The small print

Terms of Service

Effective 5 August 2026

These terms govern your use of OpenCycle, the cycling simulator at opencycle.net, and the services behind it — accounts, shared rides and coaching connections. By using OpenCycle you agree to them; by creating an account you confirm that you have read them. They are written to be read in one sitting, and the Privacy Policy is the other half of the pair.

1. What OpenCycle is

OpenCycle is a cycling simulator that runs in your browser. It is provided free of charge — there is no paid tier, no subscription and no trial. The service is operated by Storybooks LLC, the company behind Transition; "OpenCycle", "we" and "us" mean Storybooks LLC.

2. Riding without an account

Almost everything works without an account, and nothing in these terms requires you to create one. Your rider, your settings and your ride recordings live on your own machine, and what you do with them is your business.

3. Who can ride

You must be old enough to agree to these terms yourself — the age of majority where you live. If you are not, a parent or legal guardian has to read and accept them for you, and by letting you ride they take responsibility for your use: judging whether the workouts and the resistance the app commands suit you, and supervising you around the equipment. A trainer is a machine with moving parts, and section 9 is addressed to whoever answers for the rider on it.

4. Accounts

An account keeps your name, your rider and your FTP across browsers. If you create one:

• You are responsible for your password and for what happens under your account. Choose a password you do not use elsewhere.
• A username is a claim other riders see. Do not pick a name to impersonate somebody else, and do not pick one that a reasonable person would find abusive. We may release or rename a name that does either.
• Do not create accounts by automation, or in bulk.
• You can delete your account at any time from the account tab. That removes it and releases the name; it cannot be undone.

5. Playing fair

The service is shared infrastructure run at our expense, and other riders are people. You agree not to:

• harass, threaten or deliberately spoil the ride of anybody sharing a road with you;
• disrupt, overload or interfere with the service, or access it in ways it is plainly not offered — probing other riders' data, relaying non-OpenCycle traffic through our servers, or scraping the service to resell it;
• misrepresent yourself to us or to other riders in a way intended to deceive.

Good-faith security research is the exception, and it is welcome: report what you find to security@opencycle.net and reporting it will never be held against you.

A shared ride is between the riders on it. We do not supervise rides, and while we may act on a report of abuse, we are not a party to — and are not responsible for — what riders do to each other.

6. Your content

Worlds you describe, GPX files you import, your rider's appearance and your chosen name are yours. You grant us the licence we need to operate the service with them — storing your profile on your account, and showing your name and rider to the people you share a road with — and nothing more. Delete the account and that licence ends with it.

Ideas are the one exception: if you send us feedback or suggestions about OpenCycle, we may use them without restriction or payment. Telling us how to make the thing better should never turn into a claim against it.

7. The software

The OpenCycle software is proprietary. We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use it in your browser for riding, and these terms do not grant any right to copy, modify, redistribute or reverse engineer it. Versions of OpenCycle previously published under an open-source licence remain governed by the licence they were published under.

8. Ride at your own risk

Indoor cycling is vigorous exercise, and exercise carries real risk — up to and including serious injury and, rarely, death. Talk to a doctor before starting a training programme if you have a heart condition, are pregnant, have been advised to avoid exertion, or are in any doubt at all about your health. By riding, you voluntarily accept these risks, and you are responsible for choosing efforts you are fit for.

Stop immediately if you feel faint, dizzy, short of breath beyond the effort, or any pain in your chest. No workout is worth finishing past a warning like that, and no number this software shows you is a reason to override how you actually feel. Do not ride under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and if structured training is new to you, start easier than you think you need to.

OpenCycle is not a medical device and gives no medical advice. Workouts, power targets, FTP figures and difficulty settings are training suggestions, not prescriptions. Heart rate, power and every other metric on the screen are fitness estimates for training and entertainment — not the monitoring, diagnosis or treatment of anything — and readings can be wrong: sensors drop, batteries fade, and watts inferred from wheel speed are an estimate by design. Never rely on this app to watch your health for you.

9. Your trainer, and what this app does to it

OpenCycle controls physical equipment. In ERG mode it sets the power your trainer demands; with the terrain felt, it sets resistance from the gradient of a road you cannot see coming. You choose whether those modes are on, and when they are, the machine under you will get harder to pedal without asking first. You can always stop pedalling, lower the difficulty, or unpair the trainer — and mounting, riding and dismounting safely is your responsibility, not the software's.

Set up your trainer, your bike and its mounting according to their manufacturers' instructions, and keep bystanders — children especially — clear of the moving parts. The trainers, power meters, sensors and straps you pair are other companies' products: we do not make them and cannot answer for them, and to the maximum extent permitted by law we are not responsible for their malfunction, or for damage to your equipment or property arising from your use of the service.

10. Other people's services

Some things OpenCycle connects to are not ours: a coaching platform you link to your account, an AI chat you paste a world prompt into, the trainer on your floor. Their terms govern them. We are not responsible for what they do, and connecting them is always your choice — nothing is linked until you approve it.

11. A free service, honestly offered

We work to keep OpenCycle up, and we tell the truth about what it does. But it is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind — express or implied, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. Features may change, break or be withdrawn, and the service as a whole may be suspended or discontinued. Where we reasonably can, we will give notice before removing something people depend on.

12. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential damages, for lost data, for damage to trainers, bicycles or other equipment, or for any amount beyond what you paid us to use OpenCycle — which is nothing. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Nothing in them takes away consumer rights the law of your country grants you regardless of contract.

13. If what you do gets us sued

If a third party brings a claim against us because of something you did — content you had no right to use, or a breach of these terms — you agree to cover the costs and damages that claim causes us. This is the narrow kind of indemnity: it reaches what you did, not the ordinary act of riding.

14. Ending things

You can stop using OpenCycle at any time, and delete your account from the account tab. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms — where practical, with a warning first; for plainly abusive or unlawful use, without one.

15. Changes to these terms

If these terms change, the new version will be posted here with a new effective date, and a material change will be flagged on the site before it takes effect. Riding on after that date is acceptance of the new terms; if you do not accept them, stop using the service and delete your account.

16. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Oklahoma and the United States, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and any dispute that ends up in court belongs in the state or federal courts sitting in Tulsa County, Oklahoma. If you use OpenCycle as a consumer somewhere whose law gives you mandatory protections, or the right to bring a claim at home, nothing here takes those away.

17. Contact

Questions about these terms: legal@opencycle.net. Security reports: security@opencycle.net.

These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about OpenCycle. We may assign them to a successor operator and will say so if we do; your side of them is yours alone and cannot be assigned. If any part of them turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stands.