To provide you with technology that makes complicated tasks simple, giving your customers a first class shopping experience whilst keeping your weekly admin time to a minimum. We promise to continue investing in our software to keep it state of the art. We promise to treat all of our users equally regardless of size. We promise to fix problems quickly. We promise to communicate regularly and honestly. We promise to listen. We promise to plan well and make sensible commercial decisions. We promise not to allow our user-base to out-grow our resources.

To make the most of our software and make your customers happy with boxes (or bags) of brilliant veg! To use our software responsibly and keep your system and customer data secure. You promise to tell us when you encounter a problem or think of something you’d like improved. You promise to play your part in our community of veg box schemes making a difference in how the UK grows, sells and buys fresh produce. If our software makes you really happy, you promise to tell someone else about us!

Officially, we’re “Growing Good Technology Limited”, though you may see us referred to in this document and elsewhere as “Growing Good”, “GG” or even “we”, “us” or “our”.

Our “product” (that you pay for) may also be referred to as “system”, “software”, “platform” or “tech”.

You may be referred to as a “user” or our “customer”.

“Usage fee” refers to the fee we charge you for using our system week to week, it may also be called “subscription rate”, “fee”, “rate” or “charge”.

Our software platform allows you to build-out your online store and website without needing to touch code or employ a developer. The online store is purpose built for veg box schemes, offering customers the type of shopping experience they would expect with one of the big, national veg box operators.

Behind the store is an admin system that handles your week to week admin tasks, from planning box contents, managing margin, creating order and picking lists, planning your delivery routes, printing box labels and communicating essential info to customers automatically, it will make life running a box scheme a whole lot easier.

All of the above (and more) is included as part of your usage fee and is available to all users regardless of size.

Growing Good is and will remain the owner of the system outlined above (and all future evolutions of it), your usage fee gives you a license to make use of it for as long as you wish to.

Should you misuse our software in any way (such as trading unethically or illegally) then we reserve the right to terminate your agreement and use of our system at short notice.

Your account with us should be set up by a representative of your business, someone with ‘responsibility’. This means you’ll also be at least 18 years of age. You will use your account for the intended purpose, you will keep your personal and company information up to date and you promise to do everything possible to maintain a good relationship with your customers whilst using our platform.

Our platform integrates with Stripe, a leading financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies, from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startup use Stripe to accept payments. They are headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin.

All of our users will accept payments via our Stripe integration. Versus offering multiple integrations this works better for us and for you as we can focus on delivering a fantastic end-customer experience and make life as simple for you as possible, we can also pass on a big reduction to rate card prices that would be available to you directly - a benefit of being part of our community at scale operation.

Although your customer enters their card details upon registration via a pop-up on your website, this is Stripe-powered and means maximum levels of data security are maintained. You (or us) do not have to worry about holding sensitive financial information.

Payments are created when orders process and are completed immediately, avoiding any delay and confusion often caused by other providers using Direct Debit as payment mechanism (Stripe uses card details rather than account details). This also means that payment success will be confirmed before a delivery is due, giving you more control over product and reducing bad-debt. Customers can also save more than one set of card details on their account (shown on your website but secured by Stripe) to use as a back-up payment method.

Your company name will appear on customer bank statements - avoiding confusion we sometimes see with other payment providers.

Payment processing fees are additional to the Growing Good usage fee. The Stripe Services Agreement (that Growing is bound by, so purely FYI) can be found here.

Our usage fees are outlined here. We have structured them in a such a way to offer value and fairness regardless of your size, whilst keeping our business (and your product) moving forward.

Easy admin. One of the reasons that we love Stripe is that we can keep accounting admin to a minimum.

We deduct our software fee (starting at 2.5% and reducing down as per our fee calculator), plus the 1.25% for payment processing on each transaction. The biggest fee in terms of % that can be paid is therefore 3.75%.

Stripe handles the % deduction from each transaction, pushing the correct % of £ into each of our accounts. Payouts can be reduced to 3 days, although there is an element of ‘trust / eligibility’ that needs to be built up before this minimum payout delay is reached (the setting that we control will always be set to ‘minimum’ - trying to get funds to you as quickly as possible).

We (GG) are not burdened with ‘holding’ money and accompanying red-tape and you don’t have to add to your accounting admin, we’ll just send you an invoice once a month for your records (it will have already been settled). Simple stuff.

