Terms of Service

1. Who we are and this agreement

Encontado (encontado.com) is operated by Black Buoy LLC, of Dover, New Hampshire, USA ("Encontado", "we", "us"). These terms are an agreement between us and you, the person who creates an account, and the business you use Encontado for ("you"). If you accept them for a business, you confirm that you are allowed to bind that business.

By creating an account, or by using the studio or a website hosted here, you agree to these terms, to our content guidelines and to our privacy policy. The content guidelines are part of these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use Encontado.

2. Eligibility and your account

• 18 or older, for business. You must be at least 18 and able to form a binding contract. Encontado is for building websites for businesses, organisations and professionals. It is not a consumer service.
• Accurate details. Give us true information when you join and keep your email address current, because that is where we send notices.
• Keep your password safe. You are responsible for what happens under your account, including what people you invite to a website do there. Tell us straight away if you think someone else has used your account.
• Opening an account. You open an account by signing up with your name, email address, phone number and a password, and confirming the email address with a code we send to it, or through an invitation. We may decline to open an account.

3. What Encontado does

Encontado builds a business website from a short interview and material you provide, and gives you a visual editor, an AI designer you can ask for changes, hosting at an encontado.com address or your own domain, and business tools such as a shop, bookings, events, memberships, invoices, customer accounts and a newsletter.

We improve the service all the time, so features may change, be added or be removed. Some features depend on outside services (for example Stripe for payments) and only work once they are connected. We aim to keep Encontado available, but we do not promise it will always be available or free of errors.

4. AI-generated content

Your website is designed and written by AI models run by us and by the AI service providers described in our privacy policy, based on what you tell us. Please understand what that means:

• Review before you publish. AI output can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, and it can resemble material that exists elsewhere. Automated checks compare pages with your facts, but they are not a guarantee. Read every page before you publish it and after every change.
• You are responsible for what you publish. Once you publish, the words, prices, claims, photos and offers on your website are your statements to the public, whoever or whatever wrote them. You are responsible for making sure they are true, lawful and yours to use.
• No professional advice. Nothing Encontado writes is legal, tax, medical, financial or other professional advice. Have a professional check anything that needs one, such as a refund policy, a health claim or a legal notice on your website.
• Pictures. Photos come from your uploads or from stock libraries such as Pexels under their licences. The only images our AI draws are logos. We do not promise that a generated logo can be registered as a trademark or is free of conflict with someone else's mark. Check before you rely on it.
• Screening. Briefs, uploads, change requests, posts and products are screened automatically against the content guidelines. A check may refuse or pause something by mistake. You can ask for a human review, as the guidelines explain.

5. Acceptable use

You must follow the content guidelines in everything you write, upload, publish or ask the designer to make. You also agree not to:

• break the law, including consumer protection, advertising, privacy, anti-spam, tax and licensing law that applies to your business;
• send newsletters or other email to people who have not agreed to receive it, or hide how to unsubscribe;
• try to get into another person's account or website, probe or overload our systems, get around rate limits, plan limits or screening, or scrape the studio;
• copy, resell or reverse engineer the Encontado studio, or use it to build a competing product, except as the law allows;
• use Encontado to collect card numbers or passwords outside the payment and sign-in tools we provide.

Anyone can report a website that breaks these rules.

6. Your content and the permission you give us

You keep ownership of everything you bring to Encontado: your answers, documents, photos, logos, products and the records of your customers ("your content"). As between you and us, the pages we generate for you also belong to you, subject to the rights of others in stock photos, fonts and similar material, and to our rights in the Encontado software itself.

You give us a limited permission to host, store, copy, process, adapt, display and transmit your content, worldwide and without payment, only as needed to run Encontado for you: to generate and edit your website, send it to the AI and other providers listed in our privacy policy, screen it, publish it, back it up, keep it secure and support you. The permission ends when your content is deleted, except for copies we must keep for the reasons in our privacy policy (such as backups for a short time, legal holds and records of reports).

You promise that you have the right to give us this permission, and that your content and the way you use it do not infringe anyone's rights.

We do not sell your content, and we do not use it to train AI models of our own. If you send us feedback or ideas, we may use them without owing you anything.

7. Plans, subscriptions and billing

• Free and paid plans. You can build and publish on the Free plan. Paid plans add features, as described on the plans page. Paid plans may not be on sale yet; this section applies once you buy one. The price and what it includes are shown before you buy.
• Monthly, through Stripe. Paid plans are billed monthly in advance through Stripe, and renew automatically each month until you cancel. You authorise us, through Stripe, to charge your payment method for each month and for applicable taxes.
• Cancel any time. You can cancel from the studio. Your plan stays active until the end of the month you have paid for, then moves to Free. Your websites and content are kept.
• If a payment fails, Stripe tries again and we tell you. If it is still unpaid when the grace period ends (currently 7 days from the first failed payment), your websites move to the Free plan's limits. We do not delete your content for non-payment. Pay, and the paid features come back.
• Price changes. We will tell you at least 30 days before a price change takes effect for your subscription. If you do not want the new price, cancel before it applies.
• Taxes. Prices do not include taxes unless we say so. Where we must collect sales tax or a similar tax, it is added at checkout.

8. Refunds

Plain version: we do not give refunds or credits for part of a month, or for a month you did not use, unless the law requires it. When you cancel, you keep the paid features until the end of the month you paid for. If you switch between paid plans part way through a month, Stripe adjusts your next charges for the time left on each plan; that adjustment is not paid out as a refund.

Domain registrations are not refundable once the domain has been registered, because the registration cannot be undone. If we cannot complete a domain registration you paid for, we refund that payment automatically.

If you think you were charged by mistake, contact us through encontado.com/help/contact or support@encontado.com and we will look at it.

