Terms of service

Version 2026-08-10

Effective 10 August 2026 · Last updated 10 August 2026 · previous version

1Who this is between, and when it starts

This is an agreement between you — and the business you are signing up for, if that is not the same thing — and Phineworks Inc., which operates Straightbill.

You accept these terms when you create an account. The sign-up screen says so directly above the button, and we record which version you agreed to and when. If you are accepting on behalf of a business, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and "you" means that business.

Together with the Privacy policy and the Cancelling page, this is the whole agreement. Both of those form part of these terms.

2Who can use it

You must be 18 or over and able to enter a contract. Straightbill is sold for business use — it is a tool for running a trade business, not for personal or household purposes — and you confirm you are acquiring it for your business.

You are responsible for your password and for what happens under your account. Tell us at support@straightbill.com if you think someone else has got in.

3The free week, what you pay, and how renewal works

• Your first week is free. Nothing is charged during it. Cancel before it ends and you are never charged at all.
• After the free week: $29 per month, or $290 per year, for your business.
• It renews automatically — every month, or every year on the annual plan — and keeps renewing until you cancel. You authorise us to charge your payment method each period until you stop it.
• Billed in advance, on the anniversary of the day you started, or the nearest available date in a shorter month.
• Taxes are added where the law requires.
• Everything the product does is included. There is no feature held back for a higher plan, and no limit on how many estimates or invoices you send.

Before an annual renewal, we email you

At least 15 days and no more than 45 days before an annual subscription renews, we email you to say it is coming, what it will cost, and how to cancel. Nobody should be surprised by a charge they agreed to a year ago.

If the price changes

If we change the price of your subscription we give at least 45 days' notice by email, and you can cancel before it takes effect. A change never applies to a period already paid for. Forty-five days is deliberate: it is longer than the industry's usual thirty, and it means the renewal reminder we send an annual subscriber can never quote a price that then changes.

If a payment fails

We try again and email you. If it is unresolved after 14 days the subscription is suspended. Suspension is not deletion — see section 12 — and the links your customers already hold keep working. Your card expiring should not strand a homeowner holding your invoice.

4Cancelling

Cancel any time from a button in Settings. It works immediately and shows the exact end date before you confirm. You keep full access until that date. We do not refund a period already paid for — the detail, and the exceptions we always honour, are on the Cancelling page, which forms part of these terms.

5Payments your customers make to you

Card and bank payments run through Stripe, into a Stripe account connected in your own name.

• The money goes directly to you. It never passes through an account belonging to us, and we cannot hold, delay, freeze or take it.
• We add nothing to Stripe's fee. You pay Stripe's published rate — which Stripe sets and may change — and no commission to us.
• Using payments means accepting Stripe's Connected Account Agreement as well as these terms. Stripe decides who it will serve, and we cannot overturn that.
• Refunds, chargebacks and disputes with your customers are yours to handle. We are not a party to the sale, we take no position on it, and we cannot reverse a payment for you or for them.
• Charging the right amount and the right tax, and doing the work behind the invoice, are yours.

6What you are responsible for

Straightbill is a tool. What you put through it is your business:

• That the prices, taxes and terms on your documents are correct and lawful where you work.
• That you hold the licences, registrations and insurance your trade requires. We display a licence number; we do not verify it.
• That you have the right to hold the customer information you enter, and to send documents to the people you send them to.
• That you do the work you have billed for.
• Keeping your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Ask us for an export at any time.

Things you may not do

You may not use Straightbill to defraud anyone, to bill for work not done, or to break the law. You also may not:

• Resell it, or give access to anyone outside your business.
• Copy it, reverse engineer it, or use it to build a competing product.
• Upload malicious files, or anything you do not have the right to.
• Probe, scrape, overload or interfere with the service or its security.
• Send unlawful, deceptive or unsolicited messages through it. You are responsible for having the right to contact the people you send documents to.
• Work around a limit, a lock or a suspension.

7What we are responsible for

These are commitments, not marketing. We consider ourselves bound by them:

• No caps. We will not introduce a limit on how many estimates or invoices you may send.
• Cancellation stays self-service. We will not move it behind a phone call, an email, or a retention conversation.
• Your documents stay reachable. Every estimate and invoice keeps a stable link for as long as your account exists — including while it is suspended for non-payment. After deletion, see section 12.
• Your data comes out. Ask and we export it, at any time, including after you cancel and before deletion.
• Fees stated once, plainly. We will not bury a charge.
• We do not sell your data, and we do not train anything on it.

We aim to keep the service available and to tell you when it is not. We do not offer a formal uptime guarantee, and we would rather say so than promise one we have not built the operations to honour.

8Your customers' information

For information about your customers that you put into Straightbill, you decide what goes in and why — you are the controller, and we are your service provider and processor. These are contractual commitments, not statements of intent:

• We process it only to provide Straightbill to you, and only on your instructions.
• We do not sell it, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined in California law.
• We do not retain, use or disclose it for any purpose other than providing the service, and we do not combine it with information from anywhere else.
• Everyone at Phineworks, and at the providers we use, who can reach it is bound to keep it confidential.
• We will help you answer a request from one of your customers to see, correct or delete their information.
• When your account ends we delete it, on the timetable in the Privacy policy.

We understand these restrictions and we will comply with them.

9If someone else brings a claim because of what you did

If somebody outside this agreement — one of your customers, a regulator, anyone — brings a claim against us because of your data, your use of Straightbill, the work you billed for, the documents or messages you sent, or your breach of these terms, you will cover it: the defence, the costs, and any award or settlement, including reasonable legal fees.

