Terms of Service

1.1 The parties

RooVello is operated by Provident Design, LLC (“RooVello”, “we”, “us”). These Terms of Service (“Terms”) are a contract between you and Provident Design, LLC covering the website at roovello.com, its subdomains, the business dashboard, widgets, badges, emails we send on your behalf, and the public API (together, the “Service”). By using the Service, creating an account, writing a review, claiming or listing a business, embedding a widget or calling the API, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy.

1.2 Age

You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13, and we delete accounts we learn belong to anyone under 18.

1.3 Acting for a business

If you claim, list or manage a business, you represent that you are authorized to bind that business, and “you” includes the business. You are responsible for everyone you invite to your team.

1.4 Accounts

Sign-in is by email link or a supported identity provider. Keep your email account secure; anything done through it is treated as done by you. One person, one account. Do not create accounts to post reviews on your own behalf under different names.

3.1 You own what you write

Reviews, titles, replies, business descriptions, and anything else you submit (“Content”) remain yours. You are the author and publisher of your Content. RooVello is an interactive computer service that hosts, organizes, labels and aggregates Content supplied by users; we do not write reviews, we do not endorse them, and the scores we display are a mathematical summary of user ratings under the published formula.

3.2 License

So that we can run the Service, you grant Provident Design, LLC a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable license to host, store, reproduce, display, distribute, translate, excerpt, index, syndicate through widgets, feeds, the API and machine-readable pages, and create derivative works of your Content (such as a score, a summary, or a search index), in any medium now known or later developed. The license lasts as long as the Content is on the Service and, for copies already distributed, syndicated or archived, after that. It is not transferred to any business reviewed.

3.3 Append-only

Reviews are append-only. You may edit your review; each edit is kept as a version and readers can see that a review was edited. You may withdraw your review; it is then hidden with the reason “withdrawn by author” and remains in our records as required by law and for the integrity of scores, appeals and audits.

3.4 Feedback

If you send us ideas or suggestions about the Service, we may use them without obligation to you.

4.1 First-hand, honest, yours

Write only about a business you personally dealt with, about your own experience, within the last 12 months unless the experience is clearly dated. State facts you believe are true. Opinions are welcome when they are clearly opinions. One review per experience; update it rather than posting again.

4.2 What is prohibited

• Reviews you did not write from your own experience, including reviews generated by AI, bought, traded, swapped, or written for someone else.
• Accepting or offering anything of value (money, discounts, refunds, gifts, future service, review-swaps) in exchange for a review or for its rating or wording, whether from the business, a competitor or a third party.
• Reviews of a business you own, work for, are related to the owner of, or compete with, unless you clearly disclose that relationship in the review. Reviews we detect as coming from the business's own email domain are labeled and excluded from the score.
• Multiple accounts, impersonation, or writing on behalf of someone who did not ask you to.
• Content that is defamatory, threatens, harasses, reveals another person's private information (home address, phone number, financial details, health details), is obscene, promotes violence or discrimination, infringes someone else's rights, or is unlawful where you or the business are located.
• Naming non-public employees in a demeaning way. You may describe what happened; you may not target individuals.
• Marketing, links, promo codes, political campaigning, or anything that is not about the experience.
• Attempting to manipulate a score, a rank, the trust pipeline or the API, including coordinated campaigns to raise or lower a business.

4.3 You are responsible for what you write

You are legally responsible for your Content. Courts in several countries have awarded damages against reviewers for false statements of fact presented as truth. We will comply with valid court orders about specific Content (section 7.5), and we may disclose account information under valid legal process as described in the Privacy Policy.

4.4 Your right to review is not limited

Nothing in these Terms, and nothing a business may put in its own contract with you, limits your right to post an honest review of your experience on RooVello or anywhere else. We do not enforce non-disparagement clauses, and a business that uses one on its customers breaches section 6.2.

6.1 Listing and claiming

A business profile is identified by its website domain. Anyone may create a profile for a business so that it can be reviewed; the business does not need to consent to being reviewed. Claiming requires proof of control of the domain. We may reassign a claim when a better-evidenced claimant appears, and we may unclaim a business that is dissolved, sold, or in breach of these Terms.

6.2 What a business may not do

• Offer, promise or give anything of value for a review, for a rating, for changing or removing a review, or for not reviewing. Discounts conditioned on a review are prohibited whatever the rating.
• Write, commission, buy or generate reviews of itself or of a competitor, or ask employees, family, or agencies to do so without clear disclosure in the review.
• Use contracts, terms, waivers or threats that penalize or deter customers from reviewing (see the U.S. Consumer Review Fairness Act and similar state laws).
• Contact reviewers to pressure, threaten or bribe them, or use reviewer information obtained from the Service for any purpose other than responding to the review.
• Misrepresent its identity, ownership, licensing, location, or the meaning of any label, score or badge.

