Terms of Service

Who these terms are between

These terms are the agreement between you and BackendFree ("we", "us"), a sole proprietorship under Swiss law, and they govern your use of the service. "You" means the person or company holding the account.

You accept these terms when you create an account. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you confirm you are allowed to bind it.

Three other documents form part of this agreement: the Privacy Notice, which says what we do with personal data, Acceptable Use, which says what you may not run on this, and the Data Processing Agreement, which applies automatically to any personal data your own customers give you through this platform. You do not have to sign the last one separately.

What the service is

A backend for websites. You build the front end yourself, or somebody builds it for you, and this platform runs what sits behind it: content, bookings, payments, contact form messages, website measurement and notifications to your own systems, each switched on per website, reached over an API and configured from a dashboard. One project is one website.

For bookings we also serve two pages for you, under your business's name: a booking page at an address you choose, which you can link to or show inside your own website, and a page where each of your customers sees, changes or cancels their booking, which the emails to them link to unless you name a page of your own. What those pages say about your business, its services, prices and times, is what you set.

Apart from those two pages, we do not build, host or serve your website. We do not register your domain. What runs at your address is yours, and staying up is yours.

The client libraries we publish are licensed under the licence stated in each package. These terms govern the service they connect to. Our documentation, guides and examples are information to build with, not legal, tax or other professional advice.

Your account

One account holds one organization, which holds your websites. There are no additional seats or team members: the account holder is the only person on it.

Signing in is by a code sent to your email address, so whoever can read your email can open your account. Keep that address secure, and tell us if you think somebody else has reached it.

You must be at least 16 years old and able to enter a contract. Everything done through your account is treated as done by you.

Plans, and what a plan holds

Plans differ only in what the table below shows and how often they are billed. Everything else is the same on every paid plan.

Webhook endpoints are counted per website. If you need more websites on one account than a plan holds, write to us and we will agree an arrangement individually.

Moving to a different plan needs you to be inside its limit first. If you hold more websites than it allows, the change is refused and nothing happens. We will never delete, archive or hide one of your websites to make a plan fit. A switch takes effect at once, and what is left of the period you have paid for is credited against the new plan's charges.

There is no free tier and no trial. An account without a plan holds no websites.

Price, billing and renewal

Your plan renews automatically every week or every month, depending on the plan you chose, until you cancel it. You are charged its price at the start of each period, to the card you gave at checkout, and the charge continues until you cancel. There is no yearly price.

You can cancel at any time, online, from the Billing screen of your dashboard, without having to contact us.

Prices are in US dollars and exclude any value added tax or sales tax, which is added where we are required to charge it. Card payments are processed by Stripe; we never see or hold your card number.

If a payment fails, your service keeps working while your card issuer and Stripe retry it. If it is never paid, the subscription ends and your account stops holding websites. Your content is not deleted at that point: see Suspension and termination below.

Cancelling

Cancelling stops the next renewal. It does not stop the service today: your plan keeps working until the end of the period you have already paid for, and then the account stops holding websites. You can un-cancel at any point before that date and nothing will have changed.

We do not refund any part of a period you have already paid for, and there is no pro rata rebate for cancelling early. The one exception is objecting to a new sub-processor under the Data Processing Agreement.

Deleting your account is different from cancelling: it ends the subscription immediately, forfeits the remainder of the paid period, and deletes your websites and their content at once. It cannot be undone. An account cannot be deleted while any of its websites still has a payment account connected.

Monthly allowances and top-ups

Every paid plan, weekly or monthly, includes 250,000 API requests and 10,000 web analytics events per calendar month, counted in UTC and counted for the whole account rather than per website. The month resets on the first.

The two allowances are entirely separate and running out of one does not affect the other, but they fail in different ways:

• Spend the API allowance and the API refuses your requests until you add more or the month turns over. Anything your website asks the API for will stop working.
• Spend the analytics allowance and nothing new is recorded. Your websites and your visitors are not affected; only the measuring stops.

You can buy more of either at any time, from the Billing screen:

• USD 1.00 for 25,000 API requests.
• USD 5.00 for 50,000 analytics events.

A top-up is added to the month you buy it in and does not carry over. Top-ups are one-off purchases, are not refundable once the allowance has been added, and do not change your plan or its renewal.

Requests refused by a rate limit are not counted against your allowance, and neither are requests that never reached your data, such as one made with a key that is not valid. Crawlers and bots are never counted as analytics events.

Separately from the allowances, there are burst limits on how many requests a single client can make in a short window, and caps on how much can be queued or stored at once. They are the same on every plan and are not sold.

Payments you take from your own customers

If you switch on payments, you connect your own account with a payment provider and your customers pay you directly through it. The money never passes through us and never sits on a balance we hold.

That means you are the merchant of record for everything you sell. Your name is on your customer's statement. You answer the chargeback. The provider's processing fees come out of your account, and a negative balance there is yours.

