Terms

Who this is between

The trading entity is Recado — Tiago d'Aubigné, a sole trader in the United Kingdom rather than a company, so there is no company number and no Companies House registration. The address for anything formal, including service of documents, is Flat 111 Hersham Road, KT12 1RN, United Kingdom. For everything else, hello@recado.co.uk reaches us and a person reads it.

Where these terms say “we” or “us”, that is who they mean. Where they say “you”, they mean the business or person who signs up for an account.

Sending us money makes two agreements, not one. This is the part most worth reading twice, because it is unusual and it decides who you go to when something is wrong. It applies to the one thing that can be paid for, whatever that happens to be at the time.

Your agreement with Onelink is the purchase. Recado uses Stripe Managed Payments, under which Onelink is the merchant of record. They take your money, work out and pay the VAT, issue the invoice, and hold the subscription itself. When you pay, your purchase agreement is with Onelink and their terms apply to it, alongside these.

The account the payment is made to is called shippedin12months. That is the umbrella these apps are built under, and Recado is one of several. They share one payment arrangement, so a payment made here is handled by that shared account rather than by one belonging to Recado alone.

So seeing shippedin12months rather than Recado on an invoice or a bank statement is expected and correct. You may see Onelink instead, or both. Whichever it is, it is us, and it is the amount you agreed. It is said here, on the card where you pay and on the page you land on afterwards, because a charge nobody recognises weeks later is the thing about this arrangement most likely to worry somebody — and an unrecognised name on a statement is exactly what fraud looks like.

Your agreement with us is the service. Your account, your testimonials, what we may and may not do with them, and what we promise about the thing working are all between you and us. Onelink sells the subscription; we provide what it buys.

So who do you go to? Us, for almost everything. Anything about the product is ours, and so are refunds — we issue those ourselves and you do not have to go anywhere else for them. The one thing that is not ours is cancelling, because Onelink holds the subscription. That is set out under what this costs, along with what cancelling does and when it takes effect.

Somebody who leaves a testimonial is not a party to this agreement. They never see it and never agree to it. What they agree to is the consent wording on the page where they write, which is a separate thing and is theirs to withdraw. Nothing in these terms can take that away, and a clause in them that tried to would not bind them anyway.

What Recado does

You send a link to a customer. They write a testimonial and agree to it being published. It arrives in your dashboard, and nothing appears anywhere until you approve it. Approved testimonials can be shown on a page we host, or on your own website through two lines of code.

A customer can also confirm that they really bought from you — by matching an invoice number, an email address you already held, or a payment. When they do, their testimonial carries a mark saying so, and a line naming what was checked and when.

Your account

• You need an email address and nothing else. There is no password. Signing in means clicking a link we send you, so anybody who can read your email can reach your account — keep it as carefully as you would a password.
• You are responsible for who you invite. People you give access to can approve, reject and remove testimonials, and what they do counts as what you did.
• One account per business. A person may belong to more than one, and each business’s testimonials stay separate from every other’s.

Your customers’ words are not yours to change

This is the part of the agreement that matters most, because it is the thing the product exists to be true about. It is enforced by the software, not only promised here.

• You may fix a typo. You may not rewrite. Every edit is measured against the original — never against the previous edit — and refused beyond 10% of the characters or 20 characters, whichever is smaller. Fifty small edits still cannot drift into a rewrite.
• The original is kept and can be produced. Every change is recorded with what it was, what it became, who made it and when. A customer who asks to see what was done to their words is shown it.
• You may not use Recado to publish words a customer did not write. Inventing a testimonial, or having one written for you, is the one thing that ends an account immediately and without a refund of anything paid for the period in question.
• A rating cannot be changed at all. Not by you and not by us. A number has no typo worth fixing.

What that honestly protects, and what it does not. A business cannot rewrite a testimonial. A determined one could still change its meaning inside the edit budget — “not good” becomes “so good” in four characters. What protects against that is not the limit: it is that the original is kept, every change is recorded, and the customer can ask to see it. We do not claim more than that, and neither should you.

The verified mark

The mark is set by the system and never by a field anybody can edit. You cannot mark a testimonial as verified, and neither can we on your behalf. It appears when a customer completed one of the three checks, and the line beneath it says which.

