Terms of Service

Who you are contracting with

ChatNEC is operated by [[LEGAL_ENTITY]], a company registered in England and Wales under company number [[COMPANY_NUMBER]], with its registered office at [[REGISTERED_ADDRESS]]. VAT registration number [[VAT_NUMBER]].

In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean that company. "You" means the person or organisation subscribing to the service. Where you subscribe on behalf of an employer or client, you confirm you are authorised to accept these terms for them, and "you" then means that organisation.

What ChatNEC is

ChatNEC is a software service for people who administer NEC contracts. It has two parts:

• The Assistant answers questions about NEC contracts with citations to published commentaries, and drafts communications such as early warnings, compensation event notifications and Z clauses.
• The Auditor reviews payment applications and supporting evidence, recomputes arithmetic, identifies missing substantiation and produces a draft findings report.

Both work by sending your questions and documents to large language models, which generate text in response. Output is produced by software, not by a person, and is delivered to you as a draft.

ChatNEC is not legal advice

Accounts and access

You need an account to use ChatNEC. Accounts and sign-in are handled by our identity provider, Clerk. You must give accurate details, keep your credentials confidential, and tell us promptly at founders@chatnec.com if you believe your account has been used without your permission.

A subscription entitles one named individual to use the service. Sharing one login between colleagues is not permitted. If you need several people to have access, ask us about team and enterprise arrangements.

On subscribing, we create a private, isolated workspace for you. Provisioning is automatic and usually completes in under a minute. You must be at least 18 years old to hold an account.

Subscriptions, price and renewal

ChatNEC is sold as a subscription, monthly or annually, at the prices published at chatnec.com/pricing. Prices are in pounds sterling (GBP) and exclude VAT, which is added at the prevailing rate where it applies.

• Your subscription starts when your first payment is taken and access is granted.
• It renews automatically at the end of each billing period, monthly or annually, at the then current price for your plan, until you cancel.
• We may change our prices. Any change takes effect at your next renewal, and we will tell you by email at least 30 days beforehand so you can cancel if you would rather not continue.
• Annual plans are billed once for the year and the price is held for that term.

Fair use applies to plans described as unlimited. We may contact you if usage is far beyond what an individual working on live contracts could generate, and we may apply reasonable limits to protect the service. We will always talk to you first.

Payment and invoicing

Payments are processed by Stripe, through our billing provider Clerk. We do not see or store your full card number. Stripe processes card details under its own terms and its PCI DSS certification.

You authorise us to charge your payment method for each billing period until you cancel. A receipt is issued for every payment. If your firm needs consolidated invoicing, purchase order references or invoiced billing rather than card payment, write to us about the enterprise plan.

If a payment fails, Stripe retries it over a short period. If it cannot be collected, access is suspended until the payment is resolved. Your workspace and documents are retained during that period, as set out in the Privacy Policy.

Cancellation and refunds

You may cancel at any time from the billing page in your account. Cancellation stops the next renewal and your access continues to the end of the period you have already paid for.

Refund entitlements, including the statutory 14 day cancellation right where you are a consumer, are set out in full in our Refund and Cancellation Policy, which forms part of these terms.

Your documents and your data

Your documents remain yours. Contracts, payment applications, timesheets, correspondence and anything else you upload stay your property or your client's. We claim no ownership of them.

You grant us a limited licence to store, process and transmit that material for one purpose only: operating the service for you. That licence lasts as long as your account and ends when the material is deleted.

• Your material is never used to train AI models. Documents are processed by Anthropic's Claude under commercial terms which prohibit training on customer data.
• Each subscriber gets a private, isolated workspace. Your material is not pooled with any other customer's.
• Your material is held on servers in the United Kingdom and encrypted in transit.
• Output drafted for you, such as findings reports and notifications, is yours to use however you wish, including in adjudication or in correspondence with the other party.

