SangoAI Translation API — Terms of Use

Effective: 2026-08-10 · Operated by: MEYNG SAS · Contact: contact@meyng.com

By calling the SangoAI translation API you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the API.

1. Non-commercial use only

The API is offered for non-commercial use. This is our choice, not a licence we inherited — the service runs on a commercially-licensed foundation model with MEYNG's own Sango vocabulary layer, so we are free to set this term and free to change it.

We set it because the API is free to use and funded out of a small research budget. Commercial traffic would consume it without contributing to the work.

Permitted: research, academic and educational use, personal use, humanitarian and NGO operations, government and public-sector use, journalism, and language-preservation work.

Not permitted: any use primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation. This includes, without limitation: integration into paid products or services; resale or sublicensing of API output; advertising-supported services; and internal use by a commercial entity in support of revenue-generating activity.

Following Creative Commons' guidance on the same wording, this restriction attaches to the use, not the user. Commercial organisations may use the API for genuinely non-commercial purposes.

If your intended use is commercial, contact contact@meyng.com. Unlike our published model weights — which carry a genuine CC BY-NC 4.0 term inherited from Meta's NLLB-200 and cannot be relicensed by us — this API's restriction is ours to lift, and we are willing to discuss it.

Note on our other artifacts. MEYNG/nllb-sango-finetuned-600m-v2-2 and its siblings on Hugging Face are a different matter: those weights are derived from nllb-200-distilled-600M and their CC BY-NC 4.0 term is inherited and non-negotiable. Those models do not serve this API. See LICENSING.md.

2. Scope — which API these terms cover, and the key you need

These terms govern the SangoAI Public API. It requires an API key. Requests without a valid key are rejected with 401 Unauthorized; the key is sent in the Authorization header. Keys are issued through the API Key Program — see the Developers page, or write to contact@meyng.com.

Your key carries a tier, and the tier sets your rate limit and monthly quota. A free tier exists. Current tiers and their limits are published on the Pricing and Developers pages rather than restated here, so that the numbers you are held to are the live ones.

Do not share your key, and treat traffic authenticated with it as your own. You are responsible for use made under your key.

These terms are not limited to the keyed API. The SangoAI website also exposes translation and vocabulary endpoints that need no key, for the site's own features and for casual trials. Absence of a key there is a convenience, not a waiver: §§1, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 8 apply to every request to either surface. If you are building an integration, use the keyed API — the keyless endpoints exist to serve the website and may change or disappear without notice.

3. Acceptable use

You must not:

• Exceed your limits, or attempt to evade them through distributed or rotating requests, or by obtaining multiple keys to work around a single key's quota. Two limits apply at once: your key's own tier rate and monthly quota (the one you will normally meet first), and a separate ceiling on the endpoint as a whole, which is shared with every other caller — so sustained heavy use degrades the service for everyone, not only for you. Current tier figures are on the Pricing and Developers pages.
• Bulk-harvest output to train, fine-tune, or distil a competing model without written permission.
• Use the API to generate unlawful, harassing, deceptive, or misleading content, or content that misrepresents machine output as verified human translation.
• Attempt to disrupt, overload, probe, or reverse-engineer the service.
• Remove or obscure attribution where attribution is required.

We may block any client for any reason, without notice.

4. Accuracy — read this before relying on output

Sango is a low-resource language and this is an experimental system.

The API is not suitable for medical, legal, financial, safety-critical, or official government communication. Sango is under-represented in every general-purpose model, and output can be fluent and wrong at the same time — that combination is the hazard. Expect errors on idiom, tone-marked distinctions, technical vocabulary, and long or complex input.

Any use where an error could cause harm requires human review by a competent Sango speaker.

We publish our evaluations in full, including the failures — see huggingface.co/MEYNG. Note that those benchmarks measure our open-source fine-tuned models, which are not what serves this API; they are published so the research is checkable, not as a performance claim about this endpoint. We do not currently publish a benchmark for the API itself.

5. Availability

The API is provided on a best-effort basis with no uptime guarantee. It may be rate-limited, degraded, modified, or discontinued at any time without notice. Do not build a dependency that assumes availability.

6. Your content

We do not claim ownership of text you submit. You are responsible for having the right to submit it.

We do not retain what you submit. Text you send is held in memory for as long as it takes to translate it, and is not written to any database or log.

• Not stored: your submitted text, and the translation returned to you.
• Not logged: neither the text nor any part of it. Our service logs record request counts and timings, not content.
• Not used for training: nothing you submit trains or fine-tunes a model, and nothing you submit enters our published datasets.
• What we do count: the number of requests, so we can publish honest usage figures and keep the service within its budget. Counts only — no content.
• No opt-out is needed, because there is nothing to opt out of.

This was not always true. Until 2026-08-10 the API kept a 30-day translation cache that stored submitted text verbatim, undisclosed. It has been switched off rather than written up, and the records it had already created were deleted outright rather than left to expire on their remaining TTL. The store is empty: nothing submitted before that date is retained.

Please still avoid submitting personal, confidential, or sensitive information. We do not retain it, but it does travel to a third-party model provider to be translated, and no best-effort service should be trusted with data that would cause harm if exposed.

7. No warranty; limitation of liability

The API is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, MEYNG SAS shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, or special damages, or for any loss of data, revenue, or profits, arising from use of or inability to use the API.

8. Attribution

Non-commercial deployments displaying output must include a visible credit such as:

Translation powered by SangoAI (MEYNG) — https://sangoai.sbs

Do not credit this output to our published model weights, and do not mark it CC BY-NC 4.0. Until 2026-08-10 this section asked for exactly that, which contradicted §1: those weights do not serve this API, and no inherited licence attaches to what this endpoint returns. The CC BY-NC 4.0 credit belongs on the model weights when you use them directly — see LICENSING.md.

9. Changes

We may update these terms. Material changes will be posted at https://sangoai.sbs/terms with a revised effective date. Continued use constitutes acceptance.

10. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of France.

Questions: contact@meyng.com · Commercial licensing: contact@meyng.com