Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of Terms

By creating an account or using GotBack, you confirm that you are at least 16 years old and have the legal capacity to enter into this agreement. If you are using the Service on behalf of an organisation, you represent that you are authorised to bind that organisation to these Terms, and references to “you” include that organisation.

2. Description of Service

GotBack is a community platform that connects people who have lost something with people who have found it. The Service allows users to:

• Report lost or found items or pets
• Browse and search posts reported by other users
• Claim a found post and message the owner to arrange a return
• Offer a monetary reward that is held by our payment processor until the item is returned
• Subscribe to Pro for additional features (see section 7)

To help surface relevant posts, GotBack uses automated matching, including AI-assisted description generation and similarity search (see section 9). GotBack is a facilitator only. We do not take possession of, verify, or authenticate anything listed on the platform, and we do not guarantee that any lost item will be recovered.

3. User Accounts & Responsibilities

You are responsible for:

• Maintaining the security of your account credentials
• All activity that occurs under your account
• Ensuring the information you provide is accurate and up to date
• Notifying us immediately at support@gotback.world if you suspect unauthorised access to your account

We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms or that we reasonably believe to be involved in fraudulent or harmful activity. Where suspension is not urgent, we will give you a reason and, where appropriate, an opportunity to respond.

4. User Content & Licence

You retain ownership of any content you post on GotBack (descriptions, photos, messages, testimonials, and similar — “User Content”). By posting User Content, you grant GotBack a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sub-licensable licence to host, store, reproduce, display, adapt, and distribute that content solely for the purpose of operating, securing, improving, and promoting the Service. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except where we are required to keep a copy for legal, tax, or anti-fraud purposes.

You represent and warrant that:

• You own the User Content or have all rights necessary to post it;
• Your User Content does not infringe the intellectual-property, privacy, publicity, or other rights of any third party;
• If your photos include identifiable third parties, you have any consent required under applicable law to upload and share those photos.

We do not pre-screen User Content but we may remove or restrict content that breaches these Terms, our Acceptable Use rules in section 5, or applicable law.

5. Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

• Post false, misleading, or fraudulent reports
• Claim posts or rewards that do not belong to you
• Harass, threaten, stalk, defame, or abuse other users
• Use the platform for any illegal purpose, or to facilitate any illegal activity
• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to the Service, other users’ accounts, or the systems and infrastructure that support the Service
• Use automated tools, scrapers, or crawlers to extract data from the platform, or interfere with normal traffic in any way
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive source code from the Service, except to the extent that applicable law expressly permits
• Post content that is offensive, discriminatory, sexually explicit, hateful, or that violates the rights of others
• Post personal data of third parties (including photos in which they are identifiable) without a lawful basis to do so
• Post about missing people — GotBack does not support missing-person reports. Contact the police (101 in the UK) and the Missing People charity instead
• Resell, redistribute, or commercially exploit the Service without our prior written consent

We may remove content and suspend or terminate accounts that breach these rules. Where we remove your content, we will, where required by law, give you a brief statement of the reason and information about how to challenge the decision.

6. Exchange Safety

GotBack facilitates connections between users but is not responsible for in-person exchanges. When arranging to meet another user:

• Always meet in a well-lit, public place
• Consider meeting during daylight hours
• Bring a friend or let someone know where you are going
• Trust your instincts — if something feels wrong, leave
• For pets, prefer a vet, RSPCA branch, or other neutral location where staff can verify a microchip

To the maximum extent permitted by law, GotBack assumes no liability for any incident that occurs during exchanges between users.

7. Pro Subscription

Pro is an optional paid plan that unlocks the ability to post lost reports and benefit from automatic matching. The current price and renewal cadence are shown on the checkout screen before you confirm. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period unless cancelled.

Cancellation. You can cancel your subscription at any time through Stripe’s billing portal (Settings › Subscription › Manage Subscription). Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period. You will continue to have access to Pro features until that date.

