Terms of Service

What GoodWord Local does

GoodWord Local places table tents with NFC chips and QR codes in local businesses. Tap or scan one and you land on a short page where you can rate your visit. Had a good one? You write a short review in your own words and post it to Google yourself; we can help tidy the wording if you ask, but we never write it for you and we never post it. Had a rough one? You can send private feedback straight to the owner. Owners get a daily digest of what came in, and can text our assistant for stats.

Who these terms cover

GoodWord Local is a service of Abstract Evergreen Cloud Systems, LLC (“we,” “us”), a California limited liability company. These terms are an agreement between you and that company, and they apply to anyone who uses a GoodWord Local review page and to the businesses we work with. If you are a client with a signed service agreement, that agreement covers fees, hardware, and cancellation, and where the two differ, the agreement wins.

Review sites have their own rules

When you post a review on Google or any other review site, you do it there, under their terms and policies. We do not control those sites, and we cannot guarantee a review will be published or stay published; review sites filter and remove content by their own rules.

No incentives for public reviews

Nobody is paid, discounted, or rewarded for posting a public review, not by us and not by the businesses we work with. Any promo a business offers through our pages is separate from reviewing: it is never conditioned on leaving a review, or on the review being positive. Businesses using GoodWord Local agree to keep it that way.

Acceptable use

Keep it honest and keep it lawful. In particular, don’t:

• post or draft reviews of visits that didn’t happen, or pretend to be someone you are not;
• submit content that is unlawful, threatening, or abusive;
• use the service to send spam or collect data about others;
• probe, scrape, overload, or otherwise interfere with the service.

We can suspend or block access that breaks these rules.

The service comes as-is

We work hard to keep GoodWord Local fast and reliable, but the service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error free, or secure.

Parts of the service depend on companies we do not control, including our hosting, database, email, and AI providers. We are not responsible for their outages, changes, or decisions, and we are not liable for delays or failures caused by events outside our reasonable control.

What Google does is up to Google

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting as an agent of Google or any other review site. We do not control their policies, their filters, or their decisions.

So we do not promise any number of reviews, any rating, any ranking, or any business outcome, and we are not responsible if a review site declines to publish a review, removes reviews it has already published, changes how a business profile appears, or suspends or penalises a profile. A business using GoodWord Local remains responsible for its own conduct on those platforms and for following their rules, including never offering anything in exchange for a review and never discouraging honest ones. If a business breaks those rules and a claim reaches us because of it, that business agrees to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it.

Our liability is capped

To the extent the law allows, our total liability for any claim related to the service is capped at the fees you paid GoodWord Local in the 3 months before the event giving rise to the claim, and we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost business, or lost data, even if we were told they were possible. The obligations to cover costs described under “Your content” and “What Google does is up to Google” sit outside this cap. Some places don’t allow certain limits, so parts of this may not apply to you.

Your content

What you write is yours. By submitting it you give us permission to store it, show it to the business you reviewed, and count it in their statistics, which is the whole point of the service. You are responsible for what you write: that it describes a visit that actually happened, and that it is not unlawful or someone else’s to publish. If a claim is brought against us because of content you submitted, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it.

Age

You need to be 18, or old enough to enter a contract where you live, to use the service.

If something goes wrong

Email us first. Most things are a misunderstanding and get sorted in a day, and we would rather fix it than argue about it. Give us 30 days to put it right.

If that does not resolve it, you and we agree to settle the dispute by binding individual arbitration rather than in court, administered by a recognised arbitration provider under its consumer rules, in California or by phone or video if you prefer. An arbitrator can award the same individual relief a court could.

Individual only. Claims are brought in your own name. Neither of us may bring a class, collective, or representative action, and an arbitrator may not combine more than one person’s claims.

Two carve-outs. Either of us can still bring a claim in small claims court, and either of us can ask a court for an injunction to stop misuse of the service or of our intellectual property.

You can opt out. If you do not want to arbitrate, email hello@goodwordlocal.com within 30 days of first using the service and say so. Opting out costs you nothing and changes nothing else about these terms.

The rest

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. These terms, plus any signed service agreement, are the whole agreement between us about the service, and they replace anything said earlier. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later. You may not transfer these terms to someone else; we may transfer them if the business is sold, and we would tell you.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules.

Changes to these terms

If these terms change, we will update them here and change the effective date at the top. Clients get an email about meaningful changes before they take effect. Using the service after a change means you accept the updated terms.

Contact

Questions about these terms? Email hello@goodwordlocal.com. A person reads it.