Terms of Service

Draft Terms of Service and Privacy Policies for SaaS products in plain English. Readable beats clever: users and regulators both reward clarity, and courts have voided clauses buried in impenetrable prose. The two costly failures this skill prevents are shipping a ToS with a missing load-bearing section (no liability cap, no termination clause) and publishing a privacy policy that describes practices the product does not actually have - the second is worse, because a false privacy promise is an FTC deception claim waiting to happen.

The output is a strong first draft, not legal advice. Every draft must state, prominently, that a qualified attorney must review before publishing - this is a hard rule, not a courtesy line.

Operating procedure

Step 1: Gather inputs

Collect before drafting. Where the user does not know, propose a default and label it [DECISION NEEDED].

1. Product name and one-sentence description of what it does.
2. Who can use it: minimum age (default 13 in the US due to COPPA; 16 in parts of the EU), geographies served.
3. Data collected: directly, automatically (analytics, logs), and from third parties.
4. Payment model: free, subscription, usage-based; refund stance.
5. Third-party processors: payments, analytics, hosting, email - the real list, by name.
6. User-generated content: does the product host any, and who owns it.
7. Governing-law jurisdiction (default: where the company is incorporated) and dispute preference (courts vs. arbitration - [DECISION NEEDED], never silently chosen).