Terms of Service

Draft for review. This document has not been reviewed by a lawyer and is not legal advice.

Effective date: [EFFECTIVE DATE]

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") form an agreement between you and [LLC NAME], a [STATE] limited liability company with its principal place of business at [BUSINESS ADDRESS] ("GoSent", "we", "us" or "our"). They govern your access to and use of the GoSent website at https://gosent.io, the GoSent dashboard, the GoSent REST API, the SMTP relay, and every related feature we provide (together, the "Service").

By creating an account, generating an API key, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you are accepting on behalf of a company or other organization, you confirm that you have authority to bind that organization, and "you" means that organization. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

1. What GoSent provides

GoSent is a developer platform for sending transactional email and verifying email addresses. Depending on your plan, the Service includes:

• Sending: a REST API and an SMTP relay for transactional messages such as receipts, password resets, sign-in codes, subscription and billing notices, and onboarding messages.
• Templates: tools to create, store and render reusable email templates.
• Webhooks: notifications to endpoints you control about delivery, bounce, complaint and other message events.
• Stripe-triggered email: the ability to connect your own Stripe account so that selected Stripe events (for example, a successful payment or a failed renewal) trigger emails to your customers.
• Email verification: a real-time verification API and a bulk list-cleaning tool that accepts CSV uploads.

We may add, change or retire features over time. If we remove a feature that is material to a paid plan you are on, we will give you reasonable advance notice where practical.

2. Related policies

The following documents are part of these Terms and apply to your use of the Service:

• the Acceptable Use Policy, which sets out what you may and may not send and how we handle abuse;
• the Privacy Policy, which explains how we handle personal information; and
• the Refund and Cancellation Policy, which explains billing changes, cancellations and refunds.

If there is a conflict, these Terms control, except that the Acceptable Use Policy controls on questions of permitted content and sending practices.

3. Eligibility and accounts

You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract to use the Service. The Service is intended for businesses and developers, not for personal or household use.

When you sign up, you must give us accurate, current and complete information, including a working email address and truthful details about your business and intended use. You must keep this information up to date.

You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, including activity by your team members and anyone using your API keys or SMTP credentials. Keep your credentials secret, rotate them if you believe they have been exposed, and tell us promptly at support@gosent.io if you suspect unauthorized access. We are not responsible for losses caused by credentials you failed to protect.

You may not create multiple accounts to get around plan limits, free-tier allowances, sending limits or an enforcement action.

4. Account review, domain verification and sending limits

To protect deliverability for every customer, we review new accounts manually. During review we may ask for information about your business, your website, the kinds of messages you plan to send and how your recipients came to be on your list. We may decline any account, at our discretion.

Before you can send from a domain, you must prove that you control it and publish the DNS records we ask for, including SPF, DKIM and a DMARC policy. You may only send from domains you own or are authorized to use.

New accounts start with low sending limits. We may raise limits as your account builds a good sending history, and we may lower them again if we see signs of risk. Sending limits are separate from, and may be lower than, the monthly allowance of your plan.

5. Your responsibilities as sender

You decide who receives your messages, what those messages say and why they are sent. You are the sender of every message sent through your account and, for data protection purposes, the controller (or business) for the personal information of your recipients. GoSent acts as your processor or service provider for that information.

You agree that you will:

• comply with all laws that apply to your messages and your data, including the US CAN-SPAM Act, Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), the EU General Data Protection Regulation and UK GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act (as amended), and similar laws in the places where you and your recipients are located;
• have a lawful basis, and any required consent, for every message and every address you send to or verify;
• provide any notices to your recipients that the law requires, including a privacy notice that discloses your use of service providers such as GoSent;
• use shared sending infrastructure for transactional email only, as described in the Acceptable Use Policy;
• handle bounces, complaints and unsubscribe requests promptly, including any we pass to you by webhook or in the dashboard; and
• not send sensitive categories of personal data (such as full payment card numbers, government identification numbers, health records or passwords in plain text) in message content unless the law permits it and you have taken appropriate safeguards.

6. Customer content and data

"Customer Content" means everything you or your systems submit to the Service: message content, templates, attachments, recipient addresses, lists uploaded for verification, metadata, and data received from your connected Stripe account.

You keep all rights in your Customer Content. You grant GoSent a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to host, copy, transmit, process and display Customer Content only as needed to provide, secure and support the Service, to prevent abuse, and to comply with law. We do not sell Customer Content and we do not use your recipients' data to market our own products to them.

