Privacy policy

The privacy of your data — and it is your data, not ours! — is important to us. In this policy, we lay out: what data we collect and why; how your data is handled; and your rights to your data. We promise we never sell your data: never have, never will.

This policy applies to all products and services built, offered, and maintained by Sherafy.com at https://sherafy.com. 

Within all policies, terms, and agreements of Sherafy.com listed at https://sherafy.com, the terms “product”, “service”, “products”, and “services” may be used interchangeably, and all such policies, terms, and agreements are to apply to any and all of our products and services.

What we collect and why

Our guiding principle is to collect only what we need. Here is what that means in practice:

Identity & access

When you sign up for a Sherafy.com product, we typically ask for identifying information such as your name, email address, and maybe a company name. That is just so you can personalize your new account, and we can send you invoices, updates, or other essential information. We sometimes also give you the option to add a profile picture that displays in our products, but we do not normally look at or access that picture. We will never sell your personal info to third parties, and we will not use your name or company in marketing statements without your permission either.

Billing information

When you pay for a Sherafy.com product, we ask for your credit card and billing address. That is so we can charge you for service, calculate taxes due, and send you invoices. Your credit card is passed directly to our payment processor and does not ever go through our servers. We store a record of the payment transaction, including the last 4 digits of the credit card number and as-of billing address, for account history, invoicing, and billing support. We store your billing address to calculate any sales tax, VAT, or the equivalent due in the United States, to detect fraudulent credit card transactions, and to print on your invoices.

Geolocation data

We log all access to all accounts by full IP address so that we can always verify no unauthorized access has happened. We keep this login data for as long as your product account is active.

We also log full IP addresses used to sign up a product account. We keep this record forever because they are used to mitigate spammy signups.

Web analytics data — described further in the Website Interactions section — are also tied temporarily to IP addresses to assist with troubleshooting cases. We blind all web analytics data after 30 days.

Website interactions

When you browse our marketing pages or applications, your browser automatically shares certain information such as which operating system and browser version you are using. We track that information, along with the pages you are visiting, page load timing, and which website referred you for statistical purposes like conversion rates and to test new designs. We sometimes track specific link clicks to help inform some design decisions. These web analytics data are tied to your IP address and user account if applicable and you are signed into our Services. We blind all of these individual identifiers after 30 days.

Historically — including within the last 12 months — we have used third-party web analytics software. 

Cookies and Do Not Track

We do use persistent first-party cookies to store certain preferences, make it easier for you to use our applications, and support some in-house analytics. A cookie is a piece of text stored by your browser to help it remember your login information, site preferences, and more. You can adjust cookie retention settings in your own browser. To learn more about cookies, including how to view which cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, please visit: www.allaboutcookies.org.

At this time, our sites and applications do not respond to Do Not Track beacons sent by browser plugins.

Log Files

Sherafy.com follows a standard procedure of using log files. These files log visitors when they visit websites. All hosting companies do this and a part of hosting services’ analytics. The information collected by log files include internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, Internet Service Provider (ISP), date and time stamp, referring/exit pages, and possibly the number of clicks. These are not linked to any information that is personally identifiable. The purpose of the information is for analyzing trends, administering the site, tracking users’ movement on the website, and gathering demographic information.

Google Cookies

Google is one of a third-party vendor on our site. It also uses cookies, known as DART cookies, to serve ads to our site visitors based upon their visit to other sites on the internet. However, visitors may choose to decline the use of these cookies by visiting the Google ad and content network Privacy Policy at the following URL – https://policies.google.com/technologies/ads

Advertising Partners

Some of advertisers on our site may use cookies and web beacons. Our advertising partners are listed below. Each of our advertising partners has their own Privacy Policy for their policies on user data. For easier access, we hyperlinked to their Privacy Policies below.

• Google

Third Party Privacy Policies

Sherafy.com’s Privacy Policy does not apply to other advertisers or websites. Thus, we are advising you to consult the respective Privacy Policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information. It may include their practices and instructions about how to opt-out of certain options.

You can choose to disable cookies through your individual browser options. To know more detailed information about cookie management with specific web browsers, it can be found at the browsers’ respective websites.

Children’s Information

Another part of our priority is adding protection for children while using the internet. We encourage parents and guardians to observe, participate in, and/or monitor and guide their online activity.

Sherafy.com does not knowingly collect any Personal Identifiable Information from children under the age of 13. If you think that your child provided this kind of information on our website, we strongly encourage you to contact us immediately and we will do our best efforts to promptly remove such information from our records.

Online Privacy Policy Only

Our Privacy Policy applies only to our online activities at https://sherafy.com and is valid for visitors to our website with regards to the information that they shared and/or collect in Sherafy.com. This policy is not applicable to any information collected offline or via channels other than this website.

