Terms of Service - Backbrief

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1. The Service

Backbrief is built to connect to your business systems (email and QuickBooks, with calendar support in development) through OAuth and to deliver a daily brief of what needs your attention - unpaid invoices, unread messages, and opportunities you might be missing. (The connectors are in active development; this describes the Service's intended operation.)

The Service is built to read your connected data, identify business events, and compile them into recommendations for your review. Backbrief is designed so that nothing is sent on your behalf without your approval - the drafting layer produces text for you to review and has no capability to send on its own. (In the current build, outbound message sending is not yet wired; this describes how the approval boundary is architected, not an active send flow.)

2. Account terms

2.1 Eligibility

Backbrief is designed for small business owners and sole proprietors. By creating an account, you confirm you are authorised to connect the business systems you link to the Service.

2.2 Account responsibility

You are responsible for:

• Maintaining the security of your account credentials (OAuth connections are managed by your provider - we never store your passwords)
• All activity that occurs under your account
• Ensuring that any data you provide or connect complies with applicable law

2.3 Account types

The Service offers two account paths:

Standard subscriptions: month-to-month, no fixed term.

Founding members: a limited cohort of 10 accounts at a reduced rate, locked for the life of each account. See §5 for details.

3. Billing & payments

3.1 Standard pricing

3.2 Payment terms

• Payments are processed by Stripe. We do not see or store your full payment card details.
• Subscriptions are billed monthly in advance.
• Annual subscriptions are billed once per year in advance.
• If a payment fails, we will notify you and retry. Accounts with persistent failed payments may be suspended after 14 days.

4. Refund & cancellation policy

4.1 First subscription - 14-day full refund

If you subscribe for the first time and decide Backbrief isn't for you within 14 days, we will refund the full amount of your first payment. No questions asked.

4.2 After the first 14 days

• Monthly subscriptions: cancel anytime. Your access continues through the end of the current billing period. No partial-month refunds.
• Annual subscriptions (standard): cancel anytime. We will refund the unused portion (remaining full months) on a pro-rata basis.

4.3 Founding members - separate terms

Founding members are governed by §5, not §4.2.

4.4 How to cancel

You can cancel from your account settings, or by contacting the founder directly. After cancellation, you can export your data for 30 days.

5. Founding member program

The founding member program is a limited offer with terms that differ from the standard subscription. These terms apply only to the first 10 paying accounts. The cohort cap is hard and publicly stated.

5.1 Founding member pricing

5.2 Founding member - refund on service cessation

If the business winds down while you are a founding member, you receive a pro-rata refund on any unused months of prepaid service. This is personally backstopped by the founder.

5.3 Founding member - cancellation

Founding members may cancel at any time. The lifetime rate lock applies only while the account remains active; if you cancel and rejoin later, standard pricing applies.

5.4 What the program means - honest disclosure

Founding members are the first customers of an early-stage product. Here is what that means:

What we have done: the system is architected around per-tenant encryption, zero standing human access, and an evidence model that keeps your data in your own systems. We have run our own security testing and built automated cross-tenant isolation checks that run on every change to the code.

What we have not done yet: an independent senior code review, and a third-party penetration test. Both are funded by this program and scheduled - the code review before we take on customers beyond this group, the penetration test after that.

Why we are telling you: because you are taking a risk on an unproven product, and you should know exactly what that risk is.

6. Data ownership

6.1 Your data is yours

All data you connect, upload, or create through Backbrief remains your property. We claim no ownership over your business data, your customers' data, or any information processed through the Service.

6.2 What we own

The Service itself - the software, algorithms, compiled models, and infrastructure - is owned by Adam Rose. This includes anonymized, aggregated statistics we may derive across tenants ("Layer-2 aggregates"), provided those aggregates never identify you or any individual customer.

6.3 License to operate

To provide the Service, you grant us a limited, revocable license to access and process your connected systems as described in our Privacy Policy. This license exists only while your subscription is active and ends when you disconnect or cancel.

7. Acceptable use

You may not:

• Use the Service to violate any law or regulation
• Attempt to access another tenant's data
• Reverse-engineer, decompile, or extract the Service's source code or compiled models
• Use the Service to send spam, harassment, or unlawful content
• Bypass or attempt to bypass any security control in the Service

8. Service availability & limitations

8.1 Availability commitment

The Service is designed for continuous operation but is provided on an "as-is" basis at this stage of the business. We will notify you of planned maintenance and respond to outages promptly.

8.2 Dependencies

The Service depends on third-party providers:

• Hetzner (Helsinki, Finland) for application hosting
• AWS KMS (Frankfurt, Germany) for encryption key management
• Backblaze B2 for backup storage
• Stripe for payment processing

We are not responsible for outages caused by these providers, but we make reasonable efforts to mitigate impacts (e.g., caching to reduce dependency on constant key-service availability).

8.3 Beta-stage acknowledgement

The Service is in active development. Features may change, improve, or be delayed. Founding members acknowledge this and are compensated through the discounted rate and direct founder access.

9. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

• The Service is provided "as is" and "as available." We make no warranties, express or implied, including merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
• We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of the Service.
• Our total liability to you for any claim arising from the Service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months preceding the claim.
• This limitation does not apply in jurisdictions that prohibit such limitations, or to liability that cannot be excluded by law (e.g., gross negligence, fraud, death, or personal injury caused by negligence).

10. Termination

10.1 By you

You may terminate your account at any time by cancelling in your account settings or by contacting us. Your access continues through the end of the current billing period (monthly) or as specified in §4.

10.2 By us

We may suspend or terminate your account if:

• You violate these terms
• Your payment fails repeatedly after notice
• We are required to do so by law

We will provide notice before termination whenever possible.

10.3 Effect of termination

Upon termination:

• Your access to the Service ends
• You can export your data for 30 days
• After the export window, your data is deleted from live systems
• Encrypted backups are purged within 90 days of deletion. This window may be shortened as our backup schedule is finalized.

11. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. If material changes are made, we will notify you by email and/or through the Service. Continued use after changes take effect constitutes your acceptance of the updated terms.

12. Governing law

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What is not settled yet

Backbrief is pre-launch and these terms are not final. The following are named rather than left for you to discover.

1. Liability, notice period, and governing law. Each is flagged in place above. None has been reviewed by a lawyer, and none of the gaps was filled with an assumed default.
2. Operating entity. Backbrief is operated by an individual, not a company. If that changes, the party you are contracting with under these terms changes with it.
3. Payment disputes. Beyond what our payment processor provides, we have not defined a dispute-handling process.
4. Scope of our QuickBooks access. These terms make no statement about how broad or narrow our access to your QuickBooks data is. That silence is deliberate, not an oversight. We hold ourselves to describing only what we have actually demonstrated, and we have not finished demonstrating this one. We will state it here when we can state it as a fact.