Terms of Service

Draft — not yet reviewed by a lawyer. These terms are a working draft. They are published so the people we invite can read what we intend, and they will change before Earl takes its first paying customer. Nothing here is final until this notice is gone.

Effective: [Effective date, set when a lawyer has reviewed these pages]

These terms are the agreement between you and us for using Earl at hey-earl.com. Please read them. They are written to be read, not skimmed past, and where something matters we have tried to say it plainly.

1. Who we are

Earl is run by Hey Earl LLC, a Texas limited liability company, of 4070 N Beltline Rd, Ste 152 PMB 1032, Irving, TX 75038. "We", "us" and "Earl" in these terms mean that company. "You" means the person who signs in, and the business you act for, if you act for one.

2. What Earl is

Earl is an AI web developer. You tell Earl what you want for your website in plain words; Earl makes the change as code, checks it, and shows you a preview. Nothing goes live until you approve it. Earl can also rebuild a website you already have, by reading its public pages and making a new copy of it in plain HTML and CSS.

For now Earl is by invitation only. We may decline or withdraw an invitation at any time before you have a paid plan.

3. Your account

You sign in with Google, with a code we email you, or with a passkey. Keep the email account and devices you use to sign in secure; whoever controls them can control your Earl account.
Before anything goes live, or you change your account's email or your site's domain, Earl asks you to prove it is you again, with a passkey or a fresh Google sign-in. If a new way into your account is added with only an emailed code, publishing waits 24 hours and we email you. These checks protect your business; please do not try to get around them.
Tell us straight away at legal@hey-earl.com if you think someone else has used your account. Every change email has a way to tell us it was not you.
You must be at least 18 and able to make a contract for yourself or the business you act for.
By signing in, you agree to these terms and our Privacy Policy, including that Earl records how you use Earl, to run it and make it better. That record never holds what you type, and we never sell or share it (Privacy Policy, "How Earl is used").

4. Your content is yours

"Your content" is everything in your site: words, pictures, logos, designs, code, and whatever you send Earl to put there, including the pages of an existing site you ask Earl to rebuild.

You own your content, and you keep owning it. We claim no ownership of it, including the code Earl writes for your site, which is yours as soon as it is written.
You are responsible for your content, including what Earl writes at your request once you approve it, and what your site says to the people who visit it.
You promise that you have the right to everything you give Earl. That includes the site you ask Earl to copy: it must be yours, or you must have permission from whoever owns it (for example, the business it belongs to, and the photographers, designers and writers whose work is on it). Earl copies sites faithfully; it cannot tell whether you are allowed to copy one, and it will not check.
You give us permission to use your content only to run Earl for you: to store it, copy it, change it as you ask, show you previews, publish it at the addresses you choose, keep backups and history, and send it to the services in section 11 that do that work. This permission ends when your content is deleted, except for copies in backups and logs until they expire, and anything we must keep by law.

5. Changes made by AI

Earl's changes are written by an AI model. They can be wrong: a phone number mistyped, a sentence that says more than you meant, a page that looks different from what you asked for.

Every change is a preview first. You review it and approve it before it is published. Look at it properly; your approval is what puts it on your site.
What you approve is yours. You are responsible for checking that a change is accurate, lawful and what you want before you approve it. We are not responsible for errors in a change you approved.
When Earl rebuilds an existing site, the rebuild can differ from the original. Earl tells you what a simple site cannot do (for example a store or a login). Check the rebuild before you put it live.

6. What Earl will not host

Prohibited content: taken down at once

You must not use Earl, or let your site be used, to publish or do any of these:

Phishing, or anything that pretends to be another person, business or organization, or collects passwords, card numbers or other credentials under false pretenses.
Scams, fraud, or deceptive offers, including fake shops, fake charities, investment and crypto schemes, pyramid schemes, and predatory or payday lending.
Sexually explicit or pornographic content, sexual services such as escorts, or anything that sexualizes minors (which we report to the authorities).
Online gambling: casinos, betting, sweepstakes and similar games played for money, or promoting them. A real-world business that is licensed where it operates, such as a bingo hall or a store that sells lottery tickets, may say what it offers.
Illegal drugs, and prescription drugs sold without a prescription.
Hate speech, content that supports terrorist or violent extremist groups, and content that harasses, threatens or incites violence against people.
Other people's private information published without their consent, including their address or intimate images.
Content that encourages suicide or self-harm, or false health claims, such as fake cures.
Anything illegal where you are, where we are, or where your visitors are; anything that infringes someone else's copyright, trademark or other rights; or malware.
Using a site for something other than being a website: a place to store or hand out files, a link farm or search-engine spam, pages that show search engines something different from what visitors see, or sites of filler made only to fill space.
Sending spam through Earl, including through a site's contact form.
Attacking, probing or overloading Earl or anyone else's systems, or trying to get around Earl's limits, checks or security.

