Terms of service

Section 01What Bondskeeper is

Bondskeeper is software for running a bail bond agency. You write bonds in it, keep your defendants, co-signers, court dates and payments in it, send reminders and check-in requests from it, and take a record out of it when you need one.

You are the agency. We are the software company. That distinction runs through this whole document, so it is worth stating plainly at the top:

• We are not a bail bond agency, a surety, an insurer or a guarantor. We do not write bonds, we do not stand behind yours, and we take on none of your liability on a bond.
• We are not a law firm and we do not give legal advice. Nothing in the software or on our website is advice about your licence, your filings or a case.
• We are not a payment facilitator and we do not process bail premium. See section 7.
• We are not a recovery agency. What an agent does in the field is yours.

These terms cover the software: your account, our obligations, your data, money between you and us, and how either of us ends it.

Section 02Your account, and who may use it

You need an account to use Bondskeeper. You tell us who works for you and what each of them may see. You are responsible for what the people in your account do in it, and for taking access away when somebody leaves. We give you the controls; keeping them current is your job because we cannot know who is still on your payroll.

You must be legally able to run a bail bond business where you write. We do not verify your licence, and having an account here is not evidence of one.

Keep your sign-in details to yourself, and turn on the second factor. If you think somebody has got into your account, tell us straight away and we will help you shut it.

Section 03What we do not promise

Court and jail data is best effort

Where we pull court dates, hearing changes and jail bookings, we get them from public systems run by courts, clerks and jails. We do not control those systems and we do not stand behind what is in them. They go down. They change format without telling anyone. They publish late. A clerk can enter a date wrong, and every system that copies from that clerk will repeat it with equal confidence. A case can be sealed or withdrawn and simply stop being returned, which looks exactly like a case that was never there.

So: we do not warrant the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of any court or jail information in Bondskeeper. Every date we sync carries where it came from and how confident we are, and anything below our confidence threshold is put in front of a person instead of being trusted quietly. That is the effort we contract for. It is not a promise that the date is right.

You remain responsible for every appearance on your bonds

This is the sentence that matters most in this document. Bondskeeper does not replace your own docket management. It does not replace calling the clerk, reading your mail, or keeping your own calendar. The obligation on a bond is yours, the licence is yours, and if a defendant fails to appear, the consequence is yours. Use this software as one more set of eyes, not as the only one.

Messages, and what can stop one arriving

Text messages and emails depend on carriers, phone networks, mail providers and the person’s own phone. A message can be filtered, delayed, blocked, or sent to a number that has been given to somebody else. If a person replies STOP, the carrier stops our messages to that number and we honour it, which means we may have no way to reach them until they opt back in. We tell you in the software when a case has lost its messaging channel. We cannot make a message arrive.

The software itself

We work hard to keep Bondskeeper up, and we will tell you honestly when it is not. We do not offer a guaranteed uptime figure today, and we would rather say that than print a number we have not committed to. The software is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind beyond what the law will not let us disclaim.

OPEN FOR COUNSEL · whether a stated availability commitment belongs here, and whether the disclaimer language above needs to be conspicuous in a particular form under Virginia law.

Section 04What we do commit to

A page of disclaimers with nothing on the other side is not a deal. These are the commitments, and they are the ones we would want in writing if we were buying this.

Supervision keeps running when the money stops

If your subscription lapses, is cancelled, is downgraded, or a card fails, reminders and check-ins keep running on the bonds you have already written for thirty days. Everything else goes read-only: you cannot write a new bond, and you can still see and export everything.

The same rule applies on the free plan. Hitting the bond limit stops you writing the next bond. It never stops us watching the ones you already have. We will not throttle a court reminder to make an upgrade more attractive, because a defendant missing court over our billing is the exact failure this software exists to prevent.

Your data comes out whenever you ask

You can export everything, at any time, without asking us, without a fee and without a phone call to somebody whose job is to talk you out of leaving. Cases, defendants, co-signers, payments, receipts, documents and the audit trail, as CSV plus the PDFs. If we ever make that harder than it is today, we have broken this term.

We tell you when we have been in your file

Our support staff can look at your account when there is a reason to, and every time we do it is written into your own audit log where you can see it. Nothing about us being in your data is invisible to you.

Section 05Your data is yours

The records you put into Bondskeeper belong to you. We hold them and process them on your instruction so the software works. We do not sell them. We do not use one agency’s data to build a product feature that another agency benefits from, and there is no cross-agency insight feature in this product. Two agencies bonding the same person is a tempting signal and we will not touch it.

Your records include information about people who never signed up with us: defendants, co-signers, their families and their employers. How we treat that information is set out in our privacy policy, and the short version is that you are responsible for it and we act on your instruction.

We use anonymous, aggregate information about how the software is used to make it better. That never includes a person’s details and never leaves your account in an identifiable form.

Section 06Deleting things, and why we keep them anyway

There is no hard delete for case records in Bondskeeper. When you delete a case, it disappears from your working views and the file stays on our systems.

That is deliberate, and it is not our preference over yours. Virginia requires a bondsman to keep records for a minimum of three years from the date the liability ends, including the recognizance, the agreement terms, every written representation made to a court, collateral receipts and proof of return, and the paperwork from recovering a defendant. If we let a delete button erase those, we would be handing you a tool that puts your licence at risk on a bad afternoon.

So we keep a retention floor, counted from the date the liability on that bond ended, and the record cannot be destroyed before it. After that floor passes, deletion is available. If you are under a legal hold, a subpoena or a regulator’s inspection, the hold outlasts the floor.

