Response to the War in Ukraine

Loco is a small business, but it's an international one. We have paying customers in 68 countries and users of our free service in 165 countries.

We have never held our customers responsible for the actions of their governments, and we don't want to punish ordinary people simply for where they live. However, as a global business we have a responsibility to look at how we trade with a country that is actively waging war.

What we're doing

1. For existing customers: recurring card payments are likely to fail if the card issuer is subject to sanctions by Visa, MasterCard or American Express. Our standard policy for unpaid subscriptions applies here, with the exception that we won't chase payment for the usual 10 days. Failures from affected regions will result in immediate plan cancellation.

2. Any successful subscription payments from Russian accounts able to circumvent payment problems will be donated to charity. This will apply for as long as the Russian military continue their invasion.

3. Under our terms of service we "reserve the right to refuse to store any content on our servers that we deem in our sole opinion to be offensive or hateful, or posing a threat of danger or harassment to a person or group of people". Although content stored in Loco is not public, it may be destined for public distribution. We won't allow our tool to be used to spread false information, indirectly bring people to harm, or promote an active war.

4. It's illegal (and always has been) for Loco to do business with any entity on the UK sanctions list. It's a practical impossibility for us to cross reference this list with our customer base, but we expect payment problems will bring them to our attention and accounts will be closed accordingly.

5. New sign-ups originating from Russia and Belarus are paused. This is primarily to reduce the volume of accounts we'll be monitoring and to mitigate any abuse that results from us taking this stance. We know this is easily circumvented. The restriction is likely to be lifted once we're happy our monitoring systems are effective.

6. We removed Yandex integration from our WordPress plugin. You can read the notice on the WordPress forum.

What we're NOT doing

1. We're not indiscriminately suspending all Russian accounts.

2. We're not indiscriminately cancelling paid subscriptions.

Unlike the many large firms pulling out of Russia, our impact on the Kremlin's treasury is minuscule beyond measure. We would only be taking such blanket measures for good PR, or in vain protest to the war. We don't believe there would be any tangible benefit to such action, and certainly none that would out-weigh the potentially negative impact of denying access to ordinary people.

This may change, but as it stands we're not inclined to punish users just because they're based in Russia. In the process we risk punishing not just companies funding a war through their taxes, but ordinary people using translation as a tool for peaceful or educational purposes.