Terms of Service

These terms are an agreement between Prism LLC ("we", "us", "our") and the person or company using Prism ("you", "your"). They apply to your use of the service.

We should be straight about how that works today, because it affects you more than it affects us. There is no tick-box at sign-up, and we do not record which version of these terms you saw — so we are not going to claim that creating an account was a formal acceptance of a specific document. We will add that step. Until we do, treat this page as the terms we operate under and hold us to what it says; if something here is unacceptable to you, tell us rather than discovering later that we each assumed different things.

If you are accepting on behalf of a company, you confirm that you are authorised to bind that company, and "you" means that company. Because this product is built for companies, most of what follows is written on that basis — an account belongs to a company, and the people invited into it act under that company's account.

Our Privacy & Security page describes how we handle your data and forms part of this agreement. Where the two disagree, the Privacy & Security page governs on matters of data handling.

Prism is software for tracking and organising the finances of real-estate and business assets: connecting bank accounts, importing and categorising transactions, recording assets and ownership, and producing reports. The service includes our website, our mobile applications, and everything we make available through them, as each changes over time.

Subject to these terms, we grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the service for your own or your company's business purposes. Unlike a consumer budgeting app, business use is the intended use — managing your company's assets, your partners' interests and your own portfolio is exactly what this is for. What the licence does not cover is reselling the service, operating it on behalf of third parties as a service of your own, or building a competing product from it.

The software, and everything in it other than your own data, remains ours or our licensors'. It is licensed to you, not sold. Our name, logo and marks are ours; you may not use them in a way likely to cause confusion or to suggest we endorse something we do not.

You need an account to use the service, and the details you give us to open it must be accurate and kept current. You must be at least 18 years old. The service is offered from, and intended for use in, the United States.

You are responsible for everything that happens under your company's account. That includes the people you invite into it: adding a colleague, a property manager or an accountant grants them the access their role and asset permissions allow, and configuring those correctly is your decision, not ours. Removing someone's access when they leave is also yours.

Keep your password to yourself, keep your second factor working, and tell us promptly at [email protected] if you believe an account has been compromised. API keys are credentials too: they carry the access of the company they were issued to and must not be shared outside it. We are not responsible for loss caused by someone else using credentials issued to you, and accounts and subscriptions cannot be transferred or assigned to someone else.

When you link a financial institution, you instruct us to retrieve your transaction and balance information from that institution on your behalf, through our open-banking provider. You authorise us to act as your agent for that limited purpose, and for that purpose only.

You confirm that you are entitled to give this instruction for each account you link, and that doing so does not breach your agreement with that institution. You can withdraw the authorisation for any institution at any time by disconnecting it in the app, which revokes the access token at the source.

Use the service for managing your own or your company's finances. You must not:

• Break the law with it, or use it to launder money, evade tax, or conceal the proceeds of anything.
• Upload data you have no right to hand us, including another person's or company's financial records.
• Attempt to reach data belonging to another company, or to access any part of our systems you have not been granted access to.
• Probe, scan or test the security of the service, or interfere with, overload or disrupt it or anyone else's use of it.
• Scrape it, or use any automated process to extract data from it, other than through the API with your own valid key.
• Reverse-engineer, decompile or disassemble it, except to the extent the law says you may regardless of this clause.
• Remove or obscure any proprietary notice, or state or imply that we endorse you or your business without our written agreement.
• Resell it, run it as a service for others, or use it to build a competing product.
• Use it, or data taken from it, to train a machine-learning model.
• Rely on it to buy or sell securities, or to give or receive investment advice — see Not financial, tax or legal advice below.

Security research is welcome; testing that degrades the service for other customers is not. Write to [email protected] before you start and we will tell you what is in bounds. We may take any lawful step, technical or legal, to stop a breach of this section.

You own your data. Transactions, assets, documents, categories, notes, rules and reports remain yours. You grant us only the permission we need to run the service for you — to store that data, process it, back it up, and display it to the people you have given access. That permission lasts as long as we hold the data and ends when it is deleted.

