Legal

Terms of Service

Last updated 5 September 2026

By creating an account you agree to these terms. They are written to be read, and §3 is the one that matters most — please do not skip it.

1. What the service is

SWRainAlert monitors publicly available NOAA rainfall data over coordinates you register, compares accumulation against a rainfall threshold, notifies you when that threshold is crossed, and stores the inspection records and evidence you create.

2. Your account

• You must give accurate registration details and keep your credentials secure.
• You are responsible for what the people you invite into your organisation do in it.
• Admins configure sites, thresholds, forms and billing. Members inspect, attach evidence and read records.
• One account per person. Do not share logins — a shared login destroys the attribution that makes an inspection record worth anything.

3. What the service is not

Specifically, and without hedging:

• The permit is the authority, not us. Thresholds we ship are defaults drawn from state construction general permits. Your individual permit, a Sensitive Waters designation or a local requirement may be stricter. You are responsible for confirming the threshold that applies to your site.
• Where a permit names an on-site rain gauge as the system of record, the gauge is the record. Our readings are radar-derived estimates from NOAA products, not gauge measurements at your site.
• Radar has gaps. When neither source has a reading we report a data gap. A data gap is not a report of zero rainfall, and it is not a statement that no inspection is required.
• Notification delivery depends on networks we do not control — mobile carriers, push services and mail providers. We retry failed deliveries with backoff, but we cannot guarantee an alert arrives, or arrives in time.
• The inspector's judgement outranks ours. Where a state publishes an official inspection form, ours is a working aid, not a substitute for it.

You remain responsible for your regulatory compliance. Nothing in the service transfers that responsibility to us.

4. Trials, plans and billing

• Every new organisation starts with 30 days of the Complete plan. No card is required and nothing is charged if you do nothing at the end of it.
• Paid plans are billed monthly in advance, in US dollars. Prices are on the pricing page.
• You can cancel at any time. Cancellation stops the next renewal; we do not refund the current month unless the service failed materially and we could not fix it.
• We will give at least 30 days' notice by email before any price change affecting you. A paying account is never automatically downgraded.

Going over your site limit

Exceeding your plan's site limit blocks the creation of new sites, and nothing else. You keep full access to read your data, receive alerts, edit thresholds, file inspections and retrieve filed records. A billing state will never cost you access to your own compliance record.

5. Your data and your records

• Your site data, inspections and evidence remain yours. We claim no ownership.
• We process them to operate the service, as described in the privacy policy.
• You can export inspections as PDF at any time, and API keys give scripted access to your data.
• On account closure we keep records for 90 days so nothing is lost by accident, then delete them — unless you ask us to retain them for longer.
• A submitted inspection is immutable. A correction is filed as a new record, and reports render from the form snapshot as filed. This is deliberate: a record that can change after it is signed is worthless.

6. Acceptable use

Do not:

• attempt to access another organisation's data, or probe the service outside a good-faith security report to [email protected];
• resell or white-label the service without a written agreement — the Consultant/Firm plan exists for multi-client use;
• upload evidence you have no right to upload, or content that is unlawful;
• use automated access in a way that degrades the service for others. API keys are for your own scripted use.

We may suspend an account that materially breaches this section, and we will tell you why.

7. Availability

We aim for continuous availability and we do not currently offer a contractual uptime SLA. Ingestion runs on schedules driven by NOAA product availability; upstream outages, maintenance windows and provider incidents can delay readings and therefore alerts. Where an outage affects your monitoring we will tell you.

8. Liability

The service is provided "as is". To the fullest extent permitted by law, we exclude implied warranties, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss — including regulatory penalties, fines, enforcement action, lost profits or reputational harm — arising from use of, or inability to use, the service.

Our total aggregate liability is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

9. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Material changes are emailed to account holders at least 30 days before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that constitutes acceptance.

10. Termination

You may close your account at any time. We may terminate for material breach, or for non-payment after written notice and a reasonable chance to fix it. On termination you keep the export rights in §5.

11. Governing law and contact

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Georgia, United States, and the courts of that state have exclusive jurisdiction.

Questions: [email protected]