Terms of Service

1. Who these terms are between

Harkbell is a product of Softech Ops LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, registered at 30 N Gould St 40767, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA. Where these pages say "we", that is who they mean.

These terms are between you and Harkbell. By creating an account, or by using Harkbell on behalf of a business, you agree to them. If you are agreeing on behalf of a business, you confirm you are allowed to.

2. What Harkbell does

Harkbell answers calls for your business — on your website and, on a paid plan, on a phone number connected to your account. It answers using the information you give it: your services, prices, opening hours and knowledge. It can take bookings, record callback requests and hand a caller to a person. On a paid plan it can also place calls for you, from your own number: returning a callback, or delivering a message you wrote for it — always at your instruction, never on its own initiative.

Where you connect them, the same agent also answers messages on channels you own — WhatsApp, Instagram or a Facebook Page — and reads or writes the booking systems and calendars you connect. Those connections are described in section 10, and each is optional.

What the agent says comes from what you configure. We do not review it, and we do not warrant that it is correct.

Free. Signing up online opens the Free plan: one location, two team members, website and browser calls, and 30 talking minutes measured over a rolling 30 days. Telephone numbers, outbound telephone calls and social messaging are not part of Free: a telephone number and outbound calls come with the Calling and Powerhouse plans, and Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp with the Social and Powerhouse plans, which you can buy from the pricing page or your billing panel. Texting (SMS) is not offered yet. No card is required for Free and it will not automatically turn into a paid subscription. Paid features described below apply only when you choose to purchase them. Free may change or be interrupted; keep your existing way for clients to reach a person.

3. Your account

Keep your password to yourself and tell us promptly if you think somebody else has it. You are responsible for what happens under your account, including anything done by people you invite to your workspace.

You must be at least 18 and use Harkbell for a business, not personally.

4. What you are responsible for

• Telling callers they are speaking to an AI, and that the call is recorded. Recording and transcription law differs by country and by state — several require every party to consent. You choose during setup whether your agent says both, in one sentence before your greeting, and can change it in your agent settings; it is off unless you choose it, and we record who switches it off and when. Whichever you choose, your agent never claims to be a person and says it is your virtual receptionist when asked. You decide what your agent discloses, so this is your obligation, not ours, and you should take your own advice on it.
• The accuracy of what you configure. Prices, hours, services and knowledge are yours. If the agent quotes an old price, it is quoting the one it was given.
• Complying with the law when you call people. Every call the agent places — a callback, a note you asked it to deliver — is made from your number, at your instruction, and the law treats it as your call made with an artificial voice. Telemarketing, auto-dialing and robocall rules — including the TCPA in the United States, CASL and the National Do Not Call List in Canada, PECR in the UK, and the Spam Act and Do Not Call Register in Australia — apply to you, including their calling-hour limits and consent requirements. Harkbell keeps its own guardrails (daytime-only automated calls, a do-not-call record honored the moment somebody asks, and no call with an offer to anyone whose written consent to promotional calls you have not recorded), but they do not replace your obligations. When somebody asks not to be called, the agent records it and Harkbell will not dial them again.
• Having the right to the material you upload as knowledge, and to the contact details you import.

5. Harkbell is not for emergencies

Harkbell cannot call emergency services and must never be relied on to reach them. It is not a telephone service, it does not support 911, 999, 112 or any equivalent, and it does not transmit a location. Do not present it to your callers as a way to get help in an emergency, and keep a way for them to reach a person.

6. The agent is software, and it can be wrong

Harkbell uses speech recognition and large language models. It will sometimes mishear, misunderstand, or answer a question badly. It can take a booking at a time you did not intend or record a number incorrectly.

Check what it produces. Bookings, quotes and commitments a caller hears are between you and that caller — they do not bind us, and we are not a party to them.