You confirm that you are entitled to upload the material you upload, including anything confidential to your employer or client, and that doing so does not breach a contract, a confidentiality undertaking or anyone's rights. How we handle personal data is set out in the Privacy Policy. Where we process personal data on your behalf, a data processing agreement is available on request.

Acceptable use

You must not:

• Use the service unlawfully, or to produce material that is defamatory, fraudulent or intended to mislead a contract administrator, an adjudicator or a court.
• Present ChatNEC output as legal advice, or as the work of a qualified professional who has not reviewed it.
• Upload material you have no right to upload, or personal data you have no lawful basis to share.
• Attempt to extract, scrape or reconstruct the underlying models, prompts or the licensed commentary corpus, or use the service to build a competing product.
• Share your login, resell access, or use the service on behalf of people who are not covered by your subscription.
• Probe, load test or interfere with the service or its infrastructure, or circumvent any limit or security control.
• Upload malware, or anything designed to disrupt the service or another user.

Availability, support and changes

We aim to keep ChatNEC available at all times, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. Maintenance, third-party outages and faults happen. Where we plan work that will interrupt the service we will give notice by email when we reasonably can.

Idle workspaces are stopped automatically to save resources and restart on demand when you next use them. Nothing is lost when this happens.

Support is by email at founders@chatnec.com. We aim to respond within one working day.

We develop the service continuously and may add, change or withdraw features. We will not make a change that materially reduces the core functionality you subscribed to without telling you first, and if we do, you may cancel and receive a pro rata refund of the unused part of your term.

Intellectual property

The service, its software, interface, prompts, design and the ChatNEC name and marks belong to us or our licensors. Your subscription grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service. It transfers no ownership.

ChatNEC cites published NEC commentaries. Those works belong to their authors and publishers. Citations are provided as reference so you can check a point in the source, and quotation is limited to what fair dealing permits. NEC is a trade mark of Thomas Telford Limited. ChatNEC is an independent product and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by NEC, Thomas Telford Limited or the Institution of Civil Engineers.

If you send us suggestions or feedback, we may use them freely without obligation to you.

Third parties we rely on

Delivering the service means using other providers. The current list, and what each one handles, is published in the Privacy Policy. In summary: Anthropic for AI processing, Clerk for accounts and billing, Stripe for payments, DigitalOcean for hosting in London, and Cloudflare for DNS.

These providers act under their own terms and their own privacy policies. We choose them carefully and hold them to written commitments, but we are not responsible for their acts beyond the liability we accept in these terms.

Warranties and liability

We will supply the service with reasonable care and skill. Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, the service is provided as it is. We do not warrant that output is accurate, complete, current or fit for any particular contract or dispute.

We do not limit our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that, and where you use ChatNEC for business purposes:

• We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of contract, loss of anticipated savings, loss of business or goodwill, loss or corruption of data, or for any indirect or consequential loss.
• We are not liable for any loss arising because you relied on output without checking it, missed a contractual deadline, or issued a communication that was wrong, late or ineffective.
• Our total liability for all claims in any 12 month period is limited to the total fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose.

If you are a consumer, nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights, and this section applies only so far as the law permits.

Suspension and termination

You may cancel at any time as described above. We may suspend or end your access if you materially breach these terms, if payment is not collected, or if we must do so by law. Where the circumstances allow it, we will warn you first and give you a chance to put things right.

On termination your right to use the service ends. Your documents are retained for 90 days so you can return or export them, and are then deleted. You may ask us to delete them sooner. Sections that by their nature should survive termination, including intellectual property, liability and governing law, continue to apply.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects your rights, we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the new terms. If you would rather not, cancel before the date and we will refund the unused part of any period you have paid for.

Governing law and disputes

These terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom, you may bring proceedings in your own courts.

Please contact us first. Most problems are settled quickly by email, and we would always rather sort something out than argue about it.

How to contact us

[[LEGAL_ENTITY]]
[[REGISTERED_ADDRESS]]
founders@chatnec.com