Terms of Service

1. What Flare is, and what it isn't

Flare is a place where people in metro Detroit find mobile service businesses — plumbers, lawn crews, mobile mechanics, groomers, detailers — and where those businesses run their work.

Flare is not a service provider. We do not perform plumbing, lawn care, repairs, grooming, detailing or any other work. We are not a contractor, a broker, an employer, or an agent of anyone.

Flare is not a party to the agreement between a customer and a business. When you book a job, the contract for that work is between you and the business — its price, its schedule, its quality, its guarantee, its refund. We provide the place where you found each other and the tools they use to run the job. That is the whole of our role.

Flare never handles your payment for a job. The customer pays the business directly, by whatever method that business accepts. Money for a job does not pass through Flare, is not held by Flare, and is not routed by Flare. We bill businesses separately for their subscription and for our introduction fee, the same way any software vendor bills a customer.

Because of all of the above:

• Flare has no authority to issue a refund for work performed, because Flare never received the money.
• Flare cannot compel a business to return to a job, honour a quote, or redo work.
• A dispute about work is between the customer and the business. We will help where we sensibly can (see section 8), but we are helping, not adjudicating.

2. No employment, no agency, no partnership

Nothing in these terms creates an employment relationship, an agency, a partnership, a joint venture or a franchise between Flare and any business or any customer.

Businesses on Flare are independent. They set their own prices, choose which work to accept and which to pass on, decide their own hours, use their own tools and vehicles, hire and pay their own people, and serve customers found anywhere — including customers they never found through Flare. Flare does not direct how work is done.

3. What we actually check, stated precisely

This section is deliberately specific, because a platform that overstates its screening is making a promise it cannot keep.

Before a business can accept work through Flare, we require and review:

• An EIN or equivalent business registration, checked against what they tell us it is.
• A certificate of general liability insurance naming Flare as an additional insured, with an expiry date we record. If it lapses, their ability to accept work through Flare is suspended automatically until a current certificate is provided.
• A trade licence, where their trade requires one. For trades that do not require one in Michigan, we do not invent a requirement.

We may also: hold the results of a criminal background check on individual crew members where a business has asked us to manage that, and prevent anyone without a clear check from being dispatched.

What we do NOT do, and you should not assume:

• We do not inspect work, visit sites, or supervise jobs.
• We do not verify that a business is good at what it does.
• We do not run a background check on every person who might turn up, and we do not run one at all unless the business has bought that service.
• We do not re-verify continuously. A document is checked when it is submitted and when it expires — not daily.
• We do not guarantee that a business will show up, will charge what it quoted, or will do the work well.

Reviews and ratings on Flare come from customers, not from us. They reflect those customers' experiences and are not our assessment of anyone.

Verification is a floor, not a recommendation. Use your own judgement about who you let into your home.

4. Your side of it

If you are a customer, you agree to give accurate contact and address details, to be present or reachable for a job you booked, to pay the business what you agreed, and not to use Flare to harass anyone or to arrange anything unlawful.

If you are a business, you agree to the above and additionally that:

• Everything you tell us in verification is true, and you will tell us promptly when it stops being true — a lapsed policy, a surrendered licence, a change of entity.
• You hold the insurance you told us you hold, for as long as you take work through Flare.
• Your published prices are prices you will actually honour.
• The people you dispatch are people you are entitled to dispatch, and you are responsible for them.
• You will not misrepresent Flare, and you will not tell a customer that Flare stands behind your work. We do not.

5. Your content, and what we may do with it

You keep ownership of everything you put on Flare — your business description, your menu and prices, your photos, your reviews.

By posting it, you give Flare a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, display, reproduce and distribute that content in connection with operating and promoting Flare, including on our public pages, in search results and in marketing that features your business. This licence exists so we can show your listing; it does not let us sell your content to anyone else.

Reviews and job photos: a customer's review, and photos attached to a completed job, may be displayed on the business's public profile. A business may reply to a review publicly. Neither of you can delete the other's honest account of what happened.

We may remove content that is unlawful, that identifies someone without their consent, that is obviously fabricated, or that we are legally required to remove.

6. Our fees, and cancelling

For customers, Flare is free. There is no fee to search, to send a flare, to book, or to leave a review. You will never be charged by Flare for a job.