We may generate aggregated or de-identified statistics from use of the Service (for example, overall bounce rates by mailbox provider) to operate and improve the Service, provided that those statistics do not identify you or any individual.

You confirm that you have all the rights and permissions needed for us to process Customer Content as described in these Terms. Our handling of personal information within Customer Content is described in the Privacy Policy and, where required, in a data processing addendum available on request from legal@gosent.io.

We keep message logs and verification results for a limited period described in the Privacy Policy and the dashboard. The Service is not a backup or archival system; keep your own copies of anything you need.

7. Email verification

Verification results are an estimate of whether an address can receive mail, based on checks such as syntax, domain and mail-server lookups. Mail servers do not always respond consistently, so results cannot be guaranteed to be accurate. Results may be returned as valid, invalid, risky (for example, catch-all or disposable) or unknown.

You may use verification only to keep lists of people who have a genuine relationship with you accurate, such as validating an address at sign-up or cleaning an existing customer list. You may not use verification to clean or test lists that were purchased, rented, scraped, harvested or appended, or to prepare any list for unsolicited email. We may refuse or stop processing any list that appears to break this rule, and usage consumed on that list will not be refunded.

8. Plans, fees and billing

Our current plans are listed on our pricing page. At the effective date they are:

• Free: $0, up to 3,000 emails per month and 100 per day, plus 100 verifications.
• Pro: $18 per month, 50,000 emails per month, additional emails at $0.85 per 1,000, plus 1,000 verifications.
• Scale: $79 per month, 100,000 emails per month, additional emails at $0.70 per 1,000, plus 5,000 verifications, with an optional dedicated IP at $30 per month.
• Enterprise: custom pricing and terms set out in an order form.

Verification can also be bought on a pay-as-you-go basis at $0.004 per check or in packs of 10,000 for $35 and 100,000 for $250. Purchased packs do not expire while your account remains open. Checks that return an "unknown" result are not charged.

Subscriptions are billed in advance, monthly or annually, through our payment processor, Stripe. Annual billing is priced at ten times the monthly price. Overage charges for emails above your plan's allowance are billed in arrears at the end of each billing period. You authorize us and Stripe to charge your payment method for all fees when due.

Prices exclude taxes. You are responsible for any sales, use, value-added or similar taxes, other than taxes on our income. If a payment fails, we may retry the charge, pause sending or verification, or downgrade your account until the balance is paid.

We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice by email or in the dashboard. Price changes take effect at the start of your next billing period after the notice period. If you do not agree to a change, you may cancel before it takes effect.

Disputing a valid charge with your card issuer instead of contacting us first may lead to suspension of your account. Please write to support@gosent.io with any billing question.

9. Cancellation and refunds

You can cancel a subscription at any time from the dashboard. Cancellation, refunds, and how annual plans and verification packs are treated are covered in the Refund and Cancellation Policy.

10. Suspension and termination by GoSent

We may pause sending, limit features, suspend your account or terminate these Terms, with or without notice, if we reasonably believe that:

• you have broken these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy;
• your account's bounce or complaint rates exceed the limits in the Acceptable Use Policy (sending may be paused automatically in that case);
• your use creates a security risk, harms our infrastructure or reputation, or threatens deliverability for other customers;
• our infrastructure providers, mailbox providers or blocklist operators require us to act;
• you have not paid fees that are due; or
• we are required to act by law or by a court or government authority.

Where the problem can reasonably be fixed and the risk allows, we will try to contact you first and work with you to fix it. We may restore service once the issue is resolved. We may also end the Service for any account on 30 days' notice for any reason, in which case we will refund any prepaid fees for the period after termination.

Accounts terminated for abuse or a serious breach are not entitled to a refund.

11. Termination by you and effect of termination

You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time. When these Terms end for any reason, your right to use the Service stops, your API keys are revoked, and any fees already owed remain payable. We will delete or de-identify Customer Content within a reasonable period after closure, as described in the Privacy Policy, unless the law requires us to keep it. Sections that by their nature should survive (including those on fees owed, intellectual property, disclaimers, liability, indemnity and disputes) continue to apply.

12. Acceptable use of the platform

In addition to the content rules in the Acceptable Use Policy, you must not:

• resell, sublicense or white-label the Service without our written agreement;
• probe, scan or test the vulnerability of the Service, or bypass any security, rate limit or access control, except through a responsible disclosure reported to support@gosent.io;
• reverse engineer the Service except where the law allows it despite this restriction;
• use the Service to build a competing product, or to benchmark it for publication without our consent; or
• interfere with, overload or disrupt the Service or other customers' use of it.

