Terms of Service

Version 2.3 · Last updated: 10 August 2026 · Section 5 now explains billing currency, now that checkout can take US dollars as well as pounds. Nothing else changed.

1 Who we are and what these terms cover

These terms are the agreement between Dave on Duty and you. Throughout this page, we means Dave on Duty and you means the business using our service. The agreement covers the daveonduty.com website, the customer portal, and the Dave chat assistant you put on your own site.

By creating an account, starting a trial, or using the service, you accept these terms. If you sign up on behalf of a company, you're confirming you have the authority to accept them for it — and the agreement is then with the company.

Dave is a service for businesses. By creating an account you confirm you're acting as a business — a trade, craft or profession — and not as a consumer.

When you activate a paid plan, we record the moment of acceptance and email you your Service Agreement — a short summary of the plan you bought, kept as your own copy. If it and these terms ever say different things, these terms win, because they are the fuller and more current document. Our Privacy Policy and the data commitments in section 13 are part of this agreement too.

2 Your account

• You must be at least 18 and give us accurate details, including a working email address — it's how we send you everything that matters, including legal notices.
• Keep your password to yourself; what happens under your account is your responsibility. If you think someone else has got in, tell us straight away at support@daveonduty.co.uk — we can end all active sessions and help you re-secure the account.
• One account serves one business. Run several distinct businesses? Each needs its own account, so each assistant learns only its own business.
• We may decline, suspend or close accounts created with false information, used in breach of these terms, or posing a security risk.

3 What the service is

We provide an AI chat assistant — Dave — that you add to your website with a single line of code, or we install for you on request, free. Everything he answers from — your scanned website content plus the notes, documents, policies and answers you add in the portal — is his knowledge base. Depending on your plan, Dave:

• answers visitors' questions 24/7 from your knowledge base, in the visitor's own language;
• captures leads — a visitor's contact details and question — and emails them to you;
• checks availability and books, reschedules and cancels appointments, with email confirmations;
• searches your inventory, quotes shipping, looks up order status and handles return requests;
• comes with a customer portal where you manage his knowledge, settings, transcripts and billing.

Exactly what your plan includes is set out on the pricing page and in your portal. Anything described as "coming soon" or "on the roadmap" isn't part of the service until it's released.

4 The free trial

• Every new account starts with a 7-day free trial. No payment details are needed and nothing is charged.
• The trial includes the features of the plan you pick and 30 AI conversations — enough to judge Dave properly on a live website. Use them up early and he continues in essentials mode (section 5); activating a paid plan during the trial restores full AI answers immediately, with up to 60 conversations for the rest of the trial. Your plan's full monthly allowance begins when the trial ends and your first payment is taken.
• You can choose and pay for a plan at any point during the trial — the remaining trial days are still free, and your first payment falls on the day the trial ends (section 6).
• If the trial ends without a paid plan, Dave pauses (section 8) and you are not charged anything. Nothing you've set up is deleted — activate later and it's exactly as you left it.
• The trial is one evaluation per business. Creating account after account to chain free trials is a breach of these terms.

5 Plans, prices and conversation allowances

Current plans and prices are on the pricing page. The price shown is the price you pay unless the checkout says otherwise.

Currency. We bill in pounds sterling by default, and in US dollars where checkout offers it. You pick your currency when you first subscribe and it is then fixed for the life of that subscription — our payment provider cannot switch a running subscription from one currency to another. To change it, cancel and subscribe again. The two price lists are set separately rather than converted at an exchange rate, so neither moves when the rate does. Your bank may still charge you its own conversion or foreign-transaction fee, which is between you and them and never reaches us.