OPEN FOR COUNSEL · whether the three-year floor should be applied to every state or only where a state imposes one, and how it interacts with a deletion right under another state’s privacy law.

Section 07Money between you and us

You pay us a monthly subscription. What it costs and what it includes is on our pricing page. We bill in advance, and where a plan meters live bonds, we count the days a bond was live rather than charging for a case that closed on the third.

Text messages and calls are passed through at what the carrier charges us plus a stated margin, itemised on your invoice.

We never touch bail premium

Money a co-signer pays you does not come through us. You keep your own merchant account and your own processor, and our software records the payment in your ledger. We are not a payment facilitator, we are not the merchant of record, and we hold none of your customers’ money at any point. If a payment is declined, refunded or reversed, that is between you, your processor and your customer.

If you do not pay us, we will tell you, more than once, before anything changes. What happens then is section 4: supervision keeps running for thirty days and the rest goes read-only.

Section 08What you may not do with it

Most of this list is obvious. It is written down because this software holds criminal-justice information about people who did not choose to be in it.

• Do not look up a person you have no business reason to look at. Searches for people who are not connected to one of your cases are logged and flagged.
• Do not put information in here for a purpose that has nothing to do with running your bonds.
• Do not use it to harass, threaten or intimidate anybody, and do not use the messaging to do it either.
• Do not send anything through our messaging that names a person’s charges, their case details, or the word “bail”. Numbers get reassigned and a stranger must not learn somebody’s charges from a message we sent.
• Do not text or email a person who has told you to stop, and do not move them to a different number to get around it.
• Do not share one login between people, and do not give access to somebody outside your agency.
• Do not scrape, resell or redistribute the software, and do not try to get around a limit, a lock or a permission in it.
• Do not break the law of the state you are writing in, and do not use this software to help somebody else break it.

If you do one of these, we may suspend the account. Where we can, we will call you first, because most of these are somebody making a mistake rather than somebody being a problem.

Section 09Messaging, consent and the things you must get right

When Bondskeeper sends a text to a defendant or a co-signer, it is going out for your agency, on your behalf. We build the consent capture, we keep the record of it, and we honour a stop request. You are the one who has to actually get consent from the person before their number goes in.

• Consent is captured per number and per kind of message, and we keep the artifact: what they agreed to, when, and from what number.
• A stop request is honoured immediately. We assume it stops everything from that sender to that number, which is the safe assumption, and we flag the case as having no messaging channel so somebody deals with it.
• A carrier lifting a block is not the same as the person agreeing again. We ask for consent afresh.
• Messages go out inside quiet hours in the recipient’s own timezone, while reminders are timed from the court’s timezone. Those are two different clocks and we keep them apart.
• No message contains charges, case details, an amount owed, or the word “bail”.

Registering your agency with the carriers takes time and is not something we control. We will give you a real date rather than a hopeful one.

OPEN FOR COUNSEL · whether re-capturing consent after a carrier lifts a suppression is required or merely prudent, and whether the customer or Bondskeeper carries the primary obligation under the messaging rules.

Section 10Limits on what we owe you

This section says what we will and will not pay for if something goes wrong. It is short on purpose. A limitation buried in a wall of capitals is one you are hoping nobody reads.

We are not liable for a forfeiture, a judgment, a licence action, a lost bond, lost profit, lost business or reputational harm arising from a missed appearance, a wrong or late court date, a message that did not arrive, or a defendant who did not do what he was told. Read alongside section 3, that is the whole point of section 3: the responsibility for an appearance is yours, and we cannot carry a risk we have no control over.

Where we are liable, our total liability is capped at what you paid us in the twelve months before the thing that went wrong. We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses.

None of this limits anything that cannot be limited by law, including our own fraud, and none of it applies to our obligations about your data in section 5, our security obligations, or a claim about how we handled somebody’s personal information.

OPEN FOR COUNSEL · the cap amount and its shape, whether carve-outs for data protection and confidentiality should be uncapped or super-capped, and whether an indemnity in either direction belongs in this document at all. Nothing in this section has been tested against a real forfeiture claim.

Section 11Ending it, on either side

You can leave whenever you like

There is no contract term and no notice period. Cancel from inside the software. You keep access to the end of the period you have paid for, supervision on your live bonds keeps running for thirty days after that, and your export stays available throughout.

When we can end it

We can end your account if you do not pay after we have told you, if you do something in section 8, or if keeping you would put us or somebody else at real risk. Except in the serious cases, we will give you thirty days’ notice and a way to get your data out.

We can also stop offering Bondskeeper altogether. If we ever do, you get at least ninety days, your export works the entire time, and supervision on live bonds runs to the end of it. What happens to a business you built on our software is our problem to solve responsibly, not yours to discover.

What survives

Section 6 does not end when the account does. Records inside their retention floor stay on our systems until the floor passes, whether or not you are still a customer, and they stay protected the same way. You can still ask us for a copy.

Section 12Changing these terms

We will change this document, starting with the review by counsel that the notice at the top is about. When a change actually affects you, we will tell you inside the software and by email before it takes effect, and we will say what changed rather than posting a new version and starting the clock.

If you do not accept a change, you can leave, and section 11 applies as written.

Section 13Which law applies

These terms are governed by the law of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and disputes go to the courts sitting in Virginia. Bondskeeper is a Virginia business and Virginia is the first state whose bail law the product implements.

OPEN FOR COUNSEL · governing law, venue, arbitration and class-action waiver, and whether any of it survives contact with the consumer protection law of a customer’s own state.

Section 14Reaching us

Write to hello@bondskeeper.com. A person reads it. If something in this document matters to a decision you are making, ask about it before you sign up rather than after.