Terms of service

1 This agreement, and the documents that go with it #

This agreement is between Clayton Ball Limited, trading as Booked, company number 17478614, registered in England and Wales (“we”, “us”, “Booked”) and the business that subscribes to the service (“you”). It starts when you first start a trial or a subscription, and it runs until either of us ends it under section 12.

Four documents make up the whole agreement, and each governs a different thing:

1. These terms — the commercial relationship: money, duration, risk.
2. The licence agreement — what you may and may not do with the software.
3. The data processing agreement — what we may do with personal data you are responsible for. It applies automatically; you do not have to sign anything to get it.
4. The privacy policy — what we do with personal data we are responsible for.

If they conflict, the data processing agreement prevails on anything about personal data, the licence agreement prevails on anything about use of the software, and these terms prevail on everything else. A purchase order, a procurement portal’s standard terms, or anything printed on the back of your own paperwork has no effect unless we have signed it.

This is a business-to-business contract. If you are a consumer within the meaning of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, Booked is not sold to you and these terms are not written for you.

2 What we provide #

Booked is a WordPress plugin, a set of hosted services it talks to (licensing, managed SMS, payments, the AI features, and the Google and Microsoft connections), and support. Which parts you get depends on your plan; the pricing page is the current description of each plan and forms part of this agreement.

Where the software runs is the important structural point. The plugin runs on your website and your bookings, customers, answers and documents are stored in your database on your hosting. We do not host them and we do not hold a copy. That is what makes the isolation on our security page real rather than a policy, and it is also why keeping your site and its backups working is your job, not ours — see section 9.

We improve the product continuously and release roughly every two weeks. We may add, change or remove features. If we remove or materially reduce a feature you are actively using, we will tell you at least 60 days before it happens, and if that change makes the service substantially less useful to you, you may end this agreement and get a pro-rata refund of anything you have paid for the period after it takes effect.

3 Free trials #

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial. We do not ask for a card to begin one.

• At the end of the 14 days the trial simply stops unless you choose to subscribe. There is nothing to cancel and nothing is charged.
• A trial gives you the whole plan, not a reduced version of it.
• One trial per business. Starting a second trial for the same business under a different name or domain is a breach of this agreement.
• We may end a trial early if it is being used to attack, resell or reverse-engineer the service. We will tell you why.

4 Plans, fees and billing #

What you pay

• Subscription fees are those shown on the pricing page for your plan, in the currency you selected when you subscribed.
• All prices exclude VAT, which is added at the rate in force where required.
• Monthly plans are billed monthly in advance. Annual plans are billed annually in advance and are cheaper, because paying for a year up front is worth something to us.
• Usage charges — text messages, and anything else priced per use — are billed in arrears at the rate published on the pricing page at the time they are used.

Renewal, and how to stop it

Subscriptions renew automatically for successive terms of the same length until cancelled. You can cancel from inside your account at any time; the cancellation takes effect at the end of the term you have paid for, and you keep the service until then. We will never require you to telephone, email or give a reason in order to cancel.

We do not refund the unused part of a term you have already paid for, except where section 2 (a feature we removed), section 12 (we ended it without cause) or the law requires it. For annual plans cancelled within the first 30 days, we will refund in full, because a year is a long time to be stuck with a decision made in a week.

Price changes

We may change our prices. Any increase takes effect at your next renewal and only after we have given you at least 60 days’ notice by email. If you do not want to pay the new price, cancel before the renewal and you will not be charged it. We will not increase the price of a term you have already paid for.

Late payment

If a payment fails we will try again and tell you. If an invoice is more than 14 days overdue we may suspend the service after giving you at least 7 days’ written notice and a chance to put it right. We may charge statutory interest under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 on overdue sums, though in practice we would rather talk to you than invoice you for interest.

5 Booked Payments #

Booked Payments lets you take card, Apple Pay and Google Pay payments from inside Booked. It is optional; if you do not use it, none of this section applies to you.

What it costs

• 2.9% + 49p per transaction, and nothing else. No monthly fee, no setup fee, no minimum, and the same rate on every plan.
• The fee applies to money you actually take. A refunded payment is refunded in full to the cardholder; our fee on the original transaction is not returned, because it was already paid to the card networks.
• Business-plan customers may use their own payment provider instead, in which case Booked takes nothing on those transactions and the rest of this section does not apply to them.

Who holds the money

Card processing, settlement and payouts are carried out by our payment partner, which is an authorised payment institution. Funds are held by them, not by us, and are paid out to the bank account you nominate on the schedule you choose. You will be asked to accept their terms as well as ours, and to provide the identity and business-ownership information the law requires them to collect.