13. Third-party services

The Service relies on and connects with third-party services, including Amazon Web Services (including Amazon SES), Stripe and Vercel. When you connect your own Stripe account or any other third-party service, your use of that service is governed by its own terms, and you authorize us to access the data needed to provide the feature you enabled. We are not responsible for the availability or acts of services that we do not control, though we choose our providers with care.

14. GoSent's intellectual property and feedback

GoSent and its licensors own the Service, including our software, documentation, design and trademarks. These Terms give you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service during your subscription in line with these Terms; they do not transfer any ownership to you. If you send us suggestions or feedback, we may use them without any obligation to you.

15. Confidentiality

Each party may receive non-public information from the other, such as product plans, pricing in an order form or security details. The receiving party will use that information only for purposes of this agreement and protect it with reasonable care. This does not cover information that is public through no fault of the receiving party, was already known to it, was independently developed, or must be disclosed by law (with notice to the other party where lawful).

16. Disclaimers

We work hard to keep the Service reliable, but email delivery depends on systems outside our control, including recipients' mail servers, mailbox providers' filters and the public internet. We do not guarantee that any message will be delivered, delivered on time, or placed in the inbox, or that any verification result will be accurate.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", and GoSent disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement. Any uptime or support commitments apply only if set out in a written agreement such as an Enterprise order form.

17. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

• neither party is liable to the other for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, goodwill or data, even if advised that such damages were possible; and
• GoSent's total liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service, for all claims combined, will not exceed the greater of (a) the amounts you paid to GoSent for the Service in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) US $100.

These limits do not apply to your payment obligations, your indemnity obligations, or your breach of the Acceptable Use Policy, and do not limit liability that cannot be limited under applicable law.

18. Indemnification

You will defend and indemnify GoSent and its members, officers, employees and agents against any third-party claim, and related losses, fines, penalties and reasonable legal fees, arising from (a) your Customer Content or the messages you send, (b) your breach of these Terms, the Acceptable Use Policy or applicable law, including anti-spam and privacy law, or (c) your use of the Service in a way that infringes someone else's rights. We will notify you promptly of any such claim, let you control the defence (subject to our right to approve any settlement that imposes obligations on us), and give reasonable cooperation at your expense.

19. Disputes and governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of [STATE] and applicable US federal law, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Before filing any claim, each party agrees to try to resolve the dispute informally by writing to the other (for GoSent, at legal@gosent.io) and allowing 30 days for a response. If the dispute is not resolved, it will be heard exclusively in the state or federal courts located in [STATE], and both parties consent to their jurisdiction. Either party may seek urgent injunctive relief in any competent court to protect its intellectual property or confidential information.

20. Export controls and sanctions

You may not use the Service if you are located in, or are owned or controlled by a person in, a country or region subject to comprehensive US sanctions, or if you are on a US government restricted-party list. You must not use the Service to send messages to, or verify addresses of, anyone in violation of US export control or sanctions laws.

21. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. If a change is material, we will tell you by email or in the dashboard at least 30 days before it takes effect, unless the change is required by law or addresses abuse or security, in which case it may take effect sooner. Continuing to use the Service after the effective date means you accept the updated Terms. If you do not agree, you may cancel before the change takes effect.

22. General

• Entire agreement: These Terms, the policies linked in Section 2, and any order form you sign with us are the whole agreement between us about the Service. A signed order form controls if it conflicts with these Terms.
• Assignment: You may not transfer these Terms without our written consent. We may transfer them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets.
• Force majeure: Neither party is liable for delays or failures caused by events beyond its reasonable control, such as outages at upstream providers, internet failures, natural disasters or government action. This does not excuse payment obligations.
• Notices: We will send notices to the email address on your account. You can send legal notices to legal@gosent.io, with a copy by mail to [BUSINESS ADDRESS].
• Independent parties: Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, joint venture or employment relationship.
• Severability and waiver: If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• Publicity: We will not use your name or logo in our marketing without your permission.

23. Contact

Questions about these Terms: legal@gosent.io. Account and billing help: support@gosent.io. Privacy questions: privacy@gosent.io. Abuse reports: abuse@gosent.io. Postal address: [LLC NAME], [BUSINESS ADDRESS].