To date we have not included VAT in the fee taken on each transaction - this will need to be settled in addition to what is paid on a weekly basis. Look out for an invoice(s) to be with you soon. Once we have all users migrated across to ‘Stripe Express’ (there are only a few remaining on ‘standard’) we will include +20% for VAT in the split - meaning that all fees due are immediately paid and the invoices we send you are for your accounting/VAT returns only.

The discount that we unlock with Stripe is passed on to you in full. Due to some parts of the fee that GG pays Stripe being variable (network costs to Visa, Mastercard etc, increased costs for credit vs debit cards, one-off fees for card authorisations, anti-fraud issues etc), our plan is to analyse spend on payment processing every 12 weeks to ensure that we are not over or under charging you. We have no intention of ever making a margin on payment processing.

We renew our terms with Stripe every 12 months and hope at that point (around Christmas time) to be able to negotiate ever more favourable rates.

This will all hopefully result in some simple bookkeeping with one payment per transaction to cover all costs - this includes hosting, maintenance, support, the driver app and payment processing.

There is no charge for migration, set-up or training.

Our fee structure takes into account the average number of deliveries made per week (over a previous period - minimum of 4 weeks) and charges you a % of your sales upon transaction.

Fees for other current paid-for standalone or integrated software (i.e. Mailchimp email marketing) are not included in the Growing Good usage fee.

All of our apps automatically create and renew their SSL certificates, making sure the data is always secure and encrypted. DigitalOcean provide automatic OS patching for added security.

The databases runs in our account’s private network, and only whitelisted requests via the public internet can reach our database. Data is also encrypted in transit and at rest.

Sensitive data, like card details, are never stored by us. All of our sensitive accounts, use 2FA.

Please read our most recent privacy and security policy here Privacy & Security

Expected response times

Testing on fixes

We’ll make sure that updates to resolve bugs are robustly tested before releasing them to you.

Downtime

Our hosting partners Digital Ocean provide us with a 99.99% uptime promise, they are a best in class provider with 14 global data centers supporting businesses building in 185 countries (as of September 2022).

Service credits - The reality is that your critical issue is our critical issue and we’ll be doing everything within our capability to restore lost service ASAP. However, should there be downtime then we will offer the following credit on your account:

Service credits will not apply due to any of the following:

We will evaluate all information reasonably available to us and make a good faith determination of whether a Service Credit is owed.

Our view is that if you wish to terminate your use of Growing Good software then it is likely we haven’t fulfilled our promises. In this unlikely case we will promptly provide you with a high quality copy of your system database and offer the support you need to migrate away from our system. For practical reasons we will ask for a minimum of 4 weeks notice (though this can be less if requested and possible), there are no termination or data export/handling fees. If you want to leave we’ll be very sad, but we’ll also make life as easy as possible.

This is absolute worst case stuff but something every business owner needs to think about. If we wake up one day and decide to shut the business what happens? Running software that your business depends on is a big responsibility and that’s why we’re doing things properly from day one - professionally documenting process, using development best practice in language that is fit for the future. So, if the absolute worst case happens and we shut up shop, then we’re bound by this promise to open-source the software, with some support from a decent developer you can continue to operate as normal on a system with a future. Let’s not speak about this any more than we have to.

Neither party will be liable for any delays in processing or other nonperformance caused by telecommunications, utility failures, or equipment failures; labor strife, riots, war, or terrorist attacks; nonperformance of our vendors or suppliers, fires or acts of nature; or any other event over which the respective party has no reasonable control.

We provide the services and Growing Good IP “as is” and “as available”, without any express, implied, or statutory warranties of title, fitness for a specific purpose, non-infringement or any other type of warranty or guarantee.

Under no circumstances will Growing Good be responsible or liable to you for any indirect, punitive, incidental, special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting from your use or inability to use the services or for the unavailability of the services, for lost profits, personal injury, or property damage, or for any other damages arising out of, in connection with, or relating to this agreement or your use of the services, even if such damages are foreseeable, and whether or not you or Growing Good have been advised of the possibility of such damages. Growing Good is not liable, and deny responsibility for, any damages, harm, or losses to you arising from or relating to hacking, tampering, or other unauthorised access or use of the services, your Growing Good account, or data, or your failure to use or implement anti-fraud measures, security controls, or any other data security measure.

You agree to limit any additional liability not disclaimed or denied by Growing Good under this agreement to your direct and documented damages; and you further agree that under no circumstances will any such liability exceed in the aggregate the amount of fees paid by you to Growing Good during the three-month period immediately preceding the event that gave rise to your claim for damages.

These limitations on our liability to you will apply regardless of the legal theory on which your claim is based, including contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability, or any other theory or basis.

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