For businesses:

• The monthly price is whatever package you chose, shown to you before you chose it and shown again on your account page. It does not change without us telling you first.
• The introduction fee is a percentage of a job you actually collected from a customer Flare introduced to you. It applies to that customer's work for twelve months from the introduction, and after that it is zero on that customer forever — however the job reaches you. It is never charged on a customer you brought in yourself, and never on a job that was cancelled, refunded or a no-show.
• We invoice you. Your customer never sees our fee and never pays it.

Prepaid terms. If you pay for a term in advance, that term is non-refundable. You may cancel at any time, from your own account page, without calling anybody — cancelling stops the next renewal and does not refund the term already paid. We will email you before any renewal charge. If you cancel, we do not charge you again.

Pioneers. If you joined as a pioneer, the rate you were promised is yours for as long as your account stays open, and it is recorded on your account. We do not raise it.

7. Suspension and removal

We may suspend or remove a business's access to Flare, immediately and without notice, if:

• required verification lapses, is withdrawn, or turns out to be false;
• a customer is endangered, threatened or defrauded;
• there is a pattern of not turning up, or of charging materially more than quoted without agreement;
• an invoice goes unpaid after we have asked;
• Flare is used unlawfully.

We will tell you why. Where the reason can be fixed, we will tell you what would fix it. A suspension does not refund a prepaid term, and it does not create a charge either — we do not bill an exit fee.

You may close your account at any time. Your job history remains in our records, because it is what settles a dispute later, but your public listing comes down.

8. If something goes wrong on a job

Tell us. There is a help form on every Flare surface and it goes to a person who reads it.

What we can do: get hold of the business, put the two of you in contact, record what happened against that business's account, and — where a pattern emerges — suspend or remove them. Where a job Flare found went wrong, we can and do waive our own introduction fee.

What we cannot do: refund money we never held, or make a business do anything.

9. Warranties, and their limits

Flare is provided as is. We work hard to keep it accurate and available, but we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, that a listing is complete or current, or that any business will meet your expectations.

To the fullest extent Michigan law allows, Flare disclaims all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for fraud, for fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything that cannot lawfully be limited.

10. Limitation of liability

Flare is not liable for the work. Property damage, injury, defective workmanship, theft, or loss arising out of a job is the responsibility of the business that did it, and that is why we require them to carry insurance.

To the fullest extent the law allows:

• Flare is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits or lost data.
• Flare's total liability to any customer, for anything, is capped at $100.
• Flare's total liability to any business, for anything, is capped at the greater of $100 or what that business paid Flare in the twelve months before the claim.

These caps are part of the bargain. Flare is inexpensive for businesses and free for customers precisely because it does not carry the risk of the work itself.

11. Indemnity (businesses only)

If you are a business, you will indemnify Flare against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from the work you performed, from your breach of these terms, from your misrepresentation of your licensing or insurance, or from the acts of the people you dispatched.

This runs one way on purpose. A customer using a free service is not asked to indemnify anybody.

12. Not going round us

If Flare introduces a business to a customer, that business agrees not to arrange that first job off-platform in order to avoid the introduction fee.

That is the whole of it, and it is deliberately narrow:

• It applies to the first job only.
• Everything after that introduction is yours. Repeat work from that customer is never charged and is never restricted.
• It does not stop you working with anyone, ever. It is not a non-compete and it is not exclusivity.
• It lapses ninety days after the introduction.

We are not trying to own your customers. We are asking to be paid once for an introduction we actually made.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Every version is kept, numbered and dated, and you can read any of them.

For a change that materially affects you, we will email you at least thirty days before it takes effect, and you will be asked to accept the new version the next time you sign in. If you do not want the new terms, you may close your account before they take effect, and any unused prepaid term is refunded pro rata in that specific case.

Small corrections — a typo, a clearer sentence, an updated address — are published without notice and noted in the version history.

14. Law, and where a dispute goes

These terms are governed by the law of the State of Michigan, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Any dispute goes to the state or federal courts sitting in Oakland County, Michigan, and both of us consent to that.

There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver in this version, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

15. The rest

• If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest still stands.
• Not enforcing something once does not waive it.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours if Flare is sold or reorganised, and we will tell you.
• These terms, plus any package you bought and any separate signed agreement, are the whole agreement between us.

Flare Metro Detroit, Michigan hello@flaredetroit.com

Questions about these terms are welcome and get a real answer.