14-day withdrawal right (EU/UK) and waiver. Pro is a digital service that is made available to you immediately on purchase. Under the EU Consumer Rights Directive and the UK Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 you would normally have 14 days to withdraw from a digital-services contract for a full refund. Because Pro features (lost-report posting, auto-matching, and any platform-fee benefit) are made available immediately, we ask you to consent to immediate access and acknowledge that you lose this 14-day withdrawal right at the point of subscribing. You give that consent by ticking the box presented next to the Subscribe button before payment. Once you have ticked that box and payment has been taken, the subscription is not refundable except where required by law.

Referrals. When a user you referred subscribes to Pro on a yearly plan, you may receive a one-off platform-fee credit as a thank-you. The amount, eligibility rules, and any expiry are shown on your Referrals page. Credit is non-transferable, has no cash value, and is granted at our discretion.

8. Rewards, Held Funds & Payouts

When you post a lost item, you may attach a monetary reward. Rewards on GotBack work as follows:

• Holding of funds. Once you confirm a claim from a finder, your card is charged for the reward and the funds are held safely by our payment processor (Stripe) until you release them. GotBack does not hold customer funds directly.
• Release. When you receive your item back, you release the funds by tapping “Mark returned”. The finder’s share is paid out to their connected Stripe account.
• Platform fee. The finder receives 90% of each reward; the platform share is 10%, unless a different split is shown on the post at the time of claim.
• Cancellation by the owner. You may cancel a held reward before releasing funds (for example, if the item turns out not to be yours). Card holds are released; charged funds are refunded to your original payment method by Stripe.
• Withdrawal by the finder. Finders may withdraw a claim before funds are released; any held funds are then refunded to the owner.
• Abandonment. If neither party takes action for an extended period, GotBack may automatically cancel and refund the owner. We will notify both parties before doing so.

Finder payouts (Stripe Connect). To receive payouts, finders must complete onboarding with Stripe Connect, which includes identity verification (KYC) and bank-account details. That information is collected and held by Stripe under the Stripe Connected Account Agreement and Stripe’s Privacy Policy. GotBack does not see or store your bank details or government-ID documents.

Tax. Reward payouts may be treated as taxable income in your jurisdiction. You are responsible for declaring and paying any applicable taxes. Stripe may issue tax forms where required by law.

Regulatory status. GotBack is not a bank, an electronic-money institution, or an authorised payment institution. We do not provide payment services within the meaning of the UK Payment Services Regulations 2017. Where funds are charged, held, or paid out in connection with a reward, the regulated payment activity is performed by Stripe Payments UK Ltd (or its affiliates) under their own authorisations.

9. AI-Assisted Features

GotBack uses third-party AI services and other automated processing to make matching faster and easier:

• Description enhancement. When you create a post, the photo and any text you provide may be sent to a third-party vision model (currently Fireworks AI) to suggest a clearer description. You can review and edit the suggested text before publishing.
• Similarity search and matching. We generate vector representations (“embeddings”) of post content to surface possible matches between lost and found posts. Suggested matches are not decisions — they are information presented to you and to other users to act on.

We do not use your User Content to train our own models or those of our AI providers. The terms we have with Fireworks AI prohibit them from using your inputs to train their general models.

Suggested matches and AI-generated descriptions may be inaccurate. You are responsible for reviewing them before relying on them or arranging an exchange.

10. Service Availability

We will use commercially reasonable efforts to keep the Service available, but we do not offer a service-level agreement or any guarantee of uptime, throughput, or response time. The Service may be unavailable from time to time for maintenance, upgrades, or for reasons outside our reasonable control (including outages affecting our hosting providers, payment processors, AI providers, or the public internet).

We are not liable for any failure or delay in performance caused by events outside our reasonable control, including natural events, war, terrorism, civil unrest, strikes, government action, denial-of-service or other malicious activity, network or power outages, or failures of upstream providers.

11. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless GotBack, its operator, and its officers, employees, agents, contractors, and service providers from and against any and all claims, damages, losses, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or in connection with:

• Your User Content, including any claim that it infringes the intellectual-property, privacy, publicity, defamation, or other rights of a third party;
• Your breach of these Terms, our Acceptable Use rules, or applicable law;
• Your use or misuse of the Service, including any in-person exchange that you arrange through the Service;
• Your acts or omissions in connection with a reward, claim, payout, or tax obligation arising from the Service;
• Any dispute between you and another user.

