This agreement applies if you sell downloadable works, offer per-call services, sell hardware or respond to Open Calls on Encore Aria, as an individual or an organisation ("you"). It takes effect when you tick the box in the "Become an Author" flow. The "Author Agreement" mentioned on the site, including its settlement and withdrawal terms, refers to this document.
Please read the parts in bold carefully, especially: the promotion licence, our fees and how they are deducted, model costs taken from your share, trial debts, reversals and set-off, held settlements, withdrawals, enforcement, your liability to us, limits on our liability, and where disputes are heard.
1. Our relationship
1.1 We provide listing, sales, delivery, hosted execution, statements and after-sales support. You decide what to list and sell. You are the seller of your products and services and are responsible for their description, quality, delivery and after-sales service.
1.2 We are independent of each other. You may not make promises on our behalf.
1.3 This agreement applies together with the Terms of Use, Purchase Agreement, Privacy Policy and Content, Copyright and Complaints Policy. If you offer per-call works or hosted code, Schedule 3 also applies; if Schedule 3 conflicts with the rest of this agreement on hosting or calls, Schedule 3 prevails.
2. Your Author details
2.1 Your Author details must be true and accurate, including your Imprint (author byline), contact details and anything else the law or a transaction requires. To withdraw earnings you will also need to provide payout details (see Section 8). Please keep them up to date.
2.2 Organisation accounts are currently by invitation only and must submit organisation documents, as explained on the application page.
2.3 If your details are incomplete or untrue, we may pause new listings or withdrawals and tell you what we need.
3. Listing works and products
3.1 Describe each work honestly: what it does, where it runs, version, dependencies, models used, licence, how it is delivered, whether source code and updates are included, and known limitations. Do not promise results a demo cannot back up, and do not fake sales, reviews or certifications.
3.2 You must have the rights to everything you list and follow open-source licences, model provider terms and third-party licences. Do not include malicious code or send buyer data elsewhere without telling buyers.
3.3 Listings go live after our review. When you edit a published work's details (such as its description, price or licence), the work is unlisted until the edit passes review. When you submit a new version, the current version stays listed and on sale during review, and the new version replaces it only after it is approved. Material changes to functions, licence, delivery files, permissions or security should be submitted as a new version; do not quietly replace what buyers already received. A new version's price and licence apply only to new orders.
3.4 We may review, ask for corrections, decline or temporarily unlist works. Passing review does not mean we guarantee the quality, security or non-infringement of a work.
3.5 Unlisting a work does not end your obligations under existing orders, including buyers' licences, after-sales support and any undelivered items. When a per-call work is unlisted, unused calls in buyers' call packs are refunded to their Cash balance in proportion to the calls remaining, and the matching earnings are reversed.
3.6 Do not move buyers off Encore Aria to trade or talk. Please use Encore Aria messages for after-sales communication.
4. Intellectual property, promotion and exclusivity
4.1 You keep the intellectual property you hold in your works.
4.2 By accepting this agreement and publicly listing or publishing content, you give us the free, non-exclusive, worldwide licence described in Section 5 of the Terms of Use to promote Encore Aria and your works on and off the platform, including on social media, in advertising, at events and in partner and investor presentations, and to sublicense it to our affiliates, service providers and promotional partners for those purposes. We do not need to ask you each time and we do not pay you for these uses. That section explains how long the licence lasts, what happens when you delete content and what is excluded. We do not use your works, prompts or code to train AI models. It is not a transfer of copyright.
4.3 State the buyer's licence clearly on each work page. Orders record the licence version at the time of purchase, and you cannot withdraw a licence a buyer has lawfully obtained because you raise your price, unlist the work, leave or change its exclusive status.
4.4 When listing a work, you choose "Exclusive" or "Non-exclusive" for that work. With Non-exclusive, you can keep selling the work anywhere. Exclusive works pay a lower commission and must follow Schedule 2.