Chargebacks and disputes

• A cardholder can dispute a payment through their bank. When that happens the disputed amount, plus any fee the card scheme charges, is deducted from your balance while the dispute runs.
• We give you the evidence we hold — the booking record, the confirmed appointment, the messages sent, the attendance record — and will help you build the response. We cannot decide the outcome; the cardholder’s bank does.
• If the dispute goes against you the amount stays deducted. If your balance is not enough to cover it, you owe us the shortfall.
• We pass on early fraud warnings as soon as we receive them, so you have the chance to refund before a warning becomes a chargeback.

When we can hold or refuse a payout

This is the clause that matters most, so it is written as narrowly as we can make it. We may delay, withhold or reverse a payout, or require a reserve, only where we reasonably believe one of the following applies:

1. Transactions are fraudulent, or the card used was not the cardholder’s to use.
2. Your dispute rate, refund rate or fraud rate is high enough that the card schemes would put us or you into a monitoring programme.
3. You are taking payment for something other than the appointments you told us about, or for a business type the card schemes prohibit.
4. We are required to by law, by a court, by a regulator, or by the card schemes.
5. Your account is being closed and there are outstanding or reasonably foreseeable disputes to cover.

If we do any of that we will tell you within one business day, in writing, saying which of the grounds above applies and what we need in order to release the funds. We will release them as soon as the reason has gone. We will not hold a reserve for longer than 120 days after your last transaction unless a specific unresolved dispute requires it, and we will tell you which one.

Money held is still your money. We do not use it, we do not earn on it beyond the published fee, and nothing in this section entitles us to keep it.

What you may not take payment for

You may not use Booked Payments for anything unlawful, for a business type prohibited by the card schemes, for selling goods rather than appointments, or to process payments on behalf of anyone else. Doing so is a material breach and we may stop processing immediately.

6 Text messages #

Managed SMS is an optional service on the plans that include it. Messages are charged per message at the rate on the pricing page and billed in arrears.

• Prices depend on the destination. Each country has its own rate on the pricing page. A country we have not priced is refused rather than sent at a guess.
• Some countries need a rented number. Most let a text come from your business name at no extra cost, and that is the default. The United States and Canada do not, and texting there means renting a number from us for a monthly charge that is shown before you take it. A rented number keeps working until the end of the month you have paid for, whether you cancel the number or the plan, and is then released.
• You set a monthly spend cap and we will not exceed it. When it is reached, sending stops and you are told — we will not run up a bill and invoice you for it afterwards.
• You are responsible for having a lawful basis to text the people you text, and for honouring opt-outs. Booked records an opt-out and will not send to a number that has one, but the obligation is yours.
• You may not use it for marketing to people who have not agreed to receive it, and you may not send anything unlawful. We may stop sending on your behalf if you do, and we will tell you why.
• Delivery depends on mobile networks. We cannot guarantee that a message arrives or when, and a reminder is not a substitute for a record that the appointment exists.

7 Connected accounts #

You can connect a Google or Microsoft account so that Booked writes your bookings into your calendar, or sends your confirmations and reminders from your own mailbox. Both are optional, and neither is needed to use Booked.

• You are authorising us to act on that account for the feature you switched on, and nothing else. We write to the calendar you chose and send the messages you have set up. We do not read your mail or your existing appointments — the permissions we ask for cannot.
• What is sent is yours. A message that leaves from your mailbox is your message, under your name, and the same obligations apply to it as to anything else you send.
• Their terms apply alongside ours. The account remains Google’s or Microsoft’s. If they suspend it, change what a connection may do, or cap how much may be sent in a day, the feature stops until that is resolved, and that is not a fault in the service.
• You can disconnect at any time, from your settings or from the provider’s own account page. Either way the connection stops at once and the tokens we held are deleted.
• If the provider is unavailable, the connection is unavailable with it. We are not responsible for Google or Microsoft being down. Email can fall back to sending through your website instead; a calendar simply catches up when the provider returns.

8 AI features #

Some features use a large language model to produce a draft: screening questions, a summary of a month, a consultation note, a dispute response.

• Every output is a draft. It is for a person to read, correct and accept. We make no warranty that any output is accurate, complete or suitable for any purpose, clinical or otherwise.
• Clinical and professional judgment remains yours. A note the model wrote is not a note until the clinician has read it and agreed that it is right. Nothing produced by these features is medical advice, and they are not a medical device.
• Fair-use limits apply per plan. If you go past them we will tell you and offer the options; we will not silently stop the feature working.
• They can be switched off entirely for your site, and the rest of Booked is unaffected.
• What happens to the data is in the privacy policy and the data processing agreement: the text is not retained and not used to train anything.

