Terms of Service

Effective date: September 2, 2026 · Replaces the version dated August 13, 2026

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a binding agreement between you and Black Cat Software LLC, a Florida limited liability company ("BayDocket", "we", "us", "our"), governing your access to and use of the BayDocket software, the baydocket.com website, the app.baydocket.com application, the public demo at demo.baydocket.com, and any related services (together, the "Service").

1. Who these Terms cover, and acceptance

These Terms cover three different groups of people:

• Shops. Repair businesses and their staff who hold a BayDocket account. Sections 1 through 21 apply to you.
• Vehicle owners. Consumers who receive text messages, estimate-approval links, or payment links sent by a shop through BayDocket. Section 7 and the Privacy Policy apply to you. You are not a party to any shop's subscription.
• Booking requesters. Members of the public who submit a booking request to a shop through that shop's public booking page, without holding a BayDocket account. Section 7, Section 15, Section 17, and the Privacy Policy apply to you. You are not a party to any shop's subscription. You accept these Terms and the Privacy Policy by submitting a request, as the notice on the booking page says. Submitting a request does not book you in: the shop decides whether to accept it, and the Service sends you no text message in response.

You accept these Terms by creating a shop, accepting a staff invitation, logging in, submitting a booking request, or otherwise using the Service. If you accept on behalf of a business, you represent that you are at least 18 years old and authorized to bind that business, and "you" means that business. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

2. The Service, and what it is not

BayDocket provides repair order and estimate management, digital vehicle inspections, invoicing, scheduling, parts inventory and purchase orders, reporting, customer text-message communication, public booking requests, an in-app assistant, a download of your own records, and one-way accounting sync to a QuickBooks Online company you connect.

Four of those deserve describing precisely, because what they do not do matters as much as what they do:

• The in-app assistant answers questions about your shop's own records and, at your direction, makes the same edits a member of your staff could make from the screen; the harder-to-undo and customer-facing actions ask you to confirm before they run. Your prompt and the records needed to answer it are sent to our AI provider, named in Section 5 of the Privacy Policy, to produce that response, and are not used to train, fine-tune, or evaluate any model — see Section 5. The assistant can be wrong; you remain responsible for what you approve, send, and charge.
• The record download gives a shop Owner a machine-readable copy of the shop's customers, vehicles, repair orders, invoices, and payments. It is a portability tool, not a complete archive of the account: what it leaves out is listed inside the file itself.
• Accounting sync sends finalized invoices and recorded payments one way from BayDocket into a QuickBooks Online company you choose to connect. It never reads your QuickBooks data back into BayDocket's records beyond the identifiers it needs to avoid creating duplicates; it does not reconcile your books; and it is not bookkeeping advice. The provider is named in Section 5 of the Privacy Policy.
• Public booking is request-and-confirm. A visitor submits a request; it waits in your queue until a member of your staff accepts or dismisses it. Nothing is scheduled automatically, no live availability is published, and the Service sends the requester no text message.

BayDocket is a record-keeping and communication tool. It is not:

• a provider of legal, tax, accounting, or regulatory advice;
• a payment processor, money transmitter, or party to any transaction between a shop and its customer (see Section 8);
• a substitute for a technician's professional judgment, a labor-time guide, or a diagnostic authority;
• a guarantee that any estimate, authorization, inspection record, or invoice you produce satisfies the motor-vehicle repair, consumer-protection, or record-retention laws of your state (see Section 9).

3. Accounts, staff, and security

• Each shop has exactly one Owner — the person who created it. The Owner is responsible for everything done under the shop's account, including by staff they invite.
• You are responsible for safeguarding login credentials, invite links, and any device left signed in. Notify us promptly at org@baydocket.com if you suspect unauthorized access.
• Staff invite links are single-use credentials with a limited lifetime. Treat a posted or forwarded invite link as you would a password.
• Deactivate staff who leave. Deactivation revokes their sessions; their historical entries remain in the record, which is intentional.
• Accounts are for your business. Do not share one login among staff, resell access, or let a third party use your account.

4. Subscription, fees, renewal, and cancellation

Plans and renewal. Paid plans are billed in advance, monthly or annually, at the price shown at checkout. Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period, at the then-current rate for your plan, until you cancel. We charge the payment method on file each renewal.

