← Back to home

Terms of Service

Last updated: July 30, 2026

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a contract between you, the contracting business that signs up (the "Customer," "you," or "your"), and Home by Five. Home by Five is operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME TBD], a California single-member LLC (in formation) ("Home by Five," "we," "us," or "our"). They govern your access to and use of the Home by Five web application and related services (the "Service"). The Service was previously offered under the name "Paint Buddy"; these Terms are the same agreement, continued under the new name, and any acceptance recorded under the prior name remains in effect.

Please read these Terms carefully. By creating an account, clicking "I accept" (or a similar button), or using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated by reference. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

This is a plain-language template and not legal advice. It should be reviewed by an attorney before it is relied on with paying customers. Items highlighted in [square brackets] still need to be decided or filled in.

1. Definitions

  • "Service" means the Home by Five web application and related features we provide.
  • "Customer" means the contracting business that creates an account and agrees to these Terms.
  • "Authorized Users" means the people the Customer permits to use the Service under its account — for example the owner and any estimators, project managers, foremen, and crew members the Customer adds.
  • "Customer Content" means the material submitted through the Service by the Customer or its Authorized Users — voice recordings, photos, typed notes, job records, the contact details of the Customer's own customers, and contract documents the Customer uploads — together with the transcripts, scopes, proposals, and contract drafts the Service generates from them.
  • "Talking Estimator" means the feature that lets a user dictate a scope of work (and record jobsite walkthroughs with voice and photos), and generates a transcript and a draft scope from the recording.
  • "Contract Templates" means the feature that takes a contract document the Customer uploads — the Customer's own form of contract — recreates it as a reusable template, walks the Customer through reviewing and approving that recreation, and then prints the Customer's approved scope and job details onto it to produce a proposal or contract document.
  • "AI Providers" means the third-party artificial-intelligence services we use: Anthropic (the company behind Claude), which drafts scopes from transcripts and reads and labels the contract documents you upload, and Deepgram, which converts voice recordings to text.

2. Acceptance, eligibility, and authority to bind

The Service is a business tool, offered for business use only, and is intended for use by adults.

By creating an account, clicking "I accept," or using the Service, the individual doing so represents that they are at least 18 years old and are authorized to accept these Terms on behalf of the Customer, and that the Customer agrees to be bound by them. If you do not have that authority, you may not use the Service.

We record your acceptance, including the version of these Terms you agreed to and the date, against your company's account.

3. The Service and our right to change it

Home by Five helps a contracting business run its estimates and paperwork: you create a job, record a walkthrough or dictate the scope of work at the jobsite, and the Service transcribes the audio and uses AI to produce a draft scope. You review, correct, and confirm every scope before it is used. The Job Coster lets you price the job — the Service never suggests, calculates, or recommends a price; any price you attach to a scope, proposal, or contract is solely your decision and your responsibility.

With Contract Templates, you upload your own contract document, the Service recreates it and walks you through a review where you approve exactly what the template says and which parts change per job. Generated proposals and contracts are your approved template filled with your confirmed scope and the job details you entered. The Service fills in the contract document you provide and approve; it does not author contract terms.

The Service also includes crew task checklists and job hand-off tools for your team.

The Service is provided on an "as-available" basis. The product is early and evolving. We may modify, add, or discontinue features over time, and we will give reasonable notice of material adverse changes where practical. We do not promise any specific feature or level of uptime.

4. Accounts and security responsibilities

You are responsible for the accuracy of your account information, for keeping your passwords confidential, and for all activity that occurs under your company's logins, including the acts and omissions of your Authorized Users.

You decide which team members have access, you create and manage their logins, and you are responsible for removing access promptly when someone leaves. You agree to notify us promptly if you suspect any unauthorized access to or use of your account.

Details about how we protect data are in our Privacy Policy; the security responsibilities in this section are yours.

5. Acceptable use

You agree that you and your Authorized Users will not:

  • upload content you do not have the right to use, or that is unlawful, infringing, or harmful — including contract documents you do not have the right to use;
  • upload photos of identifiable people without the consents required by law (photograph the work, not people, and capture only what is needed);
  • record any person's voice or conversation without the consent their state's law requires — some states, including California, require every party's consent. Use the Talking Estimator to capture your own narration, not other people's conversations, and do not record homeowners, customers, or coworkers without the consent the law requires;
  • upload malware or attempt to disrupt, reverse-engineer, scrape, overload, or circumvent the Service or its rate limits;
  • use the Service to violate worker-safety obligations or any applicable law;
  • resell, sublicense, or share access outside your company.

Violating this section may lead to suspension or termination of access under Section 12.

6. Your content and the license you grant us

You retain ownership of your Customer Content. You grant us a limited, non-exclusive license to host, store, process, transmit (including to the AI Providers and the service providers listed in the Privacy Policy), and display Customer Content solely to operate, support, and improve the Service for you. For clarity, "improve the Service" does not include training AI models: we do not use your Customer Content to train or improve any artificial-intelligence model, ours or anyone else's.