We will give you reasonable notice of any claim, allow you to participate in the defence at your cost, and not settle the claim in a way that imposes an admission or non-monetary obligation on you without your consent (not to be unreasonably withheld). This section does not apply to the extent prohibited by applicable consumer-protection law, and nothing in this section limits any rights you have as a consumer under mandatory law.

12. Limitation of Liability

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, statutory, or otherwise, to the maximum extent permitted by law. Without limitation, we do not warrant:

• The recovery of anything lost
• The accuracy, completeness, or truthfulness of information posted by other users
• The identity or trustworthiness of other users
• The accuracy or quality of AI-generated descriptions or suggested matches
• Uninterrupted or error-free operation of the Service
• The availability of payment or payout processing at any given time

To the maximum extent permitted by law, GotBack and its operator will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages; for loss of profits, revenue, business, goodwill, anticipated savings, or data; or for damages relating to in-person exchanges, disputes between users about the authenticity of returned items, or outages of third-party providers (including payment, AI, hosting, and communications providers). Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service in any 12-month period will not exceed the greater of (a) the amounts you paid us during that period and (b) £100.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law, including (in the UK) liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for breach of the implied terms as to title under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are not affected by these Terms.

13. Termination

You may delete your account at any time through Settings > Danger Zone. This will permanently remove your account and associated data, except information we are required or permitted to retain for legal, tax, accounting, or anti-fraud reasons (for example, payment records held by Stripe and our finance records — see our Privacy Policy for retention periods).

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service if you materially breach these Terms or applicable law, if we are required to do so by law, or if we discontinue the Service. We will make reasonable efforts to notify you in advance unless doing so would be unlawful, risk harm, or undermine an investigation. Sections that by their nature should survive (including 4, 8, 11, 12, 14, and 15) will continue to apply after termination.

14. Notice and Action — Reporting Illegal or Infringing Content

If you believe that content on GotBack is illegal under applicable law, breaches these Terms, or infringes your intellectual-property rights, please contact us at legal@gotback.world with:

• A description of the content and a link or sufficient detail for us to find it;
• The reason you believe the content is illegal or infringing;
• Your name and contact details (so we can follow up);
• For copyright complaints, a statement under penalty of perjury that you are the rights holder or authorised to act on their behalf, and a physical or electronic signature.

EU users — Digital Services Act notice. The mailbox above is our designated point of contact for notices under Article 16 of the EU Digital Services Act. We will assess valid notices in a timely, diligent, and objective manner. Where we decide to restrict or remove content, we will, where required, provide the user who posted it with a statement of reasons explaining the decision and the options for redress.

Copyright (US DMCA) notices. Copyright owners and their authorised agents may submit notices under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act to the same address. We will respond to valid notices, and we will terminate the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe.

Knowingly submitting false notices may result in legal liability.

15. Governing Law and Dispute Resolution

These Terms and any non-contractual obligations arising out of or in connection with them are governed by the laws of England and Wales.

If you are a consumer (i.e., you are using the Service for purposes outside your trade, business, craft, or profession): you may bring proceedings in the courts of England and Wales, or in the courts of the country where you live. If you are a consumer resident in the European Union, you also benefit from any mandatory protections of the law of your country of residence, and nothing in these Terms takes those protections away. You also have the right to use the European Commission’s online dispute-resolution platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr.

If you are a business user: any dispute, controversy, or claim arising out of or in connection with these Terms, including any question regarding their existence, validity, or termination, will be referred to and finally resolved by arbitration under the Rules of the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA), which Rules are deemed to be incorporated by reference into this section. The seat of arbitration is London. The number of arbitrators is one. The language is English.

Nothing in this section prevents either party from seeking interim or injunctive relief from a court of competent jurisdiction, or from enforcing an arbitral award in any competent court.

16. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by posting the updated Terms on this page, updating the “Last updated” date, and (for changes affecting your existing rights) by asking you to accept the new Terms before continuing to use the Service. Your continued use of the Service after non-material changes are posted constitutes your acceptance of the revised Terms.

17. Contact Us

For general support and account questions: support@gotback.world

For legal notices, takedown requests, and DSA / DMCA matters: legal@gotback.world

For data-protection requests: see our Privacy Policy.