Cancellation. You may cancel at any time from the billing portal in Settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for; you keep full access until then.

Refunds. Except where required by law, fees are non-refundable and partial periods are not prorated. We do not refund unused time on an annual plan cancelled mid-term.

Founding-shop rate. The first ten shops to subscribe receive the founding rate for as long as their subscription remains continuously active. It survives ordinary plan changes and price increases. It does not survive a lapse: if the subscription is cancelled or terminated and later restarted, the then-current list price applies. Founding slots are allocated at the moment payment succeeds and are limited in number.

Price changes. We may change prices. Any increase takes effect at your next renewal and only after at least 30 days' notice to the email on your account. Cancelling before that renewal avoids the new price.

Failed payments. If a charge fails, the account enters a grace period during which the Service keeps working and the payment processor retries. If payment is not resolved, the subscription is cancelled and the shop moves to the read-only state described below.

What "read-only" means. When a subscription ends for any reason, we do not delete your records or hold them hostage. The shop becomes read-only: you can still sign in, read, search, and print everything, and you can resubscribe at any time with your data intact. See Section 5 for retention and deletion.

Taxes. Fees are exclusive of sales, use, VAT, and similar taxes, which we may add where required. You are responsible for taxes other than those on our net income.

Card details. Subscription payments are processed by Stripe on Stripe's hosted checkout. We never receive or store your card number.

5. Your data

You own it. As between you and us, you retain all right, title, and interest in the data your shop enters or generates — customers, vehicles, repair orders, estimates, inspections, photos, invoices, payments, and messages ("Shop Data"). You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, copy, transmit, display, back up, and process Shop Data solely to provide, secure, and support the Service for you, and to comply with law.

We act on your instructions. Where Shop Data includes personal information about your customers, you are the controller of that information and we process it as your service provider, on your documented instructions. See the Privacy Policy.

You are responsible for it. You are solely responsible for the accuracy, quality, legality, and appropriateness of Shop Data, and for having the right to collect, store, and transmit it — including any right required to photograph a vehicle or to contact a customer.

No AI training on Shop Data. We do not use Shop Data to train, fine-tune, or evaluate machine-learning models, and we do not license it to anyone who does. If we ever offer a feature that would require this, it will be opt-in and announced in advance. We may compute aggregated, de-identified statistics that cannot reasonably be used to identify you, your shop, or any individual.

No sale of data. We do not sell Shop Data, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

Getting your data out. Your records remain accessible and printable in the read-only state described in Section 4 for as long as the account exists. On written request from the Owner we will provide a machine-readable copy of the shop's records, or delete them, within a reasonable time and in any event within 30 days of verifying the request. Backups made before a deletion may persist for a limited period before expiring on their normal cycle, and we may retain records we are legally required to keep — including text-message opt-out records, which we must preserve to honour a STOP request even after other data is deleted.

6. Acceptable use

You will not, and will not permit anyone to:

• use the Service for any unlawful purpose, or in violation of messaging, privacy, consumer-protection, or motor-vehicle repair laws;
• upload malware, attempt to breach or probe the Service's security or tenant isolation, or access another shop's data;
• reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive source code, except where that restriction is unenforceable by law;
• scrape, crawl, or use automated means to access the Service outside a documented interface, or impose an unreasonable load on it;
• resell, sublicense, or provide the Service as a service bureau to a third party, or use it to build a competing product;
• remove proprietary notices, or misrepresent your identity or affiliation;
• use the Service to store or transmit payment card numbers, government identification numbers, or health information in free-text fields.

