Terms of Service

1. Who we are, and what these terms do

In plain English: this page is the contract between you and PingStuff. If you use the site or the service, you are agreeing to it.

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are an agreement between you and PingStuff (operated by 9950931 Canada Inc., carrying on business as PingStuff.com, 2240 University Ave E., Waterloo, Ontario N2K 0A9, Canada) (“PingStuff”, “we”, “us”). They govern your use of the website at pingstuff.com and the PingStuff monitoring service (together, the “Service”). By running a check, creating an account, or otherwise using the Service, you accept these Terms. If you are using the Service on behalf of a company or other organization, you confirm you have authority to bind that organization, and “you” means that organization.

Your use of the Service is also governed by our Acceptable Use Policy, our Trial & Billing Terms, and our SMS Terms, all of which are part of these Terms. How we handle personal information is described in our Privacy Policy.

2. The service

In plain English: PingStuff checks whether websites and servers are healthy, alerts you when something goes wrong, and helps explain the likely cause.

The Service currently includes:

• A free instant website health check that anyone can run without an account — it tests DNS, connectivity, TLS/SSL, and the HTTP response of a URL you supply.
• Ongoing monitoring of websites and servers you add, with email alerts when we detect an outage and when it recovers.
• Shareable reports, weekly/monthly email digests, and SSL certificate-expiry reminders.
• SMS outage alerts to a verified mobile number (see the SMS Terms). Texts are currently supported for Canadian mobile numbers only; if we cannot text your number, you still receive every alert by email. Two-way SMS commands are not available yet, and any feature not yet active is labelled as rolling out where it appears in the product.

Beta status. PingStuff is currently in an early-access (beta) period. The Service is new, features are still being activated in stages, and you should expect rough edges, changes, and occasional interruptions that would be less likely in a mature product. We do not currently offer a service-level agreement (SLA) or uptime guarantee for the Service itself.

3. Who can use PingStuff

In plain English: PingStuff is a tool for adults monitoring their own business or professional websites — not a consumer or household product.

You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service. The Service is offered for business and professional purposes only; by using it you confirm you are using it in the course of a business, trade, or profession and not as a consumer.

4. Your account

In plain English: we sign you in with an emailed link instead of a password, so whoever controls your email inbox controls your account. Keep that inbox secure.

Sign-in is passwordless: we email a one-time magic link to your account email address, and we never store a password for you. You must use an email address you control, keep the information on your account accurate, and keep access to that email inbox secure. You are responsible for everything done through your account by anyone who has access to your sign-in email. Tell us promptly (see section 17) if you believe your account has been accessed without your permission.

5. Acceptable use

In plain English: only monitor sites you are allowed to monitor, and don’t use PingStuff to attack, probe, or snoop on anything.

Your use of the Service must comply with our Acceptable Use Policy. In summary: only check or monitor websites and servers you own or are expressly authorized to monitor; do not use the Service to probe, scan, overload, or attack systems; do not try to reach private or internal networks; do not bypass rate limits or attempt to access other customers’ data; and do not resell or scrape the Service. We enforce these rules with technical safeguards and an enforcement process described in that policy.

6. Authority over what you monitor

In plain English: you must have the right to monitor every site you add, and you have to prove control of the domain within 72 hours or the monitor pauses.

You may only add monitors for websites, domains, and servers that you own or that you are expressly authorized to monitor by their owner. You are responsible for having and maintaining that authority for as long as the monitor runs. To help enforce this, we require domain verification: after you add a monitor, you must verify control of the domain (for example via a DNS record, a hosted file, or a page tag) within 72 hours, or the monitor is automatically paused until verification succeeds.

7. Plans, trial, and billing

In plain English: the instant check is free with no account. Paid monitoring starts with a 30-day trial that needs no payment method and never converts into a charge on its own.

The details of plans, the free trial, pricing, invoicing, failed payments, and cancellation are set out in the Trial & Billing Terms, which form part of these Terms. Key points: the trial requires no payment method and nothing is charged automatically when it ends — you either actively subscribe or drop to the free plan (one monitor stays active; nothing is deleted); when paid billing is available, payments are processed by Stripe and we never see or store your card number; you can cancel at any time and service runs to the end of the period you paid for. Current prices are shown on the pricing page and can change with 30 days’ notice.

8. Text messages (SMS)

In plain English: when SMS is available on your plan, we only text you operational messages you asked for — never marketing — and STOP always works.

SMS alerts are available for Canadian mobile numbers; two-way SMS commands are not available yet. Both are governed by the SMS Terms, including how consent is collected when you verify a phone number, and how to stop all texts at any time by replying STOP — which unsubscribes that number from every PingStuff alert, not just one monitor.

9. Your content and data

In plain English: your monitoring data is yours. You give us permission to process it only so we can run the Service for you, and you can download a copy of it or delete your account at any time.

As between you and us, you own the data you put into the Service and the data it generates for you — the URLs and hostnames you monitor, the contacts you add, and the check results, incidents, and reports for your monitors (“Customer Data”). You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive licence to host, process, transmit, and display Customer Data solely as needed to provide, secure, and support the Service, to comply with law, and as otherwise described in our Privacy Policy. We do not sell Customer Data and we do not use it for advertising.

