Terms of Service

1. Who we are

GroundQuote is a trading name of Daniel Carnell, a sole trader in the United Kingdom ("we", "us", "our"). Our address is 12 Gelli Frongoch, Cardiff, CF23 8QD. You can contact us at info@ground-quote.com. Our website is ground-quote.com.

"You" means the business that creates the account, and anyone that business allows to use it. The person who signs up confirms they are authorised to accept these terms for the business.

2. The service

GroundQuote is online software for preparing quotes and invoices. It lets you keep customer records, upload site photos, get suggested work items from those photos, build priced quotes from your own price book, share quotes with your customers, and create invoices. We may improve, change or remove features over time. If we remove a feature that is a main part of your plan, we will tell you in advance and you may cancel.

3. Your account

• Give accurate details when you sign up and keep them up to date.
• Keep your password safe and don't share sign-in details. Tell us straight away if you think someone else has accessed your account.
• You are responsible for everything done through your account by you or the people you let use it.
• You must be at least 18 and using the service for your business.
• GroundQuote is for UK businesses only.

4. Free trial and plans

New accounts start with a 14-day free trial of everything in the Pro plan. No card is needed for the trial and you won't be charged when it ends. When the trial ends, your account becomes read-only until you choose a plan.

Our plans are Essential (£29.00 a month or £290.00 a year) and Pro (£39.00 a month or £390.00 a year). The prices and what each plan includes are shown on our pricing page and on the Billing page in the app, and those pages form part of these terms.

Founding Member: the first 25 paying customers can choose the Founding Member plan at £19.00 a month, which includes everything in Pro. That price includes any VAT and stays the same for as long as your Founding Member subscription continues. If you cancel it or move to another plan, your place goes back to the pool and the Founding Member price can't be restored.

Referrals: if a business signs up through your referral link and pays its first subscription invoice, you each get a credit worth one month of your current plan, taken off your next invoice. You need to be on a paid plan to receive yours; until then it waits. There is one credit for each referred business that pays. Credits have no cash value and can't be transferred, and referring yourself or another business you own or work for doesn't count. We may end the referral offer at any time, but credits already earned will still be applied.

5. Fees and payment

Subscriptions are paid in advance for each billing period.

Essential and Pro prices are exclusive of VAT. We are not currently registered for VAT, so no VAT is charged. If we register for VAT, VAT at the applicable rate will be added to Essential and Pro subscriptions, and we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email first, as for any price change. The Founding Member price includes any VAT, so it will not increase if we register.

Payments are taken by our payment provider, Stripe. We don't see or store your full card details. By subscribing you authorise us, through Stripe, to charge your payment method at the start of each billing period until you cancel.

If a payment fails, Stripe will try again over the following days and we will email you. Your account keeps working during that time. If payment still can't be taken, your subscription may end and your account becomes read-only.

We may change our prices. We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before a new price applies to you, and it will apply from your next billing period after that notice, so you can cancel first if you don't want to continue. The Founding Member price does not change while your Founding Member subscription continues.

Fees already paid are not refundable, except where we have agreed otherwise or the law requires a refund.

6. Cancelling

You can cancel at any time from the Billing page. You keep full access until the end of the period you have already paid for, and you won't be charged again. After that your account becomes read-only: you can still sign in to see your data and download your quotes and invoices.

What happens to your data after that, including our deletion rule for accounts nobody has signed in to for 12 months, is set out in section 12.

7. Your quotes, prices and invoices

GroundQuote is a tool. You run your business and you are responsible for the documents you send. In particular:

• You must check every quote and invoice before you send it, including the work described, quantities, measurements, prices, VAT, discounts and totals.
• Your prices are your own. All prices come from the material prices, labour rates and settings you enter. We don't set, recommend or check your prices, and we are not responsible for a price being too high or too low.
• You are responsible for VAT: whether you are registered, the rate you charge, your VAT number and the VAT treatment of each job.
• You are responsible for making sure your quotes, invoices and dealings with your customers meet the law that applies to you, including consumer protection law (for example cancellation rights for work agreed away from your premises), invoicing rules and, if you are a limited company, showing your company details on your documents.
• Once you send a quote and your customer accepts it, the contract for the work is between you and your customer. We are not a party to it.
• Keep your own records. You can download your quotes and invoices as PDFs and export each customer's details at any time, or ask us for a full copy of your data. Keep copies of anything you need for tax or other legal purposes.