7. Messaging: consent, compliance, and the SMS program

7.1 Shops: you are the sender

When a message is sent from your shop through BayDocket, you are the sender and the initiating party. We provide the pipe; the decision to contact a given person about a given vehicle is yours. Accordingly you represent, warrant, and agree that:

• you have obtained and can document each recipient's prior express consent to receive text messages from your shop at the number you enter, and that the number belongs to the person who gave that consent;
• you will comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the CAN-SPAM Act where applicable, state telephone-solicitation statutes (including the Florida Telephone Solicitation Act), CTIA messaging principles, and the rules of the carriers and messaging providers used to deliver your messages;
• you will honour opt-out requests received by any means, including verbally or in person, and will not re-add a number that has opted out without fresh consent;
• you will keep consent and opt-out records for at least the applicable statute-of-limitations period, and will produce them to us on request if a carrier, regulator, or claimant demands them;
• you will send only the transactional messages the Service is registered to send — estimate-approval, service-update, and invoice payment-link messages relating to a real repair order. Marketing, promotional, and bulk campaign messaging is prohibited, as is any content in the categories carriers restrict (including sexual content, hate speech, alcohol, firearms, tobacco, cannabis, gambling, loans, and debt collection);
• you will observe reasonable sending hours and will not use the Service to harass any recipient.

BayDocket automatically processes STOP, HELP, and equivalent keywords and blocks further sends to a number that has opted out. That automation is a backstop, not your compliance programme. It cannot know whether consent existed in the first place.

We may suspend or throttle messaging for a shop immediately, without notice, if a carrier, messaging provider, or regulator requires it, or if we reasonably believe messages are being sent without consent. Messaging suspension does not suspend the rest of the Service or entitle you to a refund.

7.2 Vehicle owners: SMS / Text Messaging Program

Repair shops use BayDocket to send estimate-approval requests, service-update messages, and invoice payment links to their customers about work on their own vehicles. By providing your mobile number to a participating repair shop and consenting to receive texts, you agree to receive such messages from that shop via BayDocket. Submitting a booking request through a shop's public booking page does not by itself sign you up for text messages: the Service sends no text in response to a request.

• Message frequency varies based on your repair activity.
• Message and data rates may apply.
• Reply STOP to opt out at any time. Reply HELP for help.
• Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.
• Consent to receive text messages is not a condition of purchasing any goods or services.
• Support: org@baydocket.com

Text messages are sent on behalf of the repair shop you did business with. Questions about why you were contacted, or requests to correct your contact details, are best directed to that shop; you may also contact us at the address above and we will pass the request along.

8. Payments taken from your customers

BayDocket can help you collect payment from your customers, but we never take custody of those funds and we are not a party to the transaction.

• Card payments (Stripe). If you enable card payments, funds are processed by Stripe on your own connected Stripe account. You are the merchant of record: your business name appears on your customer's statement, Stripe's processing fee comes out of your payout, and you own the relationship, the refunds, and the chargebacks. BayDocket charges no application fee and takes no cut. Your use of Stripe is governed by your agreement with Stripe.
• Square reconciliation. If you connect Square, BayDocket only reads completed payments so you can match them to an invoice in one step. It never initiates, captures, refunds, or moves money in Square.
• Accounting sync (QuickBooks Online). If you connect QuickBooks, BayDocket pushes your finalized invoices and recorded payments, and the customers they belong to, one way into your own QuickBooks company. It never reads your books back, never posts to an account you have not chosen, and is not a substitute for your accountant’s review. Your use of QuickBooks is governed by your agreement with Intuit.
• Manual entries. Cash, cheque, and externally-processed payments recorded in BayDocket are bookkeeping entries you make. We do not verify that the money was received.

You are responsible for refunds, disputes, chargebacks, surcharging rules, and any receipt or disclosure your state requires. We are not liable for a payment processor's decision to hold, reverse, or decline funds, or to suspend your processing account.

9. Estimates, authorizations, invoices, tax, and vehicle data

• Repair authorization. Many states regulate written estimates, customer authorization before work begins, authorization for amounts exceeding an estimate, return of replaced parts, and record retention. BayDocket records what you enter and captures a customer's approval of the jobs you send them. Determining what your state requires, and whether your workflow satisfies it, is your responsibility. We make no representation that a BayDocket estimate, approval, inspection, or invoice constitutes a legally sufficient authorization or disclosure in any jurisdiction.
• Tax. BayDocket applies the tax rates and exemptions you configure to the lines you enter, and freezes that arithmetic onto the invoice. We do not determine taxability, nexus, rate accuracy, exemption validity, or filing obligations, and we do not provide tax advice. Verify your rates.
• Inspections and recommendations. Inspection findings, condition grades, photographs, and recommended work are your technicians' professional judgment. We neither generate nor validate them.
• VIN decoding. VIN lookups are answered by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's public vPIC database. Results are informational, are sometimes incomplete or wrong, and are always editable by hand. Do not rely on them for parts fitment or safety decisions.
• Reports. Reporting figures are computed from your own entries on the basis described in the product. They are an operational aid, not financial statements, and are not a substitute for your accounting records.

