Terms of service

1. About these terms

1.1 These terms are an agreement between [Company legal name], a company registered in England and Wales with company number [Company number] and registered office at [Registered address] (“BookPet”, “we”, “us”), and the business that signs up for BookPet (“you”).

1.2 By creating an account you confirm that you accept these terms on behalf of your business and that you have authority to do so. These terms include the data processing agreement in section 16, which applies to personal data you collect through BookPet.

1.3 BookPet is for businesses and sole traders acting in the course of their business. It is not offered to consumers. If you are an individual, you confirm you are using BookPet for your business.

2. Definitions

• Service: the BookPet software, booking pages, embed widget, dashboard, emails, calendar feeds and related support.
• Your Customers: pet owners and other people who make bookings or enquiries with you through the Service.
• Customer Data: personal data about Your Customers (and people they tell you about, such as emergency contacts) that is collected or stored through the Service.
• Account Data: personal data about you and your users that we need to run your account and bill you.
• Data Protection Law: the UK GDPR, the Data Protection Act 2018, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 and any other law relating to personal data that applies.
• Plan: the subscription plan you choose (for example Starter, Pro or Plus) as described on our pricing page.

3. Your account

3.1 You must give accurate details when you sign up and keep them up to date, including your business name, contact email and, where relevant, your licence details.

3.2 You sign in with one-time codes sent to your email address. You are responsible for keeping access to that email account secure and for everything done through your account by you or anyone you allow to use it. Tell us straight away if you think someone has accessed your account without permission.

3.3 You must be at least 18 to create an account.

4. Free trial and test mode

4.1 New accounts get a free trial of 14 days. No payment card is needed to start a trial.

4.2 During the trial, and until you subscribe and switch your booking page to live, your booking page runs in test mode: emails meant for your customers are sent to you instead, marked as a test. You must not use test mode to take real bookings.

4.3 If you don’t subscribe by the end of the trial, your booking page stays in test mode. We may delete trial accounts that haven’t subscribed after [period, e.g. 12 months], after emailing you first.

5. Plans, prices and payment

5.1 Prices are shown on our pricing page and include VAT where VAT applies. [Confirm VAT registration status of the billing company; if not registered, say “We are not currently VAT-registered, so no VAT is charged.”]

5.2 Subscriptions are billed in advance, monthly or annually, by our payment provider Stripe, and renew automatically at the end of each period until cancelled.

5.3 You can change Plan at any time. Upgrades take effect straight away, with a pro rata charge for the rest of the current period; downgrades take effect [at the end of the current period / straight away with a pro rata credit].

5.4 We may change our prices by giving you at least 30 days’ notice by email. The new price applies from your next renewal after the notice period. If you don’t agree, you can cancel before it takes effect.

5.5 If a payment fails, we’ll tell you and try again. If payment is still outstanding [14] days after we first tell you, we may return your booking page to test mode or suspend your account until it is paid.

5.6 Fees already paid are not refundable, except where these terms say otherwise or the law requires.

5.7 Features shown as “coming soon” are not part of what you pay for until they are released. We aim to deliver them but don’t promise dates.

5.8 Plans include a monthly allowance of emails sent through the Service for fair use. If you regularly go well beyond it, we’ll contact you to agree a way forward before limiting anything.

6. Cancelling and closing accounts

6.1 You can cancel your subscription at any time from your account. Your Plan continues until the end of the period you’ve paid for, and then your booking page returns to test mode.

6.2 You can ask us to close your account at any time. We keep it for a 30-day grace period, during which you can change your mind and export your data. After that, we permanently delete your account and all Customer Data, and backup copies are overwritten within a further 35 days. We keep billing records for as long as the law requires.

6.3 We may suspend or close your account if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, don’t pay, or use the Service in a way that puts us, other users or anyone else at risk. Where reasonable we’ll warn you first and give you a chance to put things right, and we’ll give you an opportunity to export your data unless the law prevents it.

6.4 We may stop providing the Service altogether by giving you at least 90 days’ notice, and we’ll refund any fees paid for the period after it ends.

