Terms of Service

InvoiceShark (the “Service”) is operated by [Your full legal name], a sole trader doing business as InvoiceShark, of [Business address] (“we”, “us”, “our”). “You” means the person or business that holds an InvoiceShark account.

By creating an account or using the Service you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

InvoiceShark helps freelancers and small businesses record invoices, identify overdue accounts, and send automated payment reminders that include a hosted payment link. You control the wording, the subject lines, and how many days after the due date each reminder is sent.

The Service is a tool. It does not verify that an invoice is valid or that money is genuinely owed, it does not provide legal, tax, or debt-collection advice, and it is not a debt-collection agency acting on your behalf. We may add, change, or remove features over time.

• You must be at least 18 and able to enter into a binding contract.
• You are responsible for the accuracy of the information in your account and for all activity that happens under it.
• Keep your login credentials secure and tell us promptly if you believe your account has been compromised.
• Authentication is handled by our provider, Clerk. Your use of the sign-in flow is also subject to Clerk's terms.
• One person or business per account. Do not share credentials or let others use your account to send reminders in their own name.

You retain ownership of the invoice, client, and business information you enter (“Your Content”). You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, copy, transmit, and display Your Content solely to operate and provide the Service to you. That licence ends when Your Content is deleted, except for backups that age out on our normal cycle.

You represent and warrant that:

• The amounts, due dates, and contact details you enter are accurate, and each invoice reflects a genuine debt owed to you.
• You are collecting a debt owed to you in your own name — not acting as a collection agent for someone else's debt.
• You have a lawful basis to email each recipient you add, and an existing business relationship with them.
• Your Content and your use of the Service do not infringe anyone's rights or break any law.

You are the sender. Reminder emails go out in your business name, from your configured reply-to address, with wording you control. We provide the delivery mechanism; we do not review, approve, or endorse what you send, and we are not the author of your messages.

You are responsible for ensuring your reminders comply with:

• The CAN-SPAM Act and equivalent anti-spam laws in your recipients' countries, including the requirement that messages are not deceptive and identify the sender accurately.
• Applicable debt-collection and consumer-protection law, including state debt-collection statutes and, where it applies to you, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
• Data-protection law governing your use of your customers' personal data, as described in clause 10.

We may pause or stop sending for your account if we receive spam complaints, if bounce rates threaten delivery for other users, or if our email provider requires it.

You agree not to:

• Use the Service to send spam, or messages that are harassing, threatening, abusive, deceptive, or unlawful.
• Send reminders to people who have no existing business relationship with you, or to purchased or scraped lists.
• Misrepresent who you are, or imply that InvoiceShark is a collection agency, law firm, or court.
• Upload malware, or attempt to disrupt, probe, reverse-engineer, or gain unauthorised access to the Service or its infrastructure.
• Scrape the Service, or use it to build a competing product.
• Resell or provide the Service to third parties except as expressly permitted.
• Exceed the limits of your plan by creating multiple accounts.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that breach this clause, with or without notice depending on severity.

• The Free plan is offered at no cost and is subject to usage limits — currently 2 active invoices and 3 reminder emails per calendar month. We may change these limits.
• The Pro plan is billed at $23.99/mo in advance through Stripe. Charges recur automatically until you cancel, and you authorise us to charge your payment method each period.
• You can cancel at any time from your account settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period; you keep Pro access until then.
• If a payment fails we may retry it and may downgrade or suspend your account if it stays unpaid.
• Except where required by law, payments are non-refundable, including for partial billing periods and for periods in which you did not use the Service.
• Prices exclude taxes unless stated. You are responsible for any sales, use, or VAT-style taxes on your subscription, other than taxes on our income.
• We may change pricing on at least 30 days' notice before your next renewal. Continued use after a price change takes effect means you accept the new price.

To accept card payments you must connect your own Stripe account through the setup flow in your account settings. Doing so creates a direct relationship between you and Stripe: you accept Stripe’s Connected Account Agreement, and you are responsible for keeping that account in good standing and for the accuracy of the information you give them.

Payments your customers make via InvoiceShark payment links are charged directly on your connected Stripe account. The funds are yours, they are paid out by Stripe on your payout schedule, and they never pass through an account we control. Your business name is what appears on your customer’s statement.

You are the merchant of record for those payments. That means refunds, chargebacks, disputes, and any obligation to deliver what the invoice was for are yours to handle. We are not a party to the underlying transaction, and we are not a bank, money transmitter, escrow agent, or payment processor.

Until you complete Stripe onboarding, your invoices cannot be paid online: reminders still send, but without a payment button. Marking an invoice as paid in InvoiceShark is a record-keeping action, not confirmation that funds have cleared.

We aim to keep the Service available but do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free operation, and we do not offer a service level agreement. Scheduled maintenance, third-party outages, or factors beyond our control may cause downtime.

