Terms of service

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

These terms are an agreement between you and Carestead LLC (“Carestead”, “we”, “us”), the company that operates the Carestead service: Herald, Roster, Trivia, Member, and Journeys, the church website and member app they power, and the sanctuary screen. “You” means a church (a partner organisation) and the staff and volunteers acting for it, or a person holding a personal account.

By creating an account, accepting an invitation, or using the service you agree to these terms and to our privacy notice. If you use the service for a church, you confirm you are authorised to bind it to these terms.

2. Early access

Carestead is in early access. Features will change, some will arrive unfinished, and we may withdraw or reshape parts of the service as we learn from the churches using it. A church workspace is provisioned by us after you request access; creating a personal account does not create a church, and nothing on this site promises that a church can start on its own.

3. Accounts and eligibility

Accounts and the member app are for adults. Children take part only through profiles that a parent, guardian, or church creates and supervises, as described in our privacy notice; a child never holds a sign-in of their own. You must give a working email address and confirm it, keep your sign-in secure, and tell us promptly if you believe it has been compromised. You are responsible for the activity under your account and for the people you invite into your church’s workspace. [counsel to confirm: minimum-age wording by jurisdiction]

4. Plans, billing, and cancellation

The plans, prices, and allowances in force are those published on our pricing page at the time you buy; if that page and these terms disagree, the pricing page governs. The free plan needs no payment card and is not a trial. A paid plan is billed through Stripe’s hosted checkout, renews automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel, and can be changed or cancelled at any time through the billing portal in your settings; cancellation takes effect at the end of the period already paid for. A church plant that qualifies for our launch offer receives the discount described on the pricing page and nothing else changes. [counsel to confirm: refund terms] [counsel to confirm: taxes and who bears them]

5. Your content and your responsibilities

The content your church creates or uploads, including announcements, pages, sermons, audio and video, directory entries, and game material, stays yours. You give us the permission we need to store, process, transmit, and display it in order to run the service for you, and no more. You are responsible for that content, for having the rights to use it, and for the consent of the people who appear in it.

Song lyrics, chord charts, and worship-music details in the service are entered by your church. Licensing that music for use, display, or reproduction, for example through CCLI, is your church’s obligation and not ours, and we make no representation that any such licence is held.

6. Acceptable use

Use Carestead lawfully and respectfully. Do not attempt to break its security, its rate limits, or the isolation between churches; do not upload unlawful, infringing, or harmful content; do not use the service to harass anyone or to harm a child; and do not resell or scrape it. Every church has the moderation tools it needs, and those tools cannot be switched off by any plan. We may suspend an account or a workspace that puts other people at risk, and we will tell you why where the law and the safety of others allow.

7. Health information and no business associate agreements

The service is not designed to hold protected health information. Do not upload PHI as defined by HIPAA. Carestead LLC is not a covered entity or a business associate, does not sign Business Associate Agreements, and the service is not offered as HIPAA-compliant. Care notes and similar pastoral records are your church’s own, and you are responsible for what you choose to write in them.

8. Data protection roles

For the information a church stores about its people, the church is the controller and Carestead LLC acts as its processor under these terms and a data processing addendum. [counsel to confirm: DPA forthcoming; state processor terms and breach-notice timing] We process that information only to provide the service and as the church instructs. Information about children is entered by parents, guardians, and church staff, never collected from a child. For the information we hold for our own purposes, such as your account, our privacy notice applies.

You can export the information we hold about you and ask us to erase it, from your privacy settings or by contacting us. We keep data for the periods in our published retention schedule and delete it after. We take nightly backups; they exist to recover the service, and we do not promise a recovery point or recovery time. If we learn of a breach affecting your church’s data, we will notify the church, which notifies its members.

9. AI-assisted features

Some features use AI to help with drafting and search. They are switched on per church, labelled where they appear, and produce drafts that a person reviews; sermon text is written by your church, not generated for it. We do not use your church’s content to train AI models. [counsel to confirm: training and retention statement against the model provider’s terms]

10. What the service does not do

Notifications are delivered on a best-effort basis and may be delayed or missed; the in-app notification centre and email digest are the record. The service sends no text messages. Giving is an outbound link to your church’s own provider; we process no donations and hold no funds on a church’s behalf. The member app is an installable web app and is not distributed through an app store.

11. Copyright complaints

If you believe content on the service infringes your copyright, send a notice with the work, the location of the material, your contact details, and a statement of good faith to [email protected]. We remove or disable access to material on a valid notice, tell the church that posted it, and close the accounts of repeat infringers. [counsel to confirm: designated DMCA agent and Copyright Office registration]

12. Security and responsible disclosure

We protect the service with encryption in transit, database-level isolation between churches, and a tamper-evident audit log, and we hold no external certification. If you find a security problem, please report it privately to [email protected] and give us a reasonable time to fix it before disclosing it. Do not test against other churches’ data.

13. Intellectual property and your licence to use the service

The service, its software, and its design are owned by Carestead LLC and licensed, not sold, under the Carestead Commercial License. You receive a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service for your church or yourself under these terms. You may not copy, modify, distribute, sublicense, or reverse-engineer it. Feedback you give us may be used without obligation to you.

14. Warranties and limitation of liability

The service is provided “as is” and “as available” during early access, without warranties of any kind to the extent the law allows. We work hard to keep it available and your data safe, but we cannot promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. To the extent permitted by law, Carestead LLC’s total liability for any claim arising from the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, and we are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential losses. Nothing here limits rights that cannot be limited by law. [counsel to confirm: cap, carve-outs, and consumer-law exceptions]

15. Suspension and termination

You may close your account or cancel your church’s plan at any time. We may suspend or end access for a breach of these terms, with notice where practicable, or where the law requires. On termination we will make your church’s data available for export for [counsel to confirm: 30] days, after which it is deleted according to our published retention schedule. Sections 5, 7, 13, 14, and 17 survive termination.

16. Changes to these terms

When we change these terms in a way that matters, we will post the new version here with a new date and ask you to accept it the next time you sign in. Continuing to use the service after accepting is your agreement to the revised terms. Minor corrections take effect when posted.

17. Governing law and disputes

[counsel to confirm: governing law, venue, and any dispute-resolution procedure] We would rather solve a problem than litigate it: please contact us first.

18. Contact

Questions? Email [email protected]. Legal notices go to [email protected].