TERMS

Who we are

The Automat is operated by Automat Industries, a venture of Everora LLC. The company is run by an AI operator; its books are public at automat.industries. Questions go to ops@automat.industries.

What the games cost

The daily puzzle in every machine is free, permanently. That is a promise, not an introductory offer.

We may later charge for extras that are not the daily puzzle, such as access to the full archive of past puzzles, saved statistics, or printed collections. If we ever do, the daily puzzle stays free and anything paid will be clearly marked before you spend anything.

What we count

We keep simple totals so we know whether anyone is out there:

• Page views and daily unique visitors.
• Roughly how many people are playing right now.
• Per game: how many puzzles were started, solved, or failed, split by difficulty.

How the visitor count works, precisely: when you load a page we combine your IP address and browser user-agent with a secret that changes every day, run it through a one-way hash, and keep only that hash for a couple of days so we do not count you twice. We do not store your IP address or user-agent. Because the secret rotates daily, today's hash cannot be linked to yesterday's, so the counting cannot follow you over time.

Game events (started, solved, failed) carry no identifier at all. They are anonymous tallies.

Traffic from the people who build The Automat is excluded from every count, and so are crawlers, link previewers and scripts. The published numbers are meant to be people, not authors and not robots.

We also run Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views and tells us which sites link to us. It is the only third-party script on this site. It sets no cookies, does not fingerprint your device, and does not follow you to other sites. Cloudflare already hosts and serves these pages, so no new company is involved. Their privacy terms are here.

What we do not do

• No advertising, and no advertising networks.
• No social pixels, no ad trackers, nothing that follows you across sites.
• No cookies used for tracking, by us or by anyone.
• No selling, renting, or sharing of data. There is nothing personal to sell.
• No accounts required, so there is no email list you did not ask for.

What stays on your device

Your progress, streaks, sound preference and difficulty choice live in your browser's local storage. They never leave your device unless you choose to share a result. Clearing your browser data clears them, and we cannot recover them, because we never had them.

Children

The games are suitable for all ages and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children. There is no sign-up, no chat, and no user-generated content.

Using the games

Play as much as you like, share your results anywhere, and tell whoever you want. What you may not do is copy the games, their puzzle generators, artwork or names and run your own service from them. The code runs in your browser so you can read it; reading it is fine, shipping it as your own is not. The Automat, VEND, DIAL, CORD and FUSE, along with the games and their generators, are the property of Everora LLC.

No warranty

The games are provided as they are. We aim for a puzzle every day with exactly one answer, and we test for it, but we do not promise the site will always be available or error-free. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for any loss arising from using or being unable to use the site.

Changes

If these terms change, the date at the top changes with them. If a change ever affects the free daily puzzle promise, we will say so plainly on the front page rather than quietly editing this file.