Businesses that sell legal products such as firearms, tobacco, vapes or CBD are welcome, as long as what they sell and how they sell it is legal where they operate.

If we reasonably believe your site breaks this list, we may take the content down, take the site offline, or close your account straight away, without notice, and we do not refund your plan. We will tell you why unless the law or the safety of others stops us. If you think we got it wrong, write to legal@hey-earl.com.

Content we would rather not host: 30 days' notice

Some content is legal and not on the list above, but is still something we decide, at our own discretion, that we do not want to host. If that happens, we will:

email you at least 30 days before we take the content or the site down, and say why;
keep Take your site with you (section 9) working the whole time, so you can move it elsewhere. If your plan is still within its refund window (section 8) when we tell you, it opens the day that window closes, and you can still refund the plan until then;
refund the part of your plan you paid for and cannot use.

If, during those 30 days, the content puts someone's safety at risk or exposes us to a legal claim, we may take it down sooner, and tell you why.

Checks before anything goes live

Earl reads every change before it goes live. If part of a page looks like it may break this section, Earl may hold it for a person at Earl to look at, just that page and never your whole site. The rest of your site carries on, and the held part shows your earlier wording, or plain filler, until the check is done. The person may then release the change or refuse it. A held change was never published, so holding it is not a takedown, and the notice above does not apply to it.

7. Takedown requests and copyright

Anyone who believes a site on Earl infringes their rights, or breaks section 6, can tell us. How, and what we do, is on our Takedown and abuse page, which includes our notice procedure under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and our designated agent. We may remove or disable content in response to a notice, and we close the accounts of people who repeatedly infringe.

8. Plans and payment

A paid plan is per site. Prices and what each plan includes are shown before you pay. Payment is taken by Stripe; we never see or store your card number.
Plans renew until you cancel. A plan paid by the month renews every month, and a plan paid by the year renews every year. When you move a site to Earl, your first payment buys the move and the first year of the Starter plan; when that year ends, the plan carries on by the month, or by the year if you choose that before the year ends, and renews from then on until you cancel.
You can cancel at any time from your site's billing page; the plan runs to the end of the month or year you paid for, and we do not refund the unused part of a month or year unless the law or these terms (sections 6 and 10) require it. If you change to another plan, it starts at once by the month, and what you paid for the rest of the current period, including a prepaid year, is credited against it.
We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice by email. A change applies from your next renewal after the notice period.
A site with a live plan cannot be deleted until its plan is cancelled, so nobody keeps paying for a site that is gone.
Refunds: full refund within 7 days of going live. You can refund a plan's first payment yourself, in full, from your site's settings, until the later of 7 days after your site goes live and 14 days after you paid. When you move a site to Earl, it goes live when you have looked it over and pressed "Looks good, I'm ready to publish"; until then nothing is public. A site with no such step (a new site, or a plan paid by the month or the year) goes live when you pay, so it has the 14 days. A refund ends the plan straight away, and your site goes back to an unpaid preview. One plan per account can be refunded this way in any 90 days. A token pack can be refunded within 7 days of buying it, while none of its tokens have been used. Once the window has passed, the year that comes with a move is paid up front and is not refunded.
A domain Earl registers for you is covered by section 18.

For review by a lawyer: the refund rule above is new (2026-10-22) and has not been read by a lawyer yet.

9. Taking your site and leaving

You can take your site with you once it has a paid plan and that plan's refund window (section 8) has passed without a refund, and from then on at any time, without asking us. A preview nobody has paid for cannot be taken, and nor can a site you moved to Earl and have not published yet, because publishing opens 7 more days of refunds. While the refund window is open you can refund the plan instead, and Earl tells you the date the site is ready to take. A plan paid for longer ago than that stays takeable even after it ends.

From your site's page in Earl, choose Take your site with you. You get a zip of your site's files, and a link to copy the whole site with its full history using git. Both are plain files that build and run anywhere, with no part of Earl inside them.
Taking a copy changes nothing on its own. Your site stays live on Earl, and your plan keeps renewing, until you cancel the plan and delete the site.
If you want your site's history moved into your own GitHub account rather than copied, ask us at legal@hey-earl.com and we will arrange it, on the same terms: once the plan's refund window has passed without a refund.

10. Ending this agreement

You can stop at any time: cancel your plans, delete your sites, and ask us to delete your account at privacy@hey-earl.com.
We can end this agreement, or suspend your access, if you break these terms, if we must by law, or if we stop offering Earl. Except where you broke section 6 or the law, or where we are required otherwise, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email so you can take your sites with you, and we will refund any part of a plan you paid for and cannot use.
When an account or site is deleted, we delete its content as described in our Privacy Policy. Sections 4 (your responsibility and promises), 5, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17 and 18 continue after this agreement ends.