The Service depends on third parties including Clerk, Stripe, Resend, MongoDB Atlas, and Vercel. We are not responsible for their acts, omissions, outages, or pricing changes, and an outage at any of them may delay or prevent a reminder from being sent. Email delivery in particular cannot be guaranteed: recipient mail servers may delay, filter, or reject messages for reasons outside our control.

Our handling of personal data is described in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

For the personal data of your customers, you are the controller and we act as your processor: we process that data only on your documented instructions, which for these purposes means your use of the Service’s features. Our commitments as processor — including confidentiality, security, sub-processors, assistance with data-subject requests, and deletion — are set out in the Processing of your customers’ data section of the Privacy Policy, which the parties intend to serve as the data-processing terms between them.

The Service, including its software, design, and the InvoiceShark name and marks, belongs to us and our licensors. These Terms grant you a limited, revocable, non-transferable right to use the Service; they do not transfer any ownership.

The default reminder wording we supply is provided for you to use and adapt in your own reminders. You may not redistribute it as a standalone template product.

If you send us feedback or suggestions, you grant us an unrestricted, perpetual, royalty-free right to use them without obligation to you.

We do not warrant that the Service will meet your requirements, that reminders will be delivered or will result in payment, that defects will be corrected, or that the Service will be uninterrupted or secure. InvoiceShark does not provide legal, tax, accounting, or debt-collection advice, and nothing in the Service is a substitute for professional advice.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this clause may not apply to you.

We will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, punitive, or consequential damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, lost data, or loss of goodwill, even if we have been advised of the possibility. This includes losses arising from a reminder that was sent when it should not have been, was not sent when it should have been, or was sent to the wrong recipient.

These limits apply regardless of the legal theory and even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose. They do not apply to liability that cannot be excluded by law, including liability for fraud. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so parts of this clause may not apply to you.

You will defend, indemnify, and hold us harmless from any claim, demand, loss, liability, penalty, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) brought by a third party and arising out of:

• Your Content, or any reminder or other message sent through your account.
• Your breach of these Terms or of any representation you make in them.
• Your violation of any law, including anti-spam, debt-collection, consumer-protection, and data-protection law.
• Any dispute between you and a customer of yours, including about whether a debt is owed.
• Your infringement of a third party's intellectual property or privacy rights.

We will notify you of any such claim, give you control of the defence (except that you may not settle a claim in a way that admits fault on our part or imposes an obligation on us without our consent), and cooperate at your expense.

You may stop using the Service at any time. To close your account and have your data deleted, email [support@invoiceshark.app]. We will action the request within 30 days, subject to any records we are required to keep — see the retention schedule. Cancelling a Pro subscription downgrades your plan but does not by itself delete your account.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you breach these Terms, if we are required to by law, if your use creates risk for us or other users, or if we discontinue the Service. Where we discontinue the Service for convenience we will give reasonable notice and a pro-rata refund of any prepaid, unused subscription fees.

On termination your right to use the Service ends. Clauses that by their nature should survive — including 4, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, and 19 — survive termination.

We may update these Terms from time to time. If a change is material we will give at least 30 days’ notice by email or in the Service before it takes effect. Continued use after that means you accept the revised Terms; if you do not accept them, stop using the Service and close your account. The “last updated” date above shows the current version.

Informal resolution first. Before starting arbitration, you agree to contact us at [support@invoiceshark.app] and give us 30 days to try to resolve the dispute informally. We will do the same before bringing a claim against you.

Arbitration. Any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service that is not resolved informally will be settled by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its rules then in effect, available at https://www.adr.org/consumer. The arbitration will be conducted in English by a single arbitrator, and judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

Class-action waiver. Claims may be brought only in your individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over a representative action. If this waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim — and only that claim — will proceed in court, and the rest of this clause still applies.

Exceptions. Either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court, and either party may seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property or to stop unauthorised access to the Service.

Your right to opt out. You may opt out of this arbitration clause by emailing [support@invoiceshark.app] with the subject line “Arbitration Opt-Out” within 30 days of first accepting these Terms. Opting out does not affect any other part of these Terms, and we will not hold it against your account.

These Terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the laws of the State of [State], United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. For any claim not subject to arbitration under clause 17, you and we submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in [State], United States, except where mandatory local law gives you the right to bring proceedings elsewhere. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

• Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service, and replace any earlier understanding.
• Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent needed to make it enforceable, or severed, and the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. Not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including outages at the third-party providers listed in clause 9.
• Notices. We give notice by email to the address on your account or by posting in the Service; you give notice by emailing us. It is your responsibility to keep your email address current.
• No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms create no rights for anyone other than you and us.
• Independent parties. Nothing here creates a partnership, agency, employment, or joint-venture relationship.

[Your full legal name], [Business address].

Questions about these Terms: [support@invoiceshark.app].