We take 0% of what you take. If a plan ever carries a transaction fee, that fee will be stated on the plan itself and on the pricing page before you are on it, and it will never be introduced silently on a plan you are already paying for.

Your relationship with your payment provider is between you and them, on their terms, including identity checks and payout timing. It is also your job, not ours, to be allowed to sell what you are selling, to charge the right tax on it, and to give your customers whatever refund and cancellation rights the law where they live requires.

Your content and your data

Your content stays yours. Pages, appointments, customers, prices, everything you put in. You give us only the permission we need to run the service: to store it, process it, and send it back out to your own website and to the people and the addresses you have asked us to send it to.

We do not sell it, we do not use it to train anything, and we do not use it to advertise to you or anybody else. We look at it only when we have to in order to run the service, keep it secure or answer a support question you asked, and anybody's access to your payment connection is written into a log you can read.

You confirm that you have the right to put the content there, and that collecting the personal data you collect through it is lawful where your customers are. For that data you are the controller and we act on your instructions: the Data Processing Agreement is the detail.

Test keys are for trying a website out. What they create is test data: it moves no real money, and it is deleted automatically after the period stated in the Privacy Notice, or sooner if you delete it. Do not run real customers through test mode.

Acceptable use

Acceptable Use is part of this agreement, and you agree to follow it.

Availability

We do not offer a service level agreement and we do not promise an uptime figure. We work to keep it running and to fix faults quickly.

The service may be unavailable for maintenance, for a provider's outage, or for a fault. We will give notice of planned work where we can.

Support is by email, and we answer as promptly as we reasonably can. There is no guaranteed response time.

Keys, secrets and security

Keep your secret API keys secret: a secret key must never appear in a browser, a mobile app, or a public repository.

Anything done with your keys is treated as done by you, and usage made with them counts against your allowance. If you suspect a key or your email account has been compromised, revoke the key and tell us as soon as you can.

Keep a webhook signing secret as you would a secret key. What we deliver to an endpoint you configured carries your customers' details, and once it arrives there, keeping that server secure is yours.

Suspension and termination

We may suspend or limit an account that is not paid for, that is breaking Acceptable Use, that is putting the service or other subscribers at risk, or where we are legally required to. Where the circumstances allow it we will tell you first and give you a chance to fix it. Where they do not, for instance an ongoing attack or a legal order, we will tell you as soon as afterwards as we can.

Either of us may end this agreement: you by cancelling, us by giving you reasonable notice, or by either of us immediately for a serious breach that is not put right.

An account whose plan has ended is not deleted. Your projects, content, appointments and customer records stay where they are and the API stops answering for them. If you start a plan again, they are still there. We may delete the data of an account that has had no plan and no activity for a long time, and we will email you before we do.

Leaving, and taking your data with you

While your account is open, the API returns your published content, your appointments with each customer's name and email address, and your payment records. For a copy of anything it does not return, write to us and we will send it in a usable form. Neither costs anything.

After a plan ends the API stops answering. If you need help getting your data out after that, write to us and we will help.

Changes to the service and to these terms

The service changes: features are added, and occasionally one is removed or reworked. We will give reasonable notice before removing something you rely on, and we will not knowingly break your website's integration without telling you.

We may change these terms. If a change materially affects you we will email you at least thirty days before it takes effect, and you can cancel before then if you do not accept it. A price rise never applies to a period you have already paid for.

Changes required by law, or that only correct an error or add something new without taking anything away, may take effect sooner.

Liability

The service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we do not give any warranty that it will be uninterrupted, error free, or fit for a particular purpose you have in mind.

We are liable for damage we cause intentionally or through gross negligence, and that liability cannot be limited. We are also fully liable for death or personal injury, and for anything else the law does not permit us to limit.

Beyond that, for ordinary negligence, our total liability to you for all claims arising in any twelve month period is limited to what you paid us in that period, and we are not liable for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, or loss caused by data you did not keep a copy of.

Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by events beyond reasonable control, such as a failure of infrastructure we do not operate, an attack, or an order of an authority, for as long as the event lasts.

Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Our backups are for our own recovery and are not a service to you.

You are responsible for what you do with the service, and you will cover us for third party claims that arise from your content, your business, or your breach of these terms.

Governing law and where disputes go

Swiss law governs this agreement, without its conflict of law rules and without the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. The courts at our seat in Switzerland have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer, none of that takes anything away from you. You keep the protection of the mandatory law of the country you live in, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of that country. Nothing in this agreement limits a right you have under mandatory consumer law, and where a clause here conflicts with such a right, the right wins.

If a clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Neither of us waives a right by not exercising it straight away. You may not transfer this agreement without our consent; we may transfer it if the business is sold, and will tell you if that happens.

How to reach us

Write to support@backendfree.com, for anything: your account, these terms, a payment or your personal data. The postal address is in the Legal Notice.