These terms cover the live.tips app, this website, the optional live.tips account, and
the optional relay behind the tip pages at tip.live.tips. live.tips is run by Nikita
Rabykin, an individual developer — not a company, not a team — and is released as free
and open-source software under the
MIT licence.
By using live.tips you accept what follows. It is short, because live.tips does very little on your behalf — and that is the point.
What live.tips is
live.tips is software you run yourself. It turns your own Stripe (or Revolut, MobilePay, Monzo) account into a live tip jar with a QR code and a screen that fills up as fans tip.
What live.tips is not
We are not a payment service, a bank, an escrow, or a party to your transactions. We never hold, route, or touch anyone's money. A tip travels directly from the fan to the artist's own payment account. There is no live.tips balance in the middle, because there is no live.tips balance at all.
This means, concretely:
- We take no commission and charge no fee. There is nothing to pay us.
- We cannot refund a tip, because we never had it. Refunds belong to the artist and their payment provider.
- We cannot see, freeze, reverse, or recover any payment.
- Your relationship for the money itself is with Stripe, Revolut, MobilePay or Monzo, under their terms — not with us.
Tips are payments for a performance
Tips collected through live.tips are voluntary payments to an artist for their live performance. They are not charitable donations, and live.tips is not a fundraising platform. Artists must describe their business to their payment provider accordingly — Stripe, in particular, treats performance and fundraising as different things, and only one of them is you.
Accounts
An account is optional, and there is still nothing you have to sign up for. The app works with no account at all — that is the default, everything stays on your device, and no live.tips server is involved.
If you want your bands, settings and history on more than one device, you can sign in with Apple, with Google, or as an anonymous guest. An account is a place to keep your own data, on Firebase (Google), readable by your account and by no other. What it holds — and what signing in changes about your privacy — is set out in the Privacy Policy, which is worth reading before you sign in.
If you have an account:
- It is yours to look after. Anyone who can sign in as you can see everything in it. Keep your sign-in method secure, and use Settings → Security to review your devices, revoke one, or sign out everywhere else.
- A guest account cannot be recovered. It has no email and no password. Lose every device signed into it and its data is gone — that is the trade for signing in without giving us anything. Use Apple or Google if that matters to you.
- You are responsible for what is in it — your band names, your public messages, and anything else you put there.
- Adding a device needs your confirmation on a device that is already signed in. Do not confirm a device you did not ask for, and do not let someone photograph the QR code and then tap confirm anyway.
- Push notifications are optional. A signed-in account may turn on push notifications, per device, to hear about tips and song requests that arrive while no set is running. They are off until you turn them on and can be turned off again at any time; a guest account and a no-account device get none.
- We may suspend or delete an account — see Ending it, below.
If you are an artist
You are responsible for:
- Your own payment account — keeping it in good standing and following Stripe's or Revolut's, MobilePay's or Monzo's rules.
- Your taxes. Tips are income. We do not report anything to anyone, issue any tax document, or know what you earned.
- Refunds, disputes and chargebacks, which you handle in your own payment dashboard.
- The law where you perform — busking permits, venue rules, and anything else local.
- What you publish. Your artist name and message appear on a public tip page; keep them lawful and your own.
- Your Stripe key. It is a restricted key you created yourself. With no account it lives only on your device. If you sign in, it moves to our server, encrypted so that no one — not another account, not us in plain sight, and not even you — can read it back; from then on Stripe reports your tips to our server and your other devices use the key only through us. Either way it is yours: treat a device that holds it as you would treat cash, and revoke the key in your Stripe dashboard if one goes missing. The Privacy Policy spells this out before you sign in.
- Your bands, and the fan messages you put on screen. A name and a message are shown to a room full of people. What appears on that screen is yours to moderate.
If you are a fan
- Tipping is voluntary and, once sent, a tip is generally final — a live tip is not a purchase with a right of return.
- If something went wrong with a payment, take it up with the artist or with the payment provider that processed it. We have no record of it and no power over it.
- Please keep the name and message you attach lawful and civil. They are shown on a screen, on stage, in front of a room full of people.
