Terms of Service
Last updated 5 October 2026
These terms are the agreement between you and Albert Lluís Viñas, who builds and runs POTE™. They are written to be read once, in plain English, by a surgeon with ten minutes. Where a sentence could be read two ways, the reading that favours you is the one we mean.
- POTE™ is a study and reference tool. It is not a medical device, not a medical record, and it gives no medical advice.
- Patient identifiers must never be stored in it.
- What you write is yours. You can export it or delete it whenever you like.
- $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year after a free trial, cancellable in one step.
- Your first paid charge is refundable in full within 14 days, on request.
1. Who you are agreeing with
POTE™, available at surgtechniques.com and app.surgtechniques.com, is provided by Albert Lluís Viñas, a self-employed professional (autónomo) registered in Spain, at C/ Alt de Pedrell, 2, 2-3, 08032 Barcelona, Spain. “We” and “us” in this document mean him, and “POTE™” means the service at those two addresses. Full identification is in the Legal notice. Questions and help: support@surgtechniques.com. Legal notices: legal@surgtechniques.com.
By creating an account you accept these terms and the Privacy Policy.
2. What POTE™ is, and what it is not
POTE™ is a personal encyclopedia of operative techniques. You write down how an operation is done, by you or by an attending you learned it from, and POTE™ keeps it organised, searchable and ready before the next case.
It is, deliberately and permanently:
- Not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat, monitor or make any recommendation about a patient, and it is not certified as a medical device anywhere.
- Not an electronic health record. It is not a clinical system, it holds no patient chart, and it must not be used as one.
- Not a source of medical advice. Everything in your atlas is what you or a colleague wrote. We do not review it, verify it or endorse it.
Every clinical decision remains yours. You are responsible for the care you give and for the accuracy of what you write down. Your hospital’s, university’s or employer’s policies apply to you in full, and if any of them say you may not use a tool like this, they win.
3. Patient data: the one rule we ask you to keep
Do not put patient identifiers into POTE™. Not names, not record or bed numbers, not dates of birth, not photographs that show a face, a wristband or a screen. A technique is how an operation is done, not who it was done to.
POTE™ tries to help you keep that rule. Every line goes through a check on your own device at two points, when it is added and again before it is saved. The check removes the identifiers it recognises and asks you about words that might be a person’s name. Dictated speech is turned into text by a speech service before this check can run on it. The check is a safety net, not a guarantee: it runs on patterns, it will miss things, and it cannot know what a sentence means.
Because of that, POTE™ makes no claim of HIPAA compliance and must not be presented as HIPAA-compliant, and it is not offered as a system of record for protected health information under any country’s law. If you put patient data in anyway, you are responsible for having done so, and you should remove it. You can edit or delete any line at any time.
4. Who may use it
POTE™ is for adults aged 18 or over who are doctors, surgical trainees or other medical professionals. One account is one person. Do not share your password; if you think someone else has reached your account, tell us and change it.
5. Your content stays yours
Everything you write, dictate, photograph or import stays your property. We claim no ownership of it, and we do not use it to advertise, to train models or to build any product.
To run the service we need your permission to do the obvious things with it: store it, back it up, transmit it, process it and display it back to you, and pass the specific parts described in the Privacy Policy to the companies that provide speech-to-text and the AI features. That permission is limited to operating POTE™ for you, it is not exclusive, and it ends when you delete the content or your account, except for backup copies, which age out on the schedule in the Privacy Policy.
A technique you share with a colleague is a copy they keep. Sending a card hands over what it contains; the recipient’s copy is theirs from the moment they accept it, and deleting your own does not remove theirs. Share only what you are willing to hand over.
6. The AI features
Three features ask a language model about your words, and one turns your voice into text:
- Clean, which sorts the notes you dictate, paste or import into the right sections, and splits a dictated line that holds more than one step.
- Ask, which answers a question by pointing at lines you already wrote.
- Spell check, which flags possible typos and lets you keep or correct each word.
- Dictation, which transcribes what you say.
Two promises hold across all of them. They point at your own lines; they never write clinical text of their own. And they can be wrong: a sorted line can land in the wrong section, an answer can miss a line, a transcription can mishear a drug or a size. Nothing they produce is checked by a person before you see it. You check the result. Treat it as a first draft of filing, never as a second opinion.
7. What you agree not to do
- Store patient identifiers (section 3).
- Store anything unlawful, or anything you have no right to store, including text or images copied from a book, a journal or another person’s material beyond what the law allows you.