11. Services we rely on

Earl is built on other companies' services: Google Cloud (hosting and storage), GitHub (where your site's code and history are kept), Anthropic (the AI model that writes changes), Stripe (payments), Postmark (email) and Name.com (registering domains, section 18). Your content passes through them as our Privacy Policy describes. We choose them carefully, but we are not responsible for their outages.

12. No promises we cannot keep

Earl is provided "as is" and "as available". We work hard to keep it running, fast and secure, but we do not promise that it will always be available, free of errors, or that a change Earl makes will be right. Our aim is for the sites we host to be reachable at least 99.9% of each month. That is a target, not a guarantee, and we do not give credits or refunds when we miss it. It does not count problems with your domain or where it is registered, changes you made, or outages at the services in section 11. To the extent the law allows, we disclaim every warranty not written in these terms, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. Section 9 makes that easy.

13. The limit of our liability

To the extent the law allows:

We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill, arising from Earl or these terms, even if we were told it was possible.
Our total liability to you for all claims arising from Earl or these terms is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, and 100 US dollars.

Some places do not allow these limits, so some of them may not apply to you.

14. Indemnity

You will defend and indemnify us, and hold us harmless, against any claim, loss, liability or expense (including reasonable legal fees) brought by someone else that arises from your content, a change you approved, your site, your use of Earl in breach of these terms, or your breaking the law or someone else's rights. We will tell you promptly of any such claim, and let you control its defence, though we may join with our own lawyer at our own cost.

15. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. If a change matters, we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and show it when you sign in. If you do not agree, you can stop using Earl and take your sites with you before the change takes effect.

16. Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of Texas and of the United States, without regard to rules about conflicts of law. Any dispute will be decided in the state or federal courts located in Texas, and you and we consent to their jurisdiction. Before going to court, please write to us at legal@hey-earl.com; most problems are quicker to fix than to argue.

17. Passing this agreement on

We may assign or transfer these terms, and everything under them, to a company that takes over Earl, including a company set up by its owner for that purpose, or to a successor in a merger, acquisition or sale of Earl's business, without your consent. We will tell you when it happens. You may not assign these terms without our written consent.

18. Domains Earl registers for you

The registrar is Name.com, Inc., an ICANN-accredited registrar. It is the sponsoring registrar of every domain Earl registers for you, and Earl resells its registration service. The domain is registered in your name: you are its owner (the registrant), not Earl.
Before Earl registers a domain for you, you agree to Name.com's Registration Agreement, and, because privacy is on for every domain, its Whois Privacy Service Agreement. You tick a box to say so, and we keep a record of it. If Name.com's Registration Agreement and these terms ever disagree about registering your domain, Name.com's Registration Agreement controls.
ICANN's Registrant Benefits and Responsibilities apply to your domain.
Price. Every price is on our Domain prices page, which updates itself daily, and the first year's price and the yearly renewal price for the name you pick are shown before you pay. Premium names are priced individually; Earl does not register them. You pay the first year with your plan, or on its own if your site already has a plan, and each renewal on your plan's invoice before the domain expires.
The domain charge is not refunded once the domain is registered, including when you refund your plan within its refund window (section 8). The domain stays yours until it expires, whatever happens to your plan.
Renewal. A domain renews while your plan is active and stops renewing when the plan ends. Earl does not renew a domain after it has expired, or restore or redeem one the registry is holding after expiry, so there is no late-renewal or redemption fee; once it has expired, what happens to it follows Name.com's agreement and the registry's rules.
Moving it. You can move your domain to another registrar at any time, with its transfer code, whether or not you have a plan. The registry does not allow a move in the first 60 days after a domain is registered.
The registry's email. When a domain is registered in your name, the registry emails you, from Name.com, to confirm your address. If it is not confirmed within 15 days, the registry switches the domain off until it is.
Help. Everything above is self-serve, on your domain's page in Earl (from your site's Settings): its renewal date, the transfer code, and sending the registry's email again. You do not need an account at Name.com. We keep the emails we send you about your domain, as Name.com requires of us.

19. Everything else

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, the Takedown and abuse page and, for a domain Earl registers for you, the agreements in section 18, are the whole agreement between you and us about Earl. If any part of them cannot be enforced, the rest still applies. If we do not enforce a part straight away, we have not given it up.

Questions about these terms: legal@hey-earl.com, or write to Hey Earl LLC, 4070 N Beltline Rd, Ste 152 PMB 1032, Irving, TX 75038.