Legal
These Terms are the agreement between you and us. They cover what you may do with what we publish, what you get when you pay us, what we do not promise, and where any dispute is settled. By using our services or buying a subscription or course, you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the services.
1. Who these Terms are with
Capacity Building International ("CBI", "we", "us") is the contracting party. Crisis Lab is CBI's operating brand. In these Terms, "we" means CBI and its subsidiaries, including Crisis Lab.
Capacity Building International, 5900 Balcones Drive #13770, Austin, Texas 78731-4257, United States. contact@crisislab.io
2. What these Terms cover
The "Services" are the Crisis Lab properties we operate:
crisislab-v3.pages.dev, migrating to crisislab.io. This is our own website, including the pages you are reading now.
crisislab.io and www.crisislab.io, which carry the newsletter, paywalled articles, podcast pages, subscription checkout, and reader accounts, served by Beehiiv until the migration completes.
community.crisislab.io, home to the Crisis Lab community, our courses, and course checkout.
Together with everything we publish through them: Crisis Lab Intelligence briefs, the newsletter, the podcast, courses, and community content (the "Content").
These Terms replace an earlier, undated version that named a different website as the governed site. This version governs the Crisis Lab properties listed above.
3. Third-party platforms
Two independent companies host most of what you interact with. Beehiiv hosts the newsletter, paywalled articles, podcast pages, reader accounts, and subscription checkout. Circle hosts the community, the courses, and course checkout. Their own terms of service and privacy policies apply to you on their surfaces, in addition to these Terms.
What follows from that, honestly stated: a platform outage, a platform feature change, or a platform account action is largely outside our control, and we are not liable for it beyond our own obligation to deliver what you paid for. We may move any part of the Services to a different platform. If we do, we will give reasonable notice and carry your paid access across.
4. Your account
Some parts of the Services need an account, held on Beehiiv or on Circle. Keep your credentials confidential, do not share your login, and tell us promptly if you think someone else is using your account. You are responsible for activity under your account. Accounts are for one named person; a team or organization needs a license per person, which we are glad to arrange. Write to us.
5. What you may do with our Content
While your subscription or course access is active, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to access the Content and to use it for your own professional and personal purposes, including internal use within your own organization. That covers briefing your team, informing your own planning, and supporting your own decisions.
What that license does not permit:
Redistribution, resale, or republication of paid Content, in whole or in substantial part, whether or not you charge for it.
Sharing your access (your login or your copy of a paid issue) with anyone else, inside or outside your organization, or posting paid Content where the public or a wider audience can read it. Your own internal use of what you learn is covered by the license above; passing the access itself along is not.
Feeding paid Content into a system that reproduces it, including using it to train, fine-tune, or ground an AI model, or making it available for automated scraping.
Removing attribution, watermarks, or notices identifying Crisis Lab as the source.
Reasonable excerpting is welcome. Quote a short passage, cite the finding, reference the analysis. Attribute it to Crisis Lab and, where you can, link to the source. If you want to use more than a short excerpt, ask us. We usually say yes.
6. Subscriptions, courses, and payment
Prices are as listed at checkout at the time you buy. Taxes may be added where the law requires.
Intelligence and Intelligence+ are subscriptions, sold monthly or annually, that renew automatically at the then-current price until you cancel. Cancel through your account on Beehiiv, the platform where they are sold. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for; you keep access until then.
For Intelligence and Intelligence+, the newsletter is how the service is delivered. Your issues are delivered to you by email, and on our publishing platform email delivery and paid access are one and the same. Unsubscribing from the emails cancels your paid subscription and ends your paid access. There is no way to keep paid access while switching the emails off. You may therefore cancel either way, through your account settings or by using the unsubscribe link in any issue. Either route takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, as above.
Community access is included with a subscription, not sold separately. An active Intelligence or Intelligence+ subscription is what grants you access to the Crisis Lab community on Circle. Community access is not a product you can buy on its own, and it does not renew on its own. It depends on the subscription that carries it, and it ends when that subscription ends.
Price changes to a renewing subscription are notified to you in advance of the renewal, so you can cancel before it applies.
Non-payment. If a renewal payment fails or a payment is reversed, we may suspend access until it is resolved.
30-day money-back guarantee. If you decide within your first 30 days on Intelligence or Intelligence+ that it is not right for you, write to contact@crisislab.io and we will refund your payment in full, no questions asked. The guarantee covers your first 30 days on either plan, monthly or annual, and does not apply to standalone course purchases.
Refunds. Fees are non-refundable except under the 30-day guarantee above, where the law gives you a refund right (including section 7 below), where sections 9 or 16 provide for one, or where we choose to make an exception. If something has gone wrong, write to us: contact@crisislab.io.
Courses are individual, one-time purchases through Circle checkout. Buying a course gives you access to that course only, on the terms shown on its listing at enrollment, which state the access period and any certificate or CEUs it carries. A course purchase is not a subscription: it does not renew, there is nothing to cancel, and it does not include community access.
7. If you are a consumer in the EU or EEA
Consumer law where you live gives you rights that these Terms do not reduce.
The 14-day right of withdrawal. For a distance contract for digital content, you normally have 14 days from purchase to withdraw without giving a reason. Because we give you immediate access to digital content, you are asked at checkout to expressly request that access start immediately and to acknowledge that doing so affects your withdrawal right to the extent applicable law provides. Where the withdrawal right survives, exercise it by writing to contact@crisislab.io within 14 days, and we will refund you as the law requires.
Your mandatory protections stand. Nothing in these Terms, including the governing law and venue clause in section 14, deprives you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence, or of your right to bring proceedings in the courts of that country.
8. What our Content is, and what it is not
This is the most important clause in this document. Read it.
