax, VAT, or GST, and is the name that appears on your card statement and your receipt. Your purchase is also governed by that provider’s own terms, which are presented to you at checkout.
4.2 Price
The price of a Pro license is the price shown at checkout at the time you purchase. We may change prices, run promotions, and offer different terms to different customers or regions at any time. A price change never affects a license you have already bought.
4.3 30-day money-back guarantee
If Italics is not for you, email support@useitalics.com within 30 days of your purchase and we will refund what you paid. You do not need to give a reason.
The details:
- The 30 days run from the date of purchase, not from when you first installed or first used the App.
- Refunds are issued through the payment provider, back to your original payment method. How quickly the money reaches you is up to your bank.
- The guarantee applies once per customer.
- It does not apply to a license terminated for breach of Section 3.7.
- When a refund is issued, the associated license key is deactivated and the App returns to Viewer mode. Your files are untouched and remain fully readable.
4.4 Taxes
Any sales tax, VAT, GST, or similar tax on your purchase is handled by the payment provider as merchant of record and will be shown at checkout. You remain responsible for any tax obligations arising from your own use of the App that the provider does not collect.
4.5 Promotions, coupons, and referrals
We may offer discount codes, promotions, bundles, or a referral or affiliate program. Each may carry its own rules and eligibility requirements, published at the time of the offer, which apply in addition to these Terms and control over them where they conflict. We may modify, suspend, or end any offer at any time, and may disqualify participants who abuse it. Void where prohibited.
If you participate in an affiliate or referral program, that program is operated through our payment provider and is governed by the provider’s affiliate terms as well as these Terms. You are responsible for disclosing your affiliate relationship wherever the law requires it.
5. Your Files
5.1 Your files are yours, and they stay where you put them
Everything you open, write, or save in Italics (“Your Files”) belongs to you. We never receive Your Files. Italics does not upload, transmit, host, store, back up, index, analyze, or process the contents of your documents on any server of ours, and it does not use them to train anything.
Some features write additional files to your computer — a .bak copy before overwriting an existing file, crash-recovery snapshots of unsaved work, and local debug logs. All of these stay on your machine. None of them are transmitted anywhere.
5.2 We ask for no license in Your Files
Cloud services need a broad license from you — to host, copy, display, and transmit your content — because they cannot function otherwise. Italics needs no such license, and we grant ourselves none. We claim no rights whatsoever in Your Files.
5.3 Your files stay readable without us
Markdown is a plain-text format. Files created in Italics are ordinary text files that open in any Markdown editor, any text editor, and Notepad. Nothing you write is trapped in a proprietary format, and nothing depends on Italics, or on Sageview, continuing to exist.
5.4 Feedback
If you send us feedback, suggestions, bug reports, feature requests, or ideas (“Feedback”), you grant Sageview a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free license to use that Feedback for any purpose, without compensation or attribution. We may, but need not, act on it.
6. Updates, Connectivity, and Changes to the App
6.1 Update checks
Italics can check whether a newer version is available, and can download and install it. The check retrieves a small file from our public releases host; installers come from the same place. Updates are cryptographically signed, and the App will not install one that fails signature verification.
Whether the App checks automatically is a setting you control. You may turn automatic checks off and check manually instead, or leave them on. Either way, no update is installed without the App having verified its signature.
We recommend leaving automatic checks on — it is how security fixes reach you — but the choice is yours, and turning them off does not limit your license or your use of the App in any way.
6.2 License validation
Some license keys are verified entirely offline, with no network request. Others may require a check against our payment provider’s licensing service when you activate or periodically thereafter. Where a network check is required, it transmits only your license key and information identifying the installation — never your files.
6.3 We may change the App
We may add, change, or remove features in new versions of Italics. We may discontinue the product entirely (see Section 3.4). Nothing we do to future versions reaches back and disables a version already installed on your computer, except where we terminate a license under Section 13.
7. Our Intellectual Property
Italics — including all software, source code, designs, user interfaces, graphics, logos, icons, product names, documentation, and website content provided by or on behalf of Sageview (collectively, “Sageview IP”) — is the exclusive property of Sageview or its licensors, and is protected by copyright, trademark, trade secret, and other laws of the United States and other jurisdictions.
“Sageview,” “Italics,” “Use Italics,” the Italics logo, and related names and designs are trademarks of Sageview Software, LLC. You may not use them without our prior written consent, except to refer accurately to the product. All other trademarks appearing in the Service belong to their respective owners.
Italics incorporates third-party open-source components, each licensed under its own terms. Those terms govern those components and, where they conflict with this Section, they control.
8. Third-Party Services
The Service relies on a small number of third parties — currently a public code-hosting provider that distributes our releases and updates, a payment provider that processes purchases and issues license keys, and, on the Site, an email service and website analytics. They are described in our Privacy Policy.
Your use of those services is governed by their own terms and privacy policies. We are not responsible for them, and we may change providers at any time.
9. Pre-Release Software
Italics is currently offered as a public beta. It is pre-release software, it may contain defects, and features may change or disappear between versions.
We take data safety seriously and have built in real protections — atomic saves, a backup copy before overwriting, crash recovery for unsaved work, and detection of changes made to a file outside the App. None of that is a substitute for your own backups. Keep independent copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. This is good practice with any editor, and it is particularly good practice with pre-release software.
