Terms of Service

Last updated: May 26, 2023

Thank you for using Reviewzap! We build it to help you do your best work. Because we don’t know every one of our customers personally, we have to put in place some Terms of Service to help keep the ship afloat.

When we say “Newsblend”, “Company”, “we”, “our”, or “us” in this document, we are referring to Newsblend UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Am Mittelhafen 46, 48155 Münster, the Germany-based company behind Reviewzap.

When we say “Services”, we mean our website at reviewzap.io and the Reviewzap product.

When we say “You” or “your”, we are referring to the people or organizations that own an account with one or more of our Services.

We may update these Terms of Service (“Terms”) in the future. Typically these changes will be to clarify some of these terms by linking to an expanded related policy. Whenever we make a significant change to our policies, we will refresh the date at the top of this page and take any other appropriate steps to notify account holders.

When you use our Services, now or in the future, you are agreeing to the latest Terms. There may be times where we do not exercise or enforce a right or provision of the Terms; however, that does not mean we are waiving that right or provision. These Terms do contain a limitation of our liability.

If you violate any of the Terms, we may terminate your account. That’s a broad statement and it means you need to place a lot of trust in us, but we do our best to deserve that trust by keeping an open door to your feedback.

Account Terms

  1. You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account and password and for ensuring that any of your users do the same. The Company cannot and will not be liable for any loss or damage from your failure to comply with this security obligation.
  2. You must be a human. Accounts registered by “bots” or other automated methods are not permitted.

Payment, Refunds, and Plan Changes

  1. If you are using a free version of one of our Services, it is really free: just like for customers who pay for our Services, we do not sell your data.
  2. For paid Services that offer a free trial, we explain the length of trial when you sign up. After the trial period, you need to pay in advance to keep using the Service. If you do not pay, we will freeze your account and it will be inaccessible until you make payment. If your account has been frozen for a while, we will queue it up for auto-cancellation.
  3. If you are buying a paid plan, or upgrading from a free plan to a paid plan, we will charge your card immediately and your billing cycle starts on the day of purchase. For other upgrades or downgrades in plan level, or switching between monthly and annual billing, the amount you already paid for the current billing cycle will be prorated. That is, the value of the unused portion of your current billing cycle will be deducted from the first payment for your new plan..
  4. All fees are exclusive of all taxes, levies, or duties imposed by taxing authorities. Paddle is our partner for all order processing, and will collect those taxes on behalf of the taxing authority and remit those taxes to taxing authorities, and their terms and conditions apply. Otherwise, you are responsible for payment of all taxes, levies, or duties.

Cancellation and Termination

  1. You are solely responsible for properly canceling your account. Within each of our Services, we provide a simple no-questions-asked cancellation link. An email or phone request to cancel your account is not automatically considered cancellation. If you need help canceling your account, you can always contact our Support team.
  2. Upon account cancellation, we will continue to provide our Services until the end of your last billing cycle. If you requested a refund, we will immediately cease providing our Services.
  3. We have the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of our Services for any reason at any time. Suspension means you and any other users on your account will not be able to access the account or any content in the account. Termination will furthermore result in the deletion of your account or your access to your account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all content in your account. We also reserve the right to refuse the use of the Services to anyone for any reason at any time. We have this clause because statistically speaking, out of the hundreds of thousands of accounts on our Services, there is at least one doing something nefarious. There are some things we staunchly stand against and this clause is how we exercise that stance.
  4. Verbal, physical, written or other abuse (including threats of abuse or retribution) of a Company employee or officer will result in immediate account termination.

Modifications to the Service and Prices

  1. We reserve the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, any part of our Services with or without notice.
  2. Sometimes we change the pricing structure for our products. When we do that, we tend to exempt existing customers from those changes. However, we may choose to change the prices for existing customers. If we do so, we will give at least 30 days notice and will notify you via the email address on record. We may also post a notice about changes on our websites or the affected Services themselves.