How content actually flows matters and is described plainly in our Privacy Policy: your walkthrough and dictation recordings, jobsite photos, transcripts, and draft scopes are stored by us as part of the estimate record; the contract documents you upload are stored as your templates; and generated proposals and contracts are produced on demand from your approved template and are not kept as separate stored copies.

You are responsible for having all rights and consents needed for the content you submit, including any images that show people and any contract documents you upload. We may delete Customer Content in accordance with the retention practices described in the Privacy Policy after your account is deactivated.

7. Our intellectual property

Home by Five and its licensors own all rights in the Service, including its software, design, content we provide, and our trademarks. Your contract documents remain yours — nothing in these Terms gives us ownership of your contract or its terms. Nothing in these Terms transfers our rights to you, except the limited right to use the Service during your subscription term. We reserve all rights not expressly granted.

If you send us suggestions or feedback, we may use them without any obligation to you.

Copyright complaints (DMCA). If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice to our designated agent at support@gethomebyfive.com [register a DMCA agent with the U.S. Copyright Office ($6) before relying on the safe harbor, and put the agent's name and address here] including: your signature; identification of the copyrighted work and of the allegedly infringing material; your contact information; a statement of good-faith belief that the use is unauthorized; and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the notice is accurate and you are authorized to act. We may remove or disable content in response to a valid notice, will accept counter-notices as the DMCA provides, and will terminate the accounts of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances.

8. AI processing, recordings, and AI-output disclaimer

How AI processing works. When you record or dictate, the Service stores your recordings and jobsite photos with the estimate, sends the audio to Deepgram to produce a transcript, and sends the transcript to Anthropic to draft a scope of work. When you upload a contract document, the Service sends its pages and text to Anthropic to read and label its parts so you can review and approve the recreated template. Corrections you make in the review are applied directly by the Service. See the Privacy Policy for more detail.

No AI training on your content. We do not use your Customer Content to train or improve AI models. Under Anthropic's commercial API terms, Anthropic does not use the inputs or outputs sent to its API to train its models, and we opt every request out of Deepgram's model-improvement program, so your recordings are not used to train Deepgram's models either.

Recordings are your responsibility. You initiate every recording, and you are responsible for obtaining any consent the law requires from anyone whose voice may be captured, as described in Section 5. Do not submit content you are not comfortable having processed this way.

AI output is guidance only. Transcripts, draft scopes, and the recreated version of your uploaded contract may be incomplete, wrong, or a poor fit for your specific job. Transcription of jobsite audio can mishear or omit words. That is why the Service walks you through reviewing and approving your scope and your contract template: you are solely responsible for reviewing, editing, and approving every scope, proposal, and generated contract before relying on it or providing it to anyone, and you use AI output at your own risk.

Not professional advice, and your contract stays your contract. The Service is a drafting and paperwork aid, not professional, engineering, safety, code-compliance, or legal advice, and it is not an estimating or pricing service: the Service never suggests a price, and all pricing, bidding, and contract decisions are solely yours. The Service prints onto the contract document you provided and approved; it does not write contract terms for you and is not a substitute for a lawyer. You remain solely responsible for your contract's compliance with the laws that govern your trade and your customers — including licensing rules and home-improvement-contract requirements such as, in California, CSLB rules and Business & Professions Code §7159 (required notices, deposit limits, cancellation rights) — and for site safety, manufacturer product instructions, OSHA and other workplace-safety requirements, and applicable building codes.

9. Data protection and your role as the responsible party

As between you and us, you control the Customer Content and the personal information in it — including the personal information of your crew and of your own customers (for example, the homeowner names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses you enter on jobs, and any details captured in your recordings or contract documents). We process that information on your behalf and on your instructions to provide the Service, and we use the sub-processors listed in the Privacy Policy (currently Anthropic, Deepgram, Vercel, Neon, Stripe, and Resend), with notice of material changes as described there.

You are responsible for giving your workers any notice or obtaining any consent that your state's worker-notice, electronic-monitoring, or biometric-privacy laws require, and for any notices your own customers are owed about the information you collect from them. The Service does not use facial recognition, does not create faceprints or voiceprints, and does not use photos or audio to identify individuals. A Data Processing Addendum reflecting our service-provider role is available to any customer that requires one [drafted; publish once reviewed by counsel].

10. Free trial, fees, and auto-renewal

The Service is a flat subscription of $20 per month per company, after a 14-day free trial. You add a payment method up front through our payment processor (Stripe) when you subscribe; we do not collect or store payment card numbers within the Service.