4.5 The promotion licence does not require you to buy promotion, join discount campaigns or sell only on Encore Aria.
5. Fees
5.1 On every sale we charge three fees based on the sale price: a platform commission, a technical service fee and a payment channel fee. Current rates (see Schedule 1 for examples):
| Sale type | Commission | Technical service fee | Payment channel fee | Total | Charged on |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Download, Exclusive | 2% | 5% | 0.6% | 7.6% | Amount actually paid after coupons |
| Download, Non-exclusive | 5% | 5% | 0.6% | 10.6% | Amount actually paid after coupons |
| Per-call service (including call packs) | 20% | 5% | 0.6% | 25.6% | Sale price |
| Hardware | 10% | 5% | 0.6% | 15.6% | Product price (excluding shipping) |
5.2 How fees are calculated:
- all three fees are calculated separately on the sale price and added together;
- the 0.6% payment channel fee also applies when the buyer pays with Cash balance;
- each fee is rounded down to the nearest fen (CNY 0.01) or cent, and the remainder goes to you;
- shipping charges on hardware are not subject to fees and go entirely to you;
- the minimum price for a per-call service is CNY 1 per call;
- the rates at the time of sale are recorded on the order. Later rate changes apply only to new orders, never to orders already placed.
5.3 We may run fee promotions for particular works or Authors, under the rules of each promotion.
5.4 Rate changes follow Section 15: we announce them at least 15 days in advance, and you must confirm any increase. If you do not agree, you can unlist your works and stop new sales.
5.5 We will not charge any fee not disclosed in this agreement or on the page at the time of sale.
6. Model costs and costs we cover
6.1 After a successful paid call, the cost of the AI models used (the model cost) is yours. It is calculated at the model prices we publish and deducted from your share of that call, up to your share after the three fees. We do not recover any excess from you or from your other earnings, and it never creates a debt. However, if a work's model costs keep exceeding your share, we may pause calls to that work and ask you to adjust the price or setup.
6.2 We cover these costs ourselves:
- models for which we have not set a price;
- the extra input used by web search;
- failed calls and automatic retries;
- running hosted code in the sandbox.
6.3 Free trials. Free trials are not available yet. Once they are, if you turn on free trials for a work, you choose whether you or we cover the trial's model costs. If you cover them, they are deducted from that month's statement; if your earnings that month are not enough, the shortfall carries over as a debt and is deducted from future earnings. There is currently no cap on this debt. If a trial uses a model with no published price, we cover the cost.
7. Earnings and statements
7.1 When earnings are recorded. Downloads are recorded when the buyer's payment succeeds; per-call services when the call succeeds; hardware 7 days after the buyer receives the item.
7.2 Monthly statements. On the 10th of each month we generate a statement for the previous month. You can review it in Author Studio and should email us about any disagreement before confirming it. Once you confirm a statement, you cannot change it yourself, and it moves into the payout queue. If you later find a calculation error, you can contact us to check and correct it.
7.3 Currency. Earnings are recorded in the currency the buyer paid (CNY or USD), with a separate statement for each. When you withdraw, they are converted to your payout currency at the rate on the day. You bear the exchange-rate risk.
8. Withdrawals
8.1 Withdrawal rules:
- you can only withdraw whole confirmed monthly statements, not part of one; the CNY and USD statements for the same period must be withdrawn together;
- you can be paid by Alipay or bank card, and the payout account must be in your real name;
- the withdrawal fee is 1% of the amount withdrawn, paid by you and deducted from what you receive;
- once submitted, a withdrawal request goes to manual review and cannot be cancelled by you;
- we pay to your payout account within 15 business days after approval; when it arrives depends on your bank or Alipay;
- you are responsible for declaring and paying your own income tax and other taxes; we do not withhold tax for you. If the law requires us to withhold tax or report tax information, we will do so and tell you;
- organisation (official) accounts must first provide an invoice for the full amount withdrawn (a Chinese invoice for CNY, a commercial invoice for USD); we will not pay without it.
8.2 Payouts may be delayed, and we will tell you why, where: (a) the related earnings are under review for a breach, refund or chargeback; (b) your payout details are wrong, do not match your real name or are rejected by the bank; (c) a payment provider or bank system is unavailable, or it is a public holiday in China; or (d) an authority requires us to suspend payment.
8.3 Payout details. To withdraw, you provide your real name and your Alipay account or bank card number and bank name. This is sensitive information and is used only to verify the payee, pay you and meet accounting and tax obligations; see Section 3 of the Privacy Policy. By saving a payout account in Author Studio, you agree that we may use this information for withdrawals. Without it you cannot withdraw.
9. Reversals, set-off and held settlements
9.1 If a buyer is refunded under the Purchase Agreement, or an order is charged back or reversed by a payment provider, the earnings from that order are reversed from your earnings, including confirmed earnings. For a partial refund, only the matching part is reversed. We will show you the order, the reason and the amount, and you can dispute it.
