Terms of Service

1. Who this agreement is between

These terms are between PorchBell ("we", "us", "PorchBell") and the business that creates an account ("you", "your business", "customer"). The PorchBell service is the hosted voice receptionist, dashboard, and any related tools we make available at porchbell.com.

2. Account and authority

You confirm that the person creating the account has authority to bind the business to these terms, and that the business information you provide is accurate. You are responsible for keeping login credentials secure and for any activity that happens under your account.

3. Acceptable use

You agree not to use PorchBell to:

• place outbound calls or send SMS that are not in response to a caller who reached out to your business first;
• collect, store, or process protected health information, financial account credentials, social security numbers, or other categories of sensitive personal information beyond what is necessary to schedule an appointment;
• impersonate another business or person, or instruct the receptionist to claim it is a human;
• violate any applicable law, including the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the CAN-SPAM Act, state call-recording laws, or consumer protection laws in your customers' states;
• attempt to reverse-engineer, scrape, or overwhelm the service.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these rules. For material or repeated violations we may do so without notice.

4. Your customers' data

Information about your customers that flows through PorchBell (phone numbers, names, transcripts, recordings, appointment notes) belongs to your business. We process it on your behalf to provide the service, as described in our Privacy Policy.

You are the data controller for your customers' information. You are responsible for telling your customers what data you collect and how you use it. We help with this by enforcing the call-recording disclosure on every greeting and by providing a Call Recording Disclosure page you can link your customers to.

5. Phone numbers, SMS, and call recording

PorchBell uses Twilio to provision phone numbers and to send and receive SMS. Numbers we provision on your behalf are leased to you for as long as your subscription is active. If you cancel, the number is released and may be reassigned to another Twilio customer.

All calls answered by the receptionist are recorded. Your greeting must include a recording disclosure (the dashboard will not let you save a greeting without one). Sending automated marketing SMS through PorchBell to U.S. recipients requires you to register an A2P 10DLC brand and campaign through Twilio. We will guide you through this when SMS broadcasting becomes available.

6. Service availability and limitations

PorchBell is currently in beta. We provide the service on a commercially reasonable best-effort basis but do not yet offer a formal uptime SLA or service credits. We rely on third-party services including Twilio, Vapi, OpenAI or Anthropic, Supabase, and Resend. Outages or changes in those services may affect PorchBell.

The receptionist is not a substitute for a human in true emergencies. If you operate in a category where a missed call could endanger life or property (medical, security, urgent home repair), you must configure the assistant to transfer those calls to a human and you must keep that human reachable.

7. Fees, billing, and cancellation

Subscription fees are billed monthly in advance and any usage charges (such as per-minute call costs) are billed in arrears. We will notify you by email at least 30 days before any change to list pricing for an existing plan. You can cancel at any time from the dashboard or by emailing hello@porchbell.com. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. Fees already paid are not refundable except where required by law.

8. Intellectual property

PorchBell, the PorchBell name, the brass-and-cream visual identity, and the software powering the service belong to us. You keep all rights to your customer data and to the configuration you create in the dashboard (your services list, FAQs, rules, persona inputs). You grant us a non-exclusive license to use that configuration to operate the service for you.

9. Confidentiality

We treat your business information and your customers' data as confidential. We do not sell it, we do not use it to train large language models for third parties, and we only share it with the subprocessors listed in our Privacy Policy or when required by law.

10. Disclaimer and limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the service is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose.

11. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to conflict of laws principles. Any dispute that cannot be resolved through good-faith discussion will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Brevard County, Florida, and you and PorchBell consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. If we make a material change we will notify you by email and update the "last updated" date at the top of this page. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the updated terms.