Terms of Service

In effect from September 28, 2026. Version 2026-09-28.

These terms are the agreement between River Marketing Inc. (“we”, “us”) and the organisation using PermitBot (“you”). They apply from the moment an account is opened for you and for as long as you use it. Everyone you invite into your organisation uses it under these terms.

What PermitBot is

PermitBot is a workspace for contractors. It keeps your jobs, customers, quotes, invoices, permits, inspections, crews and documents in one place, and helps you prepare the paperwork a California job needs.

It is a record-keeping tool, and it is not any of the following: it does not give legal advice, it does not decide what a building code requires, and it does not file, submit or pull a permit with a city or county on your behalf. Where the product tracks a permit or an inspection, it is tracking what you or your permit runner did.

Some features are produced by an artificial-intelligence service — reading a supplier invoice, drafting quote text, visualising a roof, and the assistant that answers questions about your jobs. Those answers can be wrong, and being confidently wrong is the way they are usually wrong. Check anything that matters against the document, the city or the person before you rely on it. You stay responsible for what you send to a customer or an authority.

Accounts, and the people in yours

PermitBot is for businesses. Everyone who uses it must be at least 18 and use it for the work of the organisation they are in, not as a consumer. We do not open accounts for anyone younger, and if we learn that one belongs to someone under 18 we close it.

Accounts are created by us or by an administrator in your organisation. You are responsible for who is in your organisation and for what they do with it. When somebody leaves, remove them; their access does not end by itself.

What each person can see and do is decided by their role and by the individual permissions your administrators give them. Setting those correctly is your decision and your responsibility — we give you the controls, you decide who gets the books.

The field portal works differently on purpose: a crew member signs in with a code typed on a phone, not with an account. A code is a credential. Anyone who has one can see the jobs it opens, so treat it like a password, give people their own where you can, and switch off the ones you no longer want to work. A code you deactivate stops working immediately.

Your customers’ information

Most of the personal information you put into PermitBot is not yours and not ours: it belongs to the homeowners and businesses you work for. This section is the one that matters most in this document.

• You decide what is collected, and why. We hold it and process it on your instructions. We do not use it for our own purposes, we do not sell it, and we do not use one organisation’s records for another. In the language of California’s privacy law, you are the business and we are your service provider.
• You confirm you are allowed to collect it. By putting a person’s details into PermitBot you confirm you have the right to hold them, that you collected them lawfully, and that you have given whatever notice and obtained whatever consent the law requires of you.
• Requests from your customers are yours to answer. If one of your customers asks to see, correct or delete what you hold, you can do all three in the product. If they come to us instead, we will pass the request to you and help you carry it out. We do not edit or delete your records on our own initiative unless the law requires it.
• Take your data out whenever you want. An owner can download the whole organisation as one file from Settings. You do not need to ask us, and you do not need a reason.

Messages you send from PermitBot

The product can compose a WhatsApp message about a job and open it in your own WhatsApp, with the recipient and the text filled in. You press send. The message goes from your number, through your WhatsApp account, and you are the sender of it — we are not, and we never see it.

So the rules about messaging people are yours to keep. Do not message a homeowner who has not agreed to be messaged; do not use the product to send marketing to people who have not asked for it; and stop when somebody asks you to. The same applies to a phone number or email address you got from a lead provider through the marketplace: buying a lead is not the same as having permission to message it.

Email that we send on your behalf is transactional only — an invitation to join your organisation, a password reset, a sign-in code. We do not send marketing to your customers.

Email we send you

Opening an account means we email you, and some of that email is the account working rather than an extra you agreed to: the code that signs you in, a password reset you asked for, the invitation that put you in an organisation, and the message that confirms a change of address. There is no unsubscribe from those, because unsubscribing from a sign-in code is locking yourself out. They stop when the account is closed.

We do not send you marketing. If that ever changes it will be something you turn on rather than something you are already in, every such message will carry a one-click unsubscribe and our postal address below, and leaving it will not touch the account email above.

