Last updated July 30, 2026 · Version 2026-07-30.1 · Sykla is made by Hibiscus Consulting, LLC
These are the terms you agree to when you use Sykla. We have tried to write them the way we write everything else here: plainly, and without pretending the app is something it is not. Please read section 3 in particular. It is the one that matters.
Sykla is an app for recording cycling and running done outdoors, on real roads and trails. It records your position, distance, elevation and heart rate; it saves your efforts; it matches them against segments — stretches of road with a leaderboard — and it lets you compare your times against other riders and against your own past times. It also includes navigation, group features, and a set of safety features described in section 5.
Sykla is a tool for recording and comparing. It is not a coach, not a medical device, and not a traffic-safety system. It does not know what is around the next corner, whether a road is closed, whether a bridge is out, whether the shoulder has gravel on it, or whether a driver is about to turn across your path.
You need to be at least 16 to have a Sykla account. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian has to read these terms and agree to them with you.
You are responsible for what happens under your account, including keeping your password to yourself. Tell us at blake@thepayhive.com if you think someone else is using it.
Read this part. Riding a bicycle or running on public roads carries a real risk of serious injury, permanent disability, and death. That risk exists whether or not you use Sykla. Motor vehicles, road surface, weather, wildlife, other riders and runners, your own equipment, and your own physical condition can all hurt you badly.
By using Sykla you accept that risk yourself. You decide when to go out, where to go, how hard to go, and when to stop. Sykla does not make any of those decisions for you and cannot make them for you.
You confirm that you are physically fit enough for what you are about to do, that your bike or your shoes are in a condition you would trust without an app running, and that you have whatever a reasonable person in your position would have — a helmet, lights, visible clothing at night. If you have any doubt about your health, see a doctor before you train, and especially before you race.
You must obey every traffic law, sign, and signal that applies to where you are. Every one, every time, including when a timer is running. Stop signs, red lights, speed limits, one-way streets, the rules about which side of the road you belong on, and any local rule about where bikes may and may not go. If a road is private property or closed to the public, do not ride it.
Beyond the law, you are responsible for your own judgment. Legal is not the same as safe. Only you can see the conditions in front of you. If a descent is wet, if a road you rode last summer has been resurfaced with loose chip seal, if the light is going, if there is a line of traffic behind you — that call is yours, and the right call is often to back off. No time on any leaderboard is worth being hit by a car.
Sykla has segments, leaderboards, weekly competitions, and features that let you race your own previous times or other riders' times. We want to be exact about what those are, because the misunderstanding here is the dangerous one.
Times set unsafely are not honored. If an effort was recorded in a way that indicates a traffic violation or a serious hazard to the rider or to anyone else, we will remove it from the leaderboard. That includes efforts with speeds that are implausible for a bicycle or a runner, efforts recorded in a motor vehicle, efforts that cross a road in a way no lawful line could, and efforts on a segment that turns out to be somewhere nobody should be racing. We may remove or retire a whole segment, and we do not owe anyone their KOM.
If you see a segment that should not exist — a busy intersection, a school zone, a descent with a blind corner, private property — please tell us at blake@thepayhive.com and we will look at it.
In an emergency, call 911 (or your local emergency number) first. Sykla is not an emergency service, is not monitored by anyone, and cannot summon help.
Sykla includes safety beacons, hazard alerts, and live location sharing. We built them because we think they help, and they are available to everyone regardless of what you pay or what you have agreed to. But they are best-effort, and everything they do depends on things outside our control:
Do not plan a ride around these features working. Tell a real person where you are going and when you expect to be back, the way you would if the app did not exist.
GPS is approximate. Elevation from a barometer drifts with weather. Distances, gradients, speeds, calories, heart rate zones and training estimates are calculations from imperfect data, and they can be wrong. Navigation directions can be out of date, and a road our map thinks exists may be closed, gated, or gone. Treat everything Sykla tells you as information, and your own eyes as the authority.
Do not:
Your efforts, photos, and routes remain yours. By making one public — posting to a leaderboard, sharing a route, entering a race — you give us permission to display it to other Sykla users and to show it on the parts of the service where it belongs. Marking an effort private keeps it out of every public surface, and deleting it removes it. See the privacy policy for what we do and do not collect.
Sykla is provided as is. We do not promise that it will be available, accurate, uninterrupted, or free of errors, and we disclaim all warranties to the fullest extent the law allows, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Hibiscus Consulting, LLC and everyone who works on Sykla are not liable for any injury, death, property damage, or other loss arising out of your use of the app or your participation in cycling, running, or any other activity you record with it — including anything arising from a segment, a leaderboard, a race, a route, a navigation instruction, or a safety feature that did not work.
We are also not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost profits, or lost opportunity, even if we were told they were possible.
Where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability to you for everything, added together, is limited to the greater of (a) what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or (b) fifty US dollars.
Some places do not allow some of these exclusions. Where that is true, they do not apply to you, and the rest of this section still stands. Nothing here limits liability for our own fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.
Recording is free, forever. The free tier has no card, no effort cap, and no time limit: honest GPS distance, heart-rate zones, milestones and badges, cross-device sync, suggested routes, and Strava. Paid tiers add the competitive and virtual-world layers. Current prices, which are set out on the pricing page and are what you agree to when you subscribe:
Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period at the same price, until you cancel. Prices are in US dollars and exclude any tax we are required to collect. If we change a price, we will tell you before it applies to your renewal, and you can cancel instead.
Cancelling. You can cancel at any time. Cancellation is not self-serve yet — email blake@thepayhive.com from your account email address and it is handled the same day. When you cancel, the paid features stay on until the end of the period you already paid for, and then stop. We do not pro-rate part of a period.
You keep your data either way. Dropping to free, cancelling, or letting a subscription lapse never deletes your efforts, never caps your recording, and never holds your own data hostage. The paid features simply switch off.
Refunds are not automatic, but if something went wrong, email us and we will sort it out. If you subscribed through Apple rather than through our website, Apple's refund and cancellation rules apply to that purchase and you manage it in your Apple account.
Referrals. A friend who signs up with your code and rides two paid months earns you one free month. We may end or change the referral program at any time, and we will not credit referrals we believe were gamed.
During the public beta, billing may not be switched on. If it is not, the paid features are open and nothing is charged; when billing goes live, it will not start charging an existing account without telling that account first.
You can stop using Sykla whenever you like, and you can ask us to delete your account and your data by emailing blake@thepayhive.com.
We may suspend or close an account that breaks section 8, that puts other people at risk, or that we are required by law to act on. Where we reasonably can, we will tell you why and give you a chance to respond first, and for anything short of the serious cases we will let you export your data. If we close your account for something that is not your fault — we shut a feature down, or we shut down entirely — we will refund the unused part of anything you have paid.
Sections 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 13 survive the end of your account.
We will change these terms as the app changes. When we do, we update the version string and the date at the top of this page, and:
Sykla records which version of these terms you accepted, and when. You can see that record in the app, and we keep it as our record that the terms were actually shown to you rather than buried.
These terms, together with the privacy policy, are the whole agreement between you and Hibiscus Consulting, LLC about Sykla. They are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and any dispute goes to the state or federal courts located in Wake County, North Carolina — except where the law where you live gives you the right to bring a claim locally, in which case you keep that right.
If a court decides any part of these terms cannot be enforced, that part is trimmed to the narrowest form that works, or removed, and everything else stays in force. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given it up.
You may not transfer your account or these terms to anyone else. We may transfer them if the business is sold, and we will tell you if that happens.
Hibiscus Consulting, LLC — blake@thepayhive.com. Real questions get real answers from a person.