Terms of Service

Effective September 6, 2026  ·  Version 2026-09-06

These Terms are the agreement between you and CivilsTools for your use of CivilsTools. By creating an account or using the service, you accept them.

1. Who this is between

"We", "us" and "CivilsTools" mean CivilsTools, the operator of this service. "You" means the person accepting these Terms and, where you sign up on behalf of a company, that company — and you confirm you are authorised to bind it. Our Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy and Refund Policy form part of this agreement.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 and using CivilsTools for business or professional purposes. CivilsTools is not a consumer product.

3. Your account

• Give accurate details and keep them current.
• Keep your password confidential. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
• Tell us promptly at [email protected] if you suspect unauthorised access.
• Do not share one login between people. Invite them to your workspace instead.
• If you are an administrator, you control who joins your company workspace and what they can reach — including after they leave your business.

4. Your content

You keep ownership of everything you upload and create. We claim no ownership of your documents, reports, estimates, photos or contacts.

You grant us a limited, non-exclusive licence to host, store, copy, index, transmit, process and display your content solely to operate the service for you — for example, extracting text so search works, or generating your branded PDF. That licence ends when you delete the content or close your account. We do not use your content to train AI models and we do not licence it to anyone else.

You promise that, for everything you upload, you have the right to do so. This matters particularly for two categories:

• Specifications, standards and drawings. Many specification and standards documents are copyrighted and licensed — for example those published by ASTM, AASHTO, Caltrans, ACI, AWWA, ICC or a project owner. Uploading a document to CivilsTools for your own use does not change its licence. You are responsible for holding whatever licence or permission your use requires, including when you share an indexed document with a teammate or a third party.
• Other people's contact details. When you add subcontractors, vendors, crew or project contacts, you are responsible for having a lawful basis to record and use those details, and for the accuracy of any rating or note you attach to a named person.

4A. Copyright complaints (DMCA)

We respect copyright and expect you to.

If you believe material on CivilsTools infringes your copyright, send a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to the agent above, including:

1. Your physical or electronic signature.
2. Identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed.
3. Identification of the material you say is infringing, with enough detail for us to locate it.
4. Your contact details.
5. A statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
6. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act on the owner's behalf.

We will remove or disable access to material that is the subject of a valid notice, notify the customer who uploaded it, and accept a counter-notice. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. Note that customer content is stored in private, per-company workspaces and is not publicly accessible, so in most cases we will need to work with you to identify it.

5. Acceptable use

Do not:

• Break the law, or infringe anyone's intellectual property or privacy rights.
• Upload malware, or anything unlawful, defamatory or harassing.
• Try to access another customer's data, probe or breach our security, or bypass any authentication or rate limit.
• Scrape, resell, sublicence or white-label the service without our written agreement.
• Use the service to send unsolicited marketing, or to make telemarketing calls (see §7).
• Reverse engineer the service, or use it to build a competing product.
• Place a load on the service that degrades it for others.

6. Estimates, calculations and professional judgement

Accordingly:

• Nothing CivilsTools produces is engineering advice, a professional opinion, a certified quantity, a code determination, or a substitute for a licensed engineer, surveyor, architect or estimator.
• You must have a competent, qualified person independently review and verify every figure before you rely on it — before submitting a bid, ordering material, excavating, or building anything.
• Spec search results and AI answers can be incomplete or wrong. Always read the cited source document; the governing text is the specification itself, not our summary of it.
• Default rates, productivity factors, dimensions and material properties are starting points for you to confirm against your own cost data, the contract documents and the governing standards.
• You are solely responsible for your bids, your submissions, your means and methods, and your compliance with codes, permits and safety law.

7. AI features and the AI Quote Caller

AI features assist you; they do not decide for you. Review AI output before you send, sign or rely on it.