The address we use is the one on your account, so keeping it current is yours to do: a sign-in code sent to an address you no longer read is how people lock themselves out of their own organisation.

What you may not do

• Break the law with it, or help somebody else do so.
• Put in information you have no right to hold, including a list of contacts somebody else compiled.
• Try to reach another organisation’s data, another person’s account, or any part of the system you have not been given.
• Probe, scan or load-test the service without asking us first. Tell us about a security problem instead — write to support@thepermitbot.com — and we will not come after somebody who reports one in good faith.
• Resell it, or run somebody else’s business on your account without telling us.
• Share an account login between people. Give each person their own.

Copyright complaints

If you believe something stored in PermitBot infringes a copyright you own, send a notice to our designated agent under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It needs to include: your signature, physical or electronic; the work you say is infringed; where the material is, in enough detail for us to find it; how to reach you; a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent or the law; and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the notice is accurate and that you are the owner or are authorised to act for them.

When a notice is complete we remove or disable the material and tell the organisation that put it there, which may answer with a counter-notice under the same Act. We close the accounts of people who infringe repeatedly.

Fees

There is no payment processor connected to PermitBot today. Plans and subscriptions exist inside the product as records, and nothing on this site charges a card. Where you owe us anything, it is agreed with you directly and invoiced directly. If we connect a payment processor, we will say what it costs and how it is billed before anything is charged, and these terms will be updated with notice.

Availability, and what happens when something breaks

We do not promise the service will be available at all times. It runs on other companies’ infrastructure and it is maintained by people, so it will occasionally be down or wrong. We take a backup every night, and we keep the off-site copies for up to 90 days.

The best protection you have is the export in Settings, which nobody has to approve and which you can take at any time. If your business would be damaged by not having your records for a day, take one regularly.

The service is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, free of error, or that anything it produces — an AI-drafted quote, an extracted invoice figure, a code answer — is correct.

Limits on what we owe you

Neither of us is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for lost profits, lost business or lost data, even if we were told it might happen. Our total liability to you for any claim is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before it arose, or one hundred dollars if that is more.

Nothing here limits liability that the law does not allow to be limited, including liability for fraud.

Your responsibility to us

If somebody brings a claim against us because of information you put into PermitBot, a message you sent through it, or your use of it in breach of these terms, you will cover our reasonable costs of defending it. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and let you take part in the defence.

Ending it

You may stop using PermitBot at any time; tell us and we will close the account. We may suspend or close an account that is being used unlawfully, that is putting the service or other organisations at risk, or that has not paid what it owes — and except where the risk is immediate, we will tell you first and give you a chance to fix it.

Take your export before you go. After an account closes we keep its data for 30 days so that it can still be retrieved, and we delete it within 30 days of your asking us to. Backup copies that already exist roll off within 90 days. (src/lib/retention.ts, src/lib/tenantErasure.ts)

Changes to these terms

When these terms change in substance we change the version and the date at the top of this page, and email the administrator of every organisation with an account before the new version takes effect. Continuing to use PermitBot after that date means the new version applies. If you do not accept it, close the account and take your export.

The rest

• Privacy. Our Privacy Policy is part of this agreement, and it describes what we do with the information described above.
• Your content stays yours. We claim no ownership of anything you put in. You give us permission to store, process and display it only so far as running the service for you requires. The software itself, and its name and branding, stay ours.
• Governing law. These terms are governed by the law of the State of California, and any dispute goes to the state or federal courts in Ventura County, California.
• If a clause fails. If any part of this is unenforceable, the rest of it still stands.
• Transfers. You may not transfer this agreement without our written agreement. We may transfer it to a company that acquires this business, and we will tell you if that happens.
• The whole agreement. These terms and the privacy policy are the whole of what is agreed between us about PermitBot, and they replace anything said before.

How to reach us

Email support@thepermitbot.com about the product, or privacy@thepermitbot.com about privacy. By post: