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 an account, and we do that by hand. Closing one is a button on your settings page — see section 12.

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

Founding is $19/month for the first ten customers; standard is $29/month. Both start with a fourteen-day free trial. A card is collected when you sign up and is first charged when the trial ends — see section 8.

The SMS add-on at +$20/month is published so the plan is visible in advance; it is not built and cannot be bought.

Two things about that pricing we want stated rather than assumed. The standard plan is not metered and not capped — nothing in the product counts your estimates, and there is no quote limit to exceed. 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.

Payment is taken by Stripe. The card form is on their page rather than ours, and we never see or store your card number — our privacy policy says what does reach them.

Subscription fees are not refunded, including for a period already started. You can cancel any time from the billing page: cancelling stops the next charge and your account keeps running to the end of the period you have paid for, so nothing is cut off mid-month. The founding $19 does not survive a cancellation — if you come back, you come back on the standard price. Your founding number is yours either way; it records that you were one of the first ten, not what you pay.

8. The trial, and cancelling

Cancel any time from the billing page — it opens Stripe's own portal, and there is no form to fill in or email to send. Cancelling stops the next charge; your account keeps running to the end of the period you have paid for, and follow-ups already booked go out as scheduled until then. After that nothing new goes out, but nothing is deleted and you can still sign in. Before you subscribe at all, your trial runs 14 days from sign-up and then stops sending on its own, the same way.

The deadline is real rather than nominal — when it passes, follow-ups stop going out and your board says why. Because a card is collected up front, a trial that runs its course converts into a paid subscription on that day rather than simply stopping; cancel before then and it stops instead, and you pay nothing. We email you before the fourteen days are up either way.

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: one thing is deleted automatically — the record of each individual email, two years after it was written — and your estimates and contacts are on no timer at all. Downloading your estimates and deleting your account are both things you can do yourself, from your settings page. Anything else is 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. A single estimate stops from its own card: pause it and its follow-ups wait until you start it again, or mark it won or lost and they stop. Closing the account and removing its data is a button on your settings page: it takes everything with it, immediately, and we cannot undo it. Cancel your subscription first — we will not delete an account with a live subscription, so that Stripe is not left billing a card for an account that no longer exists. If you are one of our founding ten, your founding number stays retired when you go — we never re-issue it to anybody else. See the privacy policy for the four 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. 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.