Terms of service

These terms are an agreement between Punchline and the business that creates an account — referred to below as “you”. By creating an account or using the service, you agree to them. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you are confirming you have the authority to bind it.

People who hold a loyalty card are not party to this agreement. Their relationship is with you, the business whose program they joined. Nothing here creates an obligation from us to them, and nothing here reduces what you owe them.

Punchline issues loyalty cards that live in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, records what your customers earn and redeem, and gives you tools to manage the program and reach the people in it.

The service is under active development. Access is by invitation, features change, and parts of it may be incomplete or withdrawn. We will not pretend otherwise: you should not build a critical business process on it without accepting that.

You are responsible for what happens under your account, including anything your staff do with the logins you give them. Keep credentials secure, remove staff who leave, and tell us promptly at support@punchline.business if you think an account has been compromised.

You must give accurate information about your business and keep it current. We may suspend or refuse an account where information is false, where the service is being used unlawfully, or where use is harming other users or the platform.

The loyalty program is yours. That means, in substance and not just on paper:

• The rules and the rewards. You decide what earns a stamp, what a reward is worth, and when it expires — and you honour it at the counter. We record what happened; we do not decide what it entitles anyone to.
• Consent for messages. Where you send commercial messages to your customers, you are the sender for the purposes of Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation. Our tools record consent as evidence, but obtaining it lawfully, and honouring withdrawals, is yours.
• Your obligations to your own customers. You are responsible for telling them how their information is used and for meeting privacy law that applies to you. We handle their information on your instructions, as described in the privacy policy.
• Your content. Your business name, logo, images and copy remain yours. You give us permission to use them for the purpose of running your program — putting them on passes, enrollment pages and messages — and you confirm you have the right to do that.

This one matters enough to state on its own. A points balance or a stamp count in Punchline is a record of what a customer has earned with you — a record of standing, not stored value. We never take custody of funds, and no money moves between a customer and a business through this service.

The obligation to honour a balance is yours, and it survives whatever happens to your account with us. If you stop using Punchline, what your customers are owed is still owed.

The service is currently provided at no charge while it is in development. Published plans and prices are not yet in effect, and no payment method is collected.

Before we begin charging you for anything, we will tell you the price and give you a genuine opportunity to decline. You will not be billed for a period you did not agree to, and we will not convert a free account into a paid one without your explicit agreement.

The customer records in your account are yours. You can export the full customer list to CSV at any time, on every plan including the free one, and we will not hold your data hostage to a subscription or make leaving deliberately awkward.

We use your data to run the service for you. We do not sell it, do not use it to advertise, and do not use one business’s customer list for the benefit of another. Aggregate, de-identified information that cannot be traced back to you or your customers may be used to improve the product.

Passes live in wallet apps built and controlled by Apple and Google. Their platform rules, review processes, delivery behaviour and design changes are theirs, and they can change without notice to us.

We will do our part properly, but we cannot promise that a particular pass reaches a particular phone at a particular moment, and neither platform tells us whether a notification was read. Any figure we report is a measure of what our systems did, not proof of what a customer saw.

We aim to keep the service running and to fix things promptly, but we do not offer a guaranteed uptime commitment. There will be maintenance, and there will be faults.

Because the counter has to keep working when we do not, design your workflow so a customer can be served without us — a note and a correction afterwards is better than a queue that cannot move.

You may stop using the service at any time. Export your data before you go; after your account closes we delete it on the schedule described in the privacy policy, and it will not be recoverable afterwards.

We may end or suspend an account for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, or where we are required to. Except where the law or a safety issue makes it impossible, we will give you notice and a chance to export first.

When an account ends, passes issued under it stop being updated. Your obligations to your customers, as above, do not end with it.

The software, the design of the product and the Punchline name and marks remain ours. These terms grant you the right to use the service, not ownership of it, and not permission to copy or resell it.

The service is provided as is. To the extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits, or lost or corrupted data beyond what we can restore from our own backups.

Where we are liable, our total liability for all claims in any twelve month period is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for the service in that period, or one hundred Canadian dollars.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded. Some consumer protection legislation gives rights that an agreement cannot take away, and those rights are unaffected by this section.

When these terms change, the date at the top changes with them. For a change that materially affects your rights or obligations, we will tell you directly rather than relying on you to notice, and give you reasonable notice before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the new terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Alberta and the laws of Canada that apply there, and the courts of Alberta have jurisdiction.

Questions about these terms go to support@punchline.business.