Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are a contract between you and Bethlehem Valley Farm LLC (“HeatCheck”, “we”, “us”, “our”). They cover your use of the HeatCheck website at https://www.heatcheck.io/, the host dashboard, public show pages, stream overlays, and everything else we provide under the HeatCheck name (together, the “Service”).

By creating an account, subscribing to a paid plan, or using the Service in any other way — including voting on a show page without an account — you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

Two other documents form part of this agreement and are incorporated by reference: our Acceptable Use Policy, which sets out what you may not do with the Service, and our Privacy Policy, which explains what we do with personal information. Where these Terms and the Acceptable Use Policy conflict, these Terms govern.

HeatCheck is a real-time audience feedback tool for live shows, streams, podcasts, lectures and similar broadcasts. A host runs a show; their audience opens a public page — usually from a QR code on screen — and rates how interesting the current segment is while it is happening. The host watches that score move during the show.

Depending on the plan, the Service also provides live polls, segment planning and show notes, listener-submitted segment ideas, a check-in feature called roll call, sponsor placements, custom branding, browser-source overlays for streaming software, embedded live video and chat, and post-show analytics. Which of these your plan includes is set out on the pricing page.

Voting requires no account. A member of your audience can rate a segment without signing up for anything. An account is required only for the features that carry a name between shows — roll call and listener suggestions — and for hosting a show of your own.

There are two kinds of account, and the difference matters for what you are responsible for.

Host accounts

A host account has a username, which becomes the address of your public show page. You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, for keeping your credentials secure, and for the accuracy of the information you give us. Tell us promptly at support@heatcheck.io if you believe someone else has access to your account.

Listener accounts

A listener account exists so that roll call standings, badges and submitted ideas can follow the same person between shows. It gives no access to any host’s dashboard or to any data beyond that listener’s own participation.

Usernames

Usernames are allocated first come, first served, and we do not reserve them for anyone. We may reclaim a username that impersonates a person or organisation, infringes a trade mark, or is chosen primarily to sell or to prevent someone else from using it.

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service, and at least 16 if you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use the Service only with the involvement of a parent or guardian who agrees to these Terms.

To create a host account or buy a paid plan you must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract. If you accept these Terms on behalf of a company or other organisation, you confirm that you have the authority to bind it, and “you” means that organisation.

The Service is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us personal information, write to us and we will delete it.

HeatCheck is offered on a free plan and on paid plans. What each plan includes, and the price of each, is shown on the pricing page and again on the checkout screen before you pay. Prices are stated there rather than here on purpose: the page reads them from our payment processor, which is the same source that charges your card, so the two cannot disagree.

Subscriptions renew automatically

Paid plans are sold as monthly or annual subscriptions. Unless you cancel first, your subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period, and we charge the payment method on file at the then-current price for your plan and interval. Your billing period, renewal date and interval are shown in your account.

Free trials

Where we offer a free trial, its length is shown at checkout. We collect a payment method when the trial starts, and unless you cancel before the trial ends, the subscription begins and the first charge is taken automatically. Trials are for new subscribers, one per customer, and we may withdraw or shorten a trial offer at any time before you start one.

Taxes, currency and payment failures

• Prices exclude sales tax, VAT and similar taxes unless stated otherwise. Where we are required to collect them, they are added at checkout.
• You are responsible for any bank, card or currency-conversion fees your provider charges.
• If a payment fails, we may retry it, and we may downgrade your account to the free plan until payment succeeds. Paid features stop working at that point; your shows, segments and standings are not deleted.

Price changes

We may change our prices. A change to the price of a plan you are already on takes effect at your next renewal, and we will tell you by email at least 30 days beforehand. If you do not want to pay the new price, cancel before that renewal.

You can cancel a paid plan at any time from your account settings. Cancellation stops the next renewal; it does not end the period you have already paid for. You keep your paid features until the end of that period, and then move to the free plan.