9.2 If a reversal leaves you short, the shortfall carries over as a debt and is deducted from future earnings. If you leave Encore Aria, or a debt has not been cleared after 3 statement periods, we may ask you to repay it, and you must do so within 30 days of our notice; if you do not, we may recover it as the law allows. A debt does not reduce your obligations to buyers.
9.3 If earnings turn out to come from fraud, cheating, fake orders, sham transactions or infringement, we may take them back. If your work's infringement, illegality, fraud or malicious code causes us to refund buyers, face third-party claims, be penalised or be charged chargeback fees, we may, after giving you details, set the amounts and reasonable costs off against your pending or confirmed earnings, and recover any remainder as the law allows.
9.4 Where we identify a refund, chargeback or fraud risk, we may hold settlement of, or freeze, the earnings related to that risk. We will normally hold them for no more than 90 days, or until any judicial, regulatory or payment-provider investigation ends. We release them promptly once the risk has passed, and we will not hold your other earnings for a long period because of an unrelated dispute.
9.5 Helping with or processing a refund on your behalf does not mean we will pay it from our own funds.
10. Selling hardware
10.1 State the condition (new, DIY kit or used), brand and model, specifications, shipping regions, dispatch time, shipping cost and warranty accurately, and obtain any certification or licence the law requires. Follow shipping rules for special items such as those containing lithium batteries.
10.2 Ship within the time promised on the product page and provide a trackable shipping number.
10.3 You choose when listing whether an item supports 7-day no-questions returns, and this is shown on the product page. Either way, you must handle returns and exchanges for quality problems, wrong or missing items and items that do not match their description, and meet the repair, replacement and return obligations of applicable law, including for quality problems raised more than 7 days after delivery. If you ship to buyers outside mainland China, you must also honour any statutory right to cancel that their local law gives them, whatever your product page says.
10.4 When you agree to a return, you choose who pays return shipping. If the return is due to a quality problem, a wrong or missing item or another fault on your side, you pay shipping both ways.
10.5 You can see the buyer's full delivery details (name, phone number and address). Use them only to ship and support that order. Do not use them for marketing, sell them or keep them after the order is complete.
10.6 Do not sell counterfeit, unsafe or prohibited goods. If you discover a safety defect, tell us and buyers immediately and take the action the law requires.
11. Open Calls
Open Call projects are arranged directly between the person posting the brief and you. We do not handle money for Open Calls, guarantee delivery or accept work. You may sign your own contract. If you list the resulting work in the Catalogue, the fees in this agreement apply.
12. Buyer information and confidentiality
12.1 For downloads, you see the buyer's Imprint (or display name if they have none), not their email address. For per-call services you only see totals such as number of calls, revenue and success rate; you cannot see buyers' inputs or outputs.
12.2 Use buyer information and any non-public business or technical information you learn through Encore Aria only to fulfil orders and this agreement, and keep it confidential.
13. Enforcement, leaving and termination
13.1 Where we reasonably determine, based on evidence, that you have breached this agreement, the Terms of Use or our content policy, we may, depending on the circumstances: ask you to fix it; unlist works; stop calls; restrict sales or listings; suspend settlement and hold earnings related to the breach; deduct gains from the breach; pause withdrawals; or restrict or close your account. In urgent or serious cases we may act first and tell you afterwards. Our response will be in proportion to the risk, and holds follow Section 9.4. We will tell you the reasons and the basis, and you can appeal within 7 days.
13.2 You can unlist works and stop new sales at any time. Either of us can end this agreement with 30 days' notice. We may end it immediately if you seriously breach it.
13.3 After you leave or this agreement ends, existing orders, buyer licences, after-sales support, refunds, settlement of earnings, repayment of debts and confidentiality continue to apply. Earnings you obtained lawfully and that are unrelated to any breach are paid to you under the withdrawal rules, after deducting anything you owe under this agreement.
14. Responsibility, law and disputes
14.1 You are responsible for the rights in your works, the safety of your goods, your licences and taxes, and the promises you make to buyers. If a third-party claim, a penalty or a loss to us arises from your infringement, breach, fraud, unlawful goods or malicious code, you must compensate us for it in full, including damages, fines and reasonable investigation, court and legal costs. We will tell you promptly and let you take a reasonable part in handling it.
