Terms of service

1.What ChurchOS is today

ChurchOS is software for running a local church: its public website, its people and households, attendance and connection, service planning, worship presentation, livestream production, and Bible, study and sermon work.

It is pre-launch. It is not generally available, it cannot take payment from anybody, and churches using it are doing so under a direct arrangement with us rather than by buying a subscription.

2.What ChurchOS cannot do yet

Stated in the terms rather than only in the marketing, because this is the paragraph that decides whether a church made an informed choice.

A church must not adopt ChurchOS on the assumption that any of the following will arrive by a particular date. None of them has one.

• Online giving. There is no donation processing of any kind.
• Events and registration.
• Booking appointments with pastoral staff.
• Children's check-in, guardians or authorised pickup.
• Subscription billing, invoices or a billing portal.
• Self-service export of a church's own data.
• Connecting a domain name the church already owns.

3.The account and who may use it

A church account is created by a person who confirms they are authorised to act for that church. Everyone who signs in does so with their own account; shared logins defeat the audit log, the permission model and the pastoral-note protections all at once.

A church is responsible for who it grants access to and for what those people do with it. Suspected compromise of an account should be reported to us immediately.

4.Who owns what

The church owns everything it puts into ChurchOS: its people records, its website content, its sermons, its service plans, its media. Using ChurchOS does not transfer any of it to us and does not give us a licence to use it for anything except running the service for that church.

ChurchOS owns the software itself. A church is granted the right to use it for the church's own purposes and not to resell it, copy it or reverse-engineer it.

5.Acceptable use

The acceptable use policy forms part of these terms. It sets out what may not be done with ChurchOS and what happens when it is.

6.Third-party content and licensing

Bible translations, worship songs and other licensed material carry obligations that belong to whoever holds the licence. ChurchOS records the licence status of translations and tracks song rights and reported uses, but it cannot obtain a licence on a church's behalf.

A church displaying song lyrics or reproducing a copyrighted translation is responsible for holding the licence that permits it. ChurchOS deliberately ships no lyrics catalogue for this reason.

7.Availability

ChurchOS offers no uptime commitment and no service-level agreement, and will not offer one it cannot measure. There is monitoring, health checking and a rollback path, and there is no published availability figure because there is not yet enough operating history to publish an honest one.

Maintenance that requires downtime will be notified in advance where the work is planned.

8.Backups

The database is backed up on a schedule with integrity checks, and restores are rehearsed.

Those backups are currently held on the same machine as the database. That protects a church against a bad deployment or a mistaken deletion; it does not protect against losing the machine. Off-site backup is required before ChurchOS is offered commercially and is not in place today. A church holding records it cannot afford to lose should keep its own copy.

9.Payment

Nothing is chargeable under these terms today. No payment processor is connected, there is no checkout and no invoice can be issued.

When ChurchOS begins charging, the prices, the billing cycle, the trial arrangement, refunds and what happens when a payment fails will be set out here, and no church will be charged without agreeing to those terms first.

10.Ending the arrangement

A church may stop using ChurchOS at any time and is not locked in by contract.

The honest position on the mechanics: self-service cancellation and self-service export do not exist yet, so a church leaving today should write to us and we will export its data and delete the church by hand. We would rather describe a manual process that works than an automated one that does not exist.

ChurchOS may suspend or end a church's access for a serious breach of the acceptable use policy, for non-payment once payment exists, or where continuing would put other churches on the platform at risk. Except where the breach is severe enough to require immediate action, we will say what is wrong and give a reasonable chance to fix it first.

11.Liability

ChurchOS is provided as it stands. Given that the platform is pre-launch, has no off-site backup, and has not completed an external security audit, a church should size its reliance on ChurchOS accordingly and keep its own records of anything critical.

The limits of liability that will apply have not been settled and must be drafted by a lawyer. That is deliberately not being invented here: a limitation clause written by an engineer is likely to be either unenforceable or unfair, and quite possibly both.

12.Changes to these terms

When these terms take effect they will carry an effective date and a version. Material changes will be notified in advance to the address a church signed up with, and a church that does not accept a change may leave and take its data.

13.Open items this draft cannot answer

The brief for whoever reviews this document.

• The legal entity contracting with churches, its registered address, and the governing law and jurisdiction.
• Limitation of liability, indemnities and warranty disclaimers.
• Whether a written processor agreement accompanies these terms.
• Notice periods for suspension, termination and material change.
• Pricing, trial, refund and failed-payment terms, once billing exists.
• Dispute resolution, and whether arbitration is appropriate for church customers.