Uptime, Security, and Privacy

  1. Your use of the Services is at your sole risk. We provide these Services on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We do not offer service-level agreements for most of our Services but do take uptime of our applications seriously.
  2. We reserve the right to temporarily disable your account if your usage significantly exceeds the average usage of other customers of the Services. Of course, we’ll reach out to the account owner before taking any action except in rare cases where the level of use may negatively impact the performance of the Service for other customers.
  3. We take many measures to protect and secure your data through backups, redundancies, and encryption. We enforce encryption for data transmission from the public Internet.

  4. When you use our Services, you entrust us with your data. We take that trust to heart. You agree that Newsblend may process your data as described in our Privacy Policy and for no other purpose. We as humans can access your data for the following reasons:

    • To help you with support requests you make.
    • On the rare occasions when an error occurs that stops an automated process partway through. We get automated alerts when such errors occur. When we can fix the issue and restart automated processing without looking at any personal data, we do. In rare cases, we have to look at a minimum amount of personal data to fix the issue. In these rare cases, we aim to fix the root cause to prevent the errors from recurring.
    • To safeguard Newsblend. We’ll look at logs and metadata as part of our work to ensure the security of your data and the Services as a whole. If necessary, we may also access accounts as part of an abuse report investigation.
  5. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), Newsblend is a “service provider”, not a “business” or “third party”, with respect to your use of the Services. That means we process any data you share with us only for the purpose you signed up for and as described in these Terms and the Privacy policy. We do not retain, use, disclose, or sell any of that information for any other commercial purposes unless we have your explicit permission. And on the flip-side, you agree to comply with your requirements under the CCPA and not use Newsblend’s Services in a way that violates the regulations.

Copyright and Content Ownership

  1. The Company or its licensors own all right, title, and interest in and to the Services, including all intellectual property rights therein, and you obtain no ownership rights in the Services as a result of your use. You may not duplicate, copy, or reuse any portion of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or visual design elements without express written permission from the Company. You must request permission to use the Company’s logos or any Service logos for promotional purposes. We reserve the right to rescind any permissions if you violate these Terms.
  2. You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Services, use of the Services, or access to the Services without the express written permission of the Company.

Features and Bugs

We design our Services with care, based on our own experience and the experiences of customers who share their time and feedback. However, there is no such thing as a service that pleases everybody. We make no guarantees that our Services will meet your specific requirements or expectations.

We also test all of our features extensively before shipping them. As with any software, our Services inevitably have some bugs. We track the bugs reported to us and work through priority ones, especially any related to security or privacy. Not all reported bugs will get fixed and we don’t guarantee completely error-free Services.

Services Adaptations and API Terms

We offer Application Program Interfaces (“API”s) for some of our Services. Any use of the API, including through a third-party product that accesses the Services, is bound by these Terms plus the following specific terms:

  1. You expressly understand and agree that we are not liable for any damages or losses resulting from your use of the API or third-party products that access data via the API.
  2. Abuse or excessively frequent requests to the Services via the API may result in the temporary or permanent suspension of your account’s access to the API. The Company, in its sole discretion, will determine abuse or excessive usage of the API. If we need to suspend your account’s access, we will attempt to warn the account owner first. If your API usage could or has caused downtime, we may cut off access without prior notice.

Liability

We mention liability throughout these Terms but to put it all in one section:

You expressly understand and agree that the Company shall not be liable, in law or in equity, to you or to any third party for any direct, indirect, incidental, lost profits, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, data or other intangible losses (even if the Company has been advised of the possibility of such damages), resulting from: (i) the use or the inability to use the Services; (ii) the cost of procurement of substitute goods and services resulting from any goods, data, information or services purchased or obtained or messages received or transactions entered into through or from the Services; (iii) unauthorized access to or alteration of your transmissions or data; (iv) statements or conduct of any third party on the service; (v) or any other matter relating to these Terms or the Services, whether as a breach of contract, tort (including negligence whether active or passive), or any other theory of liability.

In other words: choosing to use our Services does mean you are making a bet on us. If the bet does not work out, that’s on you, not us. We do our darnedest to be as safe a bet as possible through careful management of the business; investments in security, infrastructure, and talent; and in general giving a damn. If you choose to use our Services, thank you for betting on us.

If you have a question about any of these Terms, please contact our Support team.

Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0