7. Your responsibilities

7.1 Your business. You are responsible for your services, your prices, your own terms and conditions with Your Customers, your licence and its conditions, and the care of the animals you look after. BookPet is a tool to help you collect bookings and records; it doesn’t give legal, licensing or veterinary advice, and the templates we provide (such as T&Cs and question sets) are starting points you must check against your own circumstances.

7.2 Prices and estimates. Estimates shown to Your Customers are calculated from the price rules you set. You are responsible for checking your rules and the final price you agree with each customer.

7.3 Deposits and payments. Unless and until we offer online payments and you choose to use them, payments are made directly between you and Your Customers (for example by bank transfer). We are not a party to those payments or to your contracts with Your Customers.

7.4 Customer Data. You are the controller of Customer Data and must comply with Data Protection Law, as set out in the data processing agreement.

7.5 Your website. If you embed the booking form on your website, you’re responsible for your website and its own privacy and cookie notices.

8. Acceptable use

You must not use the Service to:

• break any law, or help anyone else do so;
• collect information you don’t need, or special category data (such as information about a person’s health) unless you have a lawful basis and it is genuinely necessary;
• send spam or unsolicited marketing;
• upload malicious code, or try to access other businesses’ data, probe our security or overload the Service;
• copy, resell or reverse-engineer the Service, except as the law allows;
• pretend to be another business or person.

9. Your data and content

9.1 You own your content (such as your logo, texts and T&Cs) and your data, including Customer Data. You give us a licence to host, copy, display and process it only as needed to provide the Service to you and as set out in these terms.

9.2 You can export your bookings and other data at any time while your account is open, and during the 30-day grace period after you ask us to close it.

9.3 If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them freely without owing you anything.

9.4 We may create anonymous, aggregated statistics about how the Service is used (which do not identify you, Your Customers or any individual) to run and improve BookPet. [Solicitor to confirm wording.]

10. Our intellectual property

We own, or have the right to use, the Service, the BookPet name and logo, and our templates, software and documentation. You may use them only to use the Service under these terms. On the Starter plan, embedded booking forms show a small “Powered by BookPet” link, which you must not hide or remove.

11. The service and changes

11.1 We’ll provide the Service with reasonable skill and care. We aim to keep it available at all times but can’t guarantee it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may need to carry out maintenance, which we’ll try to do at quiet times.

11.2 We keep improving BookPet and may change, add or remove features. We won’t make a change that materially reduces the core functions of your Plan during a period you’ve paid for without giving you notice and the option to cancel with a pro rata refund.

11.3 We provide support by email at hello@bookpet.co.uk during UK working hours.

12. Third-party services

The Service works with other services such as Stripe (payments), calendar apps (Google, Apple, Outlook) and website builders. Your use of those services is governed by their own terms, and we aren’t responsible for them. Calendar apps fetch your feed on their own schedule, which may mean a delay before changes appear.

13. Liability

13.1 Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot be limited or excluded by law.

13.2 Subject to 13.1, we are not liable for: loss of profits, revenue, business, goodwill or anticipated savings; loss caused by information you or Your Customers entered being wrong; disputes between you and Your Customers; or any indirect or consequential loss.

13.3 Subject to 13.1, our total liability to you arising out of or in connection with these terms in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim and £[amount, e.g. 500].

13.4 You are responsible for, and will compensate us for reasonable losses arising from, any claim by a third party (including Your Customers or a regulator) caused by your breach of these terms or of Data Protection Law. [Solicitor to review indemnity scope.]

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. If a change materially affects you, we’ll email you at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you don’t agree, you can cancel before then. Continuing to use the Service after the change takes effect means you accept it.

15. General

15.1 Events outside our control. We’re not responsible for delays or failures caused by events outside our reasonable control, such as failures of the internet, our hosting providers or power supplies.

15.2 Transfer. We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another organisation, for example if our business is sold; we’ll tell you, and your rights won’t be reduced. You may not transfer your account without our written agreement.

15.3 Notices. We’ll send notices to the email address on your account. You can send notices to hello@bookpet.co.uk.

15.4 Whole agreement. These terms (including the data processing agreement and any documents they refer to) are the whole agreement between us about the Service.

15.5 Severability and waiver. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we don’t enforce a right straight away, we can still enforce it later.