9 What you are responsible for #

Because Booked runs on your website, some things are necessarily yours:

• Your website, its hosting, and its backups. We can help, and Booked WP Security exists to make it easier, but keeping your site up and recoverable is your responsibility. If your host loses your database, we cannot give you your bookings back — we never had them.
• Keeping the plugin reasonably current. We support the current version and the one before it. Running something much older is a risk you are choosing.
• Your lawful basis for the data you collect. You decide what questions to ask, what records to keep, and how long to keep them. Where those questions touch health or other special-category data, you decide the Article 9 condition you rely on and you are responsible for capturing consent where that is what you rely on. Booked gives you per-question consent records, a full answer history and an export; deciding what to use them for is yours.
• Who you give access to. Accounts, roles and permissions on your site are under your control, including anyone you invite through Team and access and what you let each of them see. What they do under that access is yours to answer for.
• Your own sign-in. Whether you sign in to your Booked account with a password or with Google, keeping that means of signing in secure is your responsibility, and what is done under it is treated as done by you until you tell us otherwise.
• The accuracy of what you tell us — your business details, your bank details, what your business does.
• Complying with the law that applies to your profession. We are a software company. We do not advise on GPhC, CQC, GDC or any other regulator’s requirements, and installing Booked does not make you compliant with them.

10 Acceptable use #

You may not, and may not let anyone else:

• Use the service for anything unlawful, or to store or send anything unlawful.
• Attack, overload, probe or attempt to gain unauthorised access to the service, another customer’s site, or our infrastructure — other than good-faith security research reported to us, which we welcome.
• Resell, sublicense, white-label or provide the service to a third party, except under a partner agreement we have signed.
• Copy, decompile or reverse-engineer the software, beyond what the law expressly permits regardless of contract.
• Remove or obscure any notice of ownership, or bypass the licensing or activation mechanism.
• Use the service to send unsolicited marketing.
• Use another customer’s licence key, or use one licence across more sites than the plan allows.
• Use the AI features to generate anything unlawful, or to try to make them do something other than the job they were built for.

If we believe something is happening that threatens the service or other customers, we may suspend the account immediately and investigate. We will tell you as soon as we have, and restore it as soon as it is safe to.

11 Availability and support #

We publish real-time availability and every incident at status, including the ones that were our fault.

We do not offer a contractual uptime guarantee or service credits, and we would rather say that than publish a number we have not committed to. What we do commit to: we monitor the hosted services continuously, we publish incidents as they happen rather than afterwards, and we will tell you what went wrong.

Note what an outage of our hosted services does and does not affect. Your website, your booking form and your existing bookings run on your own site and keep working. What stops is the part that needs us — sending managed texts, the AI features, and new licence checks. Licences are cached, so a short outage does not deactivate anything.

Support is by chat and email, on every plan, from real people. Write to support@trybooked.co or use the chat on any page. We aim to reply quickly and we publish what we are actually achieving rather than an aspirational target.

We may take the hosted services down for planned maintenance. We will give notice on the status page beforehand, and we schedule it outside UK business hours wherever we can.

12 Intellectual property #

Ours stays ours. Booked — the software, the platform, the name, the design — belongs to us and to our licensors. This agreement licenses it to you; it does not sell it. The detail is in the licence agreement.

Yours stays yours. Your data, your customers, your content and your configuration belong to you. We claim no ownership of any of it and no right to use it beyond running the service for you and the terms of the data processing agreement.

If you send us feedback or a feature request, we may use it without owing you anything for it. That is not a claim on your data — it is so that a good suggestion can be built without a negotiation first.

We would like to name you as a customer and use your logo. We will ask first, and a no costs you nothing.

13 Ending this agreement #

You ending it

Cancel at any time from inside your account. It takes effect at the end of the term you have paid for.

Us ending it

We may end this agreement:

• On 60 days’ written notice for any reason, in which case we refund the unused part of anything you have paid.
• Immediately, if you materially breach this agreement and have not put it right within 14 days of us asking you to in writing — or immediately with no cure period where the breach is one that cannot be put right, such as unlawful use or an attack on the service.
• Immediately, if you become insolvent, enter administration or cease trading.

What happens then

• Your licence stops and the plugin stops receiving updates and hosted services.
• Your data stays where it is — in your own database, on your own site. We do not delete it, hold it hostage or charge you to release it. We could not delete it if we wanted to.
• We delete our own copy of your account data on the schedule in the privacy policy.
• If you use Booked Payments, outstanding funds are paid out on the normal schedule, subject only to the reserve rules in section 6.
• Anything you owe us becomes due. Anything either of us owes the other survives.
• Sections 11 (intellectual property), 13 (warranties), 14 (liability), 15 (indemnity), 17 (confidentiality) and 19 (law) survive.

