In short. LADX is free. You must be 18 or over. What you make is yours. AI output can be wrong and is never a safety function: a competent engineer must review and test everything before it reaches equipment, and that responsibility stays with you. Do not break the law or the Acceptable Use Policy. We do not limit liability where the law does not allow it.
1. Who we are
LADX is run by Wartens Ltd ("we", "us"), a company registered in England and Wales with company number 15262249. Our registered office is 8 Lyon Road, Milton Keynes, England, MK1 1EX. You can reach us at hello@ladx.ai.
These terms apply to everything at ladx.ai, including the free tools you can use without an account, LADX Studio, the forum, the document templates and the LADX desktop application. The Acceptable Use Policy, the Privacy Policy and the cookie page form part of them. By creating an account, or by using LADX without one, you accept these terms.
2. Who can use LADX
- You must be 18 or over. LADX is a professional engineering tool and is not designed for children. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we will close it and delete its data.
- If you use LADX for an organisation, you confirm you are allowed to accept these terms for it, and "you" includes that organisation.
- You may not use LADX if you are barred from doing so by law, or if we have previously closed your account for breaking these terms.
3. Your account
Give us accurate details and keep them up to date. Keep your password to yourself and tell us straight away if you think someone else has used your account. Each account is for one person. You are responsible for what happens under your account, unless it was caused by our failure to keep it secure.
If you create a team workspace, everything any member creates in it is visible to every member. The owner can invite and remove members.
4. The service
LADX is free and has no paid plans. We work hard to keep it available and correct, but we provide it as it is and cannot promise it will always be available, uninterrupted or free of errors. Features may change, and we may add or withdraw them. If we intend to withdraw LADX entirely, we will give account holders at least 30 days' notice so they can export their data, unless something outside our control prevents it.
Projects you save in LADX Studio are stored on our servers. Work in the free tools stays in your own browser and is lost if you clear your browser data. Keep your own copies of anything that matters: export your projects and download your documents.
5. AI output and engineering safety
This section applies to everything LADX generates: ladder logic, Structured Text and other PLC code, converted programs, simulations, HMI screens, drawings, test protocols, specifications and every other document or answer.
AI output can be wrong
LADX AI is an AI system. It runs on large language models made by other companies, and its output can be incomplete, wrong or unsafe even when it looks confident and well formatted. You are told you are working with an AI system wherever it appears, and documents it helps produce carry a machine-readable mark saying so.
LADX checks generated Structured Text automatically for structural mistakes, such as unclosed blocks and unbalanced brackets, and compiles it where the full IEC 61131-3 compiler is installed. Those checks find some syntax errors; on the web they do not check data types or declarations. They do not show that the code does what you intended, that it is right for your machine, or that it is safe. The ladder simulator is a model of a controller, not a controller, and does not reproduce the timing, I/O behaviour or firmware of any real PLC.
Never a safety function
- Do not use LADX output to implement a safety function, or as any part of a safety-related control system, whether rated to a Safety Integrity Level under IEC 61508 or IEC 62061 or to a Performance Level under ISO 13849-1. LADX is not developed under the IEC 61508-3 software lifecycle and is not a safety component.
- Safety functions belong in certified safety hardware and in safety programs written, verified and validated under the applicable standard by people competent to do so.
Review and test everything
Before any LADX output is used on equipment, a competent person must review it, it must be covered by a risk assessment (for example under ISO 12100), and it must be tested away from live plant, by simulation, a factory acceptance test and a site acceptance test as appropriate. This applies to code you edit as well as code you accept unchanged.
Your responsibility
You remain responsible for the machines and processes you program, and for complying with the law and standards that apply to them. In Great Britain that includes the Supply of Machinery (Safety) Regulations 2008 and the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations 1998. In the European Union it includes the Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC and, from 20 January 2027, the Machinery Regulation (EU) 2023/1230. Templates, examples, converted programs and generated documents are generic starting points. They are not validated for your application and are not a substitute for your own engineering judgement.
The AI providers' own rules
When you use LADX AI, your requests are processed by OpenRouter and by the companies whose models run them. You must not use LADX AI in a way that breaks their usage policies, including the OpenRouter terms, the Anthropic Usage Policy and the OpenAI usage policies, and the terms of any other model you choose. If you connect your own provider key, your use of that provider is also governed by your own agreement with it, and any charges are between you and the provider.
