Terms of service

The agreement

RivalGauge is operated by Matthew Spencer from Colorado, United States. In these terms, we and us mean RivalGauge, and you means the person or business holding the account.

These terms cover your use of RivalGauge, the website audit widget and the dashboard, report pages and emails that come with it. Opening an account means you accept them, and the signup form asks you to confirm it. If you are signing up for a company, you are confirming you may accept them on its behalf.

Two documents form part of these terms: the data processing addendum, which covers personal data we handle on your behalf, and the refund policy. Both apply automatically and neither needs to be requested or signed.

Your account

One subscription is one account. Keep your dashboard link and your signing key to yourself: anyone holding them can read your leads. Tell us promptly if you think either has been exposed and we will help you replace it.

You are responsible for what you put in your own branding fields, including your logo, your call to action and the message shown to visitors scanning a domain you manage.

Trial and billing

Signing up creates a workspace and costs nothing. No card is asked for, and no trial clock is running: you can set up your branding, preview your widget and your reports, and run one scan of a real site without entering payment details at any point.

A card is required at one moment, when you press Go live, which is when your hosted scanner page starts answering and your widget is allowed to answer on the sites you list. Your 14 day free trial starts from that press, not from when you signed up.

• Plans are $79, $99 or $149 per month, in US dollars, billed monthly through Stripe.
• Billing starts when the trial ends. Nothing is charged before that.
• A card is required at Go live, so a trial should never reach its end without one. If one ever does, the subscription cancels rather than invoicing you, and scanning stops. You are not charged and you are not chased.
• The founding plan is limited to 10 subscriptions at a time. When those seats are taken, the signup page offers the Core plan instead.
• The founding price stays at $79 per month for as long as that subscription runs without interruption. Cancel and resubscribe later and the price current at that time applies, and the seat you gave up may have been taken.
• Prices exclude any tax that applies where you are.

If a payment fails, Stripe retries it. Scanning keeps working while it does. Once Stripe stops retrying, the account is treated as cancelled.

Cancelling

Cancel at any time from the Manage billing button in your dashboard, which opens Stripe's own billing portal. If you would rather not click, write to support@rivalgauge.com, and one message is enough. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for, and part months are not refunded. Nobody tries to talk you out of it.

Situations where a refund is owed, including a charge after cancelling and a month you never used, are listed in the refund policy. Those are automatic and you do not have to make a case for them.

Scans and fair use

Each plan includes a monthly scan allowance, which resets monthly and does not roll over. A scan is one completed run against one domain. Repeat submissions of the same domain, trade and city inside 24 hours are served the same report and do not consume a second scan. A submission that asks about a different trade or a different city is a different question, so it counts as a new scan.

The allowance is there to keep the service affordable rather than to catch you out. If your volume regularly runs past your plan, we will tell you before anything stops.

Acceptable use

• Do not use the widget to scan domains at a volume or frequency intended to burden the sites being measured.
• Do not resell raw access to the scanning API as a standalone product. Using it as a lead magnet under your own brand, which is what it is for, is fine.
• Do not use the service to harass a business or to publish a report designed to mislead about what was measured.
• Do not attempt to work around scan allowances, plan limits or account separation.

Accounts that do these things can be suspended. Where the situation allows it, we will contact you first.

Your leads and your brand

Leads captured through your widget are yours. We process them so the product can work and we do not sell them, market to them, or use them for another customer. See the privacy page for the detail.

Your logo and brand stay yours. You give us permission to display them inside your own widget, reports and emails, which is the whole point of a white label tool.

License and ownership

While you are subscribed and within your plan's limits, you have a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the service: the widget on sites you or your clients operate, the dashboard, and the reports and emails it produces under your brand. That is the whole grant. The software, the design, the scoring, and the RivalGauge name and logo remain ours.

Do not resell raw access to the service as your own standalone product, and do not reverse engineer it except where the law says we cannot stop you. Presenting branded reports to your own leads and clients is what the license is for, and nothing in this section narrows that.

If you send us ideas or feedback about the service, we can use them without owing you anything.

What a report is and is not

Third party sources can be unavailable, rate limited or wrong. Where a check has no data on the day it is left off the report rather than shown as a failure. Grades are our scoring of what was measured, and reasonable people can score the same site differently.

Availability and changes

We aim to keep the service running and we work to fix problems quickly, but we do not promise uninterrupted availability, and no uptime figure is guaranteed under these terms.

Features can change as the product develops. If we remove something you depend on, or change pricing for an existing subscription, we will give you notice by email before it takes effect.

Liability

The service is provided as is. To the extent the law allows, our total liability for any claim arising out of it is limited to the fees you paid in the three months before the claim, and we are not liable for lost profits, lost business or indirect losses.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

Indemnification

If a third party brings a claim against us because of how you used the service, you cover us. You agree to defend and indemnify us, meaning you pay the costs, damages and reasonable legal fees, for third party claims arising from your use of the service, the data and lead lists you process through it, your own marketing and outreach to your leads, including claims under telemarketing and email laws such as the TCPA and CAN-SPAM, or your breach of these terms.

We will tell you promptly about any such claim and let you lead the defense. We may join in with our own counsel at our own expense, and you may not settle a claim on our behalf without our consent.

Disputes and governing law

Talk to us first. If your business has a dispute with us, write to support@rivalgauge.com and give us 30 days to fix it. Most disputes end there, and it costs nothing to try.

Then individual arbitration. If those 30 days pass without a fix, you and we agree to resolve the dispute by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its rules, held in Denver, Colorado or remotely by video, instead of in court. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. Either side may still bring a qualifying claim in small claims court, and either side may go to court to protect its intellectual property.

You can opt out of arbitration. Email support@rivalgauge.com within 30 days of first accepting these terms, saying who you are and that you opt out. Opting out changes nothing else in these terms.

Colorado law governs. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. Anything a court does hear belongs in the state or federal courts located in Colorado, and both of us consent to the jurisdiction of those courts.

Housekeeping

You may not transfer your subscription or these terms to someone else without our consent. We may transfer ours as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of the business, and these terms bind whoever receives them.

Neither of us is liable for a delay or failure caused by something genuinely outside our control, though nothing in this paragraph excuses paying for service already delivered.

If a court strikes one part of these terms, the rest stands. Not enforcing a term today does not waive it tomorrow. These terms, together with the data processing addendum and the refund policy, are the whole agreement between us about the service.

Terms that by their nature outlive the subscription survive it, including ownership, indemnification, the liability cap, the dispute terms, and governing law.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to support@rivalgauge.com. Postal mail reaches us at PO Box 203, Larkspur, CO 80118. If we change these terms, the date at the top of this page changes with them, and material changes are emailed to active accounts.