Terms of service

1. About these terms

These terms apply between Doffy Labs Ltd, trading as Stedwise (“we”; company number 17183964, registered office 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA), and the organisation that uses it (“you”). By starting the free readiness check or creating an account you agree to them. If you use Stedwise for an organisation, you confirm you may accept these terms for it.

2. What Stedwise is, and what it is not

Stedwise is software you use yourself (self-serve). It helps supported housing providers and managing agents prepare for licensing and quality assessment. In particular:

• It is not legal advice. Stedwise summarises published rules and labels how sure we are about each one. It does not advise you on your legal position. Take professional advice before relying on anything for a legal decision.
• Stedwise never decides who holds a licence. Where more than one party could hold a licence, it shows the facts you have recorded and the questions to put to the council. The decision is yours, the other parties’ and the council’s.
• It does not interpret contracts. Where it shows a duty from a contract, it quotes the clause and page; a person confirms it.
• Scores are not outcomes. The Readiness score is our estimate of readiness against a rule set. It is not a licensing decision or an award. Licences are granted by councils and awards by their assessors, who are not bound by anything Stedwise shows.
• Our best guesses are not law. Some rules are shown as proposed, or as our best guess with how likely we think it is. They may turn out to be wrong.
• It is independent. Stedwise is not endorsed by BVSC, Birmingham City Council, any other council or MHCLG.

3. Generated documents are starting points

Policies, protocols and other documents that Stedwise generates are starting points, not compliance guarantees. Each is marked for you to review, adapt to your service and adopt. You are responsible for the content of anything you adopt, publish or rely on, and for making sure it reflects what you actually do.

The template wording, and the rest of Stedwise, belongs to Doffy Labs Ltd. You may use, adapt and adopt the documents you generate for your own organisation, and share them with residents, councils, regulators, commissioners and your advisers. You may not sell, republish or licence the templates or the documents generated from them, or use them to build or train a competing product or template library.

4. Accounts and users

You sign in with a link sent to your email address. Keep access to that mailbox secure, and remove users who no longer need access. You are responsible for what your users do in Stedwise and for giving each the right role. Owners and managers must turn on two-step verification within 14 days of joining an organisation. Anyone who can open resident records, referrals, safeguarding records or criminal record check outcomes must turn it on before they can see them.

5. Your data

You own the data you put into Stedwise. Where it includes personal data about residents, staff or other people, we process it on your behalf under our data processing agreement, which forms part of these terms. Our privacy notice explains the data we control ourselves. Stedwise never shares data between organisations without a recorded consent and data sharing agreement.

6. The free readiness check

The check is free, and you can take it without an account. If you ask us to email you a link to carry on or the report, the link opens your check or a read-only copy of your results; it does not sign you in or create an account. A free account is created only if you ask for one, by ticking the box for it or asking for a sign-up link, and then opening the sign-in link we email you. The result comes only from your own answers. While you use the check, your email address (if you gave one) stays with it so the check can come back to you. 24 months after a check was last used we remove the email address and anything else that identifies you, and keep only the answers and scores, which we use to improve the accuracy of our scoring.