The AI Quote Caller is an optional feature that places a real outbound telephone call to a number you supply and converses using an automated voice, which identifies itself as automated. The conversation is transcribed and the transcript is saved to your project; no audio recording of the call is kept. If you enable and use it:

• You are the caller of record. You choose who is called, when, and why.
• You are responsible for compliance with all telephone, call-monitoring and recording law, including the federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, state all-party consent laws (California among them — and these can reach the interception or transcription of a call, not only the keeping of an audio file), and do-not-call rules. Several carry per-call statutory damages.
• You confirm you have a lawful basis to call the person you nominate and to have that conversation transcribed, and that the number is not one you are prohibited from calling.
• You must not use it for telemarketing, sales solicitation, debt collection, or any automated calling campaign. It exists to request a price quote from a vendor you already do business with or intend to.
• You must not disable or alter the automated caller's identification announcement.
• We may disable the feature — for your account or entirely — at any time.

Call audio and transcripts are processed by our telephony and speech providers as described in §5.2 of the Privacy Policy.

7.1 SMS reminders

You may optionally add your mobile number to receive follow-up reminders by text. If you do: adding the number and enabling reminders is your consent to be texted at it; message and data rates may apply; frequency depends on the reminders you set; and you can stop at any time by removing the number in Settings or replying STOP. We text only the number on your own account — we will not text your contacts, and you must not use CivilsTools to send text messages to anyone else.

8. Sharing and public links

You can share records with named people, and some tools can generate a link that anyone holding it can open without logging in. Those links contain a long unguessable token, but anyone you give the link to — or who it is forwarded to — can view that record. Treat a share link as public. Do not put anything in a shared record you would not want disclosed, and revoke sharing when it is no longer needed.

9. Plans, fees and cancellation

Paid plans are billed in advance through Stripe on the cycle shown at checkout, and renew automatically until cancelled. Free trials, cancellation and refunds are set out in the Refund Policy, which forms part of these Terms. You are responsible for any taxes. We may change pricing with at least 30 days' notice before it affects your next renewal.

10. Our intellectual property

The CivilsTools software, interface, documentation, name and branding are ours and stay ours. These Terms grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service during your subscription — nothing more. Feedback you send us, we may use freely and without obligation.

11. Availability and support

We aim to keep CivilsTools available and to fix faults promptly, but we do not offer a guaranteed uptime commitment unless we have signed a separate written agreement with you. The service may be unavailable for maintenance, updates, or reasons outside our control. Support is by email, on a commercially reasonable basis. Offline capture syncs when you regain connectivity; keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.

12. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law, CivilsTools is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any calculation, search result or AI output will be accurate, complete or suitable for your purpose.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

• We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, lost bids, cost overruns, project delay, rework, or loss of data — even if we were told such damage was possible.
• Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to CivilsTools is limited to the greater of (a) the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) US $100.

These limits apply regardless of the legal theory, and they are a fundamental part of the deal between us — the price of the service reflects them. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, or death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

14. Indemnity

You will defend, indemnify and hold us harmless from any claim, loss, liability and reasonable legal cost arising from: your content; your use of the service; your breach of these Terms or of any law; your use of the AI Quote Caller; or your reliance on any estimate or output without the independent professional verification required by §6.

15. Suspension and termination

You may stop using CivilsTools and close your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access if you materially breach these Terms, if your payment fails, if we are required to by law, or to protect the service or other customers — with notice where practical, immediately where it is not. On termination your right to use the service ends; export anything you want to keep first. Sections 4 (as to warranties), 6, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17 and 18 survive termination.

16. Changes to the service or these Terms

We are actively developing CivilsTools and may add, change or remove features. If we make a material change to these Terms, we will update the version and effective date above and notify account holders by email or in-app notice before it takes effect. Continuing to use CivilsTools after that date means you accept the revised Terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the service and close your account.

17. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. You and we agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in Riverside County, California, and each consent to personal jurisdiction there. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

Before filing anything, please email us at [email protected] and give us 30 days to resolve it. Most problems are a support issue, not a lawsuit.

18. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms and the policies they reference are the whole agreement between us about CivilsTools.
• Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. Not enforcing something once does not waive it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to a successor in connection with a merger or sale of the business.
• Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for failure caused by events outside reasonable control.
• No third-party beneficiaries.

19. Contact

CivilsTools
[email protected]