Terms of Service

These terms are between Openline and the business that opens an account. Whoever signs up confirms that they are allowed to accept these terms on that business's behalf, and that everyone they invite into the account will follow them too.

The registered legal entity operating Openline, and the address for formal notices, will be named here before these terms are final.

Openline is an automated receptionist for a business's inbound phone calls, together with the schedule it books against, the customer records it builds, and a dashboard to run both. Text answering is a separate paid add-on. We provide software on a subscription. We do not promise a particular result on any particular call.

Sign-in runs through our authentication provider. You are responsible for who you invite into your account, the roles you give them, and everything done through it. Keep your team list current, remove people who leave, and tell us promptly if you think an account has been compromised.

• Keeping your hours, services, prices, staff, and published knowledge accurate. The receptionist speaks from what you give it, so a quote or an offered time is yours, not ours.
• Only connecting a phone number you are entitled to use, and keeping your forwarding configuration correct.
• Complying with the law that applies to your phone line, including call recording and disclosure rules, telemarketing and do-not-call rules, consumer protection rules, and anything specific to your industry.
• Telling your callers what they need to know about how the line is answered, using the greeting and disclosure controls we give you.
• Not putting the receptionist in a position where it is expected to give medical, legal, or financial advice, or to take payment card details over the phone.

You may not use Openline to:

• break the law, or help anyone else break it;
• harass, threaten, defraud, deceive, or abuse anyone, or operate a line whose purpose is any of those things;
• place unsolicited outbound marketing or sales calls or texts. Openline exists to answer the calls that come to you. The only outbound message it sends is a short appointment confirmation to a caller who agreed on the call to receive it;
• impersonate another business or another person;
• resell, sublicense, or white label the receptionist without a written agreement with us;
• reach or attempt to reach data belonging to another business, probe our tenancy boundaries, or interfere with the service or its providers;
• scrape, overload, or automate against the service in a way that degrades it for anyone else.

We can suspend an account that breaks these rules, and we will suspend one that puts callers, our providers, or the phone network at risk.

Openline is software. It does not connect to 911, 988, or any other emergency, medical, or crisis line. It cannot dispatch help, it cannot locate a caller, and it may not recognize an emergency for what it is.

Do not use Openline as a medical, safety, or crisis line, and do not tell your callers that it can be used as one. Anyone in danger should hang up and call emergency services. If urgent calls reach your business, configure a transfer number so the receptionist can hand those calls to a person.

We can provision a local United States or Canadian number for you through our telephony provider, or you can forward a number you already have. Numbers we provision are assigned for use with the service while your account is active, and are released when the account ends or when access has been blocked long enough for us to reclaim them. We do not guarantee a specific number or area code. If a number matters to your business long term, keep one you own and forward it to Openline.

Openline is a monthly subscription billed per business through Stripe. Checkout and the billing portal are Stripe's, and we never receive your card details. Prices are in United States dollars and exclude tax, which Stripe calculates and adds where it is due.

Your subscription renews each month until it is canceled. Cancel from the billing portal at any time: cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, the service keeps running until then, and it does not renew. We do not refund partial months. If a free trial is offered when you sign up, it converts into a paid subscription when it ends unless you cancel first.

Service starts once your first invoice is paid. If a payment fails, is refunded in full, or is disputed, call answering and number provisioning stop while the dashboard and billing portal stay open, so you can read your history and fix the payment.

Each plan includes a fixed allowance of reception minutes per billing period: 900 minutes on Starter, and 2,000 minutes on Pro. Minutes count connected call time. At the start of a call we reserve the time we expect it to take, and we reconcile that reservation against the real duration when the call ends.

Allowances reset at the start of each billing period and do not roll over. When the allowance for a period is used up, the receptionist stops answering for the rest of that period and no new numbers can be provisioned. Your dashboard, your call history, your customer records, and your billing portal all stay available. Move to a larger plan or wait for the next period to start answering again.

We do not bill you for overage unless overage is switched on for your account. If we ever offer it, the rate will be shown to you before you can incur it.

We can suspend or limit the service for non-payment, a refund or chargeback, a breach of the acceptable use section, a security risk, or a legal requirement. Where the reason is billing, we block call answering and number provisioning and leave your records and billing portal reachable. Where the reason is abuse or an active risk to others, we may suspend the account outright and tell you why.

Your business's data is yours: your profile and configuration, your customers, your appointments, and your calls with their transcripts, summaries, and recordings. You give us the permission we need to host, process, and display that data in order to run the service for you, and to pass it to the providers described in our privacy policy for the same purpose.

You are responsible for having the right to give us the caller information your phone line produces, which includes meeting the recording and disclosure obligations described in the responsibilities section. Our privacy policy explains what is processed, by whom, and for how long.

The receptionist can mishear a name, misjudge what a caller wants, or confidently repeat something out of date that you published to it. The availability, prices, and policies it states come from your own configuration. Review your call history, keep your configuration current, and do not treat Openline as the sole record of a commitment to a customer where a mistake would be expensive.

We aim to keep Openline answering around the clock, and we do not offer a formal uptime commitment at launch. The service depends on our voice, telephony, authentication, payment, and hosting providers, and on the phone network itself. Outages, maintenance, and provider failures can interrupt call answering. Keep a fallback for your line, such as forwarding to a person, for the times when it matters most.

Openline, its software, its receptionist prompts, this site, and the Openline name and marks belong to us. While your subscription is current, you have a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service for your own business. Nothing here transfers ownership of anything of ours to you. If you send us feedback or suggestions, we can use them without owing you anything.

You can cancel at any time from the billing portal, and the service runs to the end of the period you have paid for. We can end an account for a breach of these terms, for non-payment, or if we stop offering the service, and we will give reasonable notice unless the reason makes notice unsafe or impossible. When an account ends we stop answering calls and release any numbers we provisioned for it. Export whatever you need before your access ends, and tell us if you want the rest deleted.

The service is provided as is and as available. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error free, or that the receptionist will be correct on any particular call.

To the fullest extent the law allows, Openline is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost business, missed or mishandled bookings, lost data, or damage to reputation, even if we were told such losses were possible.

Our total liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us for the service in the twelve months before the event that gave rise to the claim.

Some jurisdictions do not allow some of these exclusions or limits. Where that is the case, they apply only as far as the law allows, and nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

You will defend and indemnify Openline against claims, damages, and costs arising from your use of the service, from what you publish to the receptionist, from the calls made to your line and what your callers say, and from your compliance or non-compliance with recording, disclosure, and telemarketing law where you operate.

We can change the service and these terms. Material changes get notice to account owners by email or in the dashboard before they take effect, and the date at the top of this page changes with them. Continuing to use Openline after a change means you accept the updated terms. Price changes apply from your next billing period.

The governing law, the venue for disputes, and any arbitration or class action terms will be set out here before these terms are final. Until then, nothing in this draft waives a right either side has under applicable law.

Questions about these terms, your subscription, or your account: support@optimalapps.ca.