10. Third-party services

The Service depends on third parties — hosting, database, storage, messaging, email, and payment providers — and can connect to services you choose to enable. We do not control them, do not guarantee their availability or accuracy, and are not responsible for their acts or omissions or for any data you send to them. Your use of a connected service is governed by your agreement with its provider. The current list of providers we use is published in the Privacy Policy.

11. Demo, sandbox, and beta features

The public demo at demo.baydocket.com is a disposable sandbox. Demo shops and everything in them are deleted automatically, typically within a few hours. Do not enter real customer information, real phone numbers, or anything you need to keep. The demo sends no real text messages, takes no real payments, and comes with no confidentiality, availability, or retention commitment of any kind.

Features labelled beta, preview, or experimental are provided as-is for evaluation, may change or disappear, and are excluded from any commitment in these Terms.

12. Availability, changes, and support

We aim to keep the Service available and to warn you before disruptive maintenance, but we offer no uptime commitment or service-level agreement. We may modify, add, or discontinue features. If we discontinue a feature you materially rely on, or discontinue the Service entirely, we will give reasonable notice and, for a prepaid annual plan, refund the unused portion — that refund is your sole remedy. Support is provided by email at org@baydocket.com on a commercially reasonable-efforts basis.

13. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service and cancel at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access, with notice where practicable and immediately where not, if: you fail to pay; you materially breach these Terms and do not cure a curable breach within 15 days of notice; a carrier, payment processor, or regulator requires it; or your use presents a security, legal, or fraud risk to us, another shop, or a consumer.

On termination, your right to use the Service ends. Sections 5, 8, 9, 14 through 21, and any provision that by its nature should survive, survive termination. Retention and deletion after termination are governed by Section 5.

14. Disclaimer of warranties

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", "AS AVAILABLE", AND WITH ALL FAULTS. WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, THAT MESSAGES WILL BE DELIVERED, OR THAT DATA WILL NOT BE LOST OR CORRUPTED. WE MAINTAIN BACKUPS, BUT BACKUPS ARE NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR YOUR OWN RECORDS AND WE DO NOT GUARANTEE THAT ANY PARTICULAR DATA CAN BE RECOVERED. NO ADVICE OR INFORMATION FROM US CREATES ANY WARRANTY NOT STATED HERE. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain disclaimers, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

15. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, NEITHER PARTY WILL BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOST PROFITS, LOST REVENUE, LOST BUSINESS, LOST GOODWILL, OR LOST OR CORRUPTED DATA, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY.

OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE FEES YOU ACTUALLY PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS (US $100).

These limits do not apply to your payment obligations, to your indemnity obligations under Section 16, or to liability that cannot be limited by law — including, in some jurisdictions, gross negligence, wilful misconduct, or fraud. The limits are an essential basis of the bargain and apply even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose.

16. Indemnification

By you. You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Black Cat Software LLC and its members, officers, employees, and agents from and against any third-party claim, demand, proceeding, fine, or penalty, and all resulting damages, losses, settlements, and reasonable attorneys' fees, arising out of or relating to:

• your messaging — any claim that a message sent through your shop's account lacked consent or violated the TCPA, a state telephone-solicitation statute, or carrier or messaging-provider rules;
• Shop Data, including a claim that it infringes or misappropriates a third party's rights or was collected or used unlawfully;
• your repair, estimate, authorization, warranty, pricing, tax, or record-retention practices, and any dispute between you and your customer, employee, or supplier;
• your breach of these Terms or of applicable law.

By us. We will defend you against a third-party claim alleging that the Service, as provided by us and used in accordance with these Terms, infringes that party's U.S. patent, copyright, or trademark, and will pay damages finally awarded or agreed in settlement. This obligation does not apply to claims arising from Shop Data, from your combination of the Service with anything we did not supply, or from your modification or misuse of the Service, and it is subject to the cap in Section 15. If the Service becomes, or we believe it may become, the subject of such a claim, we may procure the right to continue using it, modify it, or terminate it and refund prepaid unused fees. This section states our entire liability and your sole remedy for infringement claims.

