Terms of Service

These Terms of Service are a contract between BookClay, a company based in Denver, Colorado, and the business that opens a BookClay account. In these terms, "we" and "us" mean BookClay, "you" and "your studio" mean that business, and "member" means one of your students, members or customers.

By creating an account, starting a trial or using the service you accept these terms. If you are accepting on behalf of a business, you are confirming that you have authority to bind it. Our Privacy Policy is part of this agreement.

BookClay is hosted software for running a pottery or ceramics studio. It handles class and workshop booking, waitlists, recurring memberships and dues, kiln and firing tracking, member check-in, a member portal, staff scheduling, messaging to members over SMS and email, and an AI assistant that answers member texts on your behalf.

We improve the software continuously, which means features change. We will not remove a capability you rely on without telling you first. If we ever have to, you can cancel and export your data, and we will refund any unused prepaid time.

We aim to keep the service available around the clock, but we do not currently offer a contractual uptime guarantee, and we would rather say so than publish a number we have not built the process to stand behind.

You must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract. Accounts are for businesses; BookClay is not a consumer service, and nobody under 13 may create an account.

Give us accurate information and keep it current. You are responsible for what happens under your account, including anything your staff do with the logins you issue them. Keep credentials to yourself, use the role controls to give people only what they need, and tell us at security@bookclay.app promptly if you think an account has been compromised.

You are the merchant of record

Class fees, membership dues, firing fees and anything else you charge are sold by you to your member. Payments run through your own Stripe account using Stripe Connect direct charges, and funds settle from Stripe to your bank. BookClay is not a party to that sale, never takes custody of the funds, and is not a payment processor, money transmitter or escrow agent.

That means the commercial obligations are yours: delivering the class, honoring your own refund and cancellation policy, handling chargebacks and disputes, and collecting and remitting any sales or use tax that applies to what you sell. You are also bound by Stripe's own terms with respect to your Stripe account.

Member data

You decide what you collect about your members and why. You are the data controller for those records, and you are responsible for having a lawful basis to collect them, for giving members whatever notice the law requires, and for responding to their access and deletion requests. We process that data on your instructions as your processor. See the Privacy Policy, and email us if you need a signed data processing agreement.

Waivers, safety and your own operation

BookClay can store a waiver and record that a member signed it. It does not write your waiver, decide whether it is enforceable where you operate, or take on any responsibility for what happens in your studio. Kilns, wheels, glaze chemicals, staffing and insurance are yours to run.

This section matters more than its length suggests, because the obligations here sit on you rather than on us.

Messages sent from your studio number go out under your brand, to people who are your contacts. You are the sender. That makes you responsible for compliance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the CAN-SPAM Act, carrier rules and the CTIA messaging principles, and for any state law that applies where your members are.

• Consent. Only message people who have given you the level of consent the law requires for the kind of message you are sending. Transactional and promotional are not the same standard. Uploading a list you bought, scraped or inherited is not consent.
• A2P 10DLC registration. US carriers require business messaging traffic to be registered to a real brand and campaign. You are responsible for registering accurately and for the carrier fees that come with it. Unregistered or misregistered traffic gets filtered or blocked by the carriers, and that is outside our control.
• Opt-outs. STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE and the rest are honored automatically and permanently. Do not work around a suppression, and do not ask us to.
• Content. Keep messages truthful, identify your studio, and stay off prohibited categories.
• The AI front desk. When you enable it, it replies to members in your studio's name using your schedule, policies and records. It can be wrong. You are responsible for reviewing how it is configured and for what it sends, and you can turn it off, restrict what it may answer, or require your approval before replies go out.

If your messaging generates complaints, carrier violations or regulatory action, we may suspend messaging on your account while it is sorted out.

Do not use BookClay to:

• break the law, or help someone else break it;
• send spam, or message people who have not consented to hear from you;
• upload malware, or try to breach, probe or overload the service or anyone else's account;
• reach data belonging to another studio, or attempt to defeat tenant isolation;
• scrape, resell, sublicense or white-label the service without our written agreement;
• reverse engineer the software, except to the extent the law says you may;
• infringe anyone's intellectual property, or post content that is unlawful or harassing;
• misrepresent who is sending a message, including making the AI assistant claim to be a specific person it is not.

Good-faith security research is welcome and is not a violation of this section. See the security page for how to report what you find.

We may suspend an account that is causing active harm, and we will tell you why and give you a chance to fix it whenever the situation allows.

Price

BookClay costs $49 per month, or $490 per year paid up front. One price covers every feature, unlimited members, unlimited classes and unlimited staff logins. There is no per-seat charge and we take no percentage of what you sell.

