Vigil Professional terms
The terms of a paid Vigil Professional subscription. They govern the subscription and nothing else — reading Vigil requires no account, no payment and no agreement to this page.
Last revised 15 September 2026. Questions about anything here: [email protected].
1. What Vigil Professional is
Vigil Professional is a paid layer over the work Vigil already publishes. It is intended to add monitoring depth, tools and personal workflow on top of the public corpus, together with material published for subscribers. It is a deeper layer across Vigil's existing surfaces rather than a separate product with its own analysis.
Vigil publishes continuously, and the subscription is not a guarantee that any particular feature, dataset, module or piece of material will exist, continue to exist, or stay in the same form. What a subscription buys is access to Vigil Professional as it stands while the subscription runs. Where a change is material, section 14 applies.
Nothing is taken away from the public record to create it. Everything Vigil publishes publicly today stays public and stays free, and no account is required to read it.
2. Your account
An account is an email address. There is no password: signing in sends a single-use link to that address, so whoever can read your email can sign in as you. Keeping access to that mailbox secure is your responsibility, and it is the only credential there is.
Sign-in links and sessions are personal. Do not share them, and do not share an account. If you think someone else has access to your account, signing out ends your sessions and you can write to the address above.
3. The subscription
Vigil Professional is a recurring subscription. The price and the billing interval are shown by PayPal on the approval screen, before you confirm, and PayPal charges that amount on that interval until the subscription ends. Vigil does not quote a price in these terms, so that what you read here and what you are billed cannot differ.
The intended launch price is published in advance on the Vigil Professional page, so that it can be read before anything is offered. If that published figure and the amount PayPal shows you on the approval screen ever differ, the approval screen is the one that governs — do not confirm it. Write to the address above instead: a mismatch is a mistake on Vigil's side and will be corrected rather than charged.
Renewal is automatic. If a payment fails, PayPal retries it on its own schedule, and a subscription whose payments keep failing may be suspended or ended.
4. Payment
Payment is processed by PayPal. Vigil does not collect, see or store card numbers or any other payment credentials, and there is no payment form anywhere on this site. Vigil sends PayPal your account email address so the checkout is pre-filled, and receives back a subscription identifier and a status. PayPal is responsible for the payment itself and handles your payment information under its own terms.
5. Cancelling
You can cancel at any time from your PayPal account (opens in a new tab), which is also where the funding source is changed. Cancelling stops the next renewal.
Access continues to the end of the period you have already paid for. Cancelling does not cut access off on the day you cancel, and it does not require you to ask Vigil for anything. The same holds if PayPal suspends a subscription: time that has already been paid for is honoured.
When the paid period ends, the account remains — signed in, with no Professional subscription — and can be subscribed again later.
Cancelling is not the same as deleting your account. Cancelling stops the renewal and leaves the account in place. Deleting the account removes your sign-in identity from Vigil and does not cancel anything at PayPal. Because of that, an account cannot be deleted while Professional access is still running: cancel first, let the paid period finish, and the account can then be deleted from the account page. Deletion is described in the privacy notice.
6. Refunds and your statutory rights
Vigil has no standing refund policy of its own, and says so rather than claiming refunds are never available. If something has gone wrong — a duplicate subscription, a charge you did not expect, a subscription you could not use — write to [email protected] and it will be answered by a person.
Nothing on this page limits the rights you have under applicable consumer law, including any statutory right to cancel or to a refund. Where those rights apply, they apply whatever this document says.
7. What this product is, and is not
Vigil is an analytical and research publication. It describes conflicts structurally and historically, states what its assessments rest on, grades confidence, and records what it does not know.
It is not, and must not be relied on as:
- legal advice;
- financial, investment or insurance advice;
- a forecasting service, or a guarantee that any assessment will hold;
- live or operational intelligence;
- a warning, alerting or emergency notification service;
- a substitute for your own duty of care, security decisions or professional judgment.
