Terms of service

2Words with a specific meaning

3What CrewDocket is, honestly

CrewDocket is field-operations software for small cleaning and exterior-services crews: scheduling, a day sheet the crew reads on a phone, quoting, invoicing, crew pay, and a messaging surface that reads inbound customer texts and drafts the booking they imply.

Three things are true and are stated here rather than buried:

• The Service is early. It is built and operated by one person, and it runs one real business every day. Features change, and some of what you will want is not built yet.
• We will tell you what is missing before you pay. The gaps are published next to the price rather than behind it — that is what the second list on the pricing page is.
• Nothing in the Service is a substitute for professional advice. Tax totals, pay calculations and profit figures are arithmetic performed on numbers you supply. You are responsible for checking them, and for your own filings.

4The founding-operator phase

You may open a workspace yourself, from the website, without speaking to anybody and without giving us a payment method. Doing so creates an account and a starting price list for your trade. It does not start a charge, and there is no card on file to charge.

Separately, during the founding-operator phase we set each account up by hand on a call — your services, your prices, your tax and your crew — and there is no automated billing behind it. An account opened from the website that has not been through that call is a workspace you are trying out, not yet a subscription; you owe nothing until a price is agreed with you in writing under section 6.

If you were offered a founding-operator price, that price is held for as long as your subscription runs without a gap. If you cancel and return later, the price then current applies. The founding phase ends when we say so in writing, and ending it does not change your price.

5Your account and your crew

You are responsible for everything done under your account, including by Crew Members. You must:

• keep credentials confidential, and not share one login between people — the Service gives every person their own account precisely so that you never have to;
• tell us promptly if you believe an account has been compromised;
• remove access for anyone who leaves your crew, and tell us if you need help doing it;
• make sure Crew Members understand that the customer information they can see belongs to your customers and may only be used to do the work.

We may suspend an account immediately, without notice, if we believe it is being used to break the law, to send messages without consent, or in a way that puts other people’s information at risk. We will tell you why as soon as we reasonably can. A suspension never removes your ability to export your data — see section 13.

6What you pay

• One subscription price for the business, agreed with you in writing before you start and stated on every invoice. It is not printed on this website because it is not yet set as a public price; ask and you get the real number.
• Billed monthly in advance. If you would rather pay for a year at once, ask — the arrangement is agreed in writing before you start, not assumed.
• During the founding phase we invoice by hand, out of CrewDocket itself. Payment is due on receipt.
• There is no per-seat charge and no charge that varies with the number of Crew Members.
• Fees are not refundable for a partial month, except where refusing a refund would be unlawful, or where we have failed badly enough that a refund is the fair answer — a judgement we would rather make generously than argue about.
• Third-party costs are separate and are yours. Carrier fees for text messages and card-processing fees are billed to you by those providers on your own accounts. They do not pass through us and we do not mark them up. What text messages actually cost in Ontario, including the carrier fees most quotes leave out, is set out on the pricing page.

7Sales tax

Prices are exclusive of tax. Any GST/HST or provincial sales tax that applies is added at the rate set by the place-of-supply rules for your business, and appears as a separate line on your invoice. The invoice you receive is the authoritative statement of what tax was charged.

8The covenant: nothing sends itself

This is a product principle, and we are willing to put it in the contract.

Concretely: every outbound message, quote, invoice and booking in the Service terminates in a deliberate human action by you or a Crew Member. There is no scheduler that fires messages on a timer, and no automation that contacts one of Your Customers without a person choosing to.

Two carve-outs, so this is accurate rather than merely appealing. First, messages that are a direct mechanical consequence of an action you took — a delivery receipt, a payment confirmation from the payment processor, an automatic reply carrying the opt-out language a regulator requires — are part of the action you took. Second, we send you operational and account email; that is not covered by this covenant and is described in section 20.

The one thing the Service does on its own initiative is record a customer’s opt-out, immediately, without waiting for anybody. Recording a refusal is the opposite of contacting somebody, and it is described in section 9.

If we ever want to add a feature that sends something automatically, it will be off by default, it will be obvious, and you will have to turn it on.

9Text messages, and CASL

When a text message goes out through CrewDocket to one of Your Customers, you are the sender. The message is from your business, on your number, about your work. We provide the wire.

Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) applies to commercial electronic messages, and a text message is one. You are responsible for compliance, and you confirm that for every number you upload, import or type into CrewDocket:

• you have express or implied consent to send commercial messages to it. Implied consent is limited — broadly, two years from the last purchase or contract under an existing business relationship, and six months from an inquiry — and it expires;
• you can produce evidence of that consent, including when and how it was given, if it is ever challenged. The burden of proving consent sits on the sender, not on the complainant;
• your messages identify your business and provide a working unsubscribe mechanism, and you honour an unsubscribe within ten business days;
• you do not work around an opt-out the Service has recorded, by any means, including sending from another number.

What the Service does about opt-outs

So that the obligations above are not left entirely to your memory, this is what the software does, and it is part of what you are buying:

• A reply of STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, UNSUB, CANCEL, QUIT or END is recorded as an opt-out the moment it arrives. The keyword must be the whole message, so “can you cancel Thursday” is treated as the reschedule it is.
• An opted-out number is excluded from every campaign and every bulk send, and the opt-out is shown on that customer’s record with its date.
• A reply of START, UNSTOP or YES records an opt-in again. Only the customer can do that.
• The same opt-out is applied at the carrier by our messaging provider, so it holds independently of us.
• Opt-out status is included in your data export, so the record of who said no leaves with you.

There is no message frequency to disclose, because the Service sends nothing on a schedule (section 8). How often your customers hear from you is your decision, and it is one CASL holds you to.

Carrier registration

You are responsible for carrier registration where it is required for your number — in North America, brand and campaign registration under A2P 10DLC. We will help you file it and we start it on your first day for that reason. Registration runs for weeks, not minutes, we cannot shorten a carrier’s queue, and messages sent before it completes may be filtered without notice. The pricing page explains that wait in full so that it is not a surprise after you have signed.

If a carrier, aggregator or regulator suspends or restricts messaging on your number, we will pass that through and help you respond, but we cannot override it. Penalties under CASL run to $1 million per violation for an individual and $10 million for a corporation, and directors and officers can be personally liable, which is why this section is long.

10Payments taken through the platform

Where CrewDocket generates a card-payment link for one of your invoices, the payment is processed by Stripe under Stripe’s own agreement with you, using your own Stripe account and your own keys. Money moves from Your Customer to you. It does not pass through CrewDocket, and CrewDocket is not a payment processor, a money-services business, or a party to that transaction.

Card-processing fees, chargebacks, disputes and refunds are between you, Your Customer and Stripe. We do not publish or endorse any processor’s rates.

11Acceptable use

You will not use the Service to:

• send messages to people who have not consented to receive them, or to numbers acquired from a purchased, scraped or rented list;
• store or transmit information you have no right to hold, including a client list taken from a former employer;
• store payment card numbers, government identifiers, or health information in free-text fields. The Service is not built for that and you must not put it there;
• break into, probe, overload or interfere with the Service or anyone else’s account;
• resell, sublicense or white-label the Service without a written agreement that says you may;
• reverse engineer the Service, except to the extent that restriction is unenforceable by law.

12Your data is yours

Operator Data belongs to you. We claim no ownership of it and we do not sell it, rent it, trade it, or use it to build a marketing list.

On the division of responsibility, plainly:

You grant us the limited licence we need to host, transmit, back up, display and process Operator Data for the sole purpose of providing the Service to you, keeping it secure, and complying with the law.

We may use aggregated, de-identified information about how the Service is used — counts, timings, error rates — to operate and improve it. That information never identifies you, your business, a Crew Member or one of Your Customers, and we do not publish another operator’s numbers as marketing.

How personal information is handled in detail, including where it is stored and who else touches it, is set out in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

13Getting your data out

There is no retention desk, no export fee, and nothing to phone anybody about.

• Any time, yourself. One control in settings writes your whole book — clients, jobs, invoices, quotes, leads, payments, commercial jobs, standing plans, contractor batches, campaigns, crew, crew adjustments, payouts, templates and settings — to a machine-readable file on your own computer. It states how many records of each kind it should contain and checks itself against that count, so an incomplete file says so rather than looking fine. Clients, invoices, sales, tax totals, crew statements and payouts also export to CSV from their own screens.
• The export does not depend on us. It runs in your browser, from data the app has already loaded. It is not a request to a server we control, so there is no switch on our side that turns it off — and we will not disable it for non-payment, during a suspension, or during a dispute.
• Photographs are the exception, and are not in that file. Job photographs are stored as image files rather than as records, so the file you export yourself references them but does not contain them. They are delivered with the complete export below, as their original files.
• On request, complete. Ask us in writing and we will provide a full machine-readable copy of your account data — a CSV bundle, the underlying structured file, and the job photographs — within ten business days, at no charge, as many times as you like, during your subscription and for thirty days after it ends.

