Thanks for choosing Crowdstack! We hope you love it. Here are the contractual terms, explained as simply as possible.
"We", "us", and "our" refers to Social Strata, Inc.. "Service" refers to our Crowdstack service, which we provide to you. When we say "you" or "your", we are referring to you, as a customer using our Service. When we say "User", we are referring to your members and visitors, the people posting content and interacting on your Crowdstack site. The "Selected Plan" is the particular plan type you selected for the Service. "Content" is the data and content generated by you and your Users via the Service. This Terms of Service is the "Terms".
We want you to grow your base and feel nothing but excitement. That's why we have designed our current plans to be flat fee, with no limits on growth.
If you are on one of the current paid plans (Hobby, Elemental Plus, Foundation, Startup, or Complete), you have absolutely no usage limits, other than the maximum number of concurrent chat participants across all chat events and chat rooms (a limit of 1500 for the Complete plan and 500 for all others). You may have any number of members, page views, and posts. You will never be charged for bandwidth or disk space used. You will never be charged any overage fees.
If you are on one of our legacy plans and your plan has a usage limit of some kind, we will offer you a chance to move to one of our current, unlimited usage plans, in order to avoid paying any overage fees, if that happens, because we do not want to charge anyone overage fees of any kind.
You'll be paying us in advance for the Service we provide you. You can choose between paying monthly or yearly. The fees you pay us are never refundable (unless we decide to cancel your service), however. We may apply a sales tax, depending on where you are based. View our current list of taxable jurisdictions.
The Service includes an optional Premium Membership service. If you enable the option for your Service, then you agree to abide by the Premium Membership Terms for Providers.
When you upgrade from a trial plan to a paid plan, we will charge your credit card immediately and your billing cycle begins that same day. For other upgrades or downgrades, the change will happen immediately upon request, with any prepaid amounts credited toward the change total. Note that when you upgrade to a Complete plan, the plan change will happen immediately, but the transfer of your Service to one of our dedicated environments will happen within 7 business days (and there may be some scheduled downtime when we perform the transfer).
We are continuously improving the Service -- adding new features, adjusting existing ones, fixing bugs, and more. On average, there is at least one software update per month. We communicate about these updates via our blog and discussion forums on our Hey Stack! community, so we suggest that you follow our posts there. Major changes may also be communicated to you directly via email. Sometimes the changes we make may fundamentally alter the way things work. Occasionally, some features may even be removed, especially if we discover they are not being used very often. We encourage you to provide feedback to us anytime about any changes we make.
Some new features will only be available for certain plans. The plan differences are viewable on our Pricing page.
A fundamental goal of ours is to make sure you enjoy fixed costs for our Service. We don't want you to feel penalized as your membership grows. If we ever do need to increase our fees, though, we will provide you at least 45 days' notice (and any such change would only ever apply after your current paid-through date).
Hopefully, we have a very long relationship, but we understand there may come a time when you (or we) may need to cancel your Service.
We offer an extremely reliable Service, as well as rapid response to your support inquiries. After all, the better we serve you, the happier you will be, the longer you will remain with us, and the more you will refer us to others. We value the relationship we have with you and understand that we must continuously earn your trust and satisfaction.
While we strive for 99.9% uptime for the Service, only customers on the Complete plan are covered by our Service Level Agreement (SLA). Complete plan customers are covered because they are in their own dedicated environments, whereas all other customers are in a multi-tenant ("shared") environment, where one issue may impact a greater swath of customers. The SLA also guarantees customer support response times.
We know that you are entrusting us with your data. We protect it by implementing hardware redundancies, by keeping backups, so that we can restore data in the event of catastrophic incidents, and by utilizing secure data centers. You can read more about our Security and Privacy Policy.
Note that off-site backups are stored in data centers in the same country where your Crowdstack is hosted. However, if your data center is in the European Union, it may be any other European Union country.
Note that under the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), we are a “service provider”, not a “business” or “third party”, with respect to your use of the Service. That means we process any data you share with us only to provide the Service. We will not retain, use, disclose, or sell any of that information for any other commercial purposes.
We pride ourselves on providing outstanding support for all of our customers. Free assistance is provided on our Hey Stack! Support Area and via email at [email protected].
Our free support is limited to answering questions about features/functionality, troubleshooting technical issues occurring with the Service, and resolving issues related to the performance of the Service. More complex troubleshooting/assistance may require Professional Services, for which an hourly fee will apply. Please note our Holiday schedule, as well, when support response times may be a little slower than usual.
You understand and agree that we shall not be liable to you or any other third party for any direct, indirect, consequential, exemplary, incidental, special, or punitive damages, including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, data, or other intangible losses from your use of the Service (or your inability to use it), even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.
We aren't responsible for any bad actions taken by you or your Users on the Service and thus you indemnify and hold us and any of our related parties (subsidiaries, affiliates, agents, employees, partners, related entities or licensors) harmless from any claim or demand, including attorneys' fees, made by any third party due to or arising from actions taken on your Crowdstack site.
If a legal dispute arises, our goal is to provide you with a neutral and cost-effective means of resolving it quickly. Accordingly, you and we agree that any controversy or claim at law or equity that arises shall be resolved by arbitration, in a court of law, or as otherwise mutually agreed upon in writing by the parties. Before resorting to these alternatives, we encourage you to contact us directly to seek a resolution.