7. Plans, minutes and payment

• Plans and their allowances are listed on the pricing page. A plan is bought once per account and can cover more than one business.
• A minute is time the agent spends talking to somebody. Configuring the agent and using the dashboard cost nothing. Browser voice calls, including your own tests, use the included talking-minute allowance.
• When the included minutes are spent, the agent stops answering until minutes become available again. Free uses a rolling 30-day window, so older calls gradually leave the allowance. You can upgrade, or buy a top-up of extra minutes, from your billing panel. We email you when you are close and again when it happens. We never bill you for going over — there is no overage charge, because there is no overage.
• A new subscription can be cancelled for a full refund within 30 days. Email us and we will refund it — no reason needed.
• After that, subscriptions renew monthly until cancelled. Cancel any time from the billing portal; you keep what you have paid for until the end of that period, and we do not refund part-months.
• Prices are in US dollars and exclude any tax we are required to add. We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice by email, effective at your next renewal.

8. Phone numbers

Two different things get called “your number”, and they are not the same asset. These terms treat them separately.

• A number we provide. On a paid plan we obtain a number from our carrier and point it at your agent. It is provisioned for your use rather than sold to you. You may ask to take it with you to a carrier of your own and we will not refuse unreasonably — but this is the one we cannot promise unconditionally, because it is ours to hold and the carriers have their own rules about who may port what.
• A number you port in. It stays yours. We hold it at our carrier while your agent answers on it, and we release it for porting out whenever you ask — at no charge, and whether or not your account stays open. We will not transfer it to anybody else, and we will not let it lapse while it is in our care.

Nothing of yours is released without notice. If your account closes, we email the account's owners before anything happens to the number, and hold a number we provided for at least 30 days so you have time to move it. A number you ported in is not released on a timer at all: we go on holding it, and if we ever need to stop we will tell you at least 30 days beforehand so you can port it somewhere else first.

Start a port in either direction by emailing hello@harkbell.com. Porting is run by the carriers rather than by us and takes days rather than minutes, so ask before the day you need it finished.

9. Your data stays yours

Your configuration, your knowledge, your call records and your contacts belong to you. You grant us only the permission we need to run the service for you: to store that material, send it to the providers listed in our Privacy Policy, and show it back to you.

We use aggregated, de-identified information about how the service performs to improve it. We do not sell your data, and we do not use your call content to train models of our own.

For your callers' details you are the controller and we are your processor: we handle them only to run the service for you and on your instructions, keep them confidential, use only the providers listed in our Privacy Policy, help you answer a caller who exercises a right, tell you without undue delay if their data is breached, and delete or return them when you leave. Where your law requires those terms in a signed form, email us and we will put our data-processing agreement in place with you before you start.

10. Connected accounts and messaging channels

You may connect accounts you control — a booking system such as Square Appointments, Calendly or Acuity; a Google or Outlook calendar; a Slack workspace for alerts; a WhatsApp number, an Instagram professional account or a Facebook Page. Connecting one authorizes us to act on it for the purposes the connection screen describes, and nothing beyond them. The same goes for anything you point at your own systems: a webhook, an API key or a Zapier connection sends your call, booking and contact data wherever you direct it, and what happens to it there is between you and that service.

• They are yours to connect. You confirm you are entitled to connect each account and to let an automated agent answer on it. We do not verify that, and connecting an account you do not control is a breach of these terms.
• Their rules apply too. Each provider has its own terms — Meta's in particular govern what may be sent on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. Using Harkbell does not exempt you from them, and we may refuse or stop anything that would put us in breach of a provider's terms.
• Disconnect whenever you like. Disconnecting deletes the access tokens we hold for that provider in that moment. Records already created — your bookings, your conversations — stay as your history until you ask us to erase them.
• We depend on them. A provider can change its API, restrict a plan tier, or withdraw access, and some integrations depend on that provider's own approval. We will tell you when one stops working, but we cannot promise any third-party connection will remain available, and section 14 applies to all of them.
• The agent answers; it does not solicit. On Instagram and Messenger it only replies to people who message you. On WhatsApp it can also write first, in two cases only: a message you send a client from the dashboard, using a template Meta has approved, after you confirm that client agreed to hear from you on WhatsApp; and something a caller asks for during a call — “send me that on WhatsApp” — sent to the number they are calling from, again only from an approved template. A STOP typed on any of the three apps ends it. It sends no marketing on any channel. The texts it sends first — a confirmation, a reminder — go only to clients who agreed to them on the call, and section 11 sets out that program in full.

