Terms of Service

1. About these terms

LaunchUp is run by LaunchUp Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17498191), registered office 23 Kendal Avenue, Urmston, Manchester, England, M41 8SH. In these terms "we", "us" and "our" mean that company, and "you" means the business or person who holds the account.

These terms apply whenever you use LaunchUp: the app at app.launchup.co.uk, the websites we host for you, and any domain, email or SEO service you take from us. By creating an account or using the service you agree to them. If you're agreeing on behalf of a business, you confirm you have the authority to do so.

LaunchUp is sold to businesses, sole traders included, for use in their trade. It isn't intended for personal or household use, so consumer cancellation rights don't apply. Your statutory rights as a business aren't affected.

2. What we provide

Depending on your plan and any add-ons, the service may include:

• Website. A website for your business, designed by our team with AI tools, hosted on our servers, with an editor.
• Domains. Registering, renewing and connecting domain names, or connecting a domain you already own.
• Email. Mailboxes on your domain. Your plan includes one, and more can be added for a monthly fee.
• Tools. Your enquiries inbox, live chat, reviews, visitor statistics and anything else your plan lists.

What each plan includes is shown on our pricing page and in Settings > Billing. That description forms part of these terms.

3. Your account

• Keep your sign-in details secure and turn on two-step verification if you can. You're responsible for everything done through your account.
• The details you give us, including your business name, address and billing details, must be accurate and kept up to date.
• Our staff may sign in to your account to build your website, make changes you've asked for, or help with a support request.

4. Free trial

New accounts usually start with a free trial of 14 days, unless your plan says otherwise. If you added a card, your paid plan starts automatically when the trial ends and the card is charged then. You can cancel any time before that and you won't pay anything.

If you cancel during the trial, it ends straight away. Your account is locked and your website stops being shown. If you don't choose a plan in the meantime, everything is deleted after 30 days.

5. Plans, prices and payment

• Plans are billed monthly or yearly, in advance, in pounds sterling. Prices exclude VAT unless they say otherwise. Payments are taken by our payment provider, Stripe.
• Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel.
• Extra mailboxes and other add-ons are billed on the same subscription. When you add or remove one partway through a period, the difference is prorated onto your next invoice.
• Domains are paid for separately: up front for the first year, then renewed yearly (see section 11).
• When you switch plans, the change applies straight away and the price difference is prorated.
• We may change our prices. If we do, we'll give you at least 30 days' notice by email, and the new price will apply from your next billing date after that. You can cancel before then if you don't want to continue.
• Payments are not refundable, apart from where the law requires a refund or where we have agreed one in writing.

6. If a payment fails

If we can't take a payment, we'll tell you by email and in the app. You then have 72 hours to update your card or pay the invoice, and everything keeps working while you do. After that the account is locked until the payment is made, apart from the billing screens, and your website is temporarily withheld from visitors. Visitors aren't told why. Once you pay, everything comes back as it was.

If an invoice is still unpaid 30 days after it was due, we may treat the subscription as cancelled and follow section 14.

7. AI-generated content

We use AI models to help design your website and write its words, suggest photos, draw logo ideas, write articles and draft replies and posts. AI can get things wrong. It may describe a service you don't offer, state something that isn't true, or produce something similar to existing material.

• Read everything before it goes live. You're responsible for checking it is accurate, lawful and a fair description of your business.
• That includes claims about accreditations, insurance, guarantees, prices, reviews and how long you've been trading. Never publish a claim you can't back up.
• We don't promise that anything we generate is free from third-party rights. Tell us if you think it might not be, and we'll replace it.

8. Your content and acceptable use

You're responsible for everything you upload, write or publish through LaunchUp, and for having the right to use it. You give us a licence to host, copy, adapt and display that content for as long as we need to provide the service, and to keep backup copies for a short time after that.

You must not use the service to:

• break the law or infringe anyone's rights, including copyright, trade marks and privacy;
• publish anything misleading, defamatory, hateful or obscene, or any fake reviews or testimonials;
• send spam or unsolicited marketing from mailboxes we host, or collect personal data unlawfully through forms, chat or tracking;
• pretend to be another business or person;
• upload malware, try to get into other customers' accounts, or put excessive load on our systems on purpose;
• resell the service without our written agreement.

The content on your website is published by you, so you are responsible for it. That includes your own privacy notice and cookie notice where you need them. We give you tools to help, but it's your job to make sure they fit your business.

9. Who owns what

You can download your own content at any time. Ask us, and we'll send you a copy of your website's text, your uploaded files, your enquiries and your contacts in a common format at no charge.

10. Taking your website with you (the buyout)

Your subscription pays for your website to be designed, hosted and maintained on our platform. The design isn't sold outright. If you'd like to leave and keep the website, you can buy it out.

What it costs

The buyout fee is £[amount] per website. You can request a buyout while your subscription is active, or within 30 days of cancelling, while we still hold your website.

What you get

• A static copy of every page of your website (HTML, CSS and the images you uploaded), delivered as a download within 10 working days of payment.
• A permanent, non-exclusive licence to use, change and host that copy anywhere, for your own business.
• Your logo files in every format we made, which become yours outright.

What isn't included

• The editor, the platform, and anything that only works on our servers. Contact forms, live chat, the blog, reviews feeds, visitor statistics and booking features will stop working, or will need replacing with your new provider's own.
• Stock photos. These are licensed by their owners, not by us. You'll need to download your own copies under the photographer's licence (Unsplash photos are free to use) or replace them.
• Third-party themes. If your website is a managed site built on a theme we license from someone else, that licence may not let us hand over the design. In that case we'll export your content and tell you exactly what we can provide before you pay.
• Any help setting the website up with another host, unless we agree a separate quote.

