Terms of Service

These terms are a contract between the business you represent (you) and Nrth Star (we, us). They apply to the Nrth Star website and application, the audit, and every automation we build, host and repair for you.

You accept them by creating an account, by using the service, or by approving a plan, whichever comes first. If you accept them on behalf of a company or another business, you confirm you have the authority to bind it.

If you and we sign a separate order form or agreement, that document applies to the extent it conflicts with these terms.

Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any right or remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that cannot be excluded by agreement.

Nrth Star finds where your business is losing hours to manual work, writes a plan to automate a job in your own words, builds the automation, checks it against the accounts it will use, rehearses it against your recent records, and then, once you approve it, hosts it, watches it and repairs it. Each of those steps is described in these terms, and the ones that matter most are in sections 4 to 6.

The service is provided to businesses. It is not for personal, domestic or household use, and you must be at least 18 to use it.

You need an account to use anything beyond the website. You sign in with a link sent to your email address, so keeping that mailbox secure is keeping your account secure. Tell us at once if you think somebody else has access to it.

You are responsible for everything done through your account and by anybody you give access to your workspace, including approving plans and switching automations on.

You must give us accurate information and keep it current, in particular the email address we send sign-in links and notices to.

The audit is a conversation about how your work happens. It connects to none of your accounts, it costs nothing, you can run it as often as you like, and it does not oblige you to buy anything.

What it produces is a ranked list of where your hours go, from what you tell us. The figures in it are estimates based on your answers; nobody has measured your business, and the audit says so. Treat it as a starting point, not as advice.

This is the clause the rest of the agreement rests on. An automation acts on your behalf only after all of the following have happened:

• We have written a plan in plain English and you have approved it as the right problem to solve.
• You have connected the accounts the plan needs, on each provider's own sign-in screen, and granted only the permissions listed for that plan.
• The built automation has been checked against those accounts, and any problem found has been shown to you.
• Where the automation is started by a change in your records, it has been rehearsed against your last thirty days with every send and every write switched off, and you have been shown, line by line, what it would have done.
• You have read that list and switched the automation on.

An automation does exactly what its written description says, in the order it says it. It does not learn, improvise or widen its own scope. If it reaches a situation it was not written for, it stops that run rather than guessing.

You can switch any automation off at any time, immediately, without telling us why. Switching it off does not delete it or its history.

When a tool you have connected changes in a way that stops an automation doing its job, the automation pauses. We tell you what stopped and why, and propose a fix. The fix is applied only if you approve it. We never change an automation on our own, and an automation never repairs itself.

A change you ask for produces a new version of the automation, which goes through the same checks, rehearsal and approval as the first one. The version already running keeps running until you switch the new one on.

When you connect an account you grant us access to it for the purposes of the plans you have approved, and you confirm that you have the right to grant that access, including under your agreement with that provider and under any obligation you owe to the people whose records are in it.

We use a managed connection service to hold the access tokens. We do not hold your passwords. You can revoke our access at any time, either in our application or with the provider directly. When you do, any automation that depended on that account stops and tells you so.

We read only the records an automation needs to do the job you approved, and we write and send only what its description says. For a mailbox that means we read the sender, subject, date and a short preview of a message, never its body.

You own your data: the records in your accounts, the answers you give in the audit, the documents you hand over, and the plans and automations built from them. You grant us a licence to use them only to provide the service to you, for as long as you use it. Our Privacy Policy describes what we hold, why, for how long and where.

If you close your account you can ask for a copy of your automations, written out in plain English, and of the record of what each one did.

Parts of the service are produced by large language models: the questions the audit asks, the plans we write, the wording of automations, and the text inside them, such as a follow-up email written in your voice. That output can be wrong, incomplete or not what you meant, and the service is built on the assumption that it sometimes will be, which is why nothing runs until you have read it and approved it.

You are responsible for reviewing every plan and every rehearsal before you approve it, and for the content of anything an automation sends on your behalf once you have switched it on. We do not guarantee that generated text is accurate or fit for a particular purpose.

You must not use the service, or any automation built with it, to:

• Send commercial electronic messages without the consent of the recipient, or without a working way to unsubscribe, or in any other way that would breach the Spam Act 2003 (Cth) or the equivalent law where the recipient is. Automations that send email send it from your own mailbox, to your own contacts, and the obligations are yours.
• Collect, use or disclose personal information in a way that breaches the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) or your own privacy policy.
• Act on records you do not have the right to act on, or connect an account you are not authorised to connect.
• Break the law, infringe anybody's rights, or send anything defamatory, deceptive or harmful.
• Interfere with the service, attempt to access other customers' data, or reverse engineer the platform.