Vigil publishes no current unit positions, force concentrations, movement tracking, readiness, routes or targeting-quality detail, on any surface, to any subscriber. The content model has no fields for them — see the methodology.
8. Watch, Tempo and what they do not promise
A Vigil Professional subscription does not add prediction to Vigil, and it does not buy any of the following, because none of them exists: probabilities, expected dates, severity grades, threat levels, risk scores, ordering by urgency, or machine-generated escalation signals.
A Watch question moves when an editor reviews the evidence and records an outcome. An activity series counts dated, reported occurrences at published markers and is a lower bound on the published record — not a measure of intensity, escalation or danger, and not comparable with another series or with anyone else's figures. Both are defined in the methodology, and the definitions are the same for subscribers as for everyone else.
Where Vigil delivers a notification to a subscriber, it is delivery of an editorial change Vigil has already reviewed and published. It is not an independent detection, a forecast or a warning, and it carries no promise of timeliness.
9. Using Professional material
Normal professional use is expected and welcome: reading, quoting with attribution, citing Vigil in your own work, briefing colleagues on what you have read, and using it to inform your own analysis. Nothing below is meant to restrict that.
What a subscription does not permit:
- sharing an account, its sign-in links or its sessions with other people;
- reselling, sublicensing or otherwise passing on access;
- bulk or automated collection of subscriber-only pages or datasets;
- systematic redistribution or republication of subscriber-only material, in whole or in substantial part.
If you need access for a team, an organisation or a shared workflow, ask — that is a conversation, not a violation.
10. Intellectual property
Vigil's own material — its analysis, structured records, writing, maps, design and the system that produces them — remains Vigil's. Sources cited by Vigil remain the property of whoever holds them, and Vigil's citation of a source grants you no rights in it. A subscription grants access to and use of Vigil Professional; it transfers no ownership.
11. Availability
Vigil is a small, independently maintained publication. An individual Vigil Professional subscription carries no service level agreement and no uptime commitment. Outages, maintenance and periods of degraded function happen, and Vigil's editorial cadence is stated on the editorial process page rather than guaranteed here.
12. Suspension and termination
Vigil may suspend or end a subscription where payment fails and is not resolved, where an account is used in a way section 9 prohibits, where an account is used to attack or degrade the service or other people's accounts, or where there is a serious or repeated breach of these terms. Where the circumstances allow it, you will be told what the problem is and given a chance to resolve it first.
You can end your subscription at any time under section 5, for any reason or none.
13. What a subscription does not buy
A Vigil Professional subscription buys access to Professional functionality and material. It does not buy influence over Vigil's work.
Analytical judgments, confidence grades, sourcing decisions, which questions Vigil carries in Watch, what Vigil covers, how findings are worded and when a correction is issued are decided editorially, and are unaffected by whether a reader has paid, by how much, or by how many subscribers hold a view. This is the same commitment About makes about sponsorship and advertising, and the same one Support Vigil makes about voluntary contributions. Corrections are published in the corrections log whoever asked for them.
Support Vigil and Vigil Professional are separate. A voluntary contribution grants no Professional access, and a Professional subscription is not a donation.
14. Changes to these terms
These terms may change as Vigil Professional develops. Where a change materially affects what you are paying for or what you are agreeing to, Vigil will tell subscribers at their account address before it takes effect, and you can cancel under section 5 if you do not accept it. The date at the top of this page is the date of the current version.
15. Your data
The personal data a Vigil account involves — what is held, what is not, who processes it, and how to have it removed — is described in the privacy notice. That notice is part of these terms by reference, and it is written to be checked against the code rather than agreed to.
16. Contact and interpretation
Vigil Consilium is an independently maintained publication and publishes under the project's name. Correspondence about the subscription — including a request for the operator's details where they are required — goes to [email protected].
If part of this document is found to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Where a term here conflicts with a right you hold under applicable law, that law applies.
Written in plain language on purpose. It describes how the subscription actually behaves, and where it states a limit on Vigil's part it does so without pretending Vigil can contract out of your statutory rights.