- A song request is a tip, not an order. If the artist has turned song requests on, you can tip toward a song — but the money is a voluntary tip like any other, and paying, or paying the most, does not guarantee the song is played. That is the artist's call.
Unverified tips — read this one
Revolut, MobilePay and Monzo give an app no way to confirm that a payment actually happened. A tip sent through those methods appears on the artist's screen the moment the fan submits the form — whether or not they then go through with the payment.
live.tips labels these tips unverified, and they mean exactly that: someone said they paid. They are a stage effect, not a receipt.
Never treat an unverified tip as proof of payment. Artists must reconcile against their own Revolut, MobilePay or Monzo app. Stripe tips are the only ones live.tips can actually confirm, which is why Stripe is the recommended method.
The relay and the tip pages
Tip pages live at tip.live.tips, served by a small relay we run on Firebase. It is
offered free of charge, as a courtesy, with no guarantee of any kind. It is
best-effort: it may be rate-limited, it may be unavailable, and tips may be delayed or
lost. How long a tip is kept depends on whether the artist is signed in: for a tip page
with no account behind it, the relay deliberately keeps nothing that would let anyone
recover a tip afterwards — a delivered one is deleted the instant the artist's screen shows
it, and an undelivered one is swept within the hour. For a signed-in account, the tip is
written into that artist's own history and kept as long as the band. The Privacy Policy sets
out both cases in full.
- A tip page with no account behind it is deleted after 90 days of inactivity.
- We may rate-limit, block, or delete any tip page, at any time, without notice — in particular where we see fraud, impersonation, abuse, illegal content, or an attempt to overload the service.
- We may change or shut the relay down entirely. If we ever do, Stripe-only setups will keep working, because they never depended on us.
You must not use the relay, a tip page or an account to impersonate someone, to commit fraud, to publish illegal or abusive content, to solicit charitable donations under false pretences, to get around the rate limits or the anti-bot check, or to attack the service.
Ending it
- You can stop at any time: sign out, remove a band, delete a tip page, or uninstall the app. The Privacy Policy says exactly what each of those deletes — and says honestly that deleting a whole account is, for now, an email to [email protected] rather than a button in the app.
- We may suspend, revoke or delete an account, a tip page, or access to the service where it is used for any of the things listed above, or where letting it run would put the service or other people at risk. There is no appeals panel here. There is an email address, and a person who reads it.
- If the hosted service is ever shut down, we will say so on this site. Nothing of value is locked inside it: the money is already in your own payment account, the app is open source, and a Stripe-only setup never needed us at all.
No warranty
live.tips is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. This is the standard MIT position, and it is meant literally.
We do not promise that the software is free of bugs, that the app will show every tip, that your account will sync, that the relay will be reachable during your set, or that any third-party service will behave.
Liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of live.tips. That includes — without limitation — missed, delayed, duplicated or undelivered tips; tips shown as unverified that were never paid; data that failed to sync, or that went with an account you could not recover; lost income; a device that failed on stage; the acts, outages or decisions of Stripe, Revolut, MobilePay, Monzo, Google, Apple, Cloudflare or GitHub; and anything you lost because you trusted a number on a screen.
live.tips is free software given away by one person. There is no revenue here to fund a liability, and none is accepted.
Two honest limits on that paragraph, because a term that overreaches is worth nothing:
- We do not exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.
- If you are a consumer, you keep every mandatory right your local law gives you. Nothing here takes those away.
The software is yours
live.tips is MIT-licensed. You may read, fork, modify, self-host, and run it yourself — including the relay. If you do not like how we operate the service, the honest answer open source gives you is: run your own. The source is at github.com/mekedron/live.tips.
Nothing in these terms restricts the rights the MIT licence grants you over the code itself; these terms govern the hosted service — this website, the accounts, and the relay we run.
Changes
We may update these terms as the software changes. Every past version is in the public git history, so you can see precisely what changed and when. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept it.
Contact
[email protected] — a real person reads it.
Language
These terms are published in every language the site supports, as a convenience. If a translation and the English version disagree, the English version is the one that counts.