14Ending the agreement

You may cancel at any time, with no notice period and no cancellation fee. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for. There is no minimum term.

We may end the agreement on thirty days’ written notice, or immediately for a serious breach of section 11 or a failure to pay that is not fixed within fifteen days of a reminder.

After the agreement ends:

• your account stays readable in export-only mode for thirty days, so that nothing is lost while you are busy;
• we delete Operator Data from live systems within ninety days of the end of that window, unless you ask us in writing to delete it sooner, which we will do;
• copies inside routine point-in-time backups age out on their own cycle, currently seven days, and are not accessible for ordinary use in the meantime;
• we keep the minimum records the law requires us to keep — invoices and tax records among them — for as long as it requires.

15If CrewDocket shuts down

Small software companies end. Saying so is not pessimism, it is the answer to the question every sensible buyer asks a one-person vendor.

If we decide to discontinue the Service, we will give you at least sixty days’ written notice. Export will work for the whole of that period, we will provide the complete export in section 13 on request at no charge, and we will refund any prepaid fees covering time after the shutdown date.

What we do not promise: there is no source-code escrow and no arrangement that would hand you the software itself. You would have your data, in files that open in ordinary tools, and you would not have CrewDocket. That is the honest shape of buying from one person, and it is part of why there is no contract holding you here.

16Availability, and the absence of an SLA

We do not offer a service-level agreement, an uptime guarantee, or a published status page, and we will not claim one until it exists and is measured. The Service runs on Google Cloud infrastructure and inherits its reliability, but that is not a promise we are in a position to make on someone else’s behalf.

We will give reasonable notice of planned maintenance that we expect to interrupt the Service, and we will tell you when something has gone wrong rather than wait to be asked.

17Sub-processors and third parties

Providing the Service means other companies touch data on our behalf. The current list, what each does, and where each stores information is published in the privacy policy. We will give notice before adding a sub-processor that handles personal information, and if you object on reasonable grounds we will discuss alternatives or you may cancel without penalty.

18Warranties, and what we do not warrant

We warrant that we will provide the Service with reasonable skill and care, and that we have the right to grant the licence in these terms.

Beyond that, and to the maximum extent the law allows, the Service is provided as is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, that it will meet a requirement we have not agreed to in writing, that a text message will be delivered by a carrier, or that a figure it calculates is correct for your tax or payroll circumstances. Statutory conditions and warranties that cannot lawfully be excluded are not excluded.

19Limitation of liability

Neither party is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business or lost data, however caused.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to this agreement is limited to the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the event that gave rise to the claim.

Neither of these limits applies to: a party’s fraud or wilful misconduct; your obligation to pay fees; your indemnity in section 20; or any liability that cannot be limited by law.

20Indemnity, changes, law, notices

Indemnity

You will defend and indemnify us against claims, penalties and reasonable costs arising from Operator Data, from your use of the Service in breach of section 11, or from a message sent through the Service to a person who had not consented to receive it.

Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. We will give at least thirty days’ notice by email to the address on your account for any change that materially reduces your rights, and the change takes effect at your next renewal. If you do not accept it, cancel before then and we will refund the unused portion of anything prepaid.

Email we send you

We send you account, billing, security and service email; that is part of the Service and you cannot opt out of it while you have an account. Marketing email from us is separate, requires your consent, and carries an unsubscribe link that works.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there. The courts of Ontario have exclusive jurisdiction, and both parties submit to them.

The rest

If a provision is unenforceable, the rest survives. Failing to enforce something is not a waiver of it. Neither party may assign this agreement without the other’s consent, except to a successor of substantially all of its business on notice. These terms and the privacy policy are the entire agreement about the Service. Sections 12, 13, 18, 19 and 20 survive termination.

Notices

Notices to us go to sam@crewdocket.com, which is read by the person who wrote this. Notices to you go to the email address on your account.