Consent

By using our website, you hereby consent to our Privacy Policy and agree to its terms.

Voluntary correspondence

When you write Sherafy.com with a question or to ask for help, we keep that correspondence, including the email address, so that we have a history of past correspondences to reference if you reach out in the future.

We also store any information you volunteer like surveys. Sometimes when we do customer interviews, we may ask for your permission to record the conversation for future reference or use. We only do so if you give your express consent.

Information we do not collect

We do not collect any characteristics of protected classifications including age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. You may provide these data voluntarily, such as if you include a pronoun preference in your email signature when writing into our Support team.

We also do not collect any biometric data. You are given the option to add a picture to your user profile, which could be a real picture of you or a picture of something else that represents you best. We do not extract any information from profile pictures: they are for your use alone.

When we access or share your information

Our default practice is to not access your information. The only times we will ever access or share your info are:

• To provide products or services you’ve requested. We do use some third-party services to run our applications and only to the extent necessary process some or all of your personal information via these third parties. Having subprocessors means we are using technology to access your data. No Sherafy.com human looks at your data for these purposes.
• To help you troubleshoot or squash a software bug, with your permission. If at any point we need to access your account to help you with a Support case, we will ask for your consent before proceeding.
• To investigate, prevent, or take action regarding restricted uses. Accessing a customer’s account when investigating potential abuse is a measure of last resort. We have an obligation to protect the privacy and safety of both our customers and the people reporting issues to us. We do our best to balance those responsibilities throughout the process. If we do discover you are using our products for a restricted purpose, we will report the incident to the appropriate authorities.
• When required under applicable law. If the appropriate law enforcement authorities have the necessary warrant, criminal subpoena, or court order requiring we share data, we have to comply. Otherwise, we flat-out reject requests from local and federal law enforcement when they seek data. And unless we are legally prevented from it, we will always inform you when such requests are made. We have never received a National Security Letter or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) order.

If Sherafy.com is acquired by or merged with another company — we don’t plan on that, but if it happens — we’ll notify you well before any info about you is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

Location of Site and Data

Our products and other web properties are operated in the United States. If you are located in the European Union or elsewhere outside of the United States, please be aware that any information you provide to us will be transferred to the United States. By using our Site, participating in any of our services and/or providing us with your information, you consent to this transfer.

Your Rights with Respect to Your Information

At Sherafy.com, we apply the same data rights to all customers, regardless of their location. Currently some of the most privacy-forward regulations in place are the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) in the US. Sherafy.com recognizes all of the rights granted in these regulations, except as limited by applicable law. These rights include:

• Right to Know. You have the right to know what personal information is collected, used, shared or sold. We outline both the categories and specific bits of data we collect, as well as how they are used, in this privacy policy, generated here.
• Right of Access. This includes your right to access the personal information we gather about you, and your right to obtain information about the sharing, storage, security and processing of that information.
• Right to Correction. You have the right to request correction of your personal information.
• Right to Erasure / “To be Forgotten”. This is your right to request, subject to certain limitations under applicable law, that your personal information be erased from our possession and, by extension, all of our service providers. Fulfillment of some data deletion requests may prevent you from using Sherafy.com services because our applications may then no longer work. In such cases, a data deletion request may result in closing your account.
• Right to Complain. You have the right to make a complaint regarding our handling of your personal information with the appropriate supervisory authority. To identify your specific authority or find out more about this right, EU individuals should go to https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/board/members_en.
• Right to Restrict Processing. This is your right to request restriction of how and why your personal information is used or processed, including opting out of sale of personal information. (Again: we never have and never will sell your personal data).
• Right to Object. You have the right, in certain situations, to object to how or why your personal information is processed.
• Right to Portability. You have the right to receive the personal information we have about you and the right to transmit it to another party.
• Right to not be subject to Automated Decision-Making. You have the right to object and prevent any decision that could have a legal, or similarly significant, effect on you from being made solely based on automated processes. This right is limited, however, if the decision is necessary for performance of any contract between you and us, is allowed by applicable law, or is based on your explicit consent.
• Right to Non-Discrimination. This right stems from the CCPA. We do and will not charge you a different amount to use our products, offer you different discounts, or give you a lower level of customer service because you have exercised your data privacy rights. However, the exercise of certain rights (such as the right “to be forgotten”) may, by virtue of your exercising those rights, prevent you from using our Services.

Many of these rights can be exercised by signing in and directly updating your account information. If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us here. To identify your specific authority to file a complaint or find out more about GDPR, EU individuals should go to https://edpb.europa.eu/about-edpb/board/members_en.