We may use aggregated, de-identified information — figures describing how the product is used, which cannot be traced back to you, your company or your accounts — to operate and improve it. We do not sell your data, and we do not use your financial information to target advertising. The Privacy & Security page says precisely what that means and what it rules out.

You are responsible for the accuracy of what you and your bank connections put in, and for keeping your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Exports exist for that; we would rather you used them.

If you send us feedback, suggestions or bug reports, we may use them freely to improve the product, without owing you anything for them. This does not give us any right to your financial data — feedback means the things you tell us about the software.

The service categorises transactions automatically, learning from how you and your colleagues have categorised similar ones before, and from rules you write. It also calculates figures from the data available to it — cash flow, cap rate, DSCR, ROI, schedules and reports — and models the scenarios you ask it to, such as what a sale at a chosen price would leave after selling costs, loan payoff and an estimated tax bill: depreciation recapture, capital gains, state taxes and the net investment income tax.

All of it is arithmetic and pattern-matching over your own records and over assumptions you can see and change. It is not perfect, and it is not a substitute for review: an imported transaction can be wrong at the source, a rule can catch more than you intended, a metric is only as good as the inputs behind it, and a scenario is only as good as its assumptions — a tax estimate in particular is an estimate, built on stated rates and defaults, not a filing position. Review anything you are going to rely on — for a filing, a distribution, a partner, a lender or a sale — before you rely on it.

We do not use your data to train models used for anyone other than you: the patterns the categoriser learns are scoped to your own company and are used to serve it.

Plans

The service is offered on tiered plans, including a free tier. Each plan carries limits and features, which are shown before you subscribe. We may change plans, features and prices; a change to the price of a subscription you already hold takes effect at your next renewal, and we will tell you before that happens so you can cancel if you would rather not continue.

Payment

Paid subscriptions are billed in advance through Stripe and renew automatically at the stated interval until cancelled. You authorise us and Stripe to charge your payment method for each renewal at the then-current price. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach our servers. Fees are in US dollars and exclusive of any taxes that apply to you. If a trial is offered, the subscription converts to a paid one at the end of it unless you cancel first.

Cancelling

Cancel at any time from your billing settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and you keep paid features until then. Fees already paid are not refunded on a pro-rata basis, except where the law where you are requires it. We may issue a refund or credit at our discretion, and doing so once does not oblige us to do it again — so if something has genuinely gone wrong, ask us rather than assuming.

Failed payments

If a payment fails we will keep trying and let you know. After a short grace period the account becomes read-only: you can still see everything and still export it, but not add to it. If the payment is still outstanding after 30 days, the account returns to the free plan and its limits — at which point the features that belong to paid tiers stop being available, and so does anything only those features can show you. Uploaded documents and the real-estate schedule are the clearest examples: on the free plan the screen that lists them is a paid feature, so the records remain and the way in does not.

We do not delete your data for non-payment, at any stage and for any length of time. If you need something that your current plan no longer includes, ask us at [email protected] and we will produce it — a lapsed subscription is not a reason to keep you from your own records.

The service depends on third parties: Plaid for bank connections, Stripe for payments, Google Drive for the documents you choose to store there, and a Google mail relay for email. Connecting your own Google Drive, or any other account, is subject to that provider's terms as well as these. The Privacy & Security page sets out what each of them receives.

We do not control any of them. Banks change their systems, a connection can break and need re-authenticating, and an institution can be unavailable or return data that is incomplete, delayed or simply wrong. We will do what we reasonably can to keep connections working and to pass through what we receive faithfully, but we do not warrant the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of anything that originates with a third party. If a balance or a transaction looks wrong, the institution is the authority on it, not us.

The service may link to third-party sites or services. Those links are a convenience; we do not endorse what is on the other end and are not responsible for it.

Prism is bookkeeping and analysis software. Metrics it calculates are arithmetic performed on the data available to it, presented for your own use, and scenario estimates — including what a sale might leave after costs and tax — are the same arithmetic run over assumptions you control.