• It says a real transaction was matched. It does not say the testimonial is true. Somebody who really bought from you can still write something unfair. The mark is about the person, not about the opinion, and describing it as anything more in your own marketing is your responsibility rather than ours.
• Unverified testimonials are labelled plainly and never hidden or visually punished. You may not modify the embed or the wall to remove that label, obscure it, or make a verified and an unverified testimonial look the same.
• You must not import, buy or otherwise obtain testimonials from anywhere else and present them through Recado. Every testimonial on Recado came through a Recado link, from a person who agreed to it there.

What we will not do, ever

These are not features we have chosen to leave out for now. They are things this product will not have, and if that changes these terms change with it and you would be told before it took effect.

• No AI writes or improves a testimonial. Not as a suggestion, not as a helper, not behind a setting. The moment a machine touches the words, the mark is worthless.
• We will not alter what a customer wrote, beyond carrying out an erasure they or you asked for.
• We do not sell, share or train on your testimonials, your customers’ details, or anything else in your account.
• We do not contact your customers except to send a verification link they asked for, or the link back to their own testimonial if they asked for that.

What you may not do

• Publish anything unlawful, or anything you do not have the right to publish.
• Use Recado to collect testimonials for a business that is not yours without that business’s agreement.
• Attempt to reach another account’s data, or to work out whether a particular person has left a testimonial.
• Send traffic at the collection form to flood it, or use it for anything other than collecting testimonials.
• Resell Recado as your own product. Showing it to your own clients under your own branding is what the white-label part is for and is fine; selling it on as though it were yours is not.

What this costs

• Recado is free. Everything it does is available to every account. There are no tiers, no limit on how many testimonials you may collect or show, no limit on collection pages, and no feature held back for a payment.
• It stays free unless that changes, and you will be told before it does. If Recado is ever charged for, you get at least 30 days’ notice in writing and nothing is charged for a period you have already had. Said now, in advance, rather than sprung on anybody later.
• Nothing is downgraded, because there is nothing to downgrade from. No plan can end, so nothing about your account can be reduced by one ending — not what is showing, not how many collection pages you have, and not a collection link.
• The Recado mark is yours to remove, and stays removed. It used to come back when a paid plan ended. There are no paid plans, so nothing puts it back on a wall you have taken it off.
• The one thing you can pay is a gift of £9 a month, and it buys you nothing. Everybody has the same Recado whether they send it or not. There is no better version behind it, no feature it turns on, and nothing about your account changes when it arrives or when it stops. It is a gift towards what Recado costs to run.
• It goes through Onelink, exactly as a plan would. Onelink is the merchant of record: they take the payment, work out and pay the VAT, issue the invoice and hold the subscription. Your purchase agreement for it is with them, and their terms apply to it alongside these.
• The charge will not say Recado. It will say shippedin12months — the account these apps share, of which Recado is one — or Onelink, who handle the sale and the VAT, or both. That is what you will see at checkout, on the invoice and probably on your bank statement. It is us, and it is the amount you agreed.
• It renews monthly until you stop it, and it continues only for as long as Recado does. If Recado stops, you will be told and the payment stops with it.
• You cancel through Onelink, not through us. There is no button in your Recado dashboard that does it, and we would rather say so than let you hunt for one. Onelink holds the subscription, so it is cancelled from the receipt or the invoice they emailed you. If you cannot find it, write to us and we will point you at it.
• Cancelling takes effect at the end of the month you have paid for. Not immediately — neither you nor we can stop a subscription part way through, because the payment system gives neither of us that option. What cancelling does is stop the next payment, and there is no pro-rata refund for the remainder. Nothing about your account changes either way.
• Fourteen days to change your mind. For fourteen days from the day you first pay, ask and we refund the whole thing. We will not ask why, and you do not have to have a reason. We issue the refund ourselves — you do not have to go to Onelink for it, and you do not have to cancel first.

A collection link is never switched off. It goes on invoices and receipts and can never be changed once it exists, so nothing about payment reaches it — there is no plan to fall out of and no failed payment that could. The customer who follows that link would lose the testimonial they were about to write, and neither of us would ever know.

The mark is a link to recado.co.uk, and when one of your visitors follows it we can see that the visit came from a Recado wall or embed — not which business it was, and nothing about the person; there is more on this in our privacy policy.