6.3 Review Requests (the paid service)

For the fee shown at Pricing, billed monthly through Stripe and cancellable at any time from the billing page, we email your past customers a sequence of up to three requests to review you. By uploading a customer list or copying our request address on a receipt, you confirm that each person is a real customer you served on the stated date, that you have a lawful basis to give us their email for this purpose, and that you will include every customer, not a selection chosen by expected sentiment. We decide the wording and timing; the emails never mention stars or a rating goal and always carry an unsubscribe link. A recipient who unsubscribes is suppressed platform-wide. We do not send SMS; if we ever do, it will require consent collected to the standard the law demands. Your list is used only to send your requests, is never analyzed, exported, shared or joined to other data, and can be deleted on request. Fees are non-refundable except where the law requires.

6.4 Sales and moderation are separate

No one who sells or supports paid features can moderate reviews, and no sales conversation may reference, promise or imply any effect on reviews, scores, rank or moderation. If anyone claiming to represent RooVello suggests otherwise, it is false; tell us at legal@roovello.com.

6.5 Bringing your reviews from another platform

You may upload reviews you exported from your own account on another platform. You warrant that the file came from your own account, concerns only your business, was obtained in compliance with that platform's terms, and that you have the right to republish the text. RooVello never scrapes or fetches reviews from other sites. Imported reviews are labeled with their source and original date, count at reduced weight, never enter the verified-only score, and remain subject to reporting and moderation like any review. You indemnify us for any claim arising from an import (section 11).

6.6 Replies

A claimed business may reply publicly to any review. Replies are Content under section 3 and must follow section 4.2. Do not disclose a reviewer's private details in a reply, even to dispute the review.

7.1 How reviews are checked

New reviews pass through automated rules and an AI classifier that look only at the text and surrounding facts (described at Trust and moderation). Depending on the risk score a review is published, published with a “verification pending” tag, held for a human moderator, or not published with the reason code auto_risk. During a sudden surge of reviews on one business, new reviews may be held out of the score for up to seven days while they are checked. These systems make mistakes; that is why every outcome can be appealed.

7.2 Reports

Anyone may report a review with a reason. A reported review stays visible but stops counting toward the score until a moderator resolves the report. Businesses report through the same path as everyone else and have no power to remove or hide a review.

7.3 Removals always carry a reason

We remove Content only for a listed reason: automated high risk, spam, conflict of interest, harassment, not a customer, duplicate, legal, or other (with a note). The reviewer is told the reason and may appeal once; a person decides the appeal. We never remove a review because a business asked, because it is negative, or because of any payment.

7.4 Business profiles

We may edit a profile's category, name or address to keep it accurate, merge duplicate profiles, and suspend a business's dashboard for breach of section 6. A suspension never hides reviews of that business.

7.5 Legal orders

We comply with valid court orders directed at specific Content. Where the law allows, we tell the affected user before acting. Removal under a legal order carries the reason code legal.

15.1 Talk to us first

Before starting any formal proceeding, email legal@roovello.com with your name, the account email, and a description of the dispute and the relief you want. We will do the same if we have a dispute with you. We both agree to try in good faith to resolve it for 60 days.

15.2 Binding arbitration

If we cannot, any dispute, claim or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service, including its existence, breach, termination, enforcement, interpretation or validity, and the scope of this clause, will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules (or Commercial Rules for business accounts) then in effect. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. The arbitrator may award the same relief a court could, to you individually. Hearings take place in your county of residence or by video. For consumers, we pay all filing, administrative and arbitrator fees beyond what you would pay to file in court, unless the arbitrator finds the claim frivolous.

15.3 Exceptions

Either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court. Either party may seek an injunction in court to stop infringement or misuse of intellectual property, unauthorized access, or the sale or fabrication of reviews. Nothing here prevents you from reporting to any government agency, and nothing here applies to a claim that the law does not allow to be arbitrated.

15.4 No class actions

YOU AND PROVIDENT DESIGN, LLC AGREE THAT EACH MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN AN INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS, COLLECTIVE OR REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING. The arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims. If this waiver is found unenforceable for a particular claim, that claim proceeds in court under section 16, and the rest of this section still applies to everything else. If 25 or more similar demands are filed by or with the help of the same counsel, the parties will cooperate in a staged process (batches of 10) and the fee rules above apply per batch.

15.5 Opt out

You may opt out of this section by emailing legal@roovello.com within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, with your account email and the words “opt out of arbitration”. Opting out does not affect any other part of these Terms.