Terms of service

These terms cover your use of Ascue: the website, the dashboard, the free checker, the WordPress plugin and the API. By creating an account or using Ascue, you agree to them. How we handle personal data is in the privacy policy.

The short version

• Ascue sorts your contact form messages. It will sometimes get one wrong, so it never deletes anything and delivers when it isn't sure.
• Paid plans renew automatically. Cancel any time and your plan runs to the end of the period you paid for.
• Your messages stay yours. You let us process them to run the service.
• Don't use Ascue for spam, anything unlawful, or poking at other customers' data.
• Our liability is limited to what you paid us in the 12 months before a claim.

What Ascue does

Ascue sorts contact form messages for business owners into four labels: Lead, Pitch, Spam and Ask me. You send messages in by pointing your form's notification email at a private Ascue address, through the WordPress plugin, or through the REST API. Ascue then delivers the messages that matter to your inbox and holds back confident spam and pitches, according to your settings.

Your account

• You sign in with a password, or with a one-time link we email you. Keep your password to yourself, and keep your email account secure: a sign-in link or a password reset sent there opens your Ascue account.
• You're responsible for what happens under your account, including the sites and site keys you set up.
• Use an email address you actually read. Sign-in links and notices about your account go there.

Plans and checks

• Free: $0, 1 site, 50 checks a month.
• Solo: $9 a month, 1 site, 2,000 checks a month.
• Pro: $29 a month, 5 sites, 10,000 checks a month.
• Agency: $79 a month, unlimited sites, 50,000 checks a month.

Paying yearly costs 10 months' price, so 2 months are free. See pricing for the details.

A check is one message Ascue sorts for you, from any source: forwarded email, the plugin or the API. Using the free checker doesn't count.

If you go over your monthly checks, nothing is dropped. Messages are still delivered to you, unsorted, until your checks reset for the new month or you upgrade.

Billing, renewals and cancelling

• Payments are handled by Stripe.
• Paid plans renew automatically, each month or each year depending on what you chose, until you cancel.
• Cancel any time in the billing portal, which you reach from your dashboard. Your plan keeps running until the end of the period you paid for, then your account moves to the Free plan.

The $9 pre-order

If you placed the refundable $9 pre-order, you can get it refunded on request at any time until launch. Email support@ascue.dev.

Using Ascue fairly

Please don't:

• send Ascue messages you aren't allowed to process, such as messages from forms that aren't yours or your client's;
• use Ascue to send spam, or for anything unlawful;
• try to get at other customers' data;
• overload the service, or try to;
• get around the free checker's limits, for example by scripting it or spreading requests across many IP addresses.

We may suspend accounts that abuse the service. If we do, we'll tell you why.

Your content

The messages you send through Ascue and the settings you enter stay yours. You give us permission to store and process them to run the service: to sort and deliver messages, show them in your dashboard, and learn from your corrections, as the privacy policy describes. That includes using the scores, labels, corrections and text fingerprints from your messages to improve sorting for all customers, without showing your messages to anyone else.

If you turn on "Help improve Ascue", you also let us keep message text, with personal details removed, and use it to test and improve Ascue. You can turn it off any time.

You're responsible for having the right to send us the messages you do, including telling the people who fill in your forms how their messages are handled, where the law requires it.

What Ascue promises, and what it doesn't

Ascue will sometimes label a message wrongly. That's expected, and the product is built around it:

• It never deletes anything.
• When it isn't sure, it delivers the message to you marked Ask me, unless you've chosen to hold those.
• It holds messages for 30 days, so you can release any it got wrong.
• It shows how confident it was about each label.

So check your Ask me messages and your held messages from time to time. A missed lead is the mistake we work hardest to avoid, and you're the best judge of what a lead is for your business.

If Ascue is down or slow, messages are delivered to you unsorted rather than held. That's failing open: you might get some spam for a while, but the real messages still reach you.

What we don't promise: perfect sorting, or a service that's never interrupted. Ascue isn't responsible for business lost because a message was mislabeled.

Limit of liability

This is the standard part, in plain words. As far as the law allows, if something goes wrong and Ascue is responsible, the most we'll owe you is what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.

Leaving

You can delete sites and stop using Ascue any time. Before you delete a site that uses email forwarding, point your form's notification email back at your own inbox: once the site is deleted, its Ascue address stops accepting mail. To close your account entirely, use Delete account on the Account page: it deletes the account with all its sites, messages, decisions and corrections, and you can download your data there first. A paid plan has to be cancelled in the billing portal before the account can be deleted.

Changes to these terms

When we change these terms, we'll update the date at the top. If a change is material, we'll give you notice by email.

Contact

Questions about these terms: support@ascue.dev.