Each plan includes a monthly allowance of AI conversations. The allowance is what keeps a flat monthly price honest — no per-message fees, no surprise bills. What you need to know:

• How counting works: one visitor's chat session answered using AI counts as one conversation, however many messages it contains. Sessions handled by the backup engine are free and uncounted.
• Trials: a free trial includes 30 conversations rather than a monthly allowance, or 60 if you activate a plan part-way through the trial (section 4). The demonstration assistants on our own website are limited per visitor and aren't part of any plan.
• At the limit: Dave never goes dark. Past your allowance he switches to essentials mode — still greeting visitors, sharing your key details and taking messages, but not composing AI replies — until your allowance resets on your monthly billing date. Sessions already in progress keep their AI replies.
• Top-ups: you can buy extra conversations at the rate shown in your portal. Top-ups only ever happen with your explicit approval — we never charge you automatically for going over an allowance.

If we change prices, we give you at least 30 days' notice in writing, effective from your next billing period. Don't accept the new price? Cancel before it starts and you'll never pay it.

6 Billing and payment

• Nothing is ever charged automatically at the end of a trial. We don't hold a card during the trial, so we couldn't charge you even if we wanted to. Billing starts only when you choose a plan and enter payment details yourself.
• If you activate a plan during your trial, the rest of the trial still runs free: your first payment is taken on the day the trial ends, not the day you subscribe. If you cancel before that day, you're not charged at all.
• If your trial simply runs out and you haven't chosen a plan, nothing happens to your money. Dave pauses (section 8) and your setup waits for you.
• Once a plan is active, it is billed monthly in advance and continues until you cancel.
• Payment is by card through Stripe, our payment processor, or by invoice where we've agreed manual billing. We never see or store your card number — Stripe, a PCI-DSS-compliant processor, holds it.
• Activating, upgrading or downgrading a plan is you accepting the matching Service Agreement (section 1). We record the account email, plan and timestamp, and email you a copy for your records.
• Upgrades and downgrades take effect immediately; any price difference is settled on your next invoice or billing cycle.
• A billing month that has started isn't refunded — because cancelling always lets you use what you've paid for (section 7). None of this affects statutory rights that can't be excluded.

7 Cancelling and downgrading

• You can cancel at any time, yourself, from inside your account — sign in, open Plan & billing, use Cancel my plan. Your cancellation is registered instantly, nobody at Dave on Duty has to approve it, and you never have to ask, wait for a reply, or speak to anyone. Rather we did it for you? One email to support@daveonduty.co.uk is equally valid.
• There is no notice period, no minimum term, no cancellation fee and no retention script. We won't make you justify the decision or route you to someone whose job is to talk you out of it.
• Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you've already paid for. Dave keeps working until then, then pauses.
• Nothing is deleted the moment you cancel. Your knowledge base, transcripts, leads and bookings are kept for 90 days after the service ends, so you can come back to exactly what you left, or take a copy (section 20). After 90 days they're deleted. Ask at any point and we delete them sooner.
• Downgrading keeps everything you configured for the higher plan; those features simply switch off until you upgrade again.

8 Missed payments and suspension

• If a trial ends without a paid plan, or an invoice goes unpaid, we email you first and allow a reasonable grace period.
• If payment is still outstanding after that, we suspend the account: Dave shows visitors a polite unavailable message and stops answering. Suspension doesn't touch your data.
• Pay, and reactivation is immediate — Dave resumes with everything he knew.
• We may also suspend the service, wholly or partly, where we reasonably believe there's a security threat, a serious breach of these terms, or where the law requires it. Where practical, we tell you first.

9 Your responsibilities

• Keep your knowledge base accurate. Dave answers from what you provide and approve. Your prices, policies, claims and business details are your responsibility — update them when they change, and the change reaches Dave from the next conversation.
• Review what Dave tells people. Full transcripts are in your portal; read them now and then, especially in your first weeks. Tell us about any wrong answer and we'll help you correct it, typically within one business day.
• Update your own privacy policy to mention the chat assistant on your website. We provide ready wording on request.
• Have the right to your content. Everything you upload or add must be yours to use, and must not infringe anyone else's rights.
• Follow the laws that apply to your business — consumer protection, advertising, sector rules (health claims, for example), and email and marketing law for messages the service sends on your behalf (section 12).