- Try to reach another person’s account or data, or probe, scan or overload the service.
- Use the AI features in bulk or automatically, resell them, or use them for anything other than your own atlas.
- Resell or share access to your account.
If an account is used this way we may suspend it. Where it is safe and lawful to do so we will say what happened first and give you a chance to put it right, and you can always export your atlas.
8. Plans and prices
POTE™ costs $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, in US dollars. Both plans carry exactly the same features; the yearly plan is simply cheaper. There is no free tier and no per-seat pricing.
We are the seller: the charge comes from us, it appears on your card statement as “POTE APP”, and the receipt is ours. Prices include VAT. Where another tax applies, it is calculated and shown at checkout before you pay. Payments are taken by Stripe, which handles the card details. We never see or store your card number. By subscribing you also accept Stripe’s own terms for the payment itself.
We may change prices for the future. If a change affects your plan you will hear about it by email at least 30 days before it applies to you, and you can cancel before it does. A price you have already paid never changes.
9. The free trial
Every new account gets 30 days free. If you join through a colleague’s invitation, you get 30 extra days on top (section 10). Every feature is on during the trial.
A payment method is taken when you sign up, with nothing due that day. When the trial ends it becomes the plan you picked, and the first charge is taken then. A reminder email goes out seven days before that charge, on every trial. Cancel at any point before the trial ends and you are never charged.
10. Invitations: you both get 30 extra days
Every account has a personal invitation link. When a colleague starts a trial through it, you both get 30 extra free days: 30 are added to their trial and 30 to you.
Where your 30 days go depends on where you are: if you are still in a trial, the trial gets longer; if you pay monthly, the next charge moves 30 days later; if you pay yearly, the renewal moves 30 days later; if your subscription has ended, the days are kept and applied when you resume.
The limits, so the scheme can keep existing: up to 12 free months per account per year; one reward per new payment card; nothing for inviting an account that already exists, and nothing for inviting yourself. We may change or withdraw the scheme for the future, but days you have already earned are never taken back.
11. Renewing, cancelling and what happens after
A subscription renews automatically at the end of each period until you cancel. On the yearly plan we email you at least 15 days before each renewal, with the date and the amount.
You can cancel in one step from Settings, at any time. Access continues to the end of the period you have paid for. You can switch between monthly and yearly whenever you like.
When a subscription ends, because you cancelled or because a payment kept failing, the account becomes read-only rather than closed. You can still sign in, read, search and export as PDF or .pote; adding, editing, dictation, the AI features, sharing, photos and restore are off until you resume. Nothing is deleted. The Cancellation and refunds page has the detail, including the 14-day refund on a first charge.
If a payment fails, Stripe retries it and emails you. The account only becomes read-only when the subscription actually ends.
12. Deleting your account
You can delete your account yourself, from Settings. It deletes every technique, line, note, photo and backup, your profile and your login, and cancels any subscription. It is immediate and it cannot be undone, so POTE™ offers you a .pote export of your whole atlas first. If you only want to empty your atlas and keep the account, Settings can do that too.
Stripe keeps its own record of payments already made, because the law requires it. A technique you shared and a colleague accepted stays in their account as their copy (section 5).
13. Availability
We do not promise that POTE™ is always available. It is run by one person, on infrastructure operated by others, and it can be down for maintenance or for reasons outside our control. There is no uptime guarantee and no service credit.
What we do instead is keep copies: your atlas is backed up automatically as described in the Privacy Policy, you can restore from a backup inside the app, and you can take the whole thing with you as a file at any time.
14. Changes to these terms
If these terms change in a way that affects you, we will email you at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and the date at the top of this page will change. Carrying on using POTE™ after that means you accept the new version; if you would rather not, cancel before it applies and ask for a refund of anything you have paid for time you will not use.
15. Liability
POTE™ is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profits, or for any clinical decision taken by you or anyone else. Where we are liable, our total liability is limited to what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.
Nothing in this section limits anything that cannot be limited by law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, and the rights Spanish and European Union consumer law gives you. If you are a consumer, those rights apply in full whatever this document says.
16. Law and courts
Spanish law governs these terms. If you are a consumer living elsewhere in the European Union, you also keep every protection your own country’s law gives you, and you can bring a claim in the courts where you live. Disputes we cannot settle between us go to the courts of Barcelona, Spain, except where consumer law says otherwise.
If one clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stands.