14.2 The following limits do not apply to loss caused by our wilful misconduct or gross negligence, death or personal injury caused by us, earnings payable to you, or liability that cannot be limited by law. Subject to that, to the extent the law allows, we are not liable for your loss of profits, goodwill or data or other indirect loss, and our total liability to you is limited to the platform service fees we actually retained from you for the service giving rise to the claim in the 12 months before the event. The cap applies once to any one matter.
14.3 This agreement is governed by the laws of mainland China (the People's Republic of China, excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan). The place of signing of this agreement is Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. If a dispute cannot be resolved by discussion, it will be heard by the competent people's court at the place of signing (including the Hangzhou Internet Court). Any mandatory rights you have under your local law are not affected.
15. Changes to this agreement
15.1 We may change this agreement and our fee rates. We will publish changes on the website at least 15 days before they take effect and tell you by in-app notice or email, or give longer notice where the law requires.
15.2 For changes that raise fees, reduce your share or add to your obligations, we will ask you to confirm in Author Studio. Until you confirm, we may suspend new listings and new sales of the affected works. If you do not agree, you can unlist your works and leave; we will not put unreasonable obstacles in your way.
15.3 Changes only apply to new orders after they take effect and do not affect orders already placed or earnings already recorded.
15.4 Changes needed to comply with law, or to deal with urgent security risks, may take effect immediately where the law allows; we will tell you promptly afterwards.
Schedule 1: Fees and worked examples
These examples use the 2026.10 rates. Amounts are in CNY.
Example 1: Download (Non-exclusive), price 100, no coupon
| Item | Calculation | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Sale price | 100.00 | |
| Commission 5% | 100 × 5% | −5.00 |
| Technical service fee 5% | 100 × 5% | −5.00 |
| Payment channel fee 0.6% | 100 × 0.6% | −0.60 |
| Your earnings | 89.40 |
If the same work is Exclusive: commission 2.00, technical service fee 5.00, channel fee 0.60, and your earnings are 92.40.
Example 2: Download (Non-exclusive), price 100, buyer uses a 20 coupon
Fees are charged on the 80 actually paid: commission 4.00, technical service fee 4.00, channel fee 0.48. Your earnings are 71.52.
Example 3: Per-call service, price 100 per call, paid with Cash balance, model cost 12
| Item | Calculation | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Sale price | 100.00 | |
| Commission 20% | 100 × 20% | −20.00 |
| Technical service fee 5% | 100 × 5% | −5.00 |
| Payment channel fee 0.6% | 100 × 0.6% | −0.60 |
| Your share after fees | 74.40 | |
| Model cost | At published model prices | −12.00 |
| Your earnings | 62.40 |
If the model cost for that call were 100, more than your 74.40 share, only 74.40 would be deducted and your earnings for that call would be 0. We absorb the remaining 25.60 and do not recover it from you.
Example 4: Rounding
A per-call service priced at 9.99 (999 fen):
- commission 999 × 20% = 199.8 fen, rounded down to 199 fen;
- technical service fee 999 × 5% = 49.95 fen, rounded down to 49 fen;
- channel fee 999 × 0.6% = 5.994 fen, rounded down to 5 fen;
- your share after fees = 999 − 199 − 49 − 5 = 746 fen, or 7.46 (model cost is then deducted as in Example 3).
Example 5: Hardware, product price 100, shipping 10
Fees apply to the product price only: commission 10.00, technical service fee 5.00, channel fee 0.60, leaving 84.40 from the product. The 10.00 shipping charge is all yours, for a total of 94.40. These earnings are recorded 7 days after the buyer receives the item.
Example 6: Withdrawal
You withdraw a confirmed monthly statement of 1,000. The 1% withdrawal fee is 10, so you receive 990.
Schedule 2: Exclusive listings
- Scope. Exclusivity is chosen per work. It only covers a work you listed as "Exclusive" and does not affect your other or future works.
- What you agree to. While a work is Exclusive, you will not sell, license or distribute it, or a substantially identical work, through any platform or channel other than Encore Aria. You may still show it on your own profile or social media as an introduction or preview and point people to Encore Aria to buy it.
- Rate. The download commission for Exclusive works is 2% (5% for Non-exclusive). The technical service fee and payment channel fee are unchanged.
- Switching to Non-exclusive. You can unlist the work, change it to Non-exclusive on the edit page and resubmit it for review, or email us to do it. New orders after the change use the Non-exclusive rate. Orders placed before the change keep the Exclusive rate, and we will not charge you the difference retrospectively.
