Terms of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") form a binding agreement between you ("Customer," "you") and PlanCheckNow, Inc. ("PlanCheckNow," "we," "us"). By creating an account, uploading drawings, or using any part of the PlanCheckNow service (the "Service"), you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

If you accept these Terms on behalf of an organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization, and "Customer" refers to that organization.

PlanCheckNow is an AI-powered pre-submittal review tool that analyzes architectural and structural drawings against applicable building, zoning, and life-safety codes for a given jurisdiction. It generates correction comments, code citations, and a permit- readiness assessment intended to reduce the number of plan-check cycles required to obtain a building permit.

You must provide accurate registration information and keep it current. You are responsible for safeguarding your credentials and for all activity under your account. Notify us immediately of any unauthorized access at security@planchecknow.com.

Important — please read. PlanCheckNow is a software tool. It is not a substitute for review by a licensed architect, structural engineer, plan-check engineer, code consultant, or expediter. PlanCheckNow does not certify drawings, does not stamp drawings, does not issue permits, and does not guarantee permit approval. Final approval of any project rests solely with the authority having jurisdiction (the "AHJ").

You acknowledge that building codes and zoning ordinances change frequently and are interpreted by individual plan-check engineers. The Service is provided as a helpful pre-check; corrections, citations, and readiness scores reflect the system's best automated assessment at the time of review and should be independently verified by a qualified professional before relying on them for permit submission, construction, or any other decision.

No final verdict. Nothing produced by the Service — including findings, corrections, code citations, readiness scores, suggested fixes, AI-generated chat responses, response-letter drafts, highlight overlays, or any other output — constitutes a final or binding determination of code compliance, suitability for construction, fitness for permit issuance, satisfaction of contractual obligations, compliance with HOA covenants, conformance with design-review guidelines, or any other legal or regulatory conclusion. All outputs are advisory only.

You retain full professional responsibility. Licensed design professionals using the Service remain solely responsible for the accuracy, completeness, and code compliance of their drawings, calculations, and submittals. The Service does not transfer, share, or reduce any professional liability arising from the practice of architecture, engineering, surveying, or any related licensed activity.

The Service is a pre-submittal aid. To the maximum extent permitted by law, PlanCheckNow, Inc. disclaims any responsibility for, and you release PlanCheckNow, Inc. from, all claims, liabilities, damages, costs, and expenses arising from or relating to:

• disputes with homeowner associations, design-review boards, neighbors, neighborhood councils, historic preservation authorities, or other community bodies, including disputes arising months or years after a review was generated;
• allegations of structural defects, construction defects, latent defects, building-system failures, or other construction-related claims discovered during, after, or outside the review window, regardless of when the underlying drawings were reviewed by the Service;
• permit denials, revocations, conditions, or stop-work orders issued by an AHJ, whether attributable to factors the Service flagged, factors the Service did not flag, or factors unrelated to the drawings entirely;
• third-party legal proceedings — including civil litigation, administrative proceedings, code-enforcement actions, and arbitration — that reference or rely upon any output of the Service;
• changes in building codes, zoning ordinances, design-review criteria, energy standards (including, without limitation, Title 24 of the California Code of Regulations and its successors), accessibility regulations, fire code amendments, or other applicable law that occur after a review is generated;
• any reliance by you, your clients, your contractors, or any downstream party on Service outputs in lieu of independent professional review.

You agree not to introduce, cite, characterize, or rely upon Service outputs as expert testimony, expert opinion, or evidence of professional standard of care in any legal, administrative, or quasi-judicial proceeding.

The Service is not a system of record, archive, or retention vehicle for your drawings, calculations, or project documentation. You are solely responsible for maintaining your own complete records sufficient to satisfy any applicable archival, retention, audit-trail, or document-production requirement, including without limitation:

• statutory or regulatory retention obligations imposed on licensed design professionals by state licensing boards;
• jurisdiction-specific archival rules (such as multi-year retention requirements for Title 24 documentation under California law);
• contractual retention obligations to your clients, lenders, insurers, or government authorities;
• discovery and document-preservation obligations in anticipated or pending litigation.

The Service applies automated retention windows to original uploaded files based on your subscription tier (see the Pricing page for current windows). Generated review reports and finding records are retained longer but are not guaranteed to persist indefinitely. You should download and archive any Service output you may need to preserve for legal, regulatory, or business purposes at the time of review rather than relying on the Service's continued availability of the file.

Audit logs, if any, generated by the Service are operational artifacts intended for PlanCheckNow, Inc.'s internal security and reliability purposes. They are not designed, warranted, or held out as fit for use as audit trails in any regulatory, litigation, or evidentiary context.

