Terms of service

These terms are the agreement between you and us for using startbuddi. Please read them: by creating an account or using startbuddi, you agree to them. If you are signing up for a business, you confirm that you are allowed to accept these terms on its behalf, and “you” means that business.

startbuddi is run by Tech Della Solutions Ltd, a private company limited by shares registered in Nigeria with the Corporate Affairs Commission (RC 7038770), based in Ibadan (“startbuddi”, “we”, “us”). Our contact details are at the end of these terms.

1What startbuddi is

startbuddi is an online workspace for running a service business. Depending on your plan it includes a CRM with a shared inbox (email, WhatsApp, SMS, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram and website live chat), marketing tools, websites, forms and bookings, projects and tasks, documents, invoicing and payments, people and HR tools, automations, and Chip, our AI assistant, which includes AI live chat and an AI voice agent. We call all of this “the service”.

We keep improving the service, so features change over time. We will not remove a core feature you pay for part-way through a billing period without telling you and, where it makes sense, offering a fair alternative or a pro-rata refund.

2Your account

• You must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract to create an account. startbuddi is for businesses and professionals, not for personal or household use.
• Give us accurate details and keep them up to date, especially your email address, because that is where we send important notices.
• Keep your password safe and do not share your login. Each person on your team should have their own account.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account and in your workspace, including what your team members and anyone you invite do there. Tell us straight away at hello@startbuddi.com if you think someone has got into your account.

3Workspaces, owners and team members

Each workspace has one owner. The owner, and admins the owner appoints, control billing, who can join, what each person can see and do, and whether the workspace is closed. If you join someone else’s workspace, that workspace’s owner controls the content in it, and they can remove you. If there is a dispute about who owns a workspace, we will normally treat the person or business paying for it as the owner.

4Plans, trials and payment

• startbuddi has a Free plan and paid plans. What each plan includes, its limits and its price are on our pricing page and in Billing inside the app.
• Every paid plan can start with a 30-day trial, one per workspace, with no card needed. If you have saved a card and do not cancel, the plan continues as a paid plan when the trial ends; if not, the workspace moves to the Free plan.
• Paid plans are billed monthly or yearly, in advance, and renew automatically until cancelled. Extra seats, extra sending and Chip credit packs are charged as shown in Billing.
• Payments are processed by Paystack, Stripe or PayPal. You also agree to their terms when you pay. Prices do not include taxes unless we say so; where we must charge tax, we add it to your bill.
• If a payment fails, you have a 7-day grace period to fix it. After that, the workspace is paused until the payment goes through.
• Our Refund and cancellation policy explains cancelling, refunds, seats and Chip credits, and forms part of these terms.

5Your content and your data

“Your content” means everything you and your team put into startbuddi or collect through it: contacts, messages, files, pages, forms, invoices, recordings and so on.

• You own your content. We do not claim any ownership of it.
• You give us permission to host, copy, process, send and display your content only as needed to run the service for you, to keep it secure, and to meet the law. That permission ends when your content is deleted from our systems.
• You are responsible for your content and for having the right to use it, including the right to contact the people in your contact lists.
• When your content includes other people’s personal data, you are the controller of that data and we process it for you under our Data processing agreement, which forms part of these terms.
• You can export your data at any time from Settings. Our Privacy policy explains how we handle your own personal data and how deletion works.

6Using startbuddi responsibly

You agree to follow our Acceptable use policy and, when you send email or SMS, the Sending policy. In short: only message people who have agreed to hear from you, do not deceive anyone, do not break the law, and do not try to break or misuse the service. You must also follow the rules of any third-party service you connect, such as WhatsApp’s Business policies or your payment provider’s terms.

7Chip and other AI features

• Chip can draft messages, summarise, research, suggest, and, where you allow it, take actions or answer your customers in live chat, on WhatsApp or in voice calls.
• AI can be wrong. Check Chip’s output before you rely on it, especially for anything legal, financial, medical or safety-related. You are responsible for what you send, publish or decide using Chip.
• Chip does not take actions that change your data or contact your customers unless you have asked it to or set it up to do so, and you can switch those settings off.
• Chip uses credits. Your plan includes a monthly allowance, and you can buy more. Credit costs depend on the task and are shown in Billing.
• We send the workspace data needed for each request to our AI providers, under business terms that do not allow them to train their models on it. We do not use your content to train AI models. More detail is in our Privacy policy.