10 Acceptable use

You must not use the service, or set up your assistant, to:

• break the law, infringe anyone's rights, or promote unlawful goods or services;
• deceive — impersonating another business, presenting fabricated reviews or credentials, or making the assistant state things you know to be false;
• send spam or unsolicited marketing;
• give regulated advice — the assistant must not be deployed as a source of medical diagnosis, legal advice, financial advice or emergency response;
• harm the service — no probing, scraping, load-testing, dodging rate limits, trying to extract system prompts or the underlying models, and no reverse engineering except where the law allows it;
• resell, sublicense or white-label the service without our written agreement;
• put sensitive personal records (detailed health records, for example) through chat beyond what a visitor volunteers in ordinary conversation.

We may remove content or suspend accounts that break this section (section 8 applies).

11 AI answers — what to expect

This section matters — please read it.

• Dave is powered by large-language-model AI. He is designed to answer only from your knowledge base, to say plainly when he doesn't know rather than guess, and to refuse to invent prices, availability, stock or policies. Those safeguards are good — and not perfect. Like every AI system, he can occasionally misunderstand, misstate or leave something out.
• What Dave says is information, not advice. It must not be relied on for medical, legal or financial decisions. For allergen and safety questions he quotes your own wording and tells the customer to confirm with your team — he never certifies that something is safe.
• An answer from Dave doesn't by itself create a binding offer or contract between you and a visitor unless you choose to honour it. Bookings he takes are appointments on your own booking list, on the terms you configured.
• How you deploy Dave in your business is your call and your responsibility — including any sector rules about what may be said to your customers.
• We fix reported answer problems, typically within one business day, and the portal shows you the questions Dave couldn't answer so you can close the gaps yourself in minutes.

12 Emails sent in your business's name

Some features send email to your customers on your behalf — booking confirmations, cancellation and reschedule notices, enquiry follow-ups and (where you've switched them on) review requests. For these:

• you are the sender in substance: the content reflects your business information and settings, and replies go to you;
• having the right to contact the recipient is your responsibility, as is marketing-communications law where a message is promotional;
• review requests are deliberately restrained — one email per booking, an opt-out in every message, a per-customer cooling-off period — and you can switch them off entirely at any time.

13 Your data and your customers' data

• It's yours. Your knowledge base, your visitors' conversations, leads, bookings and feedback belong to you. You give us permission to host, process, display and transmit them — only as needed to run the service.
• Legal roles: for your visitors' personal data, you are the controller and we act as your processor (Article 28 UK GDPR — the rule that governs businesses processing data for other businesses). The Article 28 data-processing terms are set out in full in Annex A and apply automatically — you don't need to request them (a separately countersigned copy is available if your compliance file needs one). For your own account data, we're the controller — see the Privacy Policy.
• Security: conversations are encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS) and held on encrypted-at-rest infrastructure, and access to customer data is limited to what running the service requires.
• Never trained on, never sold: your data is never sold, and never used to train models for anyone else. AI replies are generated through Anthropic's Claude API, which doesn't use submitted data for model training.
• Take a copy any time: download everything from Plan & billing — one JSON file with your settings, knowledge sources, conversations, leads, bookings and enquiries. Rather we sent it? Ask, and we will, within 30 days.
• Deletion: your data is deleted 90 days after the service ends, or sooner if you ask — see section 20.

14 What stays ours

• The Dave on Duty platform — the software, design, prompts, documentation, and the Dave name, character and branding — belongs to us and our licensors. These terms give you the right to use the service while your account is active, and nothing more.
• Please don't copy or modify the platform, build derivatives of it, or use our branding beyond displaying the assistant on your own website as designed.
• If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them to improve the service without owing you anything — your business data is never "feedback".

15 Third-party services

The service is built on reputable providers: Anthropic (AI replies via the Claude API), Stripe (card payments), our hosting provider, and the optional services you choose to connect — a calendar feed, a Shopify or WooCommerce store, a CRM webhook. For connections you set up:

• you authorise us to exchange the data the feature needs — reading busy times from a calendar feed you supply, for example;
• you give us the least-privileged access that works (read-only keys where offered), and you can revoke it at any time;
• third-party services have their own terms, and we're not responsible for their acts or omissions — though we choose and monitor our providers with care.