You retain all right, title, and interest in the drawings, documents, project information, and other materials you upload to the Service ("Customer Content"). You grant PlanCheckNow a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide license to host, copy, transmit, process, display, and create derivative works of Customer Content solely (a) to provide the Service to you, (b) to maintain and improve the Service's technical operation, and (c) to comply with law. We will not sell, license, or otherwise distribute your raw Customer Content (drawings, project files, identifying information) to any third party.

Aggregate engine improvement. Unless you opt out in your workspace Settings, you grant PlanCheckNow a non-exclusive license to use de-identified, aggregated, and derivative signals from your projects — including redacted finding text, accept/reject decisions, AHJ correction outcomes, severity calibration, and code-section frequency statistics — to improve the Service's review engine, jurisdiction rollups, and accuracy benchmarks for all customers. We do not use raw Customer Content (your actual drawings, project name, address, or anything that could identify you, your client, or your project) for this purpose, and we do not use Customer Content to train any third-party foundation model. You may opt out at any time at /settings; opting out applies to future data — signals already incorporated into engine weights cannot be retroactively removed because they have been transformed into non-reversible statistics.

You represent that you have all rights necessary to upload Customer Content to the Service and that doing so does not infringe any third-party right.

PlanCheckNow, the engine, prompts, code, models, methodology, user interface, documentation, brand, and all related intellectual property are owned by PlanCheckNow, Inc. and protected by applicable IP laws. Nothing in these Terms grants you any right in our intellectual property except the limited right to use the Service during your subscription term. The substantive corrections, citations, and readiness assessments generated for your project are licensed to you for use in connection with that project.

You agree not to:

• use the Service for any unlawful purpose or in violation of any applicable code or regulation;
• upload material you do not have the right to upload, including drawings owned by a third party without authorization;
• attempt to reverse-engineer, decompile, or extract the underlying prompts, weights, or training data;
• use the Service to generate content that is fraudulent, misleading, or designed to deceive an AHJ;
• resell or sublicense the Service, except as permitted in a separate written reseller agreement signed by us;
• interfere with the Service's operation, including by excessive automated requests, scraping, or denial-of-service attacks.

Subscription fees, included usage, and overage rates are displayed on our Pricing page. We use Stripe to process payment; by submitting payment information, you authorize us to charge the payment method on file for the recurring subscription fee plus any applicable taxes. Subscriptions auto-renew until cancelled. You may cancel at any time; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period and is not refundable for the current period except where required by law.

Fees are exclusive of taxes; you are responsible for sales, use, VAT, and similar taxes applicable to your purchase.

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and non-infringement. PlanCheckNow, Inc. expressly disclaims any warranty that the Service will identify all code violations, that any output is correct, that the Service will be uninterrupted, or that defects will be corrected.

AI output disclaimer. Findings, corrections, code citations, and other outputs are generated using large-language-model AI. Such outputs may contain errors, omissions, hallucinations (citations or facts that appear authoritative but are not), outdated references, or misinterpretations. You are responsible for independently verifying every output before relying on it for any decision.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, PlanCheckNow, Inc. and its affiliates, officers, employees, agents, and licensors will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, business interruption, reputational harm, regulatory penalties, defense costs, or cost of substitute goods or services, even if advised of the possibility of such damages. Our aggregate liability under these terms will not exceed the fees paid by you to PlanCheckNow in the twelve (12) months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or one hundred dollars ($100), whichever is greater. This cap applies in the aggregate across all claims, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability, or otherwise.

You agree that any decision to submit a permit application, proceed with construction, certify a drawing, sign a calculation, respond to plan-check comments, or take any other professional action based on the Service's output is your decision and your risk. We are not responsible for plan-check rejections, permit denials, construction defects, code violations, HOA actions, design-review board outcomes, insurance claims, professional liability claims, board complaints, disciplinary actions, lawsuits, or any other consequence of relying on the Service's output without independent professional review by a person qualified and licensed to perform that review.

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless PlanCheckNow, Inc. from any third-party claim arising out of (a) Customer Content, (b) your breach of these Terms, or (c) your violation of any law or third-party right.

These Terms remain in effect while you have an active account. Either party may terminate for material breach if the breach is not cured within thirty (30) days of written notice. We may suspend or terminate immediately for non-payment, suspected fraud, or violation of the Acceptable Use section. Upon termination, your access to the Service ends; provisions that by their nature should survive (IP, disclaimers, liability, fees owed, indemnification, governing law) survive termination.

Our Privacy Policy describes how we handle personal data. For business customers processing personal data through the Service, a Data Processing Agreement is available on request at legal@planchecknow.com.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules. The exclusive venue for any dispute is the state or federal courts located in Los Angeles County, California, and you consent to personal jurisdiction there. To the maximum extent permitted by law, you and PlanCheckNow each waive any right to a jury trial.

We may update these Terms from time to time. If we make a material change, we will notify you by email or via in-product notice at least thirty (30) days before the change takes effect. Continued use of the Service after that period constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

Questions about these Terms? Email legal@planchecknow.com.