8Connected services

startbuddi connects to services run by other companies, such as Meta (WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Facebook), Google, Microsoft, Paystack, Stripe, Telegram, SMS providers and your email provider. When you connect one, you let us exchange data with it on your behalf. Those services are governed by their own terms, and they may change or withdraw what they offer. We are not responsible for a third-party service, or for a feature that stops working because that service changed its rules, but we will tell you when we know and help where we can.

9Payments you take from your customers

When you send invoices, payment links or booking deposits through startbuddi, the payment is made to your own Paystack or Stripe account, under your agreement with that provider. We are not a bank or payment service, we do not hold your customers’ money, and we are not party to the sale between you and your customer. You are responsible for your prices, taxes, receipts, refunds and disputes with your customers.

10Our intellectual property

startbuddi, including the software, design, templates, Chip and our brand, belongs to us and our licensors. While your account is in good standing we give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service for your business under these terms. Templates and sample content we provide are yours to use and adapt inside your own business. If you send us feedback or ideas, we may use them without owing you anything.

11Availability and support

We work hard to keep startbuddi available and your data safe, but we cannot promise the service will always be available or free of errors. We sometimes need to carry out maintenance, and we try to do it at quiet times. We do not offer a service level agreement unless we have signed one with you separately. Support is available by email at hello@startbuddi.com and in the app.

12Suspension and closing accounts

• You can leave at any time. Cancel any paid plan in Billing first (deleting a workspace does not cancel it), export what you want to keep, then the owner can delete the workspace from Settings, then Danger zone. Deleting a workspace removes its data straight away and cannot be undone. To delete your personal sign-in account as well, email privacy@startbuddi.com. The Refund and cancellation policy explains what happens to payments.
• We can suspend or close your account if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms or the Acceptable use policy, if you do not pay, if the law requires it, or if your use puts other people, other customers or the service at risk. Where it is safe and lawful, we will tell you first and give you a chance to fix the problem.
• If we close your account without a good reason under these terms, we will refund any fees you paid in advance for the time left.
• If we close your account, you can ask us for an export of your data for 30 days afterwards, unless the law prevents it. After that we delete it as described in our Privacy policy.

13Disclaimers

Apart from what these terms say, we provide startbuddi “as is”. To the extent the law allows, we do not give any other promises or warranties, for example that the service will meet every one of your needs or that Chip’s output will be accurate. startbuddi does not give legal, tax, accounting or financial advice: templates, calculators and Chip suggestions are starting points, not professional advice. Nothing in these terms limits rights you have under consumer law that cannot be limited.

14Limits on liability

• Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law.
• Subject to that, neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or data that could have been avoided by keeping your own exports.
• Subject to that, our total liability to you for all claims in any 12-month period is limited to the amount you paid us for the service in those 12 months. If you are on the Free plan, it is limited to 100 US dollars or the equivalent in your currency.

15Indemnity

If someone makes a claim against us because of your content, your messages to your contacts, or your breach of these terms or the law, you agree to cover our reasonable losses and costs from that claim. We will tell you about the claim promptly and let you take part in defending it.

16Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the service and the law change. For material changes, we will email the workspace owner or show a notice in the app at least 30 days before the change takes effect, unless the change is required by law sooner. If you do not agree to the new terms, you can cancel before they apply. If you keep using startbuddi after they apply, the new terms apply to you.

17Governing law and disputes

If you have a problem with startbuddi, please contact us first at hello@startbuddi.com: most things can be sorted out quickly. If we cannot resolve it together, these terms and any dispute about them are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and the courts of Oyo State have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, you also keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live and can bring a claim in your local courts.

18General

• These terms, together with the documents they link to, are the whole agreement between us about startbuddi. If we have signed a separate agreement with you, that agreement wins where the two conflict.
• If a court decides part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies.
• If we do not enforce a right straight away, we can still enforce it later.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our written agreement. We may transfer ours to a company that takes over startbuddi, and we will tell you if that happens.
• Neither of us is responsible for delays caused by events outside our reasonable control, such as a major outage at a provider, a natural disaster or a change in law.

19Contact us

Tech Della Solutions Ltd (RC 7038770), Ibadan, Nigeria. General questions: hello@startbuddi.com. Privacy and data requests: privacy@startbuddi.com.

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Questions about this document? Email privacy@startbuddi.com.