The free tier
Without a key of your own, LADX AI runs on free models through LADX's shared OpenRouter account, with usage limits (currently 60 messages an hour). The companies that run free models may keep what you send and use it to train their models. Do not send personal data, confidential information or anything you are not allowed to share to the free tier. The AI transparency page explains how this works.
6. Your content
"Your content" means everything you put into LADX: programs, projects, documents, uploaded files, messages, forum posts and settings, and the output LADX generates for you.
- You own it. As between you and us, your content and the output generated for you belong to you. We claim no ownership of either.
- What you let us do with it. You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, copy, process and display your content only as needed to run LADX for you: for example to save your projects, show your forum posts to other people, and send your requests to the AI provider that answers them. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for content other people already hold (such as replies quoting your forum post) and copies in backups until they expire.
- No training. We do not use your content to train or fine-tune AI models. If that ever changes, we will ask first, and it will be off unless you turn it on.
- Output may not be unique. AI models can give similar output to different people, so we cannot promise that generated output is unique to you, or that it is free of material that belongs to someone else.
- Your responsibility. You must have the right to put your content into LADX and to let us process it as described. That includes files exported from vendor software and documents from your clients.
7. Other people's personal data
If you put personal data about other people into LADX, such as client contacts, team members or names in a document, you are responsible for having a lawful basis to do so. Where you use LADX for a business, we process that data on your behalf as your processor. In that role we will: process it only to provide LADX and on your documented instructions as expressed through your use of the service; make sure our staff are bound by confidentiality; keep it secure; use only the service providers listed on our service providers page, telling you of changes there; help you respond to requests from the people concerned and to meet your own security, breach and impact assessment duties; delete it when you delete it or close your account, subject to backups expiring; and give you the information needed to show we have met these commitments. These commitments form the data processing terms between us under Article 28 of the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR.
8. Acceptable use
You must follow the Acceptable Use Policy. In particular, you must not use LADX to break the law, to harm people or equipment, to attack systems you are not authorised to test, or to post illegal content.
9. The forum, shared pages and online safety
Forum posts, shared chats and shared documents can be read by people other than you. These rules explain how we protect people from illegal and harmful content there, as the UK Online Safety Act 2023 and the EU Digital Services Act require.
How we protect users
- We do not monitor everything that is posted, and we do not use automated moderation or other proactive technology to scan content. We rely on reports from users and others, and on our own review when we see a problem.
- When we become aware of illegal content, we take it down swiftly. Content we confirm is illegal, including terrorist content, child sexual abuse material, threats, fraud and other priority illegal content, is removed as soon as we confirm it, and normally within one working day of the report.
- We also remove content that breaks the Acceptable Use Policy, and we may restrict or close accounts that post it. What we do is proportionate to what happened and takes account of the rights of everyone involved, including freedom of expression.
- We report child sexual exploitation and abuse content to the National Crime Agency, and where we suspect an offence that threatens someone's life or safety we tell the police.
Reporting content
Anyone, with or without an account, can report content using the Report link beside every forum post and shared page, or through our reporting page. Tell us where the content is, why you think it is illegal or breaks our rules, and, if you would like to hear back, how to contact you. We acknowledge every report that gives an email address.
Decisions and reasons
If we remove your content or restrict your account, we will tell you what we did, which law or which of these terms it was based on, that the decision was made by a person and not by automated means, and how to challenge it, unless the law prevents us from telling you or doing so would put someone at risk.
Complaints and appeals
You can complain about content, about a decision we made on a report, about action we took against your content or account, or about how we are meeting our online safety duties, through the reporting page or by email. We acknowledge complaints within two working days and aim to resolve them within ten. Where possible an appeal is reviewed by a different person from the one who made the original decision. If we got it wrong, we will put it right, including restoring content.
Contact points
Users and authorities, including those in the European Union, can contact us about these matters at hello@ladx.ai, in English.
10. Our software and content
LADX, its software, design, articles, figures and templates belong to us or our licensors and are protected by copyright and other laws. We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use LADX in line with these terms.
- Templates. You may download our document templates, adapt them, and use them in your own projects and deliverables, including commercial ones. You may not resell or republish them as a template collection of your own.