15.6 Third parties. No one other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.

15.7 Law. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. [Solicitor to confirm approach for businesses in Scotland and Northern Ireland.]

16. Data processing agreement

This section forms the contract required by Article 28(3) of the UK GDPR between you (as controller) and us (as processor) for Customer Data. If anything in this section conflicts with the rest of these terms, this section wins for Customer Data.

16.1 Roles

(a) For Customer Data, you are the controller and we are your processor.

(b) For Account Data, we are a controller, and our privacy policy explains how we use it.

16.2 Details of the processing

16.3 Your instructions

We will process Customer Data only on your documented instructions, which are these terms and the settings and actions you choose in the Service, unless the law requires us to do otherwise (in which case we’ll tell you first, unless the law prevents it). We’ll tell you promptly if we think an instruction breaks Data Protection Law.

16.4 Confidentiality

Everyone we authorise to process Customer Data is bound by a duty of confidentiality. We limit access to people who need it to run and support the Service, and any access to your account by our staff is logged and visible to you.

16.5 Security

We take appropriate technical and organisational measures under Article 32 of the UK GDPR, including:

• encryption of data in transit (TLS) and storage with providers that encrypt data at rest;
• passwordless sign-in by one-time code, with codes and session tokens stored only as hashes, rate limits and bot protection;
• separation of each business’s data, enforced in code and tested automatically, so one business can’t access another’s data;
• minimisation: calendar feeds contain no phone numbers, addresses or medical notes; IP addresses are stored as salted hashes;
• daily backups and point-in-time recovery, with restores tested regularly;
• an audit log of sign-ins, approvals, exports, deletions, settings changes and staff access.

We may update these measures provided the overall level of protection is not reduced.

16.6 Sub-processors

(a) You give us general authorisation to use sub-processors. The current list is on our sub-processors page.

(b) We’ll tell you by email at least [30] days before we add or replace a sub-processor. If you object on reasonable data protection grounds, we’ll discuss it with you; if we can’t resolve it, you may close your account and we’ll refund any prepaid fees for the period after closure.

(c) We put a written contract in place with each sub-processor that gives Customer Data at least the same protection as this section, and we remain responsible to you for their performance.

16.7 Helping you meet your obligations

(a) Data subject requests. The Service lets you find everything held about a customer by email address, export it, correct it and delete or anonymise it. If we receive a request directly, we’ll pass it to you without undue delay and won’t respond ourselves except to direct the person to you.

(b) Taking into account the nature of the processing and the information available to us, we’ll provide reasonable help with your security obligations, data protection impact assessments and consultations with the ICO. [State whether assistance beyond the self-service tools is chargeable.]

16.8 Personal data breaches

If we become aware of a personal data breach affecting Customer Data, we will notify you without undue delay [and in any event within 48 hours], so that you can meet your own obligation to report it to the ICO within 72 hours where required. We’ll tell you what we know about the nature of the breach, the data and people likely to be affected, the likely consequences and what we are doing about it, and keep you updated as we learn more.

16.9 Return and deletion

You can export Customer Data at any time. When your account is closed, we delete Customer Data after the 30-day grace period described in section 6.2, and backup copies are overwritten within a further 35 days, unless the law requires us to keep it. While you have an account, the Service may automatically delete declined and cancelled requests after 12 months, which you can change in your settings.

16.10 Information and audits

We’ll make available the information reasonably needed to show that we meet this section. If that isn’t enough, you (or an independent auditor you appoint, bound by confidentiality) may audit our compliance, on at least 30 days’ notice, no more than once a year unless required by a regulator or following a breach, at your cost, and in a way that doesn’t compromise other customers’ data.

16.11 International transfers

We and our sub-processors may process Customer Data outside the UK only where the transfer is covered by UK adequacy regulations or appropriate safeguards under Article 46 of the UK GDPR (such as the International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses), as described in our privacy policy.

16.12 Your obligations as controller

You confirm that you have a lawful basis for collecting Customer Data through the Service; that you give Your Customers a privacy notice explaining how you use their information (we provide a template you can adapt); that your instructions to us comply with Data Protection Law; and that you will only collect what you need.

16.13 Liability

Each party’s liability under this section is subject to section 13. [Solicitor to confirm whether data protection liability should have a separate cap.]