10. Disclaimers
ITALICS IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Sageview disclaims all warranties, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, and accuracy, and any warranties arising from course of dealing or trade practice.
We do not warrant that:
- Italics will be uninterrupted or error-free.
- Defects will be corrected.
- Italics is free of viruses or other harmful components.
- Italics will be compatible with any particular hardware, operating system version, or file.
- Any file will be rendered, converted, or saved in a way that meets your expectations.
You use Italics at your own risk.
11. Limitation of Liability
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, SAGEVIEW AND ITS OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, AND SUPPLIERS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR:
- Any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages (including loss of profits, revenue, data, business opportunities, goodwill, or anticipated savings), even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.
- Any loss of or damage to your files, however caused.
In any event, Sageview’s total aggregate liability arising out of or related to these Terms or Italics will not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us for your license, or (b) one hundred dollars ($100).
These limitations apply regardless of the legal theory on which a claim is based (contract, tort, negligence, statute, or otherwise) and even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose. They do not apply to liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
12. Indemnification
You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Sageview and its officers, directors, employees, and agents from any claims, damages, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising from or related to:
- Your use or misuse of Italics.
- Your violation of these Terms or of any applicable law.
- Your violation of any third party’s rights, including intellectual property rights, in connection with your use of Italics.
We may assume exclusive defense and control of any matter subject to indemnification, in which case you agree to cooperate. You may not settle any such matter without our prior written consent.
13. Termination of Your License
13.1 By you
Stop using Italics and uninstall it. There is no account to close, no subscription to cancel, and nothing to notify us about.
13.2 By us
We may terminate your license and invalidate your license key if you materially breach Section 3.7 — in practice, for circumventing the licensing, trafficking in keys, or redistributing the software. Where the breach is capable of being cured and does not appear deliberate, we will give you notice and a reasonable opportunity to fix it before terminating.
We may also terminate a license issued in connection with a payment that was reversed, refunded, or charged back.
13.3 What termination does and does not do
- Your right to use Italics ends, and you must uninstall it.
- Your files are unaffected. They are on your computer, in an open plain-text format, and remain readable in any other editor. We have no ability to reach them, and terminating a license does not change that.
- No refund is due for a license terminated under Section 13.2, except where the law requires one.
- Sections 5.4, 7, 10, 11, 12, 14, and 16 survive termination.
14. Dispute Resolution
14.1 Talk to us first
Before filing a lawsuit, please email legal@useitalics.com and describe the problem. You agree not to file suit until at least 30 days after sending that notice, so we have a fair chance to resolve it. Most things are fixable with an email.
14.2 Governing law
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, United States, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.
14.3 Venue
Any lawsuit permitted under these Terms must be filed in the state or federal courts located in Tarrant County, Texas, and you and Sageview each consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.
If you are a consumer resident in a jurisdiction whose law gives you the right to bring proceedings in your local courts, or to have your local law apply, this Section does not take that right away.
14.4 Equitable relief
Nothing in this Section prevents either party from seeking injunctive or other equitable relief to protect intellectual property rights or confidential information.
15. Changes to These Terms
We may update these Terms. When we do, we will change the “Last updated” date at the top of this page and note what changed. For material changes, we will post notice on the Site at least 30 days before they take effect, and email anyone who has given us an address.
Because Italics has no accounts, we cannot notify most users directly — so the version of these Terms that applies to your license is the version in effect when you purchased it, except for changes we are required to make by law. Continuing to use the Site, or purchasing a new license, after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms.
16. General Provisions
16.1 Entire agreement
These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and Sageview regarding Italics, and supersede any prior agreements or understandings.
16.2 Severability
If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest continue in full force, and the unenforceable provision is modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable.
16.3 No waiver
Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
16.4 Assignment
You may not assign these Terms or any rights under them without our prior written consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets, or by operation of law.
16.5 Force majeure
Neither party is liable for failure or delay in performance due to causes beyond its reasonable control.
16.6 Relationship of the parties
These Terms create no agency, partnership, joint venture, or employment relationship, and neither party may bind the other.
16.7 No third-party beneficiaries
These Terms benefit you and Sageview only.
16.8 Notices
We may give you notice by posting on the Site, by a message within the App, or by email if you have given us an address. Send notices to us at:
Sageview Software, LLCAttn: Legal
729 Grapevine Hwy, Unit #3321
Hurst, TX 76054
United States
Email: legal@useitalics.com
17. Contact Us
Questions about these Terms go to legal@useitalics.com. Questions about a purchase, a refund, or the App itself go to support@useitalics.com — that one reaches a human faster.
Sageview Software, LLC729 Grapevine Hwy, Unit #3321
Hurst, TX 76054
United States
Revision history
- Version 2.0 — August 5, 2026. Rewritten for Italics desktop software. Replaced subscription and account terms with a perpetual one-time license; added the license grant formerly expected in a separate EULA; absorbed the surviving restrictions from the retired Acceptable Use Policy; removed the content license grant, which a local application does not need.
- Version 1.0 — April 25, 2026. Initial version, inherited from a hosted software-as-a-service product.