- Articles. You may quote short extracts with a link to the source. You may not republish whole articles.
- Desktop application. The licence for the LADX desktop application is for use on the number of computers your licence key allows. When it is activated, the application contacts our licence service once to check the key. You may not copy, sell or share it, or remove its licence checks. You may not decompile or reverse engineer it except where the law expressly allows you to, for example to achieve interoperability.
11. Other companies' products and trade marks
LADX names products made by other companies so that you know what it works with, for example "reads files exported from Studio 5000". Rockwell Automation, Allen-Bradley and Studio 5000 are trade marks of Rockwell Automation, Inc. Siemens and TIA Portal are trade marks of Siemens AG. CODESYS is a trade mark of CODESYS GmbH. Beckhoff and TwinCAT are trade marks of Beckhoff Automation GmbH & Co. KG. Schneider Electric is a trade mark of Schneider Electric SE. Other names are the trade marks of their owners. LADX is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by any of these companies.
LADX reads and writes their file formats to let you move your own programs between tools. You must have the right to use any program or file you bring into LADX, and you must not use LADX to remove or get around any protection a vendor or a programmer has placed on a program, such as source or know-how protection.
12. Other services
LADX links to and works with services we do not control, including OpenRouter and the AI model providers, and YouTube. Some articles include videos played through YouTube's embedded player: by playing them you agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service, and Google's use of data is covered by the Google Privacy Policy. We are not responsible for other services or for the content of sites we link to.
13. Our liability to you
Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded by law. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are not affected.
If you use LADX for business
- We are not liable for loss of profit, revenue, business, contracts, goodwill or anticipated savings, for production downtime, or for any indirect or consequential loss.
- We are not liable for loss or damage arising from LADX output that was used on equipment without the review, risk assessment and testing described in section 5, or that was used for a safety function.
- We are not liable for loss of data you could have avoided by keeping your own copies, as section 4 asks.
- Otherwise, because LADX is free, our total liability to you in any 12-month period, however it arises, is limited to £100.
We set these limits because LADX is free, because you are an engineer who controls how its output is used, and because you are in the best position to check that output and to insure against the risks of your project.
If you are a consumer
If we fail to comply with these terms, we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breach or of our failing to use reasonable care and skill, but not for loss or damage that is not foreseeable. LADX is provided for professional use. If you use it for any commercial or business purpose, we are not liable to you for any loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption or loss of business opportunity. If digital content we supplied damages a device or digital content belonging to you because we did not use reasonable care and skill, we will either repair the damage or pay you compensation.
14. Your responsibility to us
If you use LADX for business, you will cover our reasonable costs and losses arising from a claim by someone else that results from your content, from your breach of these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, or from your use of LADX output, except to the extent we caused it.
15. Ending this agreement
- You can stop using LADX at any time, and delete your account and all its data from Settings.
- We can suspend or close your account, or remove access to a feature, if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, if the law requires it, or if we need to protect other users, our service or third parties. Where it is safe and lawful to do so we will tell you why first and give you a chance to fix the problem or download your data.
- Sections 6, 10, 13, 14 and 17 continue to apply after this agreement ends.
16. Changes to these terms
We may change these terms, for example when the law changes or when we add features. If a change is material, we will tell account holders by email or with a notice in LADX at least 30 days before it takes effect, unless the change is needed sooner for legal or safety reasons. If you do not agree to a change, you can close your account before it takes effect. If you carry on using LADX after that date, the new terms apply. The date at the top shows when these terms last changed.
17. General
- Complaints. If you are unhappy with anything about LADX, write to us first. We will acknowledge your complaint within five working days and try to resolve it.
- Transfer. We may transfer this agreement to another organisation that takes over LADX, and will tell you if we do. You may not transfer it without our agreement.
- Third parties. Nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.
- Severability. If a court decides any part of these terms is unlawful, the rest stays in force.
- Waiver. If we do not insist on something straight away, we can still insist on it later.
- Events beyond our control. We are not responsible for delays or failures caused by events outside our reasonable control.
- Entire agreement. These terms, with the documents they refer to, are the whole agreement between us about LADX.
- Law and courts. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer living in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also bring proceedings in your local courts. If you are a consumer living in the European Union, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of your country and can bring proceedings in its courts.