We will tell you promptly, let you take over the defence with a lawyer of your choosing, and cooperate. You may not settle in a way that admits anything on our behalf, or that costs us money, without asking us first.

This does not apply to our own fraud, gross negligence or wilful misconduct. Those remain ours.

10Services we depend on

Straightbill runs on other companies' infrastructure — payments, hosting, database, email. We say who they are, by category, on the Privacy page. We choose them carefully and we are answerable for choosing them.

We are not answerable for their outages, for their decisions about your account with them, or for changes to their terms and pricing. If Stripe declines or closes your connected account, that is between you and Stripe; we will help you understand it, but we cannot overturn it.

11Who owns what

Your data is yours. Your business details, your customers, your documents, your prices. We claim no ownership, we do not use it to train anything, and we do not sell it. We hold it to run the service for you. We may count things in aggregate — how many invoices go out, how long a page takes to load — where the result identifies neither you nor any person.

The permission we need to run it. To do the job you are paying us for, we need your permission to store your content, copy it between our systems, send it to the people you tell us to, and display it back to you and to them. You give us that permission for those purposes and for nothing else. It lasts while your account does, and it ends when your data is deleted. It does not let us publish your work, show it to anyone you have not sent it to, sell it, or train anything on it.

The software is ours. Straightbill's code, design and name remain Phineworks Inc.'s. While you are subscribed you may use it to run your business — you may not copy it, resell it, or give access to it to anyone outside that business.

Feedback. If you tell us how to improve it, we may act on that without owing you anything. We would rather you told us than held back over what it might cost you.

12Suspension, ending, and what happens to your data

You can leave at any time — section 4. We may suspend or close an account that goes unpaid, or that is being used for fraud, abuse or anything unlawful.

Wherever we can, we will tell you why and give you a chance to put it right first. That is our default and we mean it. We act first and explain afterwards only where waiting would cause real harm — an active security threat, ongoing fraud, abuse of the email we send on your behalf, or where the law or a provider requires us to act immediately. When that happens we tell you as soon as we are able, and we restore the account if we got it wrong.

When an account ends, data is kept 90 days and then deleted, on the timetable in the Privacy policy — long enough to change your mind, or to get through a tax conversation. You can export everything yourself at any point in that window, and if you want deletion sooner, ask and we do it. After deletion the links you sent your customers stop working, so take the PDFs you need before then.

13No warranty

We work hard on correctness — money arithmetic especially — and we would rather tell you where the limits are than imply there are none.

Not professional advice. Straightbill is a tool. It does not give legal, tax, accounting or licensing advice, and it is no substitute for your own judgement or your accountant's. Tax rates you enter are yours to get right.

Backups. We keep your data and work to keep it safe, but we do not warrant against loss or corruption, and you should keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose.

14The limit on what we owe

15Things outside anyone's control

Neither of us is in breach for a failure or delay caused by something genuinely beyond our reasonable control — an infrastructure provider's outage, a network or power failure, a natural disaster, an epidemic, war, or government action. This does not excuse us from paying attention, or from telling you what is happening and what we are doing about it.

16Changes to Straightbill itself

We will keep building on it, and that means things move. We may add, change or remove features, and we may take the service down for maintenance.

Where a change removes something you rely on, we will tell you before it happens and, where we reasonably can, leave you a way to get your work out first. What we will not do is quietly withdraw anything in section 7 — those are commitments, and changing the product is not a route around them.

17Changes to these terms

If we make a change that materially affects you, we email you at least 30 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use Straightbill after that means accepting it; cancelling before it takes effect means it never applies to you. Older versions stay readable at their own dated links.

18If we disagree

Talk to us first. Before either of us files anything, we each agree to give the other written notice and 30 days to sort it out. Most things end here, and it costs neither of us anything to try.

Small claims are fine. Either of us can still bring a claim in small claims court. And either of us can go to court for an injunction to stop misuse of intellectual property or confidential information, without waiting out the 30 days.

19Governing law and where disputes go

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Santa Clara County, California have exclusive jurisdiction, and both of us consent to that jurisdiction and waive any objection to that venue.

20General

If part of this is unenforceable. If a court finds any provision unenforceable — including any limit in sections 13 or 14 — it should be narrowed to the least extent needed to make it enforceable, and any limit reduced to the maximum the law allows, rather than struck out. The rest stays in force.

What survives. Sections 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 18, 19 and this section continue to apply after your account ends.

Assignment. You may not transfer this agreement without our written consent. We may transfer it to a company that buys or merges with our business, or that acquires Straightbill — and if we do, we will tell you, and the buyer takes on these terms.

No one else gets rights under this. These terms are between you and us. They give no rights to anyone else, including your own customers.

Notices, and agreeing by email. You agree to receive notices from us electronically — by email to the address on your account, or in the app — and that these satisfy any requirement that a notice be in writing. Notices to us go to support@straightbill.com. Keep your email address current; it is how we reach you about renewals, price changes and security.

Not enforcing something is not giving it up. If we do not act on a breach, we can still act on it later, and on any other.

Sanctions. You confirm you are not located in an embargoed country and not on a US government restricted-party list, and that you will not use Straightbill from one.

The whole agreement. These terms, the Privacy policy and the Cancelling page are the entire agreement between us about Straightbill, and they replace anything said on our website, in an email, or by a person before you signed up. If those documents ever conflict, these terms come first.

21Getting hold of us

support@straightbill.com
Phineworks Inc.