How we secure your data

All data is encrypted via SSL/TLS when transmitted from our servers to your browser. The database backups are also encrypted. Most data are not encrypted while they live in our database (since it needs to be ready to send to you when you need it), but we go to great lengths to secure your data at rest.

When you delete data in your product accounts

In many of our applications, we give you the option to trash data. Anything you trash on your product accounts while they are active will be kept in an accessible trash can for up to 30 days (it varies a little by product). After that, the trashed data are no longer accessible via the application and are deleted from our active servers within the next 30 days. We also have some backups of our application databases, which are kept for up to another 30 days. In total, when you trash things in our applications, they are purged within 90 days from all our systems and logs. Retrieving data for a single account from a backup is cost-prohibitive and unduly burdensome so if you change your mind you’ll need to do so before your data are deleted from our active servers.

We also delete your data after an account is cancelled. In this case, there is no period of data being kept in an accessible trash can, so your data are purged within 60 days. This applies both for cases when an account owner directly cancels and for auto-cancelled accounts.

EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield policy

The GDPR requires that data transfer out of the EU must only happen to countries deemed as having adequate data protection laws. The United States generally doesn’t meet that requirement. Privacy Shield is an agreement between certain European jurisdictions and the United States that allows for the transfer of personal data from the EU to the US. Participation in the Privacy Shield program is voluntary.

Sherafy.com complies with the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework and the Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework as set forth by the U.S. Department of Commerce regarding the collection, use, and retention of personal information transferred from the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland to the United States, respectively. We have certified to the Department of Commerce that we adhere to the Privacy Shield Principles. If there is any conflict between the terms in this privacy policy and the Privacy Shield Principles, the Privacy Shield Principles take precedent. To learn more about the Privacy Shield program, and to view our certification, please visit https://www.privacyshield.gov/.

Sherafy.com is subject to the investigatory and enforcement powers of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with regard to the Privacy Shield Frameworks.

The Privacy Shield Frameworks uphold specific principles, many of which are already outlined in the section on Your Rights. For clarity, pursuant to the Privacy Shield Frameworks, the following principles apply to all EU, UK, and Swiss data that has been transferred into the United States:

• Individuals have the right to access their personal data and to update, correct, and/or amend information that is incomplete. Individuals also have the right to request erasure of personal information that has been processed in violation of the principles. Individuals wishing to exercise these rights may do so by signing in and directly updating your account information. If you have questions about exercising these rights or need assistance, please contact us here.
• We remain liable for the onward transfer of personal data to third parties acting as our agents unless we can prove we were not a party to the events giving rise to the damages.
• We do not sell personal data, nor do we permit it to be used for reasons other than those for which it was originally provided. If this practice should change in the future, we will update this policy accordingly and provide individuals with opt-out or opt-in choice as appropriate.
• We may be required to release personal data in response to lawful requests from public authorities including to meet national security and law enforcement requirements.

We commit to resolving all complaints

In compliance with the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Principles, we commit to resolve complaints about your privacy and our collection or use of your personal information. European Union, United Kingdom, or Swiss individuals with inquiries or complaints regarding this privacy policy should first contact Sherafgan Khan at Sherafy.com here.

Sherafy.com (the company) has further committed to refer unresolved privacy complaints under the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Principles to an independent dispute resolution mechanism, the BBB EU PRIVACY SHIELD, operated by BBB National Programs. If you do not receive timely acknowledgment of your complaint, or if your complaint is not satisfactorily addressed, please visit https://bbbprograms.org/programs/bbb-privacy-shield/eu-dispute-resolution for more information and to file a complaint. This service is provided at no cost to you. Please do not submit GDPR complaints to BBB EU Privacy Shield.

If your Privacy Shield complaint cannot be resolved through these described channels, under certain conditions, you may invoke binding arbitration for some residual claims not resolved by other redress mechanisms. To learn more, please view the Privacy Shield Annex 1 at https://www.privacyshield.gov/article?id=ANNEX-I-introduction.

Changes & questions

We may update this policy as needed to comply with relevant regulations and reflect any new practices.

Have any questions, comments, or concerns about this privacy policy, your data, or your rights with respect to your information? Please get in touch by emailing us here. and we’ll be happy to answer them!

Privacy Regulation Reference

The data privacy regulatory landscape is undergoing a lot of change. You probably have heard about the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that went into effect on May 25, 2018. There are also other regulations in the works around the world. We have written up this reference document to put information about our compliance with privacy regulations in one place.

Are Sherafy.com products in compliance?

First things first, you should view our full Privacy policy.

• We are in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”). We participate in the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Framework to safeguard the transfer of personal data to the US.
• We are in the process of ensuring compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) and have expanded your rights in our privacy policy accordingly.
• We are also watching and preparing for other legislation in the US and in other countries.