You can download a snapshot of your organization’s data yourself at any time as JSON from /app/export. The export covers your organization details, members, monitors (up to 1,000), incident history (up to 2,000 incidents), alert contacts (up to 1,000), daily uptime statistics (up to 5,000 rows), and a summary of your subscription. It does not include raw per-check results or message logs; if you need something the export does not cover, contact us via the form at pingstuff.com/contact.

An account owner can delete the account in-app: the account becomes inoperable and monitoring stops immediately, there is a 30-day grace period during which the deletion can be cancelled, and after that all of the organization’s data is permanently deleted. For each member whose only organization it was, deletion also erases their sign-in identity: the user record (email, name, and phone number), sign-in sessions (which include the IP address and browser details of each sign-in), authentication accounts, and phone-verification records. A member who still belongs to another organization keeps their sign-in identity.

A few narrow categories survive deletion:

• SMS consent and opt-out records, keyed to the phone number and unlinked from the deleted organization — kept as legally required proof of consent and opt-out.
• The global SMS STOP suppression list, so we never text a number that has opted out.
• Raw payment-processor (Stripe) event records, which are not organization-keyed, where billing was used.
• Copies in backups until they rotate: backups on our own server rotate after 14 days, and encrypted off-site copies are kept for up to 30 days.

You are responsible for Customer Data — in particular for having the right to submit it (see section 6) and for the contact details you add. Adding a contact means you confirm that person has agreed to receive the relevant alerts.

10. What monitoring can and cannot promise

In plain English: we work hard to catch outages, but no monitoring service catches everything. Checks run at intervals, and today they run from a single location, so misses and false alarms are possible. Do not rely on PingStuff for anything safety-critical.

• Checks run at intervals, not continuously. An outage that starts and ends between checks may not be detected, and detection is never instantaneous.
• Checks currently run from a single vantage point (multi-region checking is rolling out). A network problem between our vantage point and your site can look like an outage when your site is fine (a false positive), and a problem visible only from other locations can be missed (a false negative).
• Alert delivery depends on third parties (email providers, and telephone carriers when SMS is available) that we do not control. Alerts can be delayed, filtered, or lost in transit.
• The Service is not designed or licensed for emergency, life-safety, or medical use. Do not use it to monitor systems where a missed or delayed alert could lead to death, personal injury, or physical or environmental damage.

11. Disclaimer of warranties

In plain English: we provide the Service as it is, without formal guarantees.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties or conditions of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory — including any implied warranties or conditions of merchantability, merchantable quality, fitness for a particular purpose, durability, title, and non-infringement. Without limiting the foregoing, we do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, or error-free, or that every outage will be detected or every alert delivered. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranty exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

12. Limitation of liability

In plain English: if something goes wrong, our financial responsibility is capped, and we are not liable for knock-on losses like lost revenue during an outage we missed.

To the maximum extent permitted by law: (a) neither party is liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, or lost or corrupted data, even if advised of the possibility; and (b) our total aggregate liability for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms is limited to the greater of USD $50 and the total fees you paid us for the Service in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim. These limits apply to any theory of liability (contract, tort including negligence, statute, or otherwise) but do not apply where the law does not allow them to be limited.

13. Your indemnity

In plain English: if you misuse the Service — for example by monitoring a site you had no right to monitor — and someone brings a claim against us because of it, you cover us.

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless PingStuff and its personnel from and against third-party claims, and resulting damages, liabilities, and reasonable costs (including legal fees), to the extent arising from: (a) your use of the Service in violation of these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) your monitoring of any site or system without the authority required by section 6; or (c) Customer Data you submit in violation of law or of someone else’s rights.

14. Suspension and termination

In plain English: we can throttle, suspend, or close accounts that break the rules, and either of us can end this agreement — you by deleting your account, with a 30-day window to change your mind.

We may throttle, suspend, or terminate access to some or all of the Service if you materially breach these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, if we reasonably believe your use threatens the security or integrity of the Service or of others, or where required by law. Our abuse safeguards may also throttle or block traffic that shows abusive patterns; the enforcement ladder and how to appeal are described in the Acceptable Use Policy. Where practical, we will notify you and give you a chance to fix the problem before suspending a paying account.

You may terminate at any time by deleting your account in the app. Deletion follows the process in section 9: monitoring stops immediately, a 30-day grace period lets you cancel the deletion, and afterwards your organization’s data is permanently deleted, subject to the narrow categories that survive deletion listed in section 9. We may also terminate these Terms on reasonable notice to you; if we terminate without cause while you have paid for a period in advance, we will refund the unused portion.

15. Changes to the service and these terms

In plain English: the product will keep evolving, and if we change these Terms in a way that matters, we will tell you first.

We may add, change, or remove features of the Service, particularly during the beta period. We may also update these Terms from time to time. If a change is material, we will give you at least 14 days’ advance notice by email and/or a notice in the dashboard before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms; if you do not agree, stop using the Service and, if you have an account, delete it as described in section 9. The date at the top of this page shows when these Terms were last updated.

16. Governing law and general terms

In plain English: this agreement is governed by Ontario law, and the usual contract housekeeping applies.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable in Ontario, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. The courts of Ontario have exclusive jurisdiction over disputes arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service, and each party submits to their jurisdiction. These Terms (together with the policies they incorporate) are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect. Our not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control.

17. Contact

Questions about these Terms: email legal@pingstuff.com or support@pingstuff.com. Because our email forwarding is still being set up, the most reliable way to reach us is the contact form at pingstuff.com/contact.