16 Availability and support

• We aim for continuous availability and build for graceful failure: if the AI provider has an outage, a backup answering engine keeps Dave greeting visitors and capturing messages instead of going offline.
• We can't promise uninterrupted or error-free operation, and no service level applies unless we've agreed one in writing. Planned maintenance is announced in advance where practical.
• Support is through the Help & support page or support@daveonduty.co.uk, Monday to Friday, UK time. We aim to reply within one working day, and a human reads every message.

17 Custom work

Beyond subscriptions, we sometimes take on custom work — websites, integrations, automations, tailored assistant builds. Custom work is quoted and agreed in writing, separately, sometimes with its own statement of work. Unless that writing says otherwise, these terms apply to custom work too, and your subscription stays governed by these terms and your Service Agreement.

18 Liability

• Some liability can't legally be excluded — death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud — and nothing in these terms tries to.
• Beyond that, each of us is liable to the other, across everything connected to the service in a calendar year, up to the fees you paid us in that calendar year.
• Neither of us is liable for indirect or knock-on losses — lost profits, lost revenue, lost savings, lost goodwill or lost data — even if warned they were possible.
• Dave answers from the information you supply; we're not liable for the consequences of wrong or unlawful content you put in the knowledge base.
• These limits reflect the price of the service — a fair split of risk between two businesses.

19 If your content causes a claim

This is the clause lawyers call an indemnity. If someone brings a claim against us because of (a) content you put in your knowledge base that infringes their rights or breaks the law, (b) your breach of section 10, or (c) a message sent on your behalf under section 12 to someone you had no right to contact — you cover the costs and losses that claim causes us. We'll tell you promptly about any such claim and won't settle it without your input.

20 Ending the agreement

• These terms apply from your first use of the service and continue while you have an account.
• You can cancel your plan or close your account at any time, yourself, from Plan & billing — no approval from us needed at any stage (section 7). We can end the agreement for a serious breach that isn't fixed within a reasonable time of us pointing it out, for prolonged non-payment (section 8), or if we ever discontinue the service — in which case we give at least 30 days' notice and refund fees paid for the period after it closes.
• When the agreement ends: your access ends, and your data is kept for 90 days so you can return or take a copy, then deleted from live systems — except what the law makes us keep (invoices, for example, which UK law requires us to hold for six years). Ask during those 90 days and we delete it sooner.
• The parts of these terms that should outlive the agreement do — including sections 13 (your data), 14 (what stays ours), 18 (liability), 19 (claims) and 23 (governing law).

21 Changes to the service or these terms

• We improve the service continuously. We may add, change or retire features — but not in a way that materially cuts down the core of your paid plan during a period you've paid for.
• We may update these terms. Material changes are emailed to account holders at least 14 days before they take effect. Small ones (clarity, typos, contact details) can take effect on posting.
• Don't accept a material change? Cancel before its effective date — the old terms apply until then. Using the service after the date is accepting the change.
• Every version carries a number and date at the top, so you can always tell what changed and when.

22 Other legal points

• The whole agreement. These terms, your Service Agreement, the Privacy Policy and any written custom-work agreement are the entire deal between us — nothing said in a sales conversation adds to it or overrides it.
• Notices. We write to your account email; you write to support@daveonduty.co.uk. Keep your account email current.
• Passing the agreement on. You can't transfer it to someone else without our written consent, which we won't withhold without good reason. If Dave on Duty is ever sold or restructured, the agreement may move with the business — and we'd tell you.
• Events beyond anyone's control. Neither of us is liable for delay or failure caused by things outside reasonable control — internet or utility failure, a provider outage, government action. The one exception: service already provided still has to be paid for.
• If a court strikes out a clause, the rest stays in force, and the struck clause is read as the closest valid version of what it meant.
• Letting something slide once doesn't give up the right to enforce it later — for either of us.
• No one else gets rights under this agreement (for the lawyers: Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999).
• We stay independent businesses. Nothing here makes us partners, employer and employee, or agents for each other.

