miniterms produces a generated document; it does not impose where you put it. You have two production-grade options and a couple of variants. Here is when each makes sense.
Option 1 — Dekimu-hosted slug
Press Publish in the dashboard and you get a URL like https://miniterms.com/p/<your-slug>. We host the HTML, render it server-side, and serve it with the right cache headers. Update flow: regenerate in the dashboard, press Publish again, the slug now serves the new version. Old versions remain available at /p/<your-slug>/v/<version> for accountability.
Pros:
- One-time setup — link your site footer to the slug and you are done forever
- We handle TLS, CDN, and the "last reviewed" date stamp
- Version history is preserved without you doing anything
- The citation set hash is recorded server-side, so you cannot lose your accountability trail
Cons:
- Your privacy policy lives on a third-party domain (
miniterms.com) - If you ever stop using miniterms, you have to migrate
Mitigation for the "third-party domain" concern: miniterms documents that the controller (you) is the one whose data subjects are being informed. The fact that the page is hosted on a Dekimu domain is not a regulatory problem — what matters is whether the data subject can reasonably find and read the policy. A footer link from your site is sufficient.
Option 2 — Self-host (HTML copy or ZIP)
Press Export in the dashboard. You get two flavors:
- HTML snippet — a single self-contained
<article>block you paste into your CMS or your own privacy page - ZIP — a folder with
index.html, a JSON-LD sidecar, and an HTML comment carrying the citation set hash and the APR (Agent Provenance Receipt) id
The ZIP is what most users pick. Drop it on your own static host or paste the index.html body into your CMS.
Pros:
- Your policy lives on your domain — same brand, same TLS certificate, same analytics
- No third-party dependency in the critical path
- Works offline, in air-gapped reviews, in vendor due-diligence packets
Cons:
- You are responsible for re-publishing when you regenerate. miniterms cannot push updates to your site.
- You should preserve the HTML comment carrying the APR id — that is your machine-readable provenance trail.
Variant — custom domain on top of Dekimu hosting
On paid tiers you can map a custom domain (legal.yoursite.com) to your slug. miniterms issues the TLS certificate, you add a CNAME, and your published policy is reachable from your own subdomain. This combines the lowest maintenance cost (Dekimu-hosted) with the brand control of self-hosting.
The full setup is documented in your dashboard under Settings → Custom domain. We do not generate the DNS records for you; you add them in your registrar's panel.
What about embedding the policy in your app?
A few customers ask whether they can fetch the policy via an API and render it inside their own app. miniterms does not expose a public render API for that purpose today — partly because if your app fetches the policy at runtime, your accountability trail becomes dependent on miniterms being up, which is not a property you want for a legally required disclosure. Use one of the static publish flavors above.
What "canonical" means
A regulator-facing principle: the canonical home of the legal document is the customer's own site. miniterms hosting is a convenience layer, not a replacement. If you publish on a Dekimu-hosted slug, link to it from your own site footer — that link is what makes the policy "yours" in the regulator's eyes.