We will update this document as we ensure compliance with other regulations.

We are not HIPAA-compliant and currently do not have plans to become so.

GDPR: data processing addendum

Increasingly, privacy regulations require processing of personal data be governed by a data processing addendum (DPA) that is compliant with those regulations.

We provide a standard Data Processing Addendum (DPA) that is GDPR-compliant to extend GDPR privacy principles, rights, and obligations everywhere personal data is processed. If you use our products to process any EU personal data, you need to enter into GDPR-compliant data processing agreements with any online services and third party vendors you rely on, including Sherafy.com.

Sherafy.com participates in the EU-US and Swiss-US Privacy Shield Framework to safeguard the transfer of personal data to the US, meeting the GDPR requirement for adequate data protection laws.

Subprocessors

Sherafy.com uses third party subprocessors, such as cloud computing providers and customer support software, to provide our services. We enter into GDPR-compliant data processing agreements with each subprocessor and require the same of them.

You can see which subprocessors we use by application by viewing the following linked lists:

Subprocessors

We use third party subprocessors, such as cloud computing providers and support software. We establish GDPR-compliant data processing agreements with each subprocessor, extending GDPR safeguards everywhere personal data is processed.

The following is a list of personal data subprocessors we use. These subprocessors are all located in the United States:

• Amazon Web Services. Cloud services provider.
• Google Cloud Platform. Cloud services provider.
• WordPress. CMS services provider.

CCPA: our role as a service provider

In the CCPA, there is an important distinction between what are referred to as “service providers”, “businesses”, and “third parties”. You can see how the regulation defines these words by visiting the California Attorney General’s website: https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa.

Under the CCPA, Sherafy.com is a “service provider.” That means when we process data you provide, we do so solely for the purpose you signed up for. Our business model is simple: we charge a recurring subscription fee to our customers. We do not sell personal information or use your data for any other commercial purposes unless with your explicit permission.

The CCPA also grants residents of California with additional rights related to their information. We grant those rights to all of our customers and detail them in our Privacy policy. Our Privacy policy also explains the information we collect in order to provide our services and clearly lists the only times we access or share your data.

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Terms of Service

From everyone at Sherafy.com, thank you for using our products! We build them to help you do your best work. There are millions of people using Sherafy.com products every day. Because we do not know every one of our customers personally, we have to put in place some Terms of Service to help keep the ship afloat.

When we say “Company”, “we”, “our”, or “us” in this document, we are referring to Sherafy.com. We spun off Highrise HQ, LLC in the past, but it has since rejoined Sherafy.com.

When we say “Services”, we mean any product created and maintained by Sherafy.com. That includes Sherafy.com (all versions), whether delivered within a web browser, desktop application, mobile application, or another format.

We may update these Terms of Service in the future. Typically, these changes have been to clarify some of these terms by linking to an expanded related policy.

When you use our Services, now or in the future, you are agreeing to the latest Terms of Service. That is true for any of our existing and future products and all features that we add to our Services over time. There may be times where we do not exercise or enforce any right or provision of the Terms of Service; in doing so, we are not waiving that right or provision. These terms do contain a limitation of our liability.

If you violate of any of the terms, we may terminate your account. That is a broad statement and it means you need to place a lot of trust in us. We do our best to deserve that trust by being open about who we are, how we work, and keeping an open door to your feedback.

Account Terms

1. You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account and password. The Company cannot and will not be liable for any loss or damage from your failure to comply with this security obligation. We recommend users set up strong passwords and two-factor authentication (if available) for added security. In some of our Services, we may require it.
2. You may not use the Services for any purpose outlined in our Use Restrictions policy.
3. You are responsible for all content posted and activity that occurs under your account. That includes content posted by others who either: (a) have access to your login credentials; or (b) have their own logins under your account.
4. You must be a human. Accounts registered by “bots” or other automated methods are not permitted.

Payment, Refunds, and Plan Changes

1. If you are using a free version of one of our Services, it is really free: we do not ask you for your credit card and — just like for customers who pay for our Services — we do not sell your data.
2. For paid Services that offer a free trial, we explain the length of trial when you sign up. After the trial period, you need to pay in advance to keep using the Service. If you do not pay, we will freeze your account and it will be inaccessible until you make payment. If your account has been frozen for a while, we will queue it up for auto-cancellation.
3. If you are upgrading from a free plan to a paid plan, we will charge your card immediately and your billing cycle starts on the day of upgrade. For other upgrades or downgrades in plan level, the new rate starts from the next billing cycle.
4. All fees are exclusive of all , levies, or duties imposed by taxing authorities. Where required, we will collect those taxes on behalf of the taxing authority and remit those taxes to taxing authorities. See our Taxes policy for more details. Otherwise, you are responsible for payment of all taxes, levies, or duties.
5. We process refunds according to our Fair Refund policy. This policy does not apply to service retainers.

