Terms of Service

Thank you for using Curbcut. We built it to help people find and fix what their websites are failing. Because we cannot know every customer personally, we need some terms to keep things clear for everyone, and we have tried to write them so that you can actually read them.

When we say "Curbcut", "we", "our" or "us", we mean Curbcut, operated by Braedan Campbell, trading as Curbcut, in San Rafael, California, United States.

When we say "Services", we mean curbcuthq.com and everything it offers: the free scan, fix packs and full audits bought one at a time, the monitoring subscription, any other plan we sell, and the reports, files and emails they produce.

When we say "you" or "your", we mean the person or organisation using the Services. If you use them on behalf of a business, you confirm that you are entitled to bind it to these terms.

We may update these terms. When we do, we refresh the date at the top of this page, and when a change is material we email everyone with an account, an order or a subscription before it takes effect. When you use the Services, now or in the future, you are agreeing to the latest version. If we do not enforce a provision at some point, that does not mean we have waived it. These terms contain a limitation of our liability.

Who can use the Services

1. You must be 18 or over to buy anything from us.
2. You must be a human. Accounts registered by bots or other automated methods are not permitted.
3. The free scan needs no account. Paid reports and monitoring are kept in an account that you open with your email address and sign into with a link we send you. Keep those links to yourself: anyone holding one can act as you, and we cannot be liable for loss caused by a link you passed on.
4. You are responsible for everything that happens under your account.
5. You may not use the Services for any purpose listed in our Use Restrictions policy.

What an automated audit can and cannot tell you

An automated check can prove that specific failures exist. It cannot prove that a site is accessible, or that it complies with WCAG or with any accessibility, privacy, security or other law. Many requirements need human judgement: whether alt text is actually meaningful, whether a page is understandable, whether a process can be completed without a mouse. The Services list such items for you to check yourself.

Curbcut is a tool for finding and fixing a large class of common problems quickly. It is not a certification, not a legal opinion, and not a substitute for an audit by a qualified practitioner where one is required. Suggested fixes, including generated text such as alternative text, titles and descriptions, are drafts for you to review before publishing, and you are responsible for what you publish. Scores, reports and everything else the Services produce are for information only and are not legal advice. Consult a qualified professional about your legal obligations.

Attestations

Where the Services issue an attestation after a re-scan, it records only that our automated checks passed on the stated date for the pages that were scanned. It is not a certification, not a statement of conformance with WCAG or any law, and not a guarantee that a site is accessible, and it must not be presented as any of those. We may withdraw an attestation if we find that it was issued in error or that the site changed after the scan.

Scanning permission

Only scan sites you own or are authorised to test. Curbcut obeys robots.txt, honours crawl delays and rate-limits repeat scans of the same site, but you remain responsible for having permission. Our Use Restrictions policy sets out what else is not allowed.

Payment, refunds and plan changes

1. The free scan is really free: we do not ask for a card, and, just as for paying customers, we do not sell your data.
2. Fix packs and full audits are one-off purchases. Monitoring, and any other plan we offer, is billed monthly in advance and renews automatically each month until you cancel.
3. Payment is taken by Stripe, which acts as merchant of record and whose terms apply to the transaction. Prices are in US dollars. Any tax due is calculated and shown at checkout and collected by Stripe.
4. Delivery of a paid report starts as soon as payment clears. If you are a consumer in the UK or the European Union, by buying you ask us to begin immediately and acknowledge that once the report has been delivered you lose the statutory 14-day right to cancel.
5. If we change the price of a plan you are on, we will email you at least 30 days before the new price applies to you.
6. We process refunds according to our Refund policy.

Cancellation and termination

1. You can cancel a subscription yourself, at any time, from your account page: sign in and choose Manage subscription. An email asking us to cancel is not itself a cancellation, but if you are stuck, email us and we will do it for you. Our Cancellation policy has the details.
2. When you cancel, monitoring runs to the end of the month you have paid for and then stops, and we will not bill you again. There are no refunds for part of a month, except where the law requires one or our Refund policy says otherwise.
3. Your reports stay on your account page after a subscription ends. If you ask us to close your account, we delete it as described in our Privacy policy.
4. We may suspend or terminate your account and refuse any current or future use of the Services if you break these terms or our Use Restrictions policy. In practice that means an account used to scan sites it has no permission to scan, to overload a site, or to get around our rate limits.
5. Abuse of the people who run Curbcut, including threats, results in immediate termination.

Changes to the Services and prices

1. We may change or withdraw any part of the Services, including the free scan, at any time. The set of checks we run changes as web standards and our understanding of them change. A page that passed last month may fail this month because we learned to detect something new, and that is a feature.
2. If we change our pricing, existing subscribers get at least 30 days' notice by email before the new price applies to them.

Availability, security and privacy

1. Your use of the Services is at your sole risk. We provide them on an "as is" and "as available" basis and do not offer a service-level agreement. Paid reports are normally delivered within an hour; if one fails, we re-run it or refund it.
2. We may temporarily limit your use if it significantly exceeds that of other customers or affects the service for everyone else. We will contact you before doing so unless the load is causing a problem right now.
3. We take reasonable measures to secure your data, including encrypting it in transit. You agree that we may process your data as described in our Privacy policy and for no other purpose. We as humans look at your data only to help with a support request you make, to fix an automated process that failed part-way through, to investigate a report under our Use Restrictions policy, or where the law requires it.
4. We use third-party providers for hosting, payment, email and text generation. They are listed in our Privacy policy.

Your reports and our software

1. Reports we produce for you are yours to use and share, including passing them to a developer or agency to act on.
2. You keep ownership of anything you give us. You give us a limited licence to use the site address, page content and email address you supply, only so that we can provide the Services to you.
3. The software, checks, templates, wording and design of the Services remain ours. You may not copy, resell or exploit any part of the Services. The downloadable pieces of a report, such as the bookmarklet, scripts and pack files, are licensed to you for the sites you are authorised to test, not for resale as your own product except under a plan that expressly allows it.
4. Where a report links to other websites or tools, we are not responsible for what you find there.

Features and bugs

We design the Services with care, based on the published standards and on what customers tell us. There is no such thing as an audit that pleases everybody, and we make no guarantee that the Services will meet your specific requirements or find every problem on a site. As with any software, the Services have bugs. We fix the ones that matter, starting with anything that affects security, privacy or the accuracy of a report, but we do not promise an error-free service.

Liability

We mention liability throughout these terms, but to put it all in one place:

To the fullest extent the law allows, Curbcut shall not be liable, in law or in equity, to you or to any third party for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, including lost profits, goodwill, use or data, arising from the use of or inability to use the Services, from acting or declining to act on their output, from any legal claim or enforcement action relating to a website you scanned, or from any other matter relating to these terms or the Services, whether in contract, tort (including negligence) or under any other theory of liability. Our total liability to you for anything arising from the Services is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

In plainer words: choosing to use the Services means you are making a bet on us. We do our best to be a safe bet, but if it does not work out, that is on you, not us. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, and nothing removes protections you have as a consumer under the laws of the country where you live.

Disputes and governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. If you have a problem, email us first: we will try to resolve it informally within 30 days. A dispute that cannot be resolved that way may be brought in the state or federal courts located in Marin County, California, and you and we each agree to that venue. Any claim must be started within one year of arising, where the law allows.

Changes to these terms

When we change these terms we update the date at the top of this page. If a change is material, we email everyone with an account, an order or a subscription before it takes effect. If you keep using the Services after that date, the new terms apply. If you do not agree, cancel monitoring from your account page or ask us to close your account.

Contact

Questions about these terms: legal@curbcuthq.com.

Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies, used under CC BY 4.0.