By using the service you agree that we may communicate with you electronically about your account — sign-in codes, security and privacy notices, billing, service changes and support. You agree that those communications satisfy any legal requirement that a notice be in writing. Keep an email address current on your account, because it is how we reach you.

Some of that mail is not optional: security alerts, billing notices and the codes that let you sign in are part of operating the account, and you cannot unsubscribe from them while the account is open. Notifications about your data — sync results, uncategorised transactions, reminders — appear in the app, where you can read and dismiss them. There is no setting that turns a category of them off, and we cannot switch one off for you either — there is no preference behind it to set. We would rather say that than offer you a request we could not act on. It is on the list of things we have not built, on the Privacy & Security page.

We cannot control delivery. Mail can be delayed, filtered or lost by systems that are not ours, and we are not liable for a notification that arrives late, arrives wrong, or does not arrive. If you would prefer written notice of a security incident rather than electronic notice, tell us at [email protected].

We work to keep the service available and correct, and we would rather fix a problem than argue about a clause. But software depends on networks, devices and providers that no one controls, so:

We are also not liable for delay or failure caused by something outside our reasonable control — a provider outage, a network failure, an act of government, a natural disaster, or a bank changing its systems.

You will defend and indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs (including legal fees) arising from your breach of these terms, your use of the service outside what these terms permit, data you put into the service that you had no right to give us, or the acts of people you granted access to your company's account.

We will tell you promptly about any claim we want indemnified, and you may not settle one in a way that admits fault on our behalf or binds us to anything without our written agreement. We may take over the defence of a claim at our own expense, and if we do, you will co-operate with it.

You can stop using the service and close your account at any time — see Keeping, exporting and deleting for what happens to your data when you do.

We may suspend or end an account that breaks these terms, that is being used unlawfully, or that puts the service or other customers at risk. Except where the problem is serious or urgent, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right. If we end your account, we will give you a reasonable opportunity to export your data first, and we will refund the unused part of a period you have paid for unless we ended it because of your breach.

Ending this agreement does not undo what came before it. Fees already due stay due, and the sections on your data and content, categorisation and calculated figures, advice, warranties and liability, indemnification, disputes and the general terms survive it.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute arising from them or from your use of the service goes to the state and federal courts located in New York, and you and we each submit to the jurisdiction of those courts and waive any objection that they are an inconvenient forum.

There is no compulsory arbitration here, and no class-action waiver. That is deliberate. Plenty of products in this category require you to give up a jury trial and the ability to join a class action before they will let you track your own money; we would rather a dispute with us be an ordinary contract dispute. If that ever changes, it changes prospectively, with notice, and you will not be bound to it by silence.

Before either of us starts anything formal, write to us. Most of what reaches [email protected] turns out to be a problem we can just fix.

Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy & Security page are the whole agreement between us about the service, and replace any earlier understanding about it.

Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, it is narrowed to the extent needed to make it enforceable, or removed if that is not possible, and the rest continues to apply.

No waiver. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these terms without our written agreement. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of the business.

No partnership. Nothing here creates an employment, agency, joint venture or partnership relationship between us, beyond the limited agency you grant in Authorization to retrieve your account data.

Export and sanctions. You confirm that you are not located in a country subject to a US government embargo, and that you are not on any US government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

Apple. Where you obtained our mobile application from the App Store, this agreement is between you and us and not with Apple; Apple has no obligation to support the application, and Apple and its subsidiaries may enforce these terms against you as third-party beneficiaries.

Interpretation. Headings are for convenience and do not affect meaning. "Including" means "including without limitation". If we publish a translation of these terms, the English version prevails.

We may update these terms as the product changes. If a change materially affects your rights we will give you notice — by email or in the app — before it takes effect, and continuing to use the service after that means you accept the new terms. If you do not, you can stop using the service and cancel. The date at the top of this page shows when it last changed, and we would suggest checking it when you see it move.

Questions about these terms, and any notice you need to give us under them, go to [email protected].