9. Selling on your website: shops, bookings, events, memberships and invoices

Your website can take payments for products, product subscriptions, bookings and deposits, event tickets, memberships, donations, quotes and invoices. These payments use Stripe Connect: you connect your own Stripe account, and your customers pay you through it.

• You are the seller and the merchant of record. The sale is between you and your customer. Encontado is not a party to it, does not hold your customers' money and is not responsible for your products, services, prices, delivery, taxes, refunds, cancellations, disputes or chargebacks.
• Stripe's terms apply to your Stripe account, including the Stripe Connected Account Agreement. Stripe decides whether to approve and keep your account, and pays out to you.
• Your policies and the law. You are responsible for the terms, refund policy, privacy notice, prices, tax, and consumer, food, alcohol, age and licensing rules that apply to what you sell. Our tools help you show this information; they do not decide it for you.
• Accuracy. Prices, stock and totals are calculated by our server from what you enter. Check your products, prices, shipping and tax settings before you take real orders.
• If you delete a website with open checkouts, subscriptions or memberships, we close or cancel them in Stripe as part of the deletion. Completed payment records stay in your Stripe account.

10. Your customers and their data

When your website collects information from people, such as orders, bookings, event tickets, customer accounts, members, newsletter subscribers or contact form messages, you are responsible for that information (you are the "controller" or "business" under privacy laws) and we process it on your behalf (as your "processor" or "service provider"). In that role we:

• use your customers' information only to provide Encontado to you and as you instruct through the studio, and never sell it or use it for our own marketing;
• keep it confidential, protect it as described in our privacy policy, and use only the service providers listed there;
• help you answer your customers' requests to see or delete their information, and tell you without undue delay if we learn of a breach affecting it;
• delete it when you delete the website or your account, apart from the limited records described in our privacy policy.

You must have a lawful basis for collecting it, tell your customers how you use it (your own privacy notice), get consent where the law requires it (for example for marketing email), and answer their requests. If your business needs a separate data processing agreement, contact us.

11. Domains

Connecting a domain you own. You can point a domain you already own at your website. You stay the owner and keep paying your own registrar.

Buying a domain through Encontado. On plans that include it, you can buy a domain in the studio. We register it through Cloudflare Registrar in your name, as the registrant, using the contact details you give. By buying one you also agree to the registrar's terms, the rules of the registry for that ending (such as .com) and ICANN's policies, and you confirm the contact details are accurate. WHOIS privacy and automatic renewal are switched on. The price shown includes the registry cost and our fee. You can ask us for help moving the domain elsewhere; new registrations cannot usually be transferred for 60 days. If you delete your website, the domain registration stays yours. We will tell you in advance how renewal will be charged before your first renewal date.

12. Other services

Encontado works with services run by others, such as Stripe, Cloudflare, Google and Apple sign-in, YouTube, Vimeo and the booking or payment links you add. Their own terms and privacy policies apply to your use of them, and we are not responsible for them.

13. Suspension and termination

You can leave at any time. You can delete a website yourself from its overview in the studio, and we will close your whole account when you ask us through encontado.com/help/contact or support@encontado.com. Deletion is permanent: published pages stop being served, and drafts, versions, shop records and your customers' records on those websites are removed, as our privacy policy describes. Closing your account also removes your uploads. Cancel any paid plan and download anything you want to keep first.

We may suspend or remove a website, or suspend or close an account, if it breaks these terms or the content guidelines, if we must do so by law, if it puts people or our systems at risk, or for long-term non-payment. How we respond is set out under "How we enforce this" in the content guidelines. Where it is reasonable and lawful, we tell you why and give you a chance to fix the problem first. Material that endangers a child is removed without warning.

We may also stop offering Encontado. If we do, we will give you at least 30 days' notice and help you move your content where we reasonably can, except where notice is not possible for legal or security reasons.

Sections that by their nature should survive the end of this agreement do, including ownership, disclaimers, limits of liability, indemnity and governing law.

14. Disclaimers

Encontado is provided "as is" and "as available." To the extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement. We do not promise that the service or its AI output will be accurate, complete, uninterrupted, secure or error-free, or that your website will bring you visitors, search ranking, customers or sales.

15. Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows:

• neither we nor our suppliers are liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data, goodwill or business opportunity, even if we were told they were possible;
• our total liability for all claims relating to Encontado is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or 100 US dollars.

Some places do not allow some of these limits. Where that is so, they apply only as far as the law permits.

16. Indemnity

You will defend and indemnify Black Buoy LLC and its owners, employees and suppliers against claims, losses and costs (including reasonable legal fees) brought by someone else that arise from your content, your website, your sales and dealings with your customers, your use of Encontado in breach of these terms or the content guidelines, or your breach of the law or someone else's rights.

17. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New Hampshire, USA, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. Before starting a formal claim, please contact us and give us 30 days to try to resolve it informally. Any dispute that cannot be resolved that way will be decided by the state or federal courts located in New Hampshire, and you and we consent to their jurisdiction. Nothing here takes away rights you have under the mandatory law of the place you live.

18. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as Encontado changes. The date at the top shows the latest version. If a change is significant, we will tell you by email or in the studio at least 14 days before it takes effect, unless the change is required by law sooner. If you keep using Encontado after a change takes effect, the new terms apply. If you do not agree, you can delete your account.

19. General

These terms, the content guidelines and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about Encontado. If part of them cannot be enforced, the rest still applies. If we do not enforce a right straight away, we have not given it up. You may not transfer this agreement without our consent; we may transfer it to a company that takes over Encontado. Neither of us is responsible for delays caused by events outside reasonable control. We may send you notices by email or in the studio.

20. Contact

Black Buoy LLC, Dover, New Hampshire, USA. Write to us through encontado.com/help/contact or support@encontado.com.