14 What we promise, and what we do not #

We warrant that: we have the right to license the software to you; we will provide the service with reasonable skill and care; and the software does not knowingly contain any malicious code.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that it will meet a requirement you have not told us about, that it will work with every theme, plugin or host in existence, or that any AI output is accurate. Beyond what is written here, and to the extent the law allows, all other terms and warranties that would otherwise be implied are excluded.

The service is provided for business use. Nothing in it is medical, legal, accounting or regulatory advice, and using it does not make you compliant with any professional regulator’s requirements.

15 Liability #

What neither of us can limit

Nothing in this agreement excludes or limits liability for: death or personal injury caused by negligence; fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; breach of the statutory implied terms as to title; or anything else that the law does not permit to be excluded or limited. Those are excluded from every cap below.

The cap

Subject to that, our total liability to you for all claims arising in any 12-month period, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty or otherwise, is limited to the total fees you paid us in the 12 months before the first event giving rise to the claim.

What we are not liable for at all

Subject to the first paragraph of this section, neither of us is liable to the other for loss of profit, loss of revenue, loss of anticipated savings, loss of business or opportunity, loss of goodwill, or any indirect or consequential loss, however caused.

We are also not liable for:

• Loss of your data where the cause is your own site, hosting or backups. Your data is in your database. Keeping it safe, and being able to restore it, is section 9.
• Anything caused by software, themes or plugins we did not write, or by changes you or someone acting for you made to your site.
• Anything caused by you running a version of the plugin more than two releases old after we have told you to update.
• A decision a person made after reading an AI draft.
• The acts of a mobile network, a bank, a card scheme or a cardholder.

Both of us must take reasonable steps to reduce any loss. Neither of us is liable for failure caused by something genuinely outside our control — but a failure to pay is never such a thing.

16 Indemnities #

We will defend you against a claim that the software, used as we intended, infringes a third party’s intellectual property rights in the UK, and we will pay the damages and costs finally awarded. If such a claim looks likely we may, at our option, modify the software, obtain a licence for you, or end the agreement and refund the unused part of your fees. This does not apply where the claim arises from your modification of the software or its combination with something we did not supply.

You will defend us against a claim arising from the content you collect or store using Booked, from your use of the service in breach of section 10, or from your failure to have a lawful basis for the personal data you process — and you will pay the damages and costs finally awarded.

In each case the party seeking cover must tell the other promptly, let them control the defence, and not settle without their agreement.

17 Changes to these terms #

We may change these terms. For any change that materially affects your rights or obligations we will give you at least 30 days’ notice by email before it takes effect, and if you do not accept it you may cancel before then and we will refund the unused part of anything you have paid.

Changes required by law or by a regulator may take effect sooner where we have no choice; we will say so and explain why.

The version and date at the top of this page change whenever the document does, and we keep every earlier version. Ask and we will send you the one that applied on any given date.

18 Confidentiality #

Each of us may learn things about the other that are not public — your business plans, our pricing and architecture. Neither will use the other’s confidential information for anything except performing this agreement, or disclose it to anyone except people who need it and are under an equivalent duty.

This does not apply to anything already public, already known without a duty of confidence, independently developed, or required to be disclosed by law — and where disclosure is legally required, the disclosing party will tell the other first if it is lawfully able to.

These duties continue for three years after this agreement ends, and indefinitely for anything that is a trade secret.

19 General #

• Assignment. You may not transfer this agreement without our written consent, which we will not unreasonably withhold — a genuine sale of your business is a reasonable case. We may transfer it to a company that acquires our business, on notice to you.
• Subcontracting. We may use subcontractors and remain responsible for what they do. Those handling personal data are in the data processing agreement.
• Notices. Ours to you go to the email address on your account. Yours to us go to legal@trybooked.co. A notice by email takes effect when sent, unless it bounces.
• Entire agreement. The four documents in section 1 are the whole of it. Neither of us relies on any statement not written in them, except that nothing excludes liability for fraudulent misrepresentation.
• Severance. If a court finds a provision unenforceable, it is modified to the least extent needed to make it enforceable, or removed; the rest stands.
• Waiver. Not enforcing something once does not waive the right to enforce it later.
• No partnership. This agreement creates no partnership, joint venture, agency or employment relationship.
• Third parties. Nobody who is not a party to this agreement has any right to enforce it under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.
• Counterparts and signature. No signature is needed. Starting a trial or a subscription is acceptance.

20 Law and jurisdiction #

This agreement, and any dispute arising out of it or its subject matter, is governed by the law of England and Wales.

The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, except that either of us may apply to any court for an injunction to protect confidential information or intellectual property.

Before starting proceedings, we each agree to raise the issue in writing and give the other 30 days to resolve it. Write to legal@trybooked.co. Most things do not need a court, and the ones that do are not made worse by a month of trying.