Crisis Lab publishes analysis and education. It is not advice for your situation. Our Intelligence briefs, courses, podcast episodes, newsletters, and community discussions are research, analysis, and professional education, prepared for a general professional audience. They are not operational, emergency-management, security, safety, engineering, medical, financial, or legal advice, and they are not tailored to any specific organization, site, incident, or set of facts.
Nothing we publish creates a professional or advisory relationship between you and us. Do not rely on our Content as the basis for an operational decision. Decisions about real incidents, real facilities, and real people require the judgment of a qualified professional with knowledge of the actual circumstances, applied under your own organization's authorities and procedures. Our Content is an input to that judgment; it is never a substitute for it.
In an emergency, contact your local emergency services.
We do not warrant that any analysis is complete or that any conclusion applies to your case. Views expressed by individual authors, guests, instructors, or community members are their own. Mention of a product, service, organization, or vendor is not an endorsement.
9. The community, and how to behave in it
The Crisis Lab community is a professional space. The standard is simple: conduct yourself as you would at a professional conference among peers.
Do not post content that is unlawful, harassing, abusive, defamatory, hateful, threatening, obscene, deceptive, or infringing of anyone's rights. Do not post confidential, classified, or export-controlled information, or personal data about others, that you are not authorized to share. Do not spam, scrape, solicit members commercially without our agreement, impersonate anyone, or interfere with the operation of the Services.
We may moderate, edit, or remove content, and suspend or terminate access, where we judge in good faith that this section has been breached or that the community needs protecting. Because community access is carried by your Intelligence or Intelligence+ subscription, removing your community access for a serious or repeated breach may also end that subscription. Where we end a subscription for breach, we refund the unused portion of the current term unless the breach was one that caused us loss. A course you bought separately is unaffected, and you keep it for its access period.
10. Content you post
You keep ownership of what you post. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, display, and distribute your content for the purpose of operating the community and the Services, and to keep it visible in the discussion thread where you posted it after you leave. This license is limited to that purpose; we do not acquire your content for other uses.
You confirm that you have the rights to post what you post, and that it does not breach section 9. You are responsible for it.
11. Our intellectual property
The Services and the Content (text, analysis, graphics, audio, video, course materials, software, layout, and design) are owned by CBI or our licensors and protected by United States and international copyright, trademark, and other laws. Crisis Lab, Intelligence Plus, and Powered by Crisis Lab are trademarks of Capacity Building International. Except for the license in section 5, no rights are granted to you.
12. Copyright complaints
If you believe material on our Services infringes your copyright, send a notice to contact@crisislab.io including: your contact details; identification of the copyrighted work; identification of the material you say is infringing and where it is; a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act for the owner; and your physical or electronic signature.
We investigate valid notices and remove or disable material where appropriate. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake, you may send us a counter-notice with the equivalent information.
13. Disclaimers, liability, and indemnity
Warranties
The Services and the Content are provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, and uninterrupted or error-free operation. We do not warrant that the Services will always be available, that defects will be corrected, or that the Services are free of harmful components.
Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows: we are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, lost goodwill, or business interruption, arising out of or connected with the Services or the Content, even if we were told such damages were possible. Our total liability to you for all claims arising in any 12-month period is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.
These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be limited by law. That exception includes, where applicable, death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and any liability owed to a consumer that mandatory law protects. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.
Indemnity
You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from third-party claims, and the reasonable legal costs of defending them, that arise from your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Content, or content you post. This does not extend to claims arising from our own acts or omissions. We will tell you promptly about any claim, let you control the defense of it, and cooperate reasonably with you.
14. Governing law and where disputes are heard
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any suit or proceeding arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Services will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Travis County, Texas, and you consent to their jurisdiction.
Consumer carve-out: if you are a consumer, this section does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of your country of residence, or of the right to bring proceedings in the courts of that country, as set out in section 7.
There is no arbitration clause in these Terms and no waiver of your right to go to court.
15. Export controls and sanctions
Our Services are provided from the United States and are subject to US export control and sanctions laws. You confirm that you are not located in, ordinarily resident in, or acting on behalf of a country or region subject to comprehensive US sanctions, and that you are not a person listed on a US government restricted-party list. You agree not to access or use the Services, or share the Content, in breach of those laws or of the equivalent laws that apply to you.
16. Suspension and termination
You may stop using the Services at any time, and cancel a subscription as described in section 6. We may suspend or terminate your access for breach of these Terms, for non-payment, or where we are required to by law. If we end your subscription for any reason other than breach, we refund the unused portion of the current term; because community access rides on that subscription, it ends at the same time. A separately purchased course stays available to you for its access period unless we terminated it for breach.
Sections that by their nature should survive termination do survive it, including sections 5 (restrictions), 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, and 15.
17. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. The current version always lives on this page with its effective date at the foot. If a change is material, we will give notice on this page and, for subscribers, by email before it takes effect. If you keep using the Services after a change takes effect, you accept it. If you do not accept it, cancel before your next renewal.
18. The rest
Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including natural disaster, war, civil unrest, labor action, epidemic, government action, and failure of internet or platform infrastructure.
Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or to a successor in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, it is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force.
No waiver. Not enforcing a provision once does not waive it.
Entire agreement. These Terms, our Privacy Policy, our Disclosure of Proprietary Interests, and the terms shown at checkout for a specific product are the whole agreement between us about the Services, and replace any earlier version.
Notices. We send notices to the email address on your account or post them on the Services. Send notices to us at contact@crisislab.io, or by mail to Capacity Building International, 5900 Balcones Drive #13770, Austin, Texas 78731-4257, United States.
No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms are between you and us; nobody else acquires rights under them.
19. Contact
Questions about these Terms: contact@crisislab.io.
Version 2.0 · Effective 24 August 2026 · Supersedes the previous undated version. Material changes will be announced on this page with an updated effective date.