Non-Payment of Invoices and Chargebacks

1. Some of our services are billed after completion. This is typically the case for custom projects such as VCF builds, AI builds, copywriting, templates, and any other service that requires a specification for work to be completed. Work under this category will typically be billed via an invoice from Stripe, one of our payment processors.
2. For any work billed via an invoice, you, as a client of sherafy.com, are given a 14-day grace period to settle any outstanding invoices sent electronically to you from us.
3. The 14-day grace period is provided both as a courtesy, and a means to establish an amicable relationship between sherafy.com and its clients. While we prefer all invoices be paid upon receipt, we understand this is not always possible and provide the grace period as such.
4. In the event payment for an outstanding invoice is not received by the date listed on the said invoice, we reserve the right to charge a 5% penalty on the original invoiced balance for every seven (7) day period following the due date listed on the invoice. E.g., If a $1,000 invoice is due on the 1st of the month and remains unpaid, the new balance becomes $1,050 on the 8th day—$ 1,100 on the 15th day, and so on.
5. If an invoice remains unpaid twenty-one (21) days following the due date listed, any and all work performed under that invoice can no longer be used by you and becomes the sole property of sherafy.com. At our discretion, we may then use this work internally, license it for commercial use, or offer it to the public via a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
6. Any Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), Non-Compete Agreements, and any other contracts signed by us as it pertains to your company and the products and services you offer are void and nullified if a period of twenty-one (21) days have passed in which we have not received payment for any outstanding balances listed on an invoice sent to you, based on the due date of the earliest unpaid invoice.
7. In the event of a credit card chargeback or similar functional mechanism in which you revert payment of previously paid funds for our services, we treat such circumstances as an unpaid invoice, subject to all of the same terms listed in this section.

Cancellation and Termination

1. You are solely responsible for properly canceling your account. Within each of our Services, we provide a simple no-questions-asked cancellation link. You can find instructions for how to cancel your account in our Cancellation policy. An email or phone request to cancel your account is not automatically considered cancellation. If you need help cancelling your account, you can always contact our Support team here.
2. All of your content will be inaccessible from the Services immediately upon cancellation. Within 30 days, all content will be permanently deleted from active systems and logs. Within 60 days, all content will be permanently deleted from our backups. We cannot recover this information once it has been permanently deleted.
3. If you cancel the Service before the end of your current paid up month, your cancellation will take effect immediately, and you will not be charged again. We do not automatically prorate unused time in the last billing cycle. See our Fair Refund policy for more details.
4. We have the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of our Services for any reason at any time. Suspension means you and any other users on your account will not be able to access the account or any content in the account. Termination will furthermore result in the deletion of your account or your access to your account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all content in your account. We also reserve the right to refuse the use of the Services to anyone for any reason at any time. We have this clause because statistically speaking, out of the hundreds of thousands of accounts on our Services, there is at least one doing something nefarious. There are some things we staunchly stand against and this clause is how we exercise that stance. For more details, see our Use Restrictions policy.
5. Verbal, physical, written or other abuse (including threats of abuse or retribution) of Company employee or officer will result in immediate account termination.

Modifications to the Service and Prices

1. We make a promise to our customers to support our Services. That means when it comes to security, privacy, and customer support, we will continue to maintain any legacy Services. Sometimes it becomes technically impossible to continue a feature or we redesign a part of our Services because we think it could be better or we decide to close new signups of a product. We reserve the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, any part of our Services with or without notice.
2. Sometimes we change the pricing structure for our products. When we do that, we tend to exempt existing customers from those changes. However, we may choose to change the prices for existing customers. If we do so, we will give at least 30 days’ notice and will notify you via the email address on record. We may also post a notice about changes on our websites or the affected Services themselves.

Uptime, Security, and Privacy

1. Your use of the Services is at your sole risk. We provide these Services on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We do not offer service-level agreements for most of our Services but do take uptime of our applications seriously.
2. We reserve the right to temporarily disable your account if your usage significantly exceeds the average usage of other customers of the Services. Of course, we will reach out to the account owner before taking any action except in rare cases where the level of use may negatively impact the performance of the Service for other customers.
3. We take many measures to protect and secure your data through backups, redundancies, and encryption. We enforce encryption for data transmission from the public Internet. There are some edge cases where we may send your data through our network unencrypted. Please refer to our Security Overview for full details.
4. When you use our Services, you entrust us with your data. We take that trust to heart. You agree that Sherafy.com may process your data as described in our Privacy Policy and for no other purpose. We as humans can access your data for the following reasons:

• To help you with support requests you make. We will ask for express consent before accessing your account.
• To safeguard Sherafy.com. We will look at logs and metadata as part of our work to ensure the security of your data and the Services as a whole. If necessary, we may also access accounts as part of an abuse report investigation.
• To the extent required by applicable law.

