Terms of Service

1Who this is between

Alderbill is operated by [[LEGAL ENTITY NAME]] (“we”, “us”). These terms are the agreement between us and you — the business that holds an Alderbill account and uses it to invoice its own customers.

Your customers are not party to this agreement. When one of them opens an invoice link and pays, they are dealing with you, and with Stripe as the payment processor. Not with us.

By asking for an account or using one, you agree to these terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you are confirming you may bind it.

2Access is by invitation

Signing up creates a login and nothing else. It does not create a workspace and it does not let you invoice anyone. A person reads every request and either approves it or refuses it with a reason.

We may refuse a request, and we do not have to justify a refusal beyond the reason we give. We may also stop accepting new businesses entirely.

3Your account

One workspace belongs to one person: the owner. You are responsible for keeping your sign-in credentials to yourself and for everything done through your account. Tell us promptly if you think somebody else has got into it.

The web address your workspace is given is permanent. It ends up on invoices already in your customers’ hands, so it cannot be changed after the fact — a business that must change its address gets a new workspace.

4What Alderbill does, and what it does not

Alderbill lets you write an invoice, freeze it when you send it, give your customer a private link, and take a card payment against it into your own Stripe account. It keeps a record of what was sent, what was paid, and what was refunded or disputed.

Some things it deliberately does not do, as of these terms:

• It does not email your customers. Sending the invoice is your job — you copy the link and send it however you already talk to that customer.
• It does not chase late payment. There are no automatic reminders and no collections.
• It does not work out your tax. See section 8.
• It is not accounting software and is not a substitute for keeping proper books.

5The money is yours, and it never passes through us

You connect your own Stripe account. Your customers’ payments are settled by Stripe directly into that account. We never hold, receive or control your money, and we are not a payment processor, a bank, or a money transmitter.

Your use of Stripe is governed by your agreement with Stripe, not by this one. Stripe decides whether your account may take card payments, when you are paid out, and how disputes are handled. If Stripe suspends or restricts you, Alderbill cannot pay you anyway, and that is between you and Stripe.

Refunds, chargebacks and disputes are yours to resolve with your customer and with Stripe. We show you the record; we cannot reverse a payment on your behalf.

6What we charge

There is no monthly fee and no contract. We take a percentage of each payment you successfully collect — the standard rate is 2%, taken as an application fee at the moment the payment is processed. If we have agreed a different rate with you, that rate applies and you can see it against every payment in your workspace.

Our fee is separate from Stripe’s processing fees, which Stripe charges you under your agreement with them. Stripe’s published US card rate at the time of writing is 2.9% plus 30¢, but it is Stripe’s number and can change without us knowing.

We may change our standard rate. If we do, we will tell account holders before it takes effect, and it will only apply to payments processed after that date. Collect nothing and you pay us nothing.

7Your invoices and your customers

Everything you put into Alderbill is yours: your business details, your customer records, your line items, your notes. You keep all rights in it. You give us permission to store and process it only so far as we need to in order to run the service for you.

You are responsible for it being accurate and for having the right to hold it. When you enter a customer’s name, email or address, you are the one who decides what to collect and why — see the privacy policy, which explains that we handle that data on your instructions rather than for our own purposes.

A sent invoice is frozen and cannot be edited. That is a feature, not a limitation: it is what makes the record worth anything if a charge is later disputed. Corrections are made by issuing a credit note against the original.

8Tax, surcharging and staying on the right side of the law

Nothing in Alderbill is tax, legal, or financial advice, and nobody here is qualified to give it.

You decide what tax to charge and you are responsible for it being right. Alderbill applies a rate you configure. It does not determine whether you have a tax obligation in a given state, whether what you sell is taxable there, or what you must file and when.

The same applies to passing card processing fees on to your customers. The feature exists and starts switched off. Whether you may use it, and what you must disclose if you do, depends on where you and your customer are and on the card networks’ rules. Confirming that is yours to do.

9What you may not do

Do not use Alderbill to:

• invoice for anything unlawful, or for goods and services you have not provided and do not intend to;
• mislead a customer about who they are paying, what for, or how much;
• launder money, evade sanctions, or get around a restriction Stripe or a card network has placed on you;
• attack, overload, reverse-engineer or probe the service, or try to reach another business’s data;
• resell or rebrand Alderbill as your own product without our written agreement.

10Interruptions, and the fact that this is early

Alderbill is a young product under active development. Features change, and occasionally one is removed. We aim to keep it available and will not do anything deliberately careless with it, but we do not promise a particular level of uptime and there is no service credit.

Parts of the service depend on Stripe, on our authentication provider and on our hosting and database providers. When one of them is down, the corresponding part of Alderbill is down.

11Ending it

You can stop using Alderbill whenever you like. There is nothing to cancel and nothing to pay on the way out — stop invoicing and you stop paying us. Ask us and we will close your workspace.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks section 9, that exposes us or your customers to fraud or legal risk, or that we are required to act on. Where we reasonably can, we will tell you why and give you a chance to put it right first.

If your account closes, you can ask us for an export of your invoices and payment records. Ask before you go: we do not promise to keep them indefinitely afterwards, and section 10 of the privacy policy says how long we do keep things.

12What we do not promise

Alderbill is provided “as is”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that it will meet a particular need of yours.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

13Limits on what we owe you

To the fullest extent the law allows, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business or lost data, however caused.

Our total liability to you arising out of or relating to these terms, in any twelve-month period, is limited to the total fees we actually charged you in that period.

That is a real limit and it is deliberately modest, because our fee is modest. If the amounts you invoice are large enough that this limit worries you, insure the risk rather than assume we are carrying it.

14Covering us for what you do

You agree to cover us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your use of Alderbill, from the invoices you issue, from your dealings with your customers, or from your breach of these terms. This does not apply to anything caused by our own breach or negligence.

15Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects you, we will tell account holders before it takes effect. The date at the top of this page always says when the wording last changed, and continuing to use Alderbill after a change means you accept it.

16Which law applies

Alderbill operates in the United States. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of [[US STATE]], without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the courts of that state have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute.

If a provision of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing something straight away does not mean we have given it up.

17Reaching a person

Write to [[CONTACT EMAIL]] and a person will read it.

[[LEGAL ENTITY NAME]], [[REGISTERED POSTAL ADDRESS]]