11. Text messages

Where you turn texting on, Harkbell sends messages on your behalf — from your own number, under your own business name, to your own clients. This section is the program those clients are in, and it is the part to read if you received a text and wondered who sent it.

• What goes out. Booking confirmations and appointment reminders; your deposit link and your consent-form link where you have configured them; and, where you have set a review page, one message after an appointment asking for a review. Separately we text you, the owner, a summary of a booking request the agent took, which you answer by replying.
• Who gets them. Only a client who agreed on the call. The agent asks whether it may text them, in those words, and we keep the answer alongside the number and the call it came from. Consent to marketing texts is asked for separately and is never assumed from a booking. There is no other route onto the list.
• How often. Message frequency varies — it follows the appointments a client makes, and nothing goes out on a recurring schedule. Message and data rates may apply.
• How to stop. Reply STOP, STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END or QUIT to stop every message; START or UNSTOP to start again; HELP or INFO for contact details. STOP takes effect immediately, ends booking texts and marketing texts together, and is honored against anything already queued.
• Help. Ask the business that texted you, or us at hello@harkbell.com.

Your mobile information will not be sold or shared with third parties for promotional or marketing purposes. Numbers and message content are processed by our hosting, messaging and language providers as needed to operate the service — the Privacy Policy covers everything else we hold.

12. What you may not do

• Use Harkbell for anything unlawful, deceptive or harassing.
• Impersonate somebody else, or configure an agent to deny that it is an AI when a caller asks.
• Use bulk or automated calling to reach people who have no existing relationship with your business, or call anyone with an offer, a promotion or a sale without their prior express written consent to automated promotional calls from you. Harkbell treats every note and broadcast you have not marked as being about the person's own booking or as purely informational as promotional, and will place it only to people whose consent you have recorded — truthfully, in the words they agreed to. Recording consent nobody gave is itself a breach of these terms. Anyone who asks not to be called is not called again, and working around that record is itself a breach of these terms.
• Use Harkbell where the law requires a signed agreement we do not offer. We are not a HIPAA business associate and do not sign business associate agreements, so a covered healthcare practice may not use Harkbell to take protected health information. A caller may still volunteer a health detail — an allergy, a medication — and we pass it to you and nothing more; you decide whether to keep it.
• Attempt to break, overload, reverse-engineer or gain unauthorized access to the service.
• Resell Harkbell without our written agreement.

13. Suspension and closing an account

You can close your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, that has not paid, or that is causing harm or risk to other customers, to our carriers or to us. Where it is reasonable to do so we will warn you first.

After closure we stop processing your data, and we erase it on request — see the Privacy Policy for what is kept and for how long. Export anything you want to keep before you close.

14. Availability

We work to keep Harkbell running and we do not promise it will never be down. We depend on carriers, speech providers and hosting we do not control. There is no uptime guarantee on these terms, and maintenance, provider failures and outages will happen.

15. Warranties and liability

Harkbell is provided as it is. To the fullest extent the law allows we exclude implied warranties, including fitness for a particular purpose and that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free.

To the fullest extent the law allows, neither party is liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, lost revenue or lost business — including business you believe you lost because the agent answered badly, or did not answer at all. Our total liability for any claim is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before it arose or, if you paid nothing, one hundred US dollars.

If somebody brings a claim against us because of how you used Harkbell — a call you had the agent place, a notice you chose not to give, material you uploaded without the right to, or a breach of these terms — you will cover what that claim costs us, including reasonable legal fees, provided we tell you about it promptly and let you run the defense.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

16. Changes

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects you we will email you at least 30 days beforehand. Continuing to use Harkbell after a change takes effect means you accept it; if you would rather not, cancel before then.

If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stands. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about Harkbell. You may not transfer them to somebody else without our agreement; we may transfer them to a buyer of the business, and we will tell you first.

17. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the State of Wyoming, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and any dispute will be heard in the state or federal courts located in Wyoming, whose jurisdiction we both accept. If your own law gives you rights that cannot be waived, those rights are not affected.

18. Contact

Questions about these terms: hello@harkbell.com.