Terms of service

1. Who this is between

These terms are an agreement between you and Kinby, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company ("Kinby", "I", "me"), covering the Kinby web application, the texts I send, and anything I do on your behalf.

Using Kinby means you accept these terms and the privacy policy, which is part of this agreement. If you do not accept them, do not sign up.

2. Kinby is an alpha

Kinby is in a closed alpha. It is invite only, free, small, and changing every week. What that means for you in practice, said before you agree to it rather than after:

• Features will appear, change shape, and be removed.
• Things will break, and some of them will break in ways nobody anticipated.
• Data can be lost. I take backups and I will do my best, and this is still an alpha.
• The service can be suspended or discontinued, with as much notice as circumstances allow.

Do not use Kinby as the only record of anything you cannot afford to lose, and do not rely on it alone for a deadline that matters.

3. Who may use it

You must be 18 or older and able to enter a contract. Kinby is for the adults in a household. Children may not have accounts, and you may not create one on a child's behalf.

You need an invite code to sign up. Codes are mine to issue and to withdraw.

4. Your account

Signing in is by a code I text to your mobile number, and only that way, so the security of your Kinby account is the security of your phone and of the number on it. Keep your phone locked and your number with your carrier protected, and tell me at legal@kinby.ai if you think somebody else has got into your account.

An account belongs to one person. Two parents in a household get two accounts, which is the point of the next section.

5. Households, and what the other parent sees

This is the term most worth understanding before you connect a mailbox. The privacy policy explains it in detail; here is what you are agreeing to.

1. Kinby is one agent for a household, with one memory of the family, shared by every adult in it. It is not one private assistant per parent.
2. Each adult connects their own mailboxes and calendars, under their own Google consent.
3. Everything I learn from any connected mailbox becomes part of the household's shared record, and every adult in the household can see it. That includes facts about your children, what is coming up, what needs doing, and the citation for each: who sent the message it came from and when, plus, where I am explaining myself, a short quotation from it.
4. To make that concrete: a permission slip emailed only to you becomes an item on your child's page. The other parent sees the item, sees that it came from the school office on 3 September, and can approve it without you telling them anything. That is what Kinby is for.
5. What does not cross: no adult can browse, search, list, or open another adult's mailbox through Kinby. The link on a citation opens the message in Gmail, which only the owner of that mailbox can do.
6. By connecting a mailbox you confirm you are entitled to connect it, and you accept that what I learn from it will be shared with the other adults in your household. If that is not what you want for a particular mailbox, do not connect it. You choose which accounts to hand over and you can disconnect any of them at any time.
7. Anybody who has your household's invite code can join your household and see what is in it. Look after it.
8. Households do not split themselves yet. If your household changes and the record needs dividing or somebody needs removing, write to legal@kinby.ai and a person will deal with it.

6. What you may not do

• Connect a mailbox, calendar, or portal account you do not own or are not authorized to connect.
• Use Kinby to monitor another adult. It is built so that two parents can see the family's logistics together, with each of them having consented to their own mailbox being read. Using it to keep track of a partner or former partner without their knowledge is a misuse of it and grounds for me closing the account.
• Break the law with it, or use it to harass, threaten, or endanger anybody.
• Break Google's terms, a school's terms, or any other site's terms through me.
• Reverse engineer, scrape, resell, or resource-abuse the service, or get around its rate limits, invite gate, or any other restriction.
• Upload anything you have no right to, or anything containing malware.

7. I use AI models, and I get things wrong

Kinby reads your mail with large language models. They are good and they are not reliable in the way a database is. I will sometimes read a date wrongly, attach a fact to the wrong child, invent a teacher's name, miss something that mattered, or find something that was never there.

Everything I tell you is a suggestion to check, not a fact to act on unread, and none of it is professional advice: not medical, legal, financial, tax, or educational. Verify anything that carries a consequence, especially appointments, payments, deadlines, and anything to do with your children's health or safety. You remain the person responsible for your family's logistics. I am trying to make that job smaller, and I am not taking it off you.

8. What I may do on your behalf

Kinby asks what it may do on its own, in five categories, and you set each of them to do it, ask me, or never. Those settings are yours to change at any time.

Today those answers are recorded and nothing acts on them. Nothing is sent, replied to, booked, signed, or paid without you. When that changes, I will tell you before it does, not after.

Where you do authorize an action, you appoint me as your limited agent for that action, and you are responsible for it as if you had taken it yourself. If you connect a school portal or team app, you authorize me to sign in as you and do what you have asked me to do there, within that site's own terms.

Money is always yours. I hold no funds and I am not a payment processor. If a school fee is paid through a portal, it is paid from your payment method on that portal, and it is yours to dispute with them.

9. Your content, and mine

What you put into Kinby, and what your mail contains, stays yours. You give me the permission I need to run the service for you: to store it, process it, show it to the adults in your household, and send it to the providers listed in the privacy policy for that purpose. Nothing else.

I do not use your content to train models, mine or anybody else's, and neither may my providers. I may keep aggregated statistics that cannot identify you or your family.

Kinby's own software, design, and name are mine. If you send me feedback or an idea, I may use it freely and owe you nothing for it, which is the ordinary arrangement and is said here so it is not a surprise.

10. Other people's services

Kinby runs on Google, OpenAI, Kernel, Stripe, Twilio, and Render, and it acts inside school portals and team apps that belong to somebody else. Their terms govern their part, I do not control them, and I am not responsible for what they do or fail to do. Kinby's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

11. What it costs

Kinby is free during the alpha. If it stops being free, you will be told well in advance and asked before you are charged anything. Nothing here converts into a paid subscription on its own.

12. Ending it

You can stop at any time: disconnect your accounts, or write to legal@kinby.ai to have your account deleted. What happens to your data then is in the privacy policy.

I may suspend or close an account during the alpha, particularly for anything in section 6, and I will say why unless the law stops me.

Sections 7, 9, 13, 14, 15, and 16 survive the end of this agreement.

13. No warranty

Kinby is provided "as is" and "as available", with no warranties of any kind, express or implied, to the fullest extent the law allows. That includes any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. I do not warrant that Kinby will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that anything it tells you is correct. Section 2 is not a formality: this is alpha software.

14. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, I am not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or a missed deadline, appointment, payment, or event, however caused.

My total liability arising out of or relating to Kinby is limited to the greater of the amount you paid me in the twelve months before the claim (during the alpha, nothing) or 100 US dollars.

Some places do not allow these exclusions, so where that is true of yours, they do not apply to you and the rest of this section still does.

15. Indemnity

You agree to cover my costs, including reasonable legal fees, for any claim brought by somebody else that arises from your use of Kinby in breach of these terms, from content you put into it, or from a mailbox or account you connected without being entitled to.

16. Disagreements

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to conflict of laws rules. If something goes wrong, write to legal@kinby.ai first: nearly everything at this size is settled by two people reading the same email. Anything that cannot be settled that way goes to the state and federal courts located in New Castle County, Delaware, and we each consent to that.

17. Changes to these terms

When these terms change, the date at the top changes with them. A material change gets a notice in the app or an email before it takes effect, and carrying on using Kinby after that is how you accept it. If you would rather not, close your account.

18. The rest

These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about Kinby. If a court finds one part unenforceable, the rest stands. Not enforcing something once does not waive it. You may not transfer this agreement; I may transfer it to a successor if Kinby is acquired.

These terms are written only in English, and the English version is the one that governs, whatever language you are reading Kinby's screens in.

19. Getting hold of me

legal@kinby.ai. Kinby, LLC, 131 Continental Dr, Suite 305, Newark, DE 19713, USA.