Payments are otherwise non-refundable, including for partial billing periods and for periods in which you did not run a show. We are not obliged to give a refund or credit, and cancelling does not entitle you to one for the current period.

That is the rule, not the whole of how we behave. If something on our side went materially wrong — an outage during your show, a charge you did not expect, a plan that did not do what this site says it does — write to support@heatcheck.io within 30 days of the charge and tell us what happened. We would rather fix it.

Nothing in this section limits a refund right you have under the consumer law where you live, which applies regardless of what this document says.

“Your Content” means everything you put into the Service: your show names, segments and show notes, poll questions and options, sponsor creative and links, your logo, brand colors, channel details, and anything else you upload or type.

Your Content is yours. We claim no ownership of it. You do grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, display and adapt it — but only for the purpose of operating, securing and improving the Service for you, and only for as long as we need to. Adapting means the technical kind: resizing an image, rendering your brand colors into an overlay, caching a page. It is not permission to use your material to advertise HeatCheck.

If we ever want to feature your show, your logo or your numbers in our own marketing, we will ask you first.

You are responsible for Your Content, and you confirm that:

• you own it or have the rights you need to put it into the Service and let us do the things described above;
• it does not infringe anyone’s copyright, trade mark, privacy, publicity or other rights;
• it does not break the Acceptable Use Policy or any law that applies to you.

We do not routinely review Your Content, but we may remove anything that we reasonably believe breaks these Terms, and we may do so without notice where the risk is immediate.

Your audience can contribute to your show: ratings, poll responses, segment ideas submitted through listener suggestions, upvotes, and roll-call check-ins. Some of it is anonymous and some of it carries a listener’s display name.

Anyone who contributes grants you and us the licence needed to display their contribution on your show page, your overlays, your dashboard and your analytics. We may also use ratings, poll responses, check-ins and similar signals in aggregated, de-identified form to operate and improve the Service — for example, to tune how scores are calculated. Aggregated data of that kind is not personal information and is not attributable to any individual.

We are not a party to whatever arrangement you have with your audience. If you promise your listeners something about their data that goes beyond what our Privacy Policy says, that promise is yours to keep.

Paid plans let you run sponsor placements on your show page and overlays. Those placements are your advertising, not ours. You are responsible for:

• having the rights to the creative you upload and the marks it shows;
• the accuracy of every claim in it, and for any regulated category it falls into;
• disclosing the commercial relationship to your audience where the law requires it — in the United States that is the FTC’s endorsement guidance, and equivalent rules apply elsewhere;
• the destination of any link you attach. Links must use HTTPS; the Service will refuse anything else.

We report click counts to you as a convenience. They are our best measurement, not an audited figure, and we do not warrant their accuracy for the purpose of billing a sponsor.

We may remove a placement that breaks these Terms, the Acceptable Use Policy or the law.

Your use of the Service is subject to the Acceptable Use Policy, which forms part of these Terms. In short: do not use HeatCheck to break the law, to harm or harass people, to manipulate the results it reports, or to attack the Service itself.

You also agree not to resell, sublicense or provide the Service to third parties as a service of your own, to reverse engineer it except where that right cannot lawfully be excluded, or to access it by any automated means other than the interfaces we provide.

The Service works with things we do not control. Live video and chat are embedded from YouTube. Payments are handled by Stripe. Signing in with Google is Google’s flow. Your streaming software — OBS, Streamlabs, Streamyard — is your own.

Your use of any of those is governed by that provider’s terms, not ours. We are not responsible for their availability, their content policies, or a change they make that affects how a HeatCheck feature behaves. If an embed stops working because a platform changed its rules, we will do what we reasonably can, but we cannot promise a fix.

We work hard to keep HeatCheck up, particularly while shows are live, but we do not offer a service level agreement and the Service is provided on an “as available” basis. It may be unavailable for maintenance, for a problem at a provider we depend on, or for a reason outside our control.

We may change, add or remove features. If we remove or materially reduce a feature your paid plan depends on, we will give you reasonable notice by email, and you may cancel and ask for a pro-rata refund of the unused part of the period you have paid for. That is the one refund we commit to in advance.