23 Governing law

These terms, and any dispute or claim connected to them or the service, are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. Before going anywhere near a court, talk to us — almost everything is fixable in one email thread.

24 Contact

Questions about these terms, cancellations, data requests, complaints: support@daveonduty.co.uk, or the Help & support page. A human reads everything, and we aim to reply within one working day.

A Annex A — Data-processing terms (UK GDPR Article 28)

This annex forms part of these terms and applies automatically to every customer — you don't have to ask for it, sign anything extra, or wait for us to send a document. It exists because Article 28 of the UK GDPR requires a written contract between a controller and its processor, and because your own compliance file needs it. If you need it as a separate countersigned document for that file, email us and we'll send one.

In this annex, Visitor Personal Data means personal data relating to your website visitors and customers that we process on your behalf through the service. For that data you are the controller and we are your processor. (For your own account and billing data we are the controller — see the Privacy Policy.) Where this annex conflicts with another part of these terms in relation to Visitor Personal Data, this annex wins.

A1 · What is processed, and for how long

A2 · Our obligations as your processor

• Only on your instructions. We process Visitor Personal Data only on your documented instructions — which are these terms, your settings and the material you give the assistant — unless UK law requires otherwise, in which case we'll tell you first unless the law forbids it. We use it for no purpose of our own: no training, no analytics product, no resale, ever.
• We'll say so if an instruction looks wrong. If we think an instruction would breach data-protection law, we'll tell you rather than quietly comply.
• Confidentiality. Everyone with access is bound to confidentiality, and access is limited to what running the service requires.
• Security. We maintain appropriate technical and organisational measures under Article 32. What they actually are is set out in full on the Security & Data page, including what we don't yet have.
• Sub-processors. You give us general written authorisation to engage the sub-processors listed in Privacy, section 9. We impose equivalent obligations on each of them and remain fully liable to you for their performance. We will update that page before adding a new one, and if you object on reasonable data-protection grounds, tell us — if we can't resolve it, you can cancel without penalty.
• Helping with your data-subject requests. Your data export runs on demand from Plan & billing → Download all my data, and you can delete records yourself. Where a request needs something the product can't do, we'll help within a reasonable time and at no charge for ordinary volumes. If a visitor comes to us directly, we'll point them to you rather than act unilaterally.
• Breaches. If we become aware of a personal data breach affecting Visitor Personal Data, we will notify you without undue delay and give you what you need to meet your own 72-hour obligation to the ICO.
• Assistance with Articles 32–36 — security, breach notification, and data-protection impact assessments — taking into account the nature of the processing and the information we hold.
• Deletion or return at the end. Export your data at any time in one click; on termination we delete it after the retention window in Privacy, section 11, or sooner on request, except where UK law requires us to keep something (accounting records).
• Audit. We'll make available the information needed to demonstrate compliance with this annex and respond to reasonable security questionnaires. We'll cooperate with an audit or inspection by you or your auditor on reasonable notice, no more than once a year unless a regulator requires otherwise or there has been a breach, and conducted so it doesn't disrupt other customers' service.
• International transfers. Some sub-processors operate outside the UK; transfers rely on the safeguards described in Privacy, section 10 — standard contractual clauses plus the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.

A3 · Your obligations as controller

• You confirm you have a lawful basis for the personal data your assistant collects, and that you have given your visitors the privacy information they're entitled to — including telling them the chat assistant exists and that a processor operates it. Ask and we'll send you wording you can paste into your own privacy notice.
• You decide what the assistant knows, what it asks for and what happens to the leads and bookings that result. Please don't configure it to solicit special category data or payment card details.
• Your instructions to us must themselves be lawful.

This annex is written to be read and to do its job, not to be impressive. If your legal or compliance team wants something specific added or clarified before you sign off, say so — we'd rather amend it than lose you over a clause.