5. We use third party vendors and hosting partners to provide the necessary hardware, software, networking, storage, and related technology required to run the Services. You can see a list of all subprocessors who handle personal data in our subprocessors section.
6. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), Sherafy.com is a “service provider”, not a “business” or “third party”, with respect to your use of the Services. That means we process any data you share with us only for the purpose you signed up for and as described in these Terms of Service, Privacy policy, and other policies. We do not retain, use, disclose, or sell any of that information for any other commercial purposes unless we have your explicit permission. And on the other side, you agree to comply with your requirements under the CCPA and not use Sherafy.com’s Services in a way that violates the regulations.

Copyright and Content Ownership

1. All content posted on the Services must comply with U.S. copyright law. We provide details on how to file a copyright infringement claim.
2. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Services. All materials uploaded remain yours.
3. We do not pre-screen content but reserve the right (but not the obligation) in our sole discretion to refuse or remove any content that is available via the Service.
4. The names, look, and feel of the Services are copyright© to the Company. All rights reserved. You may not duplicate, copy, or reuse any portion of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or visual design elements without express written permission from the Company. You must request permission to use the Company’s logo or any Service logos for promotional purposes. Please contact us here, requests to use logos. We reserve the right to rescind this permission if you violate these Terms of Service.
5. You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Services, use of the Services, or access to the Services without the express written permission by the Company.
6. You must not modify another website so as to falsely imply that it is associated with the Services or the Company.

Features and Bugs

We design our Services with care, based on our own experience and the experiences of customers who share their time and feedback. However, there is no such thing as a service that pleases everybody. We make no guarantees that our Services will meet your specific requirements or expectations.

We also test all of our features extensively before shipping them. As with any software, our Services inevitably have some bugs. We track the bugs reported to us and work through priority ones, especially any related to security or privacy. Not all reported bugs will get fixed and we do not guarantee completely error-free Services.

Services Adaptations and API Terms

We offer Application Program Interfaces (“API”s) for some of our Services (currently Sherafy.com and all its subdomains). Any use of the API, including through a third-party product that accesses the Services, is bound by the terms of this agreement plus the following specific terms:

1. You expressly understand and agree that we are not liable for any damages or losses resulting from your use of the API or third-party products that access data via the API.
2. Third parties may not access and employ the API if the functionality is part of an application that remotely records, monitors, or reports a Service user’s activity other than time tracking, both inside and outside the applications. The Company, in its sole discretion, will determine if an integration service violates this bylaw. A third party that has built and deployed an integration for the purpose of remote user surveillance will be required to remove that integration.
3. Abuse or excessively frequent requests to the Services via the API may result in the temporary or permanent suspension of your account’s access to the API. The Company, in its sole discretion, will determine abuse or excessive usage of the API. If we need to suspend your account’s access, we will attempt to warn the account owner first. If your API usage could or has caused downtime, we may cut off access without prior notice.

Liability

We mention liability throughout these Terms but to put it all in one section:

You expressly understand and agree that the Company shall not be liable, in law or in equity, to you or to any third party for any direct, indirect, incidental, lost profits, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, data or other intangible losses (even if the Company has been advised of the possibility of such damages), resulting from: (i) the use or the inability to use the Services; (ii) the cost of procurement of substitute goods and services resulting from any goods, data, information or services purchased or obtained or messages received or transactions entered into through or from the Services; (iii) unauthorized access to or alteration of your transmissions or data; (iv) statements or conduct of any third party on the service; (v) or any other matter relating to this Terms of Service or the Services, whether as a breach of contract, tort (including negligence whether active or passive), or any other theory of liability.

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Security overview.

We protect your data.

All data are written to multiple disks instantly, backed up daily, and stored in multiple locations. Files that our customers upload are stored on servers that use modern techniques to remove bottlenecks and points of failure.

Your data are sent using HTTPS.

Whenever your data are in transit between you and us, everything is encrypted, and sent using HTTPS. Within our firewalled private networks, data may be transferred unencrypted.

Any files which you upload to us are stored and are encrypted at rest. Our application databases are generally not encrypted at rest — the information you add to the applications is active in our databases and subject to the same protection and monitoring as the rest of our systems. Our database backups are encrypted using GPG.

Full redundancy for all major systems.

Our servers — from power supplies to the internet connection to the air purifying systems — operate at full redundancy. Our systems are engineered to stay up even if multiple servers fail.

Sophisticated physical security.

