Beta version

Ownerhound terms of service

Last updated: [date]. Effective: [date].

These terms are an agreement between Cole Stepanik (until Ownerhound LLC, a Massachusetts limited liability company, is formed) ("Ownerhound", "we", "us") and the team or person who signs up ("you", "the Team"). If you sign up for a team, you promise you can bind it. Our Privacy Policy and the [Data Processing Addendum] are part of these terms.

1. What Ownerhound is

Ownerhound is software that helps a team keep a list of businesses, check public records and company websites about them, and log calls and follow-ups that team members make themselves. Teams use it to sell services (for example websites, marketing, trades work, or business-to-business sales) or to approach owners about buying a business. Ownerhound does not call, text, or email anyone for you. Your people dial and send by hand. We do not give legal, financial, tax, or investment advice.

2. Accounts, Teams, and roles

  1. You must be 18 or older, and by signing up or accepting an invitation you confirm that you are. You sign in with a Google account or an emailed link. If we learn that a user is under 18, we will close the account and delete their personal information. We do not allow anyone under 13. Keep your sign-in secure. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
  2. The person who creates a Team is its first Admin. Admins can invite people, change roles, change settings, see everyone's work, and remove members. Callers use the workspace and see their own private items and the Team's shared items. A Team always keeps at least one Admin.
  3. The Team, through its Admins, is responsible for who it invites, what each person does, and removing people who leave. Tell us at hello@ownerhound.com if an account is compromised.
  4. Each Team's data is kept separate from every other Team's data.

3. Your data

  1. You own it. Your lists, notes, call logs, templates, and settings ("Team Data") stay yours. We do not claim ownership.
  2. What you let us do. You give us permission to host, process, copy, and display Team Data only to run the service for you, keep it secure, back it up, fix problems, and follow the law. We handle Team Data as described in the Privacy Policy and the Data Processing Addendum.
  3. We do not sell or share Team Data. We do not use one Team's lists, notes, or contacts for any other Team, for advertising, or to build a database to sell or give to others. We do not train AI models on Team Data.
  4. Anonymous statistics. We may use combined, anonymous usage numbers (for example, how many calls were logged across all Teams) to run and improve the service. They do not identify you, your firm, or any business.
  5. What you must not upload. Social Security numbers, driver's license or ID numbers, dates of birth, financial account numbers, health information, court or credit records, or the contents of deal documents covered by a confidentiality agreement that bars hosting them (for example CIMs, unless the agreement allows it). Delete anything you upload by mistake and tell us.
  6. Your legal basis for the data. You promise you have the right to upload Team Data and to contact the people and businesses in it.
  7. Do Not Call Registry files. If you upload a National Do Not Call Registry file, it must be your own subscription, used only to check your own list. We use it only to mark matches, we do not share it with anyone, and we delete the file after matching.

4. Public records and accuracy

  1. For each business, Ownerhound checks public sources (for example state business and license records and the company's own website) and shows what it found, with a source link and the date checked, and a confidence level. We read official open-data sources where they exist, we follow each site's rules, and we do not scrape sites that forbid it or require a login.
  2. We do not guarantee any record is correct, complete, or current. Public records can be wrong, old, or about a different business with a similar name. We are careful: a record is shown only when it clearly matches, and a blank is better than a wrong answer. Still, you must check anything important before relying on it, especially before calling a cell number, naming an owner, or telling anyone a fact about their business.
  3. If we or you find an error, tell us. We will fix it where we can, but we are not liable for decisions made on the data.
  4. Public-record information belongs to its sources and is subject to their terms. You may use it in the workspace for your own outreach. You may not resell it or build a competing data product from it.

5. Calling, texting, and email: your responsibility

Your Team is solely responsible for how it contacts people. Ownerhound is for calls to businesses. Do not use it for calling or texting homeowners, households, or other consumers (including contractors prospecting homeowners) unless we have agreed in writing to a consumer mode. You agree to follow the law and the rules below, and to make every member of your Team do the same. Selling services by phone is "telemarketing" under federal and state law, and the rules apply to you as the seller.

