Terms of service

1. Who you’re dealing with

circlinback is operated by Vera Labs LLC. “We”, “us” and “circlinback” in this document all mean Vera Labs LLC; “you” means the person or business using the service. You can reach a person at hello@circlinback.com. Using the service means you accept these terms; if you don’t, don’t use it.

2. What the service actually does

You log an estimate. We email your customer a short follow-up on day 2, then day 5, then day 12 — in your words, signed by you, from our sending domain. If they reply to one of those emails, we forward it to you and stop.

Specifically, and these are the parts we hold ourselves to:

• Three follow-ups per estimate, maximum. You can set fewer per estimate. You cannot set more — there is no fourth email anywhere in the product.
• Business hours only. Sends land between 8:30am and 6pm in the timezone you set for your business, and never on a Sunday. That is your timezone, not your customer’s — we don’t know where your customer is.
• Every email carries your name, your sign-off, your postal address and a working unsubscribe link. Those are added by us and you can’t remove them. If your postal address is missing, nothing sends until you add it.
• An unsubscribe is permanent and immediate, for that customer and your business. So is a plain-language refusal in a reply — “not interested”, “wrong person”, “take me off”.

3. The limit you should know before you rely on it

“It stops the second they reply” is true of replies that reach us. It is not true of a customer who answers your original estimate email, or picks up the phone.

Every follow-up we send has its own private return address, and a reply to that address stops the sequence within seconds. But your original estimate went out from your own mailbox, and we can’t see it. We do not read, connect to, or have any access to your email account. So if your customer replies to your thread instead of ours, or calls you, we don’t know, and the next follow-up will go out as scheduled.

Marking the estimate won, lost or paused on your board stops it. That is the only thing that closes the gap today, and it is a manual step.

4. Your account

You sign in with a link emailed to you — there is no password. Anyone who can read your email can get into your account, so treat that mailbox accordingly. One account owns one business. Tell us at hello@circlinback.com if you need something changed; there is no self-serve way to transfer or close an account yet, and we do it by hand.

5. What you’re responsible for

The single most important clause here. You type in your customers’ email addresses. We don’t know where they came from, and we send in your name from a domain every other customer of ours shares.

You promise us that, for every person you enter:

• They asked you for an estimate, or you otherwise have a genuine business relationship with them, and you are allowed to email them about it under the law where you and they are.
• The address is theirs and you got it from them — not scraped, bought, guessed, or lifted from a list.
• The estimate is real and the wording you send is honest. Our templates won’t let you send manufactured urgency (“act now”, “limited time”, a percentage off), and that is a floor, not the whole of the obligation.

This matters more than it usually would. Every business on circlinback sends through the same reviewed domain and the same email provider. If one account emails people who never asked, the complaints land on a reputation everybody shares, and our provider’s policy is that an account over the line can be shut down without warning — which would stop every other customer’s follow-ups and lock everyone out of signing in, at the same moment. That is why the paragraph above is a promise you make to us and not a suggestion.

You also agree not to use circlinback for anything other than following up on estimates you have actually sent: no newsletters, no marketing blasts, no messages to people who have not asked you for a price.

6. What we do automatically, and what we can switch off

Some of this is protective and runs without asking you. You should know it exists before it happens to you.

• We cap how much a new account can send per day, and raise the cap as the account establishes itself. Follow-ups over the cap wait for the next day rather than being lost.
• We can pause your sending automatically if your bounce rate, spam-complaint rate, unsubscribe rate or refusal rate crosses the lines we set. Your board tells you that it happened;we do not currently email you about it, so the board is where you will find out. You cannot lift that pause from your own settings — that is the point of it — so write to us and we’ll look at it together.
• An address that hard-bounces or reports one of our emails as spam is blocked across the whole platform, permanently. Not just for your business — for every business using circlinback. This can mean you find you cannot email a homeowner because someone else’s follow-up annoyed them first. We do it because the alternative is repeatedly mailing an address that has already told us to stop, which is what gets the shared domain shut down. There is no automatic way to reverse it; write to us.
• We may suspend or close an account that breaks section 5, or that we reasonably believe is damaging the shared sending reputation. Where it isn’t urgent we’ll tell you first.

7. What it costs

Nothing yet, because there is no way to pay us yet. No card is collected at sign-up and no charge has ever been made. The free trial is real and it does end — see section 8.

The prices published on our pricing page are what the service will cost once we can take payment: founding at $19/month for the first ten customers, standard at $39/month. Busy at $79/month and the SMS add-on at +$20/month are published so the plan is visible in advance; neither is built and neither can be bought.

Two things about that pricing we want stated rather than assumed. The “up to 60 quotes a month” on the standard plan is not metered — nothing in the product counts your estimates, and nothing will until the Busy tier is actually built. The “first 10” founding places, on the other hand, are real and limited: seats are numbered, the database allows exactly ten, and the eleventh sign-up cannot take one however quickly it arrives.

When we can take payment we will tell you before we ask for a card, and you will not be charged for any period before then.

8. The trial, and cancelling

There is no subscription to cancel, because there is nothing to buy yet. Your trial runs 14 days from sign-up and then stops sending on its own — nothing is deleted, nothing is locked, and you can still sign in. If you want to keep going when it ends, email us. When paid subscriptions exist we will set out how to cancel one before we ask anyone for a card.

The deadline is real rather than nominal — when it passes, follow-ups stop going out and your board says why. No card is asked for anywhere in the product, so a trial that ends stops sending rather than converting into a paid subscription.

9. The founding ten

The founding price is offered in exchange for a 20-minute call in your first month and a testimonial we can use. The seat is enforced — there are ten, they are numbered, and once they are claimed the offer is gone. The call and the testimonial are not enforced by anything; we mean them as a genuine trade rather than as fine print.

10. What we don’t promise

We will try hard to deliver every follow-up on time, and most of the product is built around doing exactly that. But we do not guarantee delivery, and there are two cases where a scheduled follow-up is abandoned rather than sent — in neither of which do we currently email you:

• If a follow-up ends up more than seven days late — after an outage, say — we drop it rather than send something stale. You are not currently notified when this happens, and your board may still show it as pending.
• If a follow-up has been pushed out of your sending window more than eight times, we stop trying. You are not notified about this one either, and the estimate simply stops having a next nudge.

We also can’t promise that a follow-up reaches the inbox rather than the spam folder. That is decided by your customer’s email provider, not by us.

The service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties, and we are not liable for lost business, lost profits, or work you didn’t win. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot legally be excluded.

11. Your data

What we hold, who it reaches, and how long we keep it is set out in our privacy policy, which is part of these terms. The short version worth reading twice: we do not currently delete anything automatically, and there is no self-serve export or delete. Both are handled by hand if you ask.

You keep ownership of your estimates, your customers’ details and your template wording. We use them to run the service for you and for nothing else — we do not sell data and we do not use your customers’ addresses for our own marketing.

12. Ending it

You can stop using circlinback whenever you like, and you can stop all sending immediately from your settings. Closing an account and removing its data is a manual job today — email us and we’ll do it. See the privacy policy for the two kinds of record that survive a deletion, and why.

We can end your access if you break these terms, or if we shut the service down. If we shut down, we’ll give you reasonable notice and a way to get your data out.

13. Changes

We may change these terms and we may change our prices, including introducing the Busy tier to accounts that grow into it. If a change affects what you pay or what you agreed to, we’ll email you before it takes effect. A founding price described as locked for life stays locked. Prices published for plans that don’t exist yet are a stated intention, not an offer.

14. Getting in touch

hello@circlinback.com. It is a real mailbox and a person reads it.