Terms of service

1. Who this is between

This agreement is between Gatehouse (“we”, “us”) and the business that created a Gatehouse account (“you”, “the venue”). Creating an account means accepting it. If you are accepting on behalf of a company, you are confirming you are allowed to bind that company.

2. What Gatehouse is, and what it is not

Gatehouse is software you use to sell your own tickets. It is not a ticket seller, a marketplace, or a party to the sale.

You sell the ticket. We sell you the software. Every card payment is a direct charge on your own Stripe account: your business is the merchant of record, your name appears on the buyer’s statement, the money is yours from the moment it settles, and it is paid out to you by Stripe on whatever schedule you and Stripe have agreed. We never hold it.

That has consequences in both directions, and they are the most important paragraphs in this document, so they are section 5.

3. Your account and your people

You are responsible for who you let in and what they do. Accounts are per person, not per role, because the audit log is only useful if the name on a refund is a name. Do not share passwords.

Keep your owner account reachable. It is the only role that can add staff, and if every owner loses access we can help you recover but we cannot do it instantly.

4. What it costs

• A subscription: $49.99 a month, or $449.99 a year paid once.
• $1 per paid ticket, taken as a Stripe application fee at the moment the charge settles. Free tickets and comps cost nothing.
• No percentage of face value, no setup fee, no charge for a box office terminal, and no charge for your own domain.

Card processing is between you and Stripe at whatever rate you have with them. We do not mark it up and we never see it, because it never passes through us.

Prices are exclusive of any sales tax or VAT that applies to the subscription itself. Amounts already charged are not refunded on cancellation, and a yearly plan cancelled mid-term runs to the end of the term rather than being refunded pro rata.

If we change the price

We will tell you at least 30 days before a change affects you, in writing, to the address on your account. A price change never applies to a term you have already paid for. If you would rather not, cancel before it takes effect.

If a payment fails

You keep selling through a grace window rather than stopping the same afternoon, because the people punished by an instant cut-off would be buyers who have no idea a subscription exists. After that window new sales stop. Tickets already sold are unaffected: they still scan, still refund, still transfer, and your reports still work.

5. Selling is yours, and so is the liability that comes with it

Because you are the merchant of record, the following are yours and not ours:

• The event happening. If a show is cancelled, rescheduled or moved, that is between you and your buyers.
• Your refund policy, and complying with consumer law where you operate. We give you the tools to refund any subset of an order; we do not decide when you should.
• Chargebacks and disputes. They land on your Stripe account. Stripe bills you directly and you carry your own negative balances. This is the other side of nobody being able to hold your money, and we are not going to pretend it is free.
• Tax. Admissions tax, sales tax and VAT on ticket sales are your affair. The reports give you the figures on both a sale-date and an event-date basis; they are a starting point for your accountant and they are not a return.
• Fee disclosure. You set your service fee. Gatehouse shows every buyer one all-in total before they commit, which is what the FTC rule on unfair or deceptive fees requires of live-event ticket sellers, and you cannot switch that off. Whether your fee is a reasonable one is still your decision.

6. Your buyers, your data

The people who buy tickets from you are yours. We will not market to them, sell their details, or put your event next to somebody else’s. There is no marketplace in this product to do it on.

The only mail this system sends your buyers is the confirmation they asked for and the notices they