Your subscription renews automatically each month unless cancelled. Your trial converts to a paid subscription at the end of the trial period unless you cancel before it ends. You can cancel online at any time from your billing settings, without having to call or email us; cancellation takes effect as described at checkout. We will give advance notice before any price change.

We present the auto-renewal terms at or before checkout and record your acceptance. [A dedicated auto-renewal consent step — clear-and-conspicuous terms with a separate express-consent checkbox, a retainable acknowledgment email, and annual renewal reminders — is being finalized; the final auto-renewal copy is subject to attorney review.]

11. If you don't subscribe

If you do not complete checkout (or your subscription ends), access to the app is paused at the billing screen until a subscription is in place. Your account data is retained during a reasonable wind-down period in accordance with the retention practices in the Privacy Policy, and then deleted or de-identified.

12. Term, suspension, and termination

These Terms start when you create an account or begin a trial and continue for as long as you use the Service or maintain a subscription, renewing as described in Section 10 unless cancelled.

You may cancel or stop using the Service at any time. We may suspend or terminate access for material breach of these Terms (including violations of Section 5), for non-payment (with a short cure period where practical), or immediately in cases of serious abuse or a security risk.

After termination or deactivation, Customer Content is deactivated and then deleted in accordance with the retention practices in the Privacy Policy, and any fees already due remain payable. The following survive termination: Sections 6 (license, to the extent needed to wind down), 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," AND WE DISCLAIM ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

The Service may be interrupted or contain errors. Transcripts, draft scopes, recreated templates, and generated proposals and contracts are guidance, not a guarantee of a correct, complete, or compliant result. We make no warranty about the accuracy of any AI output. You remain responsible for the work performed, for every price and bid you set, for every document you send to your own customers, for site safety, and for compliance with product instructions and applicable laws and codes.

14. Limitation of liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST DATA, OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY. THESE LIMITS APPLY TO CLAIMS ARISING FROM RELIANCE ON TRANSCRIPTS, DRAFT SCOPES, RECREATED TEMPLATES, OR GENERATED PROPOSALS OR CONTRACTS, AND TO CLAIMS ARISING FROM RECORDINGS MADE BY YOU OR YOUR AUTHORIZED USERS.

OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS UNDER THESE TERMS WILL NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US IN THE [3 / 12 — OWNER AND ATTORNEY TO DECIDE] MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM. [Any carve-outs from this cap, such as for indemnification or a party's own fraud or willful misconduct, are subject to attorney review.]

15. Indemnification

You will indemnify and defend Home by Five against third-party claims, and pay resulting damages and reasonable costs, arising from: (a) your Customer Content (for example, a recording of a person captured without required consent, or a contract document uploaded without the right to use it); (b) your or your team's use of the Service in violation of these Terms or law; or (c) the work you perform and the documents you provide to your own customers, including any estimate, scope, proposal, contract, or price, and their compliance with the laws that apply to your trade.

To be indemnified, we will give you prompt notice of the claim, may participate in the defense with our own counsel, and will not be bound by any settlement you make that imposes obligations on us without our consent. [Any provider-side indemnity, for example for a claim that the Service itself infringes intellectual property, would be subject to the liability cap and customary exclusions and is left to attorney review.]

16. Governing law, venue, and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. [The state and county here are placeholders pending entity formation and attorney confirmation.]

[DISPUTE RESOLUTION — OWNER AND ATTORNEY TO CHOOSE ONE: Option A (court): disputes will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in [County], California, and each party waives any right to a jury trial. Option B (arbitration): disputes will be resolved by binding arbitration under the AAA Commercial Rules, seated in [County], California, with a class-action waiver and a carve-out for small-claims matters and for injunctive relief to protect intellectual property. This choice is a genuine business and legal decision and must be confirmed with counsel.]

17. Force majeure

We are not responsible for any delay or failure to perform caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including outages or failures of third-party hosting, database, payment, email, or AI providers, internet or network failures, natural disasters, and government action. This does not excuse your obligation to pay for the Service already provided.

18. General

  • Entire agreement: these Terms and the Privacy Policy (plus any order or billing terms) are the complete agreement and supersede prior discussions.
  • Severability: if any provision is held unenforceable, the rest stays in effect.
  • Assignment: you may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them to an affiliate or to a successor in a merger, sale, or reorganization.
  • Waiver: our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
  • Notices: we may give legal notice to your account owner's email; you give us legal notice to the contact email below. You also agree to transact with us electronically, and your click-to-accept has the same legal effect as a handwritten signature; we keep electronic records of the agreements you accept and you may request a copy.

19. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. Material changes are reflected by a new version date, and the version in effect is recorded against your company's account. For material changes, we will give reasonable notice (such as email to the account owner or an in-app notice) before they take effect, and may ask you to accept the new version before continued use. Continued use after the effective date means you accept the updated Terms.

20. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Email us at support@gethomebyfive.com.

See also our Privacy Policy.