Some parts of the Service are ephemeral by design — live votes, presence and in-show suggestion state are held in short-lived storage and are not a record you can retrieve later. What is kept, and for how long, is set out in the Privacy Policy. Keep your own copy of anything you need to keep.

The Service — its software, design, the HeatCheck name and logo, the guide and every page on this site — belongs to us or our licensors and is protected by intellectual property law. These Terms give you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service in the way it is meant to be used, for as long as you comply with them. Nothing else is granted.

You may not use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse you or your show, beyond saying accurately that you use HeatCheck.

If you send us an idea, a bug report or a suggestion, we may use it without restriction and without owing you anything for it. We are not asking you to send confidential information, and you should not treat anything you send as confidential. This does not give us any rights in Your Content.

You can stop using the Service at any time, and you can delete your account by writing to support@heatcheck.io.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you materially break these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, if we are required to by law, or if your use puts the Service or other users at risk. Except where the problem is urgent, illegal, or repeated, we will tell you what the problem is and give you a fair chance to fix it first.

If we terminate your account without cause, we will refund the unused portion of any period you have paid for. If we terminate it because you broke these Terms, we will not.

After termination we may delete your data. Sections that by their nature should survive — your content licence as it applies to material already published, ownership, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnity, and governing law — survive termination.

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement, and any warranty arising from a course of dealing or trade usage.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, that any defect will be corrected, or that the scores, counts and analytics it reports are accurate, complete or fit for any decision you make on them. HeatCheck measures what its audience chose to tell it; it is a signal, not a survey, and it should not be relied on as a measurement instrument for anything that matters financially or legally.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither we nor our suppliers will be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost goodwill, lost audience, or the cost of a substitute service — whether or not we were told such damages were possible.

Our total liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service, in aggregate, will not exceed the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred US dollars.

These limits apply to every theory of liability — contract, tort, negligence, strict liability or otherwise — and apply even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose. They do not apply to liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold us harmless from any claim, demand, loss or expense (including reasonable legal fees) brought by a third party and arising out of Your Content, your sponsor placements, your use of the Service, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of any law or third-party right. We will tell you promptly about any such claim, let you control the defence with counsel of your choice, and cooperate reasonably — and you will not settle anything that imposes an obligation on us without our consent.

We may update these Terms. When we do, we change the “Last updated” date at the top of this page, and the version you are reading is the one in force.

For a material change — one that meaningfully reduces your rights or increases your obligations — we will give you at least 30 days’ notice by email to the address on your account, or by a notice in the product, and the “Effective” date at the top of this page will be the day the new version starts binding you. Continuing to use the Service after that date means you accept the new version. If you do not accept it, cancel before it takes effect and write to us for a pro-rata refund of the unused part of your current period.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Arkansas, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

Talk to us first

Most problems are a misunderstanding, and a lawsuit is a slow way to discover that. Before starting a formal proceeding, please write to support@heatcheck.io describing the problem and what you want. We will do the same if the complaint is ours. Both of us agree to try in good faith to resolve it informally for 30 days from that notice.

If that does not work

Any dispute that is not resolved informally will be brought exclusively in the state and federal courts located in Arkansas, and both of us consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of the country where you live, or of the right to bring proceedings in your local courts where that right cannot be excluded.

• Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Acceptable Use Policy and the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between us about the Service and replace anything said before.
• Severability. If a provision is found unenforceable, it is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, we have not waived it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, on notice to you.
• Notices. We give notice by email to the address on your account or by posting in the product; you give notice by email to support@heatcheck.io.
• Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our reasonable control.
• No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms give rights to you and to us, and to nobody else.
• Independent parties. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, employment or agency relationship.

Questions about these Terms go to support@heatcheck.io. Please put “Terms” in the subject line so it reaches the right place.

The contracting entity is Bethlehem Valley Farm LLC, a limited liability company organised under the laws of the State of Arkansas.