The party seeking indemnity must give prompt notice, allow the indemnifying party to control the defence, and cooperate reasonably. No settlement that imposes an obligation on the indemnified party may be made without its consent.

17. Dispute resolution, arbitration, and class-action waiver

Please read this section carefully. It affects your legal rights, including your right to file a lawsuit in court and to have a jury decide your claims.

17.1 Informal resolution first. Before starting arbitration or a small-claims case, you agree to email org@baydocket.com with a description of the dispute and the relief you seek. The parties will try in good faith to resolve it for 30 days. This step is a condition precedent to filing, and any limitations period is tolled while it runs.

17.2 Binding individual arbitration. If the dispute is not resolved, any claim arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be resolved by final and binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules (or, where applicable, its Consumer Arbitration Rules), before a single arbitrator, seated in Miami-Dade County, Florida. The arbitrator decides all issues except that a court decides the enforceability of Section 17.3. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section.

17.3 Class-action waiver. CLAIMS MAY BE BROUGHT ONLY IN AN INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY CLASS, COLLECTIVE, CONSOLIDATED, OR REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING. THE ARBITRATOR MAY NOT CONSOLIDATE MORE THAN ONE PERSON'S CLAIMS OR PRESIDE OVER ANY FORM OF CLASS PROCEEDING. If this waiver is held unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim alone proceeds in court and the rest of this section still applies.

17.4 Exceptions. Either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court, and either party may seek temporary or preliminary injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property or confidential information, without first arbitrating.

17.5 Your right to opt out. You may reject this arbitration agreement by emailing org@baydocket.com with the subject line "Arbitration Opt-Out", together with your name and shop name, within 30 days of first accepting these Terms. Opting out affects nothing else in these Terms and will not be held against you.

17.6 Time limit. Any claim must be filed within one year after it accrues, or it is permanently barred, except where a longer period cannot be shortened by agreement.

17.7 Governing law and forum. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules and excluding the U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. For any dispute not subject to arbitration, the parties consent to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the state and federal courts located in Miami-Dade County, Florida, and waive any objection to that forum.

18. Feedback

If you send us ideas, suggestions, bug reports, or feature requests, we may use them without restriction, attribution, confidentiality, or compensation. You are not obliged to send feedback, and we are not obliged to act on it. This does not give us any right to Shop Data.

19. Intellectual property

The Service, including its software, design, and trade marks, is owned by Black Cat Software LLC and protected by law. We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the Service during your subscription in accordance with these Terms. No other rights are granted, expressly or by implication.

20. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. For material changes we will give notice through the Service or by email to the address on your account at least 30 days before they take effect; other changes take effect when posted. The effective date at the top of this page always reflects the current version. If you do not accept a change, cancel before it takes effect; continuing to use the Service after that is acceptance. Changes do not apply retroactively to a dispute already noticed under Section 17.

21. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us on this subject and supersede prior discussions, proposals, and purchase-order terms.
• Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in force.
• No waiver. Failing to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent, except to a successor of your business that is not a competitor of ours. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
• No third-party beneficiaries, except that our indemnified parties may enforce Section 16.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a delay or failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including outages of hosting, network, carrier, or payment providers, cyberattack, natural disaster, epidemic, war, labour action, or government act. Payment obligations are not excused.
• Notices. We may give notice by email to the address on your account or by posting in the Service; you give notice to org@baydocket.com. Email notice is deemed received the day it is sent.
• Electronic communications. You consent to receive agreements, notices, and disclosures electronically, and agree that electronic acceptance and records satisfy any legal requirement of a writing or signature.
• Export and sanctions. You represent that you are not located in, or acting on behalf of anyone in, an embargoed jurisdiction or on a U.S. restricted-party list.
• Relationship. The parties are independent contractors. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, or employment relationship.
• Interpretation. "Including" means "including without limitation". Headings are for convenience only.

22. Contact

Black Cat Software LLC · org@baydocket.com

See also the Privacy Policy.