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Terms of Service

The deal, in plain English: what you get, what it costs, how you leave, and what happens to your data when you do. No tie-in, no auto-renew trap, no call-us-to-cancel.

Last updated: 28 August 2026

These are the terms between you and us when you use Trades Toolbox. By creating an account you agree to them. They are written to be read — if anything here is unclear, email us and we will give you a straight answer.

1. Who we are

  • Company: SME Toolbox Ltd, trading as Trades Toolbox
  • Company number: 17376135, registered in England and Wales
  • Registered office: 38 Scott Close, Ditton, Aylesford, England, ME20 6QP
  • Contact:info@tradestoolbox.co.uk

2. What the service is

Trades Toolbox runs the business side of a trade business: your customer records, quotes and invoices, and — on the paid tier — drafted replies to enquiries and a daily briefing. Exactly what is in each tier is listed on the pricing page, and that list is part of these terms.

Some features work by connecting to your email account, and connections are only available for supported email providers. We tell you what a feature needs before you pay for it — never after.

The service is for business use. By signing up you confirm you are 18 or over, using it for your trade or business, and — if you sign up on behalf of a company — that you are entitled to do so.

3. The free tier

  • It is free. It does not expire. It never asks for a card. The only way a free account ends without you choosing it is the abandoned-account rule in section 13 — and that comes with email notice and your data first.
  • It is not a trial with a cliff — it is a permanent tier, and your data in it is yours (see section 7).
  • To be straight with you about why it exists: we would like you to see the service is good and, one day, take the paid tier. That is the whole business model. There is no catch beyond that.

4. The paid tier, the trial, and the price

The paid tier is not on sale yet. Right now you can only sign up for the free tier. This section and sections 5 and 6 are published so you can see the deal in advance; they take effect only if and when you start a paid subscription — and we will not take a card until the systems behind every promise in them (the reminder email, self-serve cancellation, the drop to the free tier on a failed payment) are built and working.

  • The price is £45 a month. [[PLACEHOLDER: VAT posture — confirm whether SME Toolbox Ltd is VAT registered; state either "We are not VAT registered, so no VAT is added" or "plus VAT at the current rate"]]
  • It is month to month. No 12-month tie-in, no minimum term, no exit fee.
  • It starts with a 14-day trial, and the trial needs a card.Before we take your card details we show you, on the same page, the date your trial ends and the amount you will then be charged. We email you a plain reminder a few days before the trial ends.
  • If you do nothing, the trial becomes a paid subscriptionat £45 a month on the date we told you, and — like any monthly subscription — it then renews each month until you cancel. That is why we tell you the date and the amount twice before it starts.
  • Cancel during the trial and you pay nothing. Cancelling is self-serve, from your account settings — no phone call, no retention script.
  • Payment is taken by our payment provider; your card details go to them, not to us. [[PLACEHOLDER: name the payment provider and link their terms once chosen — billing is not yet live]]

5. Cancelling, and refunds

  • Cancel yourself, any time, from your account settings. It takes effect at the end of your current billing period — the monthly period your last payment covered, not the calendar month — and you keep access until then.
  • When a paid subscription ends, your account drops to the free tier — it is not locked, and your data does not disappear.
  • Refunds: because it is month to month, cancelling stops the next charge rather than refunding the current one. We do not give partial-month refunds as a rule — but if we have got something badly wrong, email us and we will be reasonable. Nothing in these terms takes away rights the law gives you.

6. If a payment fails

If a monthly payment fails we will tell you and retry. If it keeps failing, your account drops to the free tier. A failed payment by itself never locks you out of your data — suspension is only ever about the things in section 13.

7. Your data is yours

This is a marketing line on our website, so here it is as a term you can hold us to:

  • As between you and us, everything you put in and everything made for you is yours — your customer records, your quotes, your invoices, your drafts. We claim no rights over any of it beyond what we need to run the service for you. Two honest notes: personal data is not property, so for your customers' details "yours" means you control them and we act only on your instructions; and text drafted by AI may attract no copyright of its own — what we promise is that we claim nothing.
  • Export on exit. Ask, and we give you a machine-readable copy of your data — any time while your account is open, or during the window between closing your account and deletion (next bullet). We provide it within 30 days of your request, free. To be clear about words: cancelling a paid subscription just returns you to the free tier and deletes nothing; "closing your account" means deleting your account entirely.
  • After you close your account, we delete your data [[PLACEHOLDER: proposed 90 days]] after closure — everything except two things. Our own records of what we charged you, which the law makes us keep. And the invoices you created for your customers: HMRC requiresyour business to keep those for 6 years from the end of the relevant tax year, so unless you ask us to delete them instead (they are your records and your call — but HMRC will still expect you to keep a copy), keeping them for that period is part of the service and continues as your standing instruction to us. Either way, we give you a copy of your documents when you leave.
  • Your customers' data. For the personal data of the people you do work for, you are the data controller and we process it only on your instructions, under our data processing agreement, which forms part of these terms. [[PLACEHOLDER: link to the DPA once it exists — required before launch]] Ourprivacy policy covers your own data.