- Breach. If you break the exclusivity terms, we may switch the work to Non-exclusive and apply the Non-exclusive rate from then on, and you must compensate us for any loss this causes.
- Buyers are not affected. Changes to a work's exclusive status do not affect buyers' licences, after-sales support or undelivered items.
Schedule 3: Per-call works and hosted code
This Schedule applies if you list per-call works, upload code to run on Encore Aria or use our developer features. If it conflicts with the rest of this agreement on hosting or calls, this Schedule prevails.
- How per-call works run. Per-call works run on our servers and may combine prompts, model calls, web search and code you write. Buyers can run them on the website or from a local AI agent through an installed call wrapper. The wrapper can be viewed publicly but does not contain your source material. Hosted code is currently available only for selected works; it runs in an isolated sandbox on Alibaba Cloud Function Compute in Hangzhou, China.
- Hosting licence. You give us a non-exclusive licence to build, test, security-check, host, run, troubleshoot, deliver and back up your work, as far as this is needed to provide it.
- Your source stays private. Public materials on the work page are covered by the promotion licence in Section 5 of the Terms of Use. Your prompts, code and other source material are not made public because they are hosted, and buyers cannot obtain them by running a call, unless the work page says the source is included.
- Your promises. You have the rights you need in the code, prompts, dependencies, data and tool calls in your work, and you follow open-source licences and model provider terms. You describe accurately the version, functions, models, dependencies, whether the work goes online and where, how it uses data, and its limits. You must not include backdoors, steal credentials, mine cryptocurrency, hide network access, access anything without authorisation or upload malicious dependencies; use buyer data for anything other than that call; or fake successful calls, charge twice or get around our limits. If you find a vulnerability or rights problem, tell us promptly and fix, replace or disable the affected feature.
- Our review and control. Where necessary, we may ask for source code or technical material for checks, run automated or manual checks and isolated tests, approve versions, set resource limits, and downgrade, roll back or stop a work. If there is a security risk, infringement, illegality or harm to buyers, we may suspend calls to the work immediately and tell you afterwards. If you refuse to provide what we need, or the risk cannot be controlled, we may refuse or stop hosting. Passing review and going live do not mean we guarantee the work's security, non-infringement or long-term availability; you remain responsible for the parts you control.
- Permissions and buyer data. A work may only run within the scope of the call the buyer confirmed. Running a call does not authorise the work to read files on the buyer's device, pay on the buyer's behalf or send messages for them. Network requests from hosted code go through our outbound proxy. List the external addresses your work accesses in its description, and submit any new destination or data use for review first. Buyers' inputs and outputs can only be viewed by the buyer; you see only totals such as number of calls, revenue and success rate. You must not try to obtain, record or pass on buyers' inputs or outputs. Call content is kept as set out in the Privacy Policy: inputs are deleted after 7 days and outputs after 30 days.
- Billing and costs. Charges for successful calls, automatic refunds for failed calls, call packs, platform fees and model costs follow Sections 5 and 6 of this agreement and the Purchase Agreement. The cost of running hosted code in the sandbox is paid by us; it is not counted as model cost and does not affect the buyer's price. Ordinary model costs are capped at your share of the call; we do not recover any excess from you and it never creates a debt. However, we may set off against your earnings, or recover as the law allows, losses caused by your malicious code, cheating or unauthorised actions.
- Limits and changes. We may set limits on call frequency, run time per call and per day, deployments, storage and network access, as described on the listing page or notified to you. We may change interfaces, available models and the runtime environment. We give advance notice of ordinary changes and may act immediately for security or compliance risks. We do not promise a fixed level of availability, unlimited computing resources, permanent compatibility or that any model will always be available. Effects on services buyers have already paid for are handled under the Purchase Agreement.
- Updates and services already sold. When you submit an update, explain changes to functions, dependencies, billing or permissions and how they affect services already sold. We may require re-review, testing, fixes or a rollback. Code updates do not change the price or fees of call packs already sold or orders already placed. If an older version can no longer run for security or legal reasons, stopping it, notice, replacements and refunds follow the Purchase Agreement.
- Responsibility and leaving. You are responsible for your work's description, fixes and after-sales support. Third-party claims or losses arising from your infringement, malicious code, misuse of data or breach are your responsibility under Section 14.1, including reasonable investigation, court and legal costs. Our limits on liability, governing law and disputes follow Section 14 of this agreement, and the cap applies once to any one matter. When hosting ends, we stop new calls, refund call packs already sold and keep records as needed.