We may pause an automation, or suspend an account, if we reasonably believe it is being used in breach of this section, and we will tell you when we do and why.

Prices are in Australian dollars and are exclusive of GST, which is added where it applies and shown on your invoice. What a plan costs is set out before you subscribe to it, and in any order form we sign with you.

A plan is billed in advance, monthly or annually. Annual billing charges 10 months for a year of service. Each plan includes a number of automation runs a month; if you reach it we tell you and offer a larger plan, and a running automation is never stopped in the middle of a month because of it.

There is no charge per run beyond your plan's allowance and no charge for the AI used inside your automations. Hosting, monitoring and repairs are included.

We may change our prices. We will give you at least thirty days' notice by email before a change affects you, and a change takes effect from your next billing period after that notice. If you do not accept it, you can cancel before it takes effect.

If a payment fails we will tell you and try again. If it still fails after fourteen days we may pause your automations until it is resolved, and we will tell you before we do.

You can cancel your plan at any time. Your automations keep running until the end of the period you have paid for, then they are switched off. We do not refund the unused part of a period except where the law requires it or where we have failed to provide the service.

We may end this agreement on thirty days' written notice, or at once if you are in serious breach of it and do not fix the breach within fourteen days of being told, or if the law requires us to. If we end it for a reason other than your breach, we will refund the unused part of any period you have paid for.

When the agreement ends, your automations are switched off and you have 30 days to export your plans and history. After that we delete your data as our Privacy Policy describes.

We aim to keep the service available at all times and to keep your automations running, and we will tell you when something on our side stops them. We do not promise uninterrupted availability: automations depend on the providers you connect and on our own hosting, both of which can be unavailable.

Support is by email. We answer within one business day, and faster for anything that has stopped a running automation.

We improve the service continually and may add, change or remove features. If a change would materially reduce what your plan gives you, we will tell you at least thirty days before it takes effect.

We own the platform: the software, the models and methods we use to write plans and build automations, the way automations are described and checked, and the Nrth Star name and marks. These terms do not transfer any of that to you.

You own your data and the automations built for you: the plan in your words, the automation's written description, and the record of what it did. Once your plan is paid for, that ownership is unconditional, and you may keep and use those documents after you leave.

You may not copy, resell or provide the platform to third parties, or use it to build a competing service.

Each of us will keep the other's confidential information confidential and use it only for this agreement. Yours includes your records, your audit answers, your documents and your plans. Ours includes the non-public workings of the platform. This does not cover information that is already public, that either of us already had, or that the law requires to be disclosed.

Where the Australian Consumer Law applies to you, our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded, including that they will be provided with due care and skill and be fit for their purpose. Nothing in this section limits those guarantees. Where we are permitted to limit our liability for a failure to comply with a guarantee, our liability is limited to supplying the services again or paying the cost of having them supplied again.

Apart from that, and to the extent the law allows:

• Our total liability to you under or in connection with this agreement, in any twelve-month period, is limited to the fees you paid us in that period.
• Neither of us is liable to the other for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill or data, or for indirect or consequential loss, except that this does not limit your liability for breach of section 8 or either party's liability for breach of section 13.
• We are not liable for the acts or omissions of the providers you connect, for changes they make to their services, or for the consequences of an automation you approved and switched on doing what its description said it would do.

These limits reflect that automations act only on plans you approve and rehearsals you have read, and that the fees are a small fraction of the value of the work they replace.

You indemnify us against any claim by a third party arising from your breach of section 8, from an account you connected without the right to, or from the content of anything an automation sent on your behalf in accordance with a plan you approved. This indemnity is reduced to the extent we caused the loss.

Our Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect, why, who we share it with, where it is held and for how long. It forms part of this agreement. Where an automation handles personal information from your accounts, we handle it on your instructions and you remain responsible for having collected it lawfully.

We may update these terms. The date at the top is the version in force. For a change that reduces your rights or increases your obligations, we will email you at least thirty days before it takes effect, and you can cancel before then if you do not accept it. Continuing to use the service after that date is acceptance of the new terms.

This agreement is governed by the law of New South Wales, Australia, and each of us submits to the courts of New South Wales and the courts that hear appeals from them.

If there is a dispute, write to harrison@nrthstar.app first. We will try to resolve it with you in good faith within thirty days before either of us starts proceedings, except where urgent relief is needed.

If part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest still applies. A failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it. Neither of us may assign this agreement without the other's consent, except that we may assign it to a successor of our business on notice to you. Notices to you go to the email address on your account; notices to us go to the address in section 20.

Questions about this agreement go to harrison@nrthstar.app. A person reads that inbox.