8. Drafts, approvals, and what you send

Parts of the service draft things for you — replies, documents, summaries. The deal on those is:

  • Nothing goes out in your name without your say-so.Drafts wait for you.
  • A draft is a draft. Check it before you approve it — especially prices, dates and anything you are promising a customer. Once you approve and send something, it is your communication and you are responsible for it, including under advertising and consumer law.
  • We work hard to make drafts accurate, but we do not guarantee that any draft is correct, complete or suitable to send unedited.

9. What we expect from you

Use the service lawfully and decently. In particular:

  • Only put in customer data you are entitled to hold, and comply with data protection and marketing law when you contact your customers through the service.
  • No unlawful, deceptive or harmful content; no spam; no using the service to mislead your customers.
  • Keep your sign-in details safe, and tell us if you think your account has been compromised.
  • Do not probe, overload or attempt to break the service, and do not resell it or pass your account to someone else without asking us.

10. What you can expect from us

  • We provide the service with reasonable skill and care, and we aim to have it available whenever you need it.
  • We do not promise uninterrupted service. Things break; we fix them. Planned maintenance happens outside working hours where we can manage it.
  • Parts of the service depend on other companies (hosting, email providers, the AI provider, payments). If one of them has an outage, the features that depend on it will be affected until it is resolved.

11. Intellectual property

We own the platform — the software, the design, the name. You own your data and the documents produced for you (section 7). You give us only the licence we need to host and process your content to run the service, and nothing more.

12. Our liability — the honest version

  • Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law says cannot be limited.
  • Beyond that, our total liability to you is capped at whichever is greater: the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or [[PLACEHOLDER: proposed £100 — solicitor to confirm the floor, and to assess the whole cap for UCTA reasonableness against our actual PI/cyber cover rather than monthly fees]]. The floor means the cap is never nil — including on the free tier and during a trial.
  • We are not liable for loss of profits, loss of business, or indirect losses; for losses caused by content you approved and sent; or for losses caused by things reasonably outside our control.
  • If we lose your data through our own failure, the cap above applies, but we will also do everything we reasonably can to recover it.

13. Suspension and closing accounts

  • We can suspend or close your account if you seriously or repeatedly break section 9, if the law requires it, or to protect the service or other customers. Unless the situation makes it impossible, we warn you first and give you a chance to put it right.
  • A failed payment never triggers suspension — it drops you to the free tier (section 6).
  • We may close accounts that have been completely inactive for a long time [[PLACEHOLDER: proposed 12 months — align with the dormant-tenant policy, TTBOX-98]] — with email notice first and the export offer in section 7. This is the one exception to "the free tier does not expire" in section 3: an abandoned account is not the same thing as a free one.
  • Whatever the reason an account ends, section 7 applies: your data is yours, and you can have it — unless the law prevents us handing something over (a court order, or an ongoing investigation, for example). If we cannot give you something, we tell you why, unless the law forbids even that.

14. Changes

  • To the service: we improve it continually. If we ever materially reduce what a paid subscription includes, we give at least 30 days' notice by email, and you can cancel before the change lands so it never applies to you.
  • If we ever have to withdraw the service — or the free tier — entirely, we give at least [[PLACEHOLDER: proposed 90 days]] notice by email, and section 7 applies in full: your data comes with you.
  • To the price: never mid-billing-period, and never without at least 30 days' notice by email. If you do not like a new price, cancel before it starts and it never applies to you.
  • To these terms: for material changes we give at least 30 days' notice by email. Carrying on using the service after that means you accept them; cancelling costs nothing (section 5).

15. The legal wrap-up

  • These terms, the pricing page and the data processing agreement are the whole agreement between us. Our privacy policy is not a contract term — it is the notice, required by law, that explains how we handle personal data.
  • If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stands.
  • If we do not enforce a term straight away, we have not waived it.
  • You need our agreement to transfer your account to someone else. We may transfer our side (for example, if the business is sold), but only to someone who takes on these same obligations to you.
  • No one other than you and us has rights under these terms.
  • These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction.

Notes for the solicitor (do not remove before review; companion brief: docs/legal/solicitor-brief-2026-08.md):(1) Consumer status — many buyers are sole traders. If any are acting wholly or mainly outside their trade they may be consumers, and the business-use confirmation in section 2 cannot contract out of that. If consumers are admitted, the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 (pre-contract information, durable confirmation, 14-day cooling-off) and CRA 2015 apply — please advise whether the signup flow and these terms must accommodate them. (2) DMCC Act 2024 subscription regime (expected in force spring 2027) — please review the trial disclosure, reminder and cancellation flow against it now rather than retrofitting. (3) Section 12 cap — please assess UCTA reasonableness against our actual PI/cyber cover, and advise on carve-outs for confidentiality, data protection and IP obligations.