Terms of Service

Contracts were originally made one person at a time. You negotiated terms, printed two copies, signed, and each side kept one. That works at thirty users. It doesn't work for a service where 400 people arrive in a day through a signup button. Negotiating separately with those 400 would require several people doing nothing else.

So early web services ran without contracts, and when something went wrong there was nothing to stand on. A user who kept posting material harassing other users couldn't be suspended, because no sentence said they could be. Reducing free-plan storage from 3 GB to 1 GB had no written permission behind it either. And when a customer's legal reviewer asked who owns the documents their company uploads, the answer went out by email — an email that came out slightly differently for each company.

Terms of service fix those conditions once and bind everyone with the same wording. The absence of negotiation is what separates them from an individual contract. There's a price for that, though: changing the content means notifying everyone currently using the service in advance. Which is why reducing free-plan storage is both a product decision and a terms revision project.

Eight sections cover most of it. The ordering varies by company; what breaks when it's missing does not.

1. Service and accounts — what the service provides and on what conditions an account can be created. Age limits and whether one person may hold several accounts live here.
2. Fees and payment — how money is charged and when, and under what circumstances refunds happen. How many days of notice precede a price increase belongs here too.
3. Prohibited conduct — the list of what users may not do. Harassing other users, uploading material that infringes someone's rights, hitting the service with automated traffic. This list is the grounds for suspending an account.
4. Content rights — who owns what users upload. The common form leaves rights with the user and grants the provider only what's needed to operate the service. Enterprise customers read this section first.
5. Service changes and interruptions — whether features can be changed or removed, and how maintenance downtime gets announced.
6. Disclaimers and liability limits — how much gets owed when something goes wrong. Limitation of liability is the central sentence, commonly capping exposure at the amount received over the previous twelve months.
7. Termination — how a user leaves and when the provider may suspend an account. Substantively the same material as a termination clause, except the numbers here are set by the provider without negotiation.
8. Amendment procedure and governing law — how many days of notice a change requires and through what channel, and which country's law reads the document.

Section 8 is the one most often left out. Without a written amendment procedure, every future price increase means deciding the notification method from scratch — and a method invented after the decision tends to be the one that draws complaints.

Legal drafts it and product fills it in. A lawyer sets the frame of the clauses, but the values inside come from the product side. How many gigabytes the free plan holds and how many days a refund window runs are not values a lawyer can decide. So this document shares its values with the product policy — the rules pinning down how the product behaves in which situations. When the two documents state different refund windows, nobody knows which one is true.

There are three readers. Ordinary users barely read it. The reason to have a proper document is the other two. The second reader is a customer's legal and security reviewer, who reads sections 4 and 6 sentence by sentence and asks for a separate contract when the answers don't suit. The third is whoever reviews you: app marketplaces and payment processors check the terms during onboarding and reject applications missing required sections.

There's an internal reader too. Support agents answer refund questions out of this document, so the day the terms change, the support guidance changes with them. Let those two drift apart and different agents start giving different answers to the same question.

"Cutting free-plan storage means a terms revision and 30 days' notice."

A product change dragging a legal task behind it.

"Their legal team won't accept the content rights clause, so we're moving to a separate contract."

The moment terms of service stop being enough and a contract takes over.

"The terms say seven days for refunds and the help center says fourteen."

Catching the same value stated two different ways.

Pagedeck's terms were drafted by Grace with outside counsel, and Mia filled in the values that the draft left as blanks. Six sections carry product values: free-plan storage, refund window, maintenance notice period, grounds for suspension, data retention after termination, and notice period for price increases. Those six appear with identical values in the product policy document, and the rule is that changing one means changing the other.

Enterprise customers rarely stop at the terms. Companies above 200 employees generally require their own paper, and that means a master service agreement (MSA) — the contract holding the common conditions for all dealings. When both documents apply to one customer, the contract states that it prevails over the terms.

The most common mistake is treating it as a document legal handles alone. It's written in legal language, so the assumption is natural. But every number inside it is a product decision. Whether the refund window is seven days or fourteen isn't set by law, and that value moves both support workload and revenue. Hand the whole thing to legal and a lawyer picks the values that leave the company safest, which is rarely what the product actually does. When a dispute arrives with those two out of alignment, the written terms are the ones that count.

The other mistake is treating it as finished once written. The document is long and awkward to change, so it sits. But terms move when the product moves. Every new plan or storage adjustment creates something to check. Leave it and the gap between what's written and what happens widens — and a customer's legal review of that gap stops a deal on the spot. Sweeping the quarter's product changes for anything touching the terms is easier than one large revision later.