The trial

New studios get 14 days free. The trial does not ask for a card, which means nothing can be charged at the end of it. If you want to keep going you add a payment method and the subscription starts then. If you do nothing, the account simply stops at the end of the trial. We will never convert a trial to a paid plan without a card you have deliberately added.

Renewals and taxes

Once you are paying, the subscription renews automatically each month or each year until you cancel, charged to the card on file through Stripe. Fees are in US dollars and exclude any sales, use or similar taxes, which we will add where we are required to collect them. If a payment fails we will retry and email you; if it keeps failing we may suspend access until it is resolved.

Price changes

If we change the price we will give you at least 30 days notice by email before it applies to you, and it will never take effect mid-term on an annual plan.

What is not in the price

Stripe's processing fees are paid by you to Stripe at their rates. Text messages are sent through your own Twilio account at Twilio's rates, including carrier and A2P registration fees. We do not mark either of them up.

Cancel whenever you want, from the settings page, without talking to anyone. You keep access through the end of the period you have already paid for, and then the subscription stops.

We do not refund partial periods. There is also no minimum term, no cancellation fee and no notice period, so the most you can be out is the remainder of one month, or the remainder of a year you chose to prepay. Export your data before or after you cancel; the export does not expire when the subscription does.

If we terminate your account for a reason that is not your breach of these terms, we will refund the unused portion of what you prepaid.

We own BookClay: the software, the interface, the name, the logo and everything we have written. These terms give you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service while your account is active, and nothing more. You may not copy it, resell it or build a competing product out of it.

You own your content: your studio's name and branding, your class descriptions, your photos, your policies and your member records. You grant us the limited license we need to host, process, back up and display that content in order to run the service for you, and no license beyond that. We do not use your content or your members' data to train machine learning models, ours or anybody else's.

If you send us feedback or a feature idea, we may use it without owing you anything. Please keep sending it.

Your studio's data belongs to your studio. Not to us, and not to whoever we might one day sell software to.

You can export members, bookings, attendance, memberships, payments and kiln records to CSV from inside the app at any time, on any plan, including during the trial and after you have given notice. There is no export fee, no gated "data liberation" tier and no requirement to talk to someone first.

After you cancel we keep your data for 30 days so you can change your mind or pull a copy you forgot. Ask us and we will delete it sooner. After that window it is deleted from live systems, and backups age out on the schedule in the Privacy Policy. Records we are required to keep for tax and accounting are the only exception.

BookClay depends on Stripe, Twilio, Clerk, Supabase, Vercel, Anthropic and others, listed in the Privacy Policy. Your use of some of them, Stripe and Twilio in particular, is also governed by your own agreement with them. If one of those services goes down or changes its rules, we will work around it as best we can, but we are not responsible for their acts.

The service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law permits, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error free, that every message will be delivered by the carriers, or that the AI assistant's replies will always be correct. Keep an eye on it, the same as you would a new employee at the front desk.

Nothing in BookClay is legal, tax or accounting advice. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain disclaimers, in which case they apply to you only as far as the law allows.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost goodwill or lost data, even if it was told such damages were possible.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to this agreement or the service, whatever the theory, will not exceed the total fees you paid us in the 12 months immediately before the event giving rise to the claim.

These limits do not apply to a party's fraud, willful misconduct, or gross negligence, or to your obligation to pay fees, or to anything that cannot be limited under applicable law.

You agree to defend and indemnify BookClay against third-party claims, damages and reasonable legal costs arising from your use of the service in breach of these terms, from your content or your member data, from the goods and services you sell to your members, from your messaging practices including TCPA and A2P claims, and from injuries or disputes that happen at your studio.

We will indemnify you against a third-party claim that the BookClay software itself infringes their intellectual property rights.

Either party claiming indemnity has to tell the other promptly and let them control the defense, and neither may settle in a way that admits fault for the other without consent.

This agreement runs while your account is open. You can close the account at any time. We can terminate or suspend an account for material breach of these terms, for non-payment, or if keeping it open would expose us to legal liability, and we will give you notice and a reasonable chance to cure whenever it is practical to do so.

On termination your access ends, the export and deletion timelines in section 10 apply, and the sections that should obviously survive (intellectual property, disclaimers, liability, indemnity, governing law) survive.

We may update these terms. If a change is material we will email the account owner at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you do not agree with it, cancel before it applies and we will refund the unused portion of anything you prepaid. Continuing to use the service after the effective date means you accept the new terms.

This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Denver, Colorado have exclusive jurisdiction, and both parties consent to venue there.

The UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply. If a provision of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

These terms plus the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us on this subject, and they replace anything discussed beforehand. Neither party may assign this agreement without the other's consent, except in connection with a merger or sale of substantially all of its business. A delay in enforcing a right is not a waiver of it. There are no third-party beneficiaries.

Questions about any of this go to hello@bookclay.app, and a person will answer.