The buyout gives you the right to use the design. It doesn't give you any rights in the LaunchUp brand, or the right to resell our designs or templates to anyone else.

11. Domains

Domains we register for you

• We register domains through our registrar, currently Namecheap. Domains are held in our registrar account, and our company details may appear as the registrant contact. This is so we can renew them and set them up for you. You are the person entitled to the domain, and we won't sell it or use it for anything else.
• Registration is paid for a year at a time. If auto-renew is on, we charge your saved card shortly before the domain expires and renew it. If the charge fails, we'll try again for a few days. We won't renew a domain we haven't been paid for.
• If you turn auto-renew off, the domain stays yours until its expiry date and then lapses. When a domain lapses, the registry may release it, and someone else can then register it.
• Your registration also has to follow the rules of the domain's registry (for example Nominet for .uk) and of ICANN. That includes giving accurate contact details.

Moving your domain away from us

You can move a domain we registered for you to another provider at any time. We charge an administration fee of £[amount] per domain for any of the following:

• pointing its DNS (nameservers) to another provider, for example to host your website or email elsewhere;
• transferring its registration to another registrar, or to an account of your own (we supply the authorisation code or change the IPS tag for .uk domains); or
• moving the domain's registrant details from our account into your name.

Once the fee is paid, we'll complete the change within 10 working days. You'll need to pay any renewal that is due, and any fee your new registrar charges. Some domains can't be transferred within 60 days of being registered or transferred, because of registry rules. Once a domain has moved, we're no longer responsible for its DNS, renewals or anything that depends on them.

Domains you already own

If you connect a domain registered somewhere else, it stays with your own registrar. You're responsible for renewing it and for its DNS records. You can disconnect it from LaunchUp at any time, free of charge.

Changes to DNS

Where we manage a domain's DNS, we set the records your website and email need. Changes made outside our tools, or asked of our team, can take up to 48 hours to work across the internet.

12. Email hosting

• Each mailbox comes with 10 GB of storage. A full mailbox may stop receiving mail.
• Mail is hosted by our email provider, currently MXroute. You can use it with any standard mail app (IMAP/SMTP) or through webmail.
• Don't use mailboxes for bulk or unsolicited email. Our provider limits how much can be sent, and may suspend a mailbox that sends spam or gets flagged by other mail providers.
• We don't guarantee every message will be delivered, and we don't promise to keep backups of your mail. Keep copies of anything important.
• When you delete a mailbox, its mail is deleted straight away and can't be recovered.

13. SEO services

SEO is a separate subscription with its own price, and can be cancelled on its own. It covers tools and work that aim to help your business be found online. Nobody can control how search engines or AI assistants rank businesses, so we don't promise any particular ranking, traffic, mention or number of enquiries. Articles, posts, outreach emails and listing changes we draft are only sent or published when you, or we acting on your instruction, approve them.

14. Cancelling

You can cancel at any time from Settings > Billing. Cancelling stops the next renewal, and you keep everything until the end of the period you've already paid for. Until that date, you can change your mind and stay.

What happens to each part of the service

Before anything is deleted, you can ask for a free copy of your own content (see section 9). Copies may stay in our backups for up to 30 days before they are overwritten. We may also keep some records for longer where the law requires it, such as invoices for tax purposes. Our Privacy Policy explains this.

If you cancel during a trial, the plan ends straight away rather than at the end of a period (see section 4).

15. When we can suspend or close an account

We may suspend your account, take your website offline or end the service if:

• you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, especially section 8;
• you don't pay (see section 6);
• the law, a court, a regulator or a domain registry requires it; or
• your account puts our systems, other customers or the public at risk.

Where we reasonably can, we'll warn you first and give you a chance to put things right. We can also end the service for any reason by giving you 60 days' notice. If we do that, we'll refund any period you've paid for but won't receive.

16. Availability and changes to the service

We work hard to keep LaunchUp and your website running, but we can't promise they will never be interrupted. Interruptions can come from maintenance, problems with our suppliers, or events we can't control. We back up our systems regularly, but backups aren't a substitute for keeping your own copies of important material.

We keep improving LaunchUp, so features will change, and we may replace or remove some. If we remove something important that your plan includes, we'll tell you in advance, and you can cancel without paying for any further periods.

Some features rely on other companies, such as Google, Stripe, Unsplash, review sites and AI providers. If one of them changes or withdraws their service, the matching feature may stop working. That isn't a breach of these terms by us.

17. Liability

• Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law doesn't allow to be limited.
• We're not liable for loss of profits, revenue, business, goodwill, data or opportunity, or for any indirect or consequential loss.
• We're not liable for the content of your website or for claims you make on it, including content generated with AI that you published.
• Otherwise, our total liability to you in any 12-month period is limited to the amount you paid us in that period.
• You agree to cover our reasonable losses from claims brought against us because of your content, or because you broke section 8.

18. Data protection

Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data about you and your team.

When we process personal data on your behalf, we act as your processor and you are the controller. That includes the enquiries, chat messages and contacts your website collects, and the visitors to your website. Our Data Processing Addendum forms part of these terms and covers that processing. It includes the list of subprocessors we use.

19. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. For significant changes, we'll email you at least 30 days before they take effect. If you keep using LaunchUp after that, you accept the new terms. If you don't agree, you can cancel before they take effect.

20. General

• These terms and your plan description are the whole agreement between us about the service.
• If a court decides part of these terms can't be enforced, the rest still applies.
• If we don't enforce a right straight away, we can still enforce it later.
• You can't transfer your account to someone else without our agreement. We may transfer our rights and obligations to another company, for example if our business is sold, and we'll tell you if we do.
• We're not responsible for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control.
• These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.