8. AI suggestions

GroundQuote can analyse site photos you upload using an AI service. The AI only suggests the work that may be needed and rough quantities. It does not set prices: prices always come from your own price book, and anything without a saved price is flagged rather than guessed.

AI suggestions are a starting point, not advice and not a survey. They can be wrong or incomplete, and photos can't show everything about a site, such as what is underground, levels, access or the condition of existing structures. Estimated sizes are marked as estimates until you confirm them. You must check and confirm every suggestion, measurement and line before a quote is sent. We are not responsible for losses caused by relying on an AI suggestion without checking it.

9. Acceptable use

You must not:

• use the service for anything unlawful, fraudulent or misleading, or to send spam;
• upload anything you don't have the right to use, or content that is offensive, harmful or infringes anyone's rights;
• upload photos or information about people that you have no lawful reason to collect;
• upload health information or other special category data, identity documents or payment card numbers (GroundQuote isn't designed to hold them);
• try to get into other businesses' data, test or break our security, or interfere with the service;
• copy, resell or reverse-engineer the service, or use automated tools to access it except as we allow;
• share your account to get around plan limits.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these rules. Where reasonable we will tell you first and give you a chance to put things right.

10. Your data and our software

Your data stays yours. That includes your business details, price book, customers, photos, quotes and invoices, and any AI suggestion once you've added it to a quote. You give us permission to store and process it only to provide, secure and support the service for you. We never sell it.

We keep your business information, including your price book and customer list, confidential and use it only as these terms and our privacy notice describe.

You are responsible for having a lawful basis to give us your customers' personal data and for telling your customers how you use it (for example in your own privacy notice).

We may combine anonymised data from many businesses, such as typical prices for common jobs in an area, to improve GroundQuote and to develop related products and services. Anything we produce this way will never identify you, your business, your customers or your individual prices, and we'll only show a figure that is drawn from at least five businesses.

We own GroundQuote and all rights in it, including its software, design, text, templates and branding. While you have an account, we give you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use GroundQuote for your own business, in line with these terms. That right ends when your account ends, apart from your right to export your data under these terms.

If you send us ideas or suggestions, we can use them freely without owing you anything.

How we handle personal data for which we are responsible ourselves, such as your account details, is explained in our Privacy notice.

11. Data processing terms

This section sets out the terms required by Article 28(3) of the UK GDPR. When you put your customers' personal data into GroundQuote, you are the controller of that data and we process it on your behalf as your processor.

• Subject matter: providing the GroundQuote service to you.
• Duration: for as long as you use the service, and afterwards until the data is deleted as described below.
• Nature and purpose: storing, organising, displaying and transmitting your data so you can prepare and share quotes and invoices; analysing site photos to suggest work items; sending emails you approve; and showing your customers the documents you choose to share.
• Types of personal data: your customers' names, contact details (email, phone), site and billing addresses, site photos and anything visible in them, notes, quotes, invoices, payment records, quote responses (such as a typed name when accepting), and records of emails sent and quote views.
• Data subjects: your customers and prospective customers, and anyone shown in photos you upload or named in notes you write.

We will:

• process the data only on your documented instructions, which are these terms and the way you use the service, unless the law requires otherwise (in which case we will tell you first unless the law forbids it), and tell you if we think an instruction breaks data protection law;
• make sure anyone we allow to process the data is bound by confidentiality;
• not use the data to train, fine-tune or improve any AI model, and only use AI providers whose terms stop them from training on it;
• take appropriate technical and organisational security measures, including keeping each business's data separate from every other business's, storing photos privately, encrypting connections, and limiting access to those who need it;
• only use the sub-processors listed below, under written terms that give your data the same level of protection, and remain responsible to you for them;
• give you at least 30 days' notice by email or in the app before adding or replacing a sub-processor, so you can object; if we can't reasonably address your objection, you may cancel and we will refund any fees paid for the period after the change;
• help you, taking into account the nature of the processing, to respond to requests from people exercising their data protection rights (the app lets you export or erase an individual customer's details);
• help you meet your obligations on security, personal data breaches, data protection impact assessments and prior consultation with the ICO, taking into account the information available to us;
• notify you without undue delay after becoming aware of a personal data breach affecting your data, with the information you reasonably need to meet your own obligations, including what happened, what data is affected, what we have done about it and what you should do;
• at the end of the service, delete your data (before then you can download your documents, export customer details or ask us for a full copy, and you can delete your whole account yourself from Settings), unless the law requires us to keep it; data that was not deleted by you is deleted under the rule in section 12;
• make available the information you reasonably need to show that these obligations are met, and allow for and contribute to audits, including inspections, by you or an auditor you appoint, with reasonable notice. We may first answer written questions, and ask that audits are proportionate and kept confidential.