What we promise about it working

There is no uptime guarantee, and it would be dishonest to offer one. Recado runs on infrastructure we do not own, on plans chosen so the service costs nothing to run. We will keep it working and we will tell you when it is not, and that is the whole of the commitment.

• Published testimonial pages are static. They keep serving even when parts of the product are not working, which is deliberate: the page your customers see is the last thing that should break.
• When a limit outside our control is reached, we refuse plainly rather than failing quietly. If we cannot send email one day, the screen says so rather than pretending a link is on its way.
• We may change how Recado works. If a change removes something you were relying on, you will be told before it happens, and 30 days is the notice you get.

Your data, and getting it out

• Your testimonials are yours. You can download all of them at any time, with the exact consent wording each person agreed to, what was corrected and when, and which checks were made — enough to answer a customer who asks what you hold about them.
• Erasure is one action and it is complete. It takes a testimonial off your wall, out of the embed on your own website, and out of every copy we hold, including the record of edits. What survives is the fact that something was removed and when, holding none of the words.
• A customer can take their own testimonial down without asking you. They agreed to publication and they can withdraw that agreement, from the link they were given when they wrote it. You cannot prevent this, and neither can we.
• What we do with personal information is set out in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.

Ending it

• You can close your account at any time, and download everything first.
• What happens to your testimonials when you close: you choose. Closing asks you which, and does not decide for you.
  Leave them up and the walls and embeds on your website keep working exactly as they did. You have lost the way in, not the thing you built — the people who wrote those words agreed to them being published, and closing an account is not a reason to take them down without asking.
  Erase them and they go everywhere at once, including from any website showing your embed, within seconds. That is the same erasure a customer can ask for and it cannot be undone — see what we keep afterwards, below.
  If you close it by mistake, the account is closed rather than deleted, so write to us and we will open it again. There is no time limit on asking and no screen that does it for you. If you chose to erase, though, the testimonials are gone and reopening will not bring them back — that is what erasure means, and it is the reason we ask you to type your business name before it happens.
• Closing your Recado account does not cancel your subscription. They are two agreements and they end separately. Close the account here, and cancel with Onelink so no further payment is taken. If you close and forget, write to us and we will chase it with them.
• We can close an account that invents testimonials, immediately and without notice. Anything else — non-payment, or a breach of these terms — gets 30 days written notice and a chance to put it right.
  What we cannot do, even then, is end your subscription early. We can close the account on notice; the subscription still runs to the end of the period you have paid for, because only Onelink can stop it and only at that point.
• If we stop running Recado, you get 30 days notice, an export of everything, and a refund of any period paid for and not used. We issue that refund ourselves — it is our promise to make and we can honour it.

If something goes wrong

This section is the one most likely to be rewritten by a solicitor, and the numbers in it are placeholders. It is here to show the shape of what is intended rather than to state a settled position.

• We do not exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow to be excluded.
• Otherwise, the most we can be liable for is what you have paid us. The ceiling is the fees you paid in the twelve months before the claim, or everything you have paid if you have been with us less than a year. Recado is free, so unless you have chosen to send the £9 gift there is nothing in that figure at all. It is never more than you have given us.
• This is not the refund policy and should not be read as one. The cap above is the ceiling if something goes badly wrong and somebody claims against us. Refunds are further up, under paying for it: fourteen days to change your mind, and after that no refund of a part-used period. One is a limit the law cares about; the other is a decision we made.
• We are not liable for lost profits, lost business or lost goodwill.
• You are responsible for what you publish. If somebody brings a claim because of a testimonial on your website, that is between you and them.
• These terms are for businesses. If you are a consumer, you have rights these terms do not affect, and nothing here takes them away. Rather than argue about whether a sole trader counts as a consumer, everybody gets the same fourteen days to change their mind — which is at least what the law would give somebody who did count, and simpler than deciding case by case.

Changes to these terms

We will tell you before these terms change, at least 30 days in advance, by email to the address on your account. If a change is one you are not willing to accept, you can close your account and get back the part of any period you have paid for and not used. Carrying on using Recado after a change takes effect means accepting it.