7. Plans, prices and billing

• There are two plans. The Free plan includes the readiness check, licence cards for the law in force now, the to-do list and the responsibility map. Steward includes every section. Housing associations oversee the managing agents that share with them free, however many agents share.
• Steward is priced by units. A unit is one bed space at an active address in an active scheme on your account: registered capacity, not occupancy, so empty rooms count. Archived addresses and schemes do not, nor do homes outside England or homes you record as not supported housing (such as temporary accommodation or general needs).
• Each bed space is billed once, to the organisation that runs the home day to day. Where a managing agent records a home and shares it with you through agent oversight, the agent pays for it and you are not billed for it, even if you record it too.
• The monthly price is graduated, and each rate applies only to the units in its band: £149 for the first 10 units (the minimum, which also applies with fewer than 10 units or none), then £9 a unit for units 11 to 50, £7 for units 51 to 200, £4.50 for units 201 to 1,000 and £2.50 for each unit above 1,000. Above 1,000 units you may ask us for a price instead (Steward for estates).
• You can pay monthly or yearly. The annual price is ten times the monthly price: two months free.
• You pay by card unless you choose to pay by invoice, which we offer on annual billing over £5,000 a year. We then email an invoice when each year starts, payable by bank transfer within 30 days, and your plan starts straight away. If an invoice is not paid by its due date we treat it as a failed payment: we tell the account owners, and your plan is unchanged for now.
• Your units are counted from the addresses and bed spaces you record, and your subscription follows them. When your units go up, the extra units are charged straight away for the rest of the current billing period, in proportion to the time left. When they go down, the lower count applies from your next renewal; there is no credit or refund for the period already paid.
• Founding customers: the first 10 organisations to take an annual subscription pay 30% less than the list price on every annual payment due on or before 31 March 2028. Each such payment covers the full year it pays for, even where that year runs past 31 March 2028. Annual payments due after that date are at the list price. The discount does not apply to monthly billing; a founding customer who moves to monthly billing pays the monthly list price, and gets the founding price again if they return to annual billing before it ends. A founding place is not transferable. The founding listing terms are in section 8.
• Packs are one-off purchases. The S.E.A.Q.A.S. pack (£995) is credited in full against a subscription you start within 90 days of buying it. The licence application pack (£495 per council area, included free for annual subscribers) will be available once the national application form is published.
• We are not registered for VAT, so no VAT is charged.
• Prices will be reviewed when licensing begins. If they change, existing customers keep their price for 12 months, and we will tell account owners by email before any change affects them.
• A first monthly Steward subscription starts with a free trial of 7 days. You give a card at checkout, and nothing is charged until the trial ends. We email the account owners 2 days before it ends. If you cancel before it ends, you pay nothing and move to the Free plan with every record kept; if you do not, the first monthly payment is taken when it ends. One trial per organisation. There is no trial with annual billing, or when S.E.A.Q.A.S. pack credit pays for your first months. During the trial, documents download as PDFs marked “trial copy”; clean copies and Word files open after the first payment.
• Cancelling stops the next renewal. You keep access until the end of the period you have paid for, and there is no refund for the rest of that period.

8. Founding members listing

The founding price is given in return for being named as a founding member, or, if you cannot be named, for an anonymous case study. When you take a founding place:

• You give us permission to list you. You agree that we may show your organisation’s name (as you give it) and logo, with a link to your website, on stedwise.co.uk under “Founding members”, and that we may ask you for a short case study. You confirm you may give that permission for the name and logo, and you keep all rights in them. We use them only for this listing and do not change them, other than showing the logo in grey until someone points at it and at a fixed size.
• If you cannot be named publicly, for example because you run a refuge or your residents could be put at risk, you may choose instead to agree to a short anonymous case study. We then never show your name or logo, and publish nothing that names or locates you, your schemes or your residents. You still get the founding price.
• We check every listing first. Nothing is shown until Stedwise staff have approved it, and any change you make comes back to us to check. We may correct an obvious mistake in the name or website, or decline or hide a listing, and we tell you why on your billing page. We show the list only once at least three founding members are approved, and only while you subscribe.
• You can be removed at any time. Remove the listing from your billing page, or email us, and we take it down promptly (a copy may remain in search engines and caches for a short time). The listing is a condition only when you take the place: removing it later, or our hiding it, does not end or reduce your founding price.
• No endorsement either way. A listing means only that you are a founding customer. It does not mean you endorse Stedwise, or that Stedwise, a council or any assessor endorses your service, and a case study is not a claim about your readiness, a licence or an award.

9. Acceptable use

Do not use Stedwise to break the law, to upload data you have no right to process, to test or attack its security, or to present its output as endorsed by a council, BVSC or MHCLG. Do not upload resident personal data into document checks: those are for organisational documents only, and Stedwise will refuse documents that contain resident data.

10. Changes to the rules and the service

Supported housing rules are changing. We update the requirements we score against, our templates and the rules we track as sources change, and record these changes in the public list of changes. Past assessments keep the version of the requirements they were scored against. We may change these terms; we will tell account owners by email before a material change takes effect.

11. Liability

Our total liability to you under or in connection with these terms, whatever the cause, is capped at the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the event that gave rise to the claim. For the free readiness check, where no fees are paid, we accept no liability beyond what the law does not allow us to exclude.

We are not liable for loss of Housing Benefit, loss of income, a refused or revoked licence, a missed award, or decisions you make on the basis of a score, forecast or generated document. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law.

12. Ending

An owner can export all of an organisation’s data, and close the organisation, at any time from Settings, Data protection. Closing ends everyone’s access and cancels the subscription straight away, with no refund for the rest of the period. We keep the data for 30 days in case it was a mistake, then permanently delete it, except billing records, which we keep for as long as the law requires. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms.

13. Law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction.

14. Contact

Email hello@stedwise.co.uk.