Our state-of-the-art servers are protected by biometric locks and round-the-clock interior and exterior surveillance monitoring. Only authorized personnel have access to the data center. 24/7/365 onsite staff provides additional protection against unauthorized entry and security breaches.

Regularly updated infrastructure.

Our software infrastructure is updated regularly with the latest security patches. Our products run on a dedicated network which is locked down with firewalls and carefully monitored. While perfect security is a moving target, we work with security researchers to keep up with the state-of-the-art in web security.

We protect your billing information.

All credit card transactions are processed using secure encryption—the same level of encryption used by leading banks. Card information is transmitted, stored, and processed securely on a PCI-Compliant network.

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Use Restrictions

Hundreds of thousands of teams use Sherafy.com products. We are proud to give them a better way to work. We also recognize that technology is an amplifier: it can enable the helpful and the harmful. That is why we have established this policy. If you have an account with any of our products, you cannot use them for any of the restricted purposes listed below. If we find out you are, we will take action.

Restricted purposes

• Child exploitation, sexualization, or abuse: We do not tolerate any activities that create, disseminate, or otherwise cause child abuse. Keep away and stop. Just stop.
• Doxing: If you are using Sherafy.com products to share other peoples’ private personal information for the purposes of harassment, we do not want anything to do with you.
• Infringing on intellectual property: You cannot use Sherafy.com products to make or disseminate work that uses the intellectual property of others beyond the bounds of fair use.
• Malware or spyware: Code for good, not evil. If you are using our products to make or distribute anything that qualifies as malware or spyware — including remote user surveillance — begone.
• Phishing or otherwise attempting fraud: It is not okay to lie about who you are or who you affiliate with to steal from, extort, or otherwise harm others.
• Spamming: No one wants unsolicited commercial emails. We do not tolerate folks (including their bots) using Sherafy.com products for spamming purposes. If your emails don’t pass muster with CAN-SPAM or any other anti-spam law, it’s not allowed.
• Violence, or threats thereof: If an activity qualifies as violent crime in the United States or where you live, you may not use Sherafy.com products to plan, perpetrate, or threaten that activity.

We have outlined these restrictions to be clear about what we will not stand for. That said, this list is by no means exhaustive. We will make changes over time.

How to report abuse

See someone using a Sherafy.com product for one of the restricted purposes? Let us know by contacting us here. and we will investigate. If you are not 100% sure, report it anyway.

Please share as much as you are comfortable with about the account, the content or behavior you are reporting, and how you found it. Sending us a URL or screenshots is super helpful. If you need a secure file transfer, let us know and we will send you a link. We will not disclose your identity to anyone associated with the reported account. For copyright cases, we have outlined extra instructions on how to notify us about infringement claims.

Someone on our team will respond within one business day to let you know we have begun investigating. We will also let you know the outcome of our investigation (unless you ask us not to or we are not allowed to under law).

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Copyright Infringement Claims

Notification of Copyright Infringement Claims

Making original work is hard! As described in our Use Restrictions policy, you cannot use Sherafy.com products to make or disseminate work that uses the intellectual property of others beyond the bounds of fair use.

Are you a copyright owner? Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512), you have the right to notify us (Sherafy.com) if you believe that an account user of any product we built and maintain has infringed on your work(s) as copyright owner. To be effective, the notification of claimed infringement must be written. Please include the following information:

• A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
• Identification of the copyrighted work(s) claimed to have been infringed. If there are multiple, please share a representative list of those works.
• A way for us to locate the material you believe is infringing the copyrighted work.
• Your name and contact information so that we can get back to you. Email address is preferred but a telephone number or mailing address works too.
• A statement that you, in good faith, believe that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
• A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DCMA”) Counter-notifications

On the other side, if you believe your material has been removed in error, you can file a written counter-notification. Please include the following information:

• A physical or electronic signature, or the signature of the person authorized to act on your behalf.
• A description of the material that was removed.
• A description of where the material appeared in Sherafy.com products prior to their removal.
• Your name and contact information so that we can get back to you. Email address is preferred but a telephone number or mailing address works too.
• A statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification.
• A statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the Federal District Court for the judicial district in which your address is located, or if your address is outside of the United States, in the Federal District Court nearest to (where Sherafy.com is located).
• A statement that you will accept service of process from the person who filed the original DMCA notice or an agent of that person. (In other words, you have designated that person to receive documents on your behalf.)

Where to Send Notices

You can notify us of either copyright infringement claims or DCMA counter-notifications through either of the following channels:

By email: contact us here

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A fair refund policy.

Bad refund policies are infuriating. You feel like the company is just trying to rip you off. We never want our customers to feel that way, so our refund policy is simple: If you’re ever unhappy with our products* for any reason, just contact our support team here. and we’ll take care of you.