Sub-processors we use:

• Supabase: database and private file storage (photos and logos). Region: London, UK (AWS eu-west-2).
• Vercel: application hosting. Our application runs in Vercel's London region; Vercel is a US company and may process data in the US for support and operations.
• Resend: email delivery, sent from Resend's EU region. US provider.
• Anthropic: AI analysis of the site photos and notes you submit for analysis. US provider.
• Stripe: subscription payments for your GroundQuote account.
• Cloudflare R2: encrypted off-site backups of the database and stored files, which only we can decrypt.

International transfers: some sub-processors are based in, or may access data from, the United States or other countries outside the UK. Where personal data is transferred outside the UK, we make sure an appropriate safeguard under UK data protection law is in place, such as UK adequacy regulations (including the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified) or the ICO's International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, as provided for in each provider's data processing terms.

12. Keeping and deleting data

While you have an active, trial or past-due subscription, we keep your data. If your subscription has ended, your account stays read-only and your data is kept, so you can still read and download it, or subscribe again.

If your business has no active, trial or past-due subscription and nobody from it has signed in for 11 months, we email the account owner to warn that the account will be deleted. If there is still no sign-in, we permanently delete the business account and everything in it, including stored photos, 12 months after the last sign-in. We only delete once a warning email has actually been delivered, and never sooner than 30 days after it was delivered. Signing in at any time restarts the clock.

If you delete your account from Settings, it is deleted straight away. Deletion can't be undone, so download anything you need to keep first.

13. Availability

We use reasonable care and skill to provide the service and keep it running, but we provide it "as is" and "as available". We don't promise it will always be available, uninterrupted or error-free. It may be unavailable at times for maintenance, updates or reasons outside our control, such as failures of our hosting or other providers or of your internet connection.

We aren't responsible for delays or failures caused by events outside our reasonable control, including outages at our hosting, database or AI providers.

Except as set out in these terms, we don't give any other promises about the service, for example that it is suitable for a particular purpose, to the extent the law allows.

14. Our liability

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

Subject to that, we are not liable for any indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profits, revenue, business, contracts, goodwill or anticipated savings, or for loss or corruption of data (please keep your own exports), however it arises.

Subject to that, our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or in connection with the service or these terms in any 12-month period is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.

We are not responsible for the content of your quotes and invoices, your prices, your dealings with your customers, or losses caused by your failure to check documents before sending them.

15. Ending the agreement

You can stop using the service and cancel at any time (section 6), and delete your account from Settings.

We may suspend or end your access if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, if you don't pay, or if we have to by law. Where reasonable we will warn you first. We may also stop providing the service altogether by giving you at least 30 days' notice, and we will refund any fees paid for the period after it stops.

When the agreement ends, the sections on fees owed, your data, data processing, keeping and deleting data, our liability and governing law continue to apply.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms, for example to reflect changes to the service or the law. If a change materially affects you, we will tell you by email or in the app at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you don't agree with the change, you may cancel before it takes effect. If you carry on using the service after that, the new terms apply.

17. General

These terms, together with the plan details on our pricing and Billing pages, are the whole agreement between you and us about the service. You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our written agreement. We may transfer them to someone who takes over the service, and will tell you if we do. If any part of these terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we don't enforce a right straight away, we can still enforce it later. Nobody else has any rights under these terms.

These terms and any dispute about them, including non-contractual disputes, are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

Questions about these terms: info@ground-quote.com.