The things listed under “What we will not do, ever” are different. Those are the product’s reason for existing, and if one of them ever changed it would be announced as what it is rather than as an update to a document.

Law, and where a disagreement is settled

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales deal with any dispute. If part of them turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still applies.

Before any of that: write to hello@recado.co.uk and a person will read it. Most things that look like a dispute are a misunderstanding somebody could have cleared up in a paragraph.

Who is responsible for your customers’ data

You and Recado are joint controllers of the testimonials you collect. Not us on your behalf, and not you alone. You decide who is invited, what the prompt asks and what gets published; we decide what is collected, what people are told, what they agree to, how long it is kept and how requests about their rights are answered. Both are decisions about someone’s personal data, which is what makes this joint rather than one of us working for the other.

So there is no data processing agreement to sign, and we will not send you one. This section is the arrangement. It is here because the law requires the roles to be agreed and transparent, not because it requires a contract.

• What you are responsible for. Having a proper reason to contact the customers you invite, what your prompt asks them, and your decision to publish or not. If you also hold their details in your own systems, that is yours and nothing to do with this.
• What we are responsible for. Holding the data securely, what the submission page asks for and tells people, the consent wording and its versions, keeping originals unchanged, retention, and answering requests about people’s rights.
• Who a customer goes to. Either of us, and we will not send them in circles. Requests can come to hello@recado.co.uk and we will act on them, telling you where you need to know. A customer is equally entitled to come to you, and you must not simply redirect them to us and stop there.
• The part that costs you something, said plainly. Joint controllers are each liable for the whole of any damage caused, not a share of it, and an arrangement between us cannot change that as far as the customer is concerned. In practice it means a customer harmed by something we did can come to you for all of it, and the other way round. What we can do — and this is what the sentence below is — is agree that whichever of us actually caused it carries it between ourselves, and the other can recover what it paid out.
• Between the two of us, fault follows the cause. If something goes wrong because of a decision that was ours, it is ours. If it goes wrong because of a decision that was yours — who you invited, what you asked, what you published — it is yours.

This position is our own reading of the Information Commissioner’s test, worked through decision by decision rather than assumed, and we have asked the ICO to confirm it in writing. If they tell us it is wrong, this section changes and we will tell you it changed rather than quietly editing it.

What a solicitor has to decide

Listed here so the meeting starts from a list rather than from the whole document. Nothing above is missing now — the entity, the address and the seller of record all have answers. What is left is judgement rather than fact, and this is it.

1. Whether the two-agreement description above is right, and whether it is enough. Paying us anything makes an agreement with Onelink as merchant of record and an agreement with us for the service — today that is the £9 gift, and if plans come back it is those. That is two contracts where a customer will reasonably believe there is one. What a solicitor is being asked is whether these terms allocate liability correctly across that split — particularly when the product fails and the payment fails as one event — and what a business has to be told, and where. It is first on the list because the rest of the money sections hang from it.
2. Whether the joint-controller position above is right. We have worked it through against the ICO’s own test and concluded that we are joint controllers with you and that no data processing agreement is needed. It is a reading, not advice, and the ICO has been asked to confirm it. What a solicitor is being asked is whether the arrangement above allocates the roles properly — not whether to start the question again.
3. The liability position. The cap, what is excluded, and whether the business-to-business framing above is right given that a sole trader may sign up.
4. The badge wording, against the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. “Verified” is a commercial claim about somebody else’s business, made by us, displayed on their website. The Act names fake reviews specifically. We believe proof of purchase is exactly the reasonable step it asks for — but the wording of the mark and the proof line is the claim the business rests on.
5. Whether a business can be held to the editing rules by contract, and what happens if one of them breaks the rules in a way the software did not prevent.
6. Consumer status. Whether a sole trader signing up is a business or a consumer, and what the terms have to say differently if the second.
7. The transfer paperwork for Resend and Stripe — which mechanism, and whether a transfer risk assessment has to be on file.
8. Whether anything here should be shorter. The document is written to be read by the person signing it. If plain English costs enforceability somewhere, we would like to know where rather than have the whole thing rewritten into the usual language.

Getting in touch

hello@recado.co.uk. A person reads it.

By post, including anything formal: Recado — Tiago d'Aubigné, Flat 111 Hersham Road, KT12 1RN, United Kingdom.