Terms of Service

The short version

• Free-Lance is pre-release software built by one person (Dan Jacobs) for freelancers, production crew first.
• You own the data you put in. Export all of it, anytime, in CSV or JSON — see the Privacy Policy.
• Use it for real freelance business, not to spam, scrape, or break things.
• Your portfolio page is published publicly, you keep ownership of everything on it, and you need the rights to what you put there.
• There is no paid plan yet, so we bill you nothing. Online invoice payments run on your own Stripe account; Stripe’s fees are Stripe’s — see Fees and Online payments below.
• It is early software: no warranty, and liability is limited — see the sections on that below.

Who this is

Free-Lance (at free-lance.app) is built and operated by Dan Jacobs. In this document, “we,” “us,” and “Free-Lance” mean that. “You” means anyone who creates an account or otherwise uses the product.

Eligibility

You need to be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live, to create an account. If you’re using Free-Lance through a school or employer program under different arrangements, check with whoever set that up for you.

Your account

You’re responsible for what happens under your account — keep your password and any device you’re signed into secure, and tell us if you think someone else has access. Passkeys and two-factor authentication (TOTP) are available if you want a stronger login than a password alone. Two-factor is required before certain sensitive actions regardless of how you normally sign in — viewing or sending a stored W-9, for instance, or changing how you get paid — and each of those requires a fresh code, not just an active session.

Acceptable use

Use Free-Lance for real freelance business — yours. Specifically, don’t:

• Use it to send unsolicited bulk email, or spam another freelancer’s public booking page with fake inquiries.
• Upload anything you don’t have the right to upload, or anything illegal.
• Try to break, scrape, reverse-engineer, or overload the service, or probe it for vulnerabilities without asking us first.
• Impersonate another person or business, or misrepresent your connection to one.
• Use a link, booking page, or piece of public information belonging to another freelancer for anything other than what it was given to you for.

We can suspend or close an account that does any of the above — see Termination below.

Your content and data

Everything you enter — clients, jobs, daily logs, invoices, uploaded documents — is yours. We store and process it so the product can work: rendering your invoices, running the rate engine, sending the emails you ask it to send. Not for anything else. The Privacy Policy has the specifics: what we collect, who else ever sees it, and exactly how to get all of it back out whenever you want it.

If you turn on AI-assisted document import, redacted text extracted from your uploaded documents is sent to Anthropic to help read it — see the Privacy Policy for exactly what “redacted” means there. That exchange is governed by Anthropic’s own terms for that service, not this document.

What you publish

Free-Lance publishes a portfolio page for you, at free-lance.app/u/{your-name} and at {your-name}.free-lance.me. It’s public, and search engines index it.

You keep every bit of ownership in what you publish. You give us only the permission we need to actually run the thing: to store, reproduce and display your page and its contents for the purpose of hosting it for you, on the addresses above. That permission exists so we can serve the page, and it ends when you take the content down or close your account. We don’t use your work to advertise Free-Lance, and we don’t license it to anyone else.

In exchange, you’re promising that you actually have the right to publish what you publish — the stills, the reels, the credits. Work you shot for a client may belong to that client, or be under an embargo or an NDA. That’s between you and them, and it is your call to get right, not something we can check for you.

We can remove published content, or unpublish a page, if we get a valid copyright complaint about it, if it breaks Acceptable Use above, or if it puts the domain other freelancers’ pages are served from at risk. How copyright complaints work — and how to answer one if you think your work was removed by mistake — is on the Copyright & DMCA page. Repeatedly publishing other people’s work as your own will cost you your account.

Clients and other people you invite in

People you do business with — clients, booking contacts — never need a Free-Lance account to view an estimate, view or pay an invoice, or submit a booking inquiry to you. That’s a deliberate design choice, not a missing feature. You’re responsible for what you send them, and for having the right to enter their contact information into the product in the first place.

If you are a client or a visitor, not an account holder: the only parts of these terms that reach you are this section and Online payments below. The invoice, estimate or inquiry you are looking at is between you and the freelancer who sent it; Free-Lance is the tool they used, not a party to the work or the bill. Approving an estimate by typing your name sends that approval to the freelancer as your electronic acceptance of their estimate.

Online payments

A freelancer can connect a Stripe account and let clients pay invoices online by card or bank transfer. When they do, each payment is a charge on the freelancer’s own Stripe account, made on Stripe’s hosted checkout page under Stripe’s terms. The freelancer is the merchant. Free-Lance does not hold the money, is not the payee, and is not a party to the payment.

Refunds, disputes, chargebacks and reversed bank transfers are between the client, the freelancer and Stripe, and are handled through the freelancer’s Stripe account. If a bank transfer is reversed after it was recorded as paid, the invoice goes back to owing the reversed amount, because that is what happened. We show what Stripe reports; we cannot reverse, refund or release a payment ourselves.

Freelancers: you agree to Stripe’s Connected Account Agreement when you connect, you are responsible for the accuracy of every invoice you let a client pay, and Stripe’s processing fees are charged by Stripe on your account. Free-Lance currently adds no fee of its own on top; if that changes, the Fees section and the Pricing page will say so before it applies to you.

Fees

There is no paid plan today. The free tier is live and free for everyone, exactly as described on the Pricing page — including its limits of three active clients and three invoices sent per month. When a paid tier launches, its price and terms will be posted before you’re ever asked to pay anything, and moving to a paid tier will mean agreeing to those terms at that time.

No warranty

Free-Lance is pre-release software, provided “as is,” without warranties of any kind — including, to the extent the law allows us to disclaim them, any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We don’t promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or available at any particular time. Back up anything you can’t afford to lose — that’s exactly what the export feature is for.

Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows, Free-Lance and Dan Jacobs are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from your use of the product — including lost income, lost data, or a missed invoice. Our total liability for any claim is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. There is no paid plan today, so that amount is currently zero.

Termination

You can stop using Free-Lance at any time — see the Privacy Policy for how to have your account and data deleted. We can suspend or terminate an account that violates Acceptable Use above, that we reasonably believe is being used unlawfully, or that’s abusing the service in a way that affects other users. We’ll try to give notice first when that’s practical, and act immediately when it isn’t.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the product changes — especially once a paid plan exists, which will need its own terms. We’ll update the date at the top when we do, and for a change significant enough to matter, we’ll email you before it takes effect.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Nevada, without regard to conflict-of-law principles.

Contact

Questions about these terms: support@free-lance.app.