  1. Calls. Dial by hand, one number at a time. No autodialers, no prerecorded, artificial, or AI voices, no ringless voicemail drops, and no call recording unless everyone on the call knows and the law of every involved state allows it (Massachusetts requires all parties' knowledge). Call during legal hours (we suggest 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the business's local time, Monday to Saturday). Show your real caller ID and never block or spoof it.
  2. Do Not Call. Subscribe to the National Do Not Call Registry in your Team's name for the area codes you call, and check every cell phone number and every number you are unsure is a business line before you call. Federal law presumes a cell number is residential even if the owner also uses it for work. Use a registry file that is no more than 31 days old. Keep a written do-not-call policy, train every caller on it, and honor every request to stop on the same day, on every channel. Calling a business's office line is lower risk, but it is not risk free.
    • Honest sales calls. Federal law (the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, as amended in 2024) bans false or misleading statements on business-to-business sales calls too. Say who you are, which company you work for, and why you are calling in your first sentence. Never pretend to be Google, Yelp, a directory, a government agency, or another company; never say a listing or account is expiring, overdue, or in trouble when it is not; and never promise rankings, traffic, leads, or results you cannot prove.
  3. Texts. Text only numbers you may call, and only if the business publishes the number for texting or the owner agreed on a call. Name your firm, include "Reply STOP to opt out," send during calling hours, and use a properly registered business number. Send one text at a time and no bulk or automated texts.
  4. Email. Use a real sender name and address, an honest subject, your postal address, and a plain opt-out, and honor opt-outs the same day. No tracking pixels.
    • State registration. Some states require telemarketers and sellers to register, post a bond, or file, and their exemptions for business-to-business sales are narrow. Texas, Florida, California, and Washington are examples. You are responsible for finding out whether they apply to your Team and for registering. Ownerhound shows reminders by state, but they are not legal advice and you must confirm them yourself.
    • Frequency and hours. Follow the stricter of federal and state limits on calling hours and on how often you may call the same number. Ownerhound's defaults are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. recipient time, Monday to Saturday, and at most 3 attempts per number in 24 hours.
    • Recording. Ownerhound does not record calls. If your phone system does, announce it at the start of every call. Many states, including California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington, require everyone on the call to know.
    • Records. Keep proof of consents, opt-outs, scripts, and call logs for at least 5 years.
  5. Be truthful. Say who you are and why you are calling. Do not mislead a gatekeeper or an owner about your identity, your role, who funds you, or what you promise.
  6. No paid services in the pitch that could turn a call into a regulated sales call, and no promises about price or terms.
  7. Opt-outs and Do Not Contact. The workspace has a Do Not Contact tag that blocks the company. Use it. If someone tells you to stop, tag it before the next dial or send.
  8. Ownerhound's call-rule defaults and templates are general guidance and not legal advice. Laws differ by state and change. You are responsible for checking them for your Team, and for getting a lawyer's advice where needed.

6. Acceptable use

You may not: break the law; use Ownerhound to harass, threaten, or deceive anyone; upload malware; probe, overload, or break into the service or another Team's data; bypass the limits on your plan; share your login with people outside your Team; reverse engineer the service except where the law allows; use Ownerhound to make decisions about credit, insurance, employment, or housing; use it with consumer or residential contact lists; let anyone under 18 use your account; use it to sell lists or leads to others; or use the output to build a competing product. We may suspend access that breaks these rules, and we will tell you why when we can.

7. Fees

[Early access is free until [date]. After that, fees are [amount] per [Team / seat] per [month], billed in advance through [payment processor]. Fees are non-refundable except where the law requires [or as stated here]. We will tell you at least 30 days before any price change. You can cancel before the next billing date.] If a plan renews automatically, we will show the renewal terms before you pay and send a reminder before each renewal as the law requires. Taxes are extra.

8. Third-party services

Ownerhound works with Google (sign-in, Sheets, and optional Gmail drafts), hosting and database providers, and other services. Their terms apply to their parts. We are not responsible for them, though we choose them with care.

9. Our property

Ownerhound, its code, design, name, logo, and templates are ours or our licensors'. We give you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service for your Team's internal business while these terms are in effect. Template wording is general guidance (see section 5.8). If you send ideas or feedback, we may use them without owing you anything.

10. Confidentiality and security

We keep Team Data confidential and protect it with reasonable measures, as the Privacy Policy describes. We do not look at Team Data except to run, secure, and fix the service, to respond to your request, or as the law requires. You keep your own security: strong sign-in, removing people who leave, and keeping devices up to date.

11. Ending the agreement

  1. You may close your Team at any time in Settings.
  2. We may suspend or end your access for serious or repeated breach of these terms, nonpayment, legal risk, or if we end the service. We will give at least 30 days' notice if we end the service for reasons other than your breach.
  3. Export. For 30 days after the Team closes or we end your access (unless that access ended for illegal use), Admins can export Team Data in a standard format (CSV and the workbook layout) [until the export tool exists: by emailing us, and we will send it within 10 business days]. After that we delete Team Data, and backups are overwritten within [35] days. We keep Do Not Contact records and the minimum records the law requires.
  4. Sections that by their nature should continue (data ownership, disclaimers, liability limits, your duties in section 5, and governing law) survive.

12. Disclaimers

Ownerhound is provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty about the accuracy or completeness of public records or confidence scores. We do not promise the service will be uninterrupted or error free. Early-access and beta features are provided for testing and may change, and during a beta we may reset test data.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows: (a) we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or lost profits, deals, or data, even if we were told they could happen; and (b) our total liability for all claims about the service is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim or $[100]. These limits do not apply to liability that the law does not allow us to limit. [Attorney: confirm carve-outs for confidentiality and data protection breach.] Some states do not allow some of these limits, so they may not fully apply to you.

14. Your promises and indemnity

You agree to pay for and defend us against claims, fines, and costs (including reasonable lawyers' fees) from third parties that arise from your Team Data, your Team's calls, texts, and emails, or your breach of sections 3, 5, or 6. This includes claims under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule, and state telemarketing, registration, and privacy laws, and claims that you let a person under 18 use the service. We will tell you promptly about a claim and let you control the defense, and you will not settle in a way that admits fault for us without our consent.

15. Disputes and governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, without regard to conflict of law rules. [Option 1: courts. Any dispute will be heard in the state or federal courts in [Middlesex County], Massachusetts, and you and we consent to them.] [Option 2: arbitration. Any dispute will be settled by individual arbitration in [location] under the rules of [AAA/JAMS], and not as a class action. Either side may use small claims court.] Before suing, each side will try to resolve the dispute informally by writing to the other for 30 days. [Attorney: choose option and check Massachusetts consumer law, c. 93A, which applies mainly to consumers but also to some business disputes.]

16. General

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