Examples of full refunds we would grant.

• If you were just charged for your next month of service but you meant to cancel, we are happy to refund that extra charge.
• If you forgot to cancel your account a couple of months ago and you have not used it since then, we’ll give you a full refund for a few back months. No problem.
• If you tried one of our products for a couple of months and you just were not happy with it, you can have your money back.

Examples of partial refunds or credits we would grant.

• If you forgot to cancel your account a year ago, and there’s been activity on your account since then, we’ll review your account usage and figure out a partial refund based on how many months you used it.
• If you upgraded your account a few months ago to a higher plan and kept using it in general but you didn’t end up using the extra features, projects, or storage space, we’d consider applying a prorated credit towards future months.
• If we had extended downtime (multiple hours in a day, or multiple days in a month) or you emailed customer service and it took multiple days to get back to you, we’d issue a partial credit to your account.

Non-Billable / Learning Hours

Certain types of work are not billed to our clients. You may see these line items listed as “NB” or “Learning” on our invoices or timesheets. 

In short, these items reference work we do that may support your project but is not exclusive to your project. When you pay us for time worked, there is an underlying expectation that we understand certain elements of the programs we use and the necessary development work required to utilize them efficiently. These hours are listed on the invoice to help us analyze the amount of time spent on non-billable work to serve our clients more effectively in the future.

However, this is not to say that all “learning” done by sherafy.com associates is “non-billable.” If clients require us to use a particular program or insist certain elements be completed using a software platform we are unfamiliar with, those learning hours can be billable.

E.g., Client ABC has retained us to draft a model forecasting certain supply-side risks. We opt to use Excel to outline the model and run a simulation, but we run into technical issues with this particular model that requires us to seek external guidance. The expectation between our clients and us is that we efficiently utilize the time we bill. As such, it would be unfair to ABC to bill for such time, given the inherent expectations and our familiarity with drafting these models in Excel. 

If, however, the client insists we use an alternate program (e.g., Google Sheets) to draft such a model, any learning hours here can be billed. The inherent (although subtle) differences between the two programs can limit our efficiency. As such, learning hours, in this case, can be billed because ABC insists we use an alternative program with which we are unfamiliar.

The decision to classify hours worked as non-billable or learning lies at the sole discretion of sherafy.com and its associates. We try to be as fair and realistic as possible when meeting client expectations. 

Cancellation policy

We want satisfied customers, not hostages. That is why we make it easy for you to cancel your account directly in all of our apps — no phone calls required, no questions asked.

Our legal responsibility is to account owners, which means we cannot cancel an account at the request of anyone else. If for whatever reason you no longer know who the account owner is, contact us here. We will gladly reach out to any current account owners at the email addresses we have on file.

What happens when you cancel?

You will not be able to access your account once you cancel, so make sure you download everything you want to keep beforehand.

We will permanently delete your account data within 30 days from our servers and logs, and within 60 days from our backups. Retrieving data for a single account from a backup is not possible, so if you change your mind, you will need to do it within the first 30 days. Data cannot be recovered once it has been permanently deleted.

We will not bill you again once you cancel. We don’t automatically prorate any unused time you may have left but if you haven’t used your account in months or just started a new billing cycle, contact us here for a fair refund. We will treat you right.

Sherafy.com-initiated cancellations

We may cancel accounts if they have been inactive for an extended period:

• For trial accounts: 30 days after a trial has expired without being upgraded
• For frozen accounts: 180 days after being frozen due to billing failures
• For free accounts: after 365 days of inactivity

We also retain the right to suspend or terminate accounts for any reason at any time, as outlined in our Terms of Service. In practice, this generally means we will cancel your account without notice if we have evidence that you are using our products to engage in abusive behavior.

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Taxes!

We are required to collect and remit sales tax in a number of US states and localities. Not all states tax the sale of software as a service (SaaS), but it is becoming increasingly common. The rate being collected on your invoice is determined by your billing address and, in certain jurisdictions, whether you are using our products for business/commercial or personal purposes. As regulations change, we will update this list.

Updating your billing address

If you need to change your billing information because you do not actually reside in a taxable jurisdiction, you can easily handle that within your accounts. You may need to re-enter your credit card information as part of the billing address update.

We are here to help

Please contact our Support team at here if you have trouble or if:

• you believe you are being charged in error.
• your organization is sales tax exempt. Include your tax-exempt certificate and your product account ID or domain when you email Support. If you are based in the US, please share your state-specific tax-exempt documentation as not all US federal (IRS) exemptions are recognized by each state. Your account information can typically be found in a URL when you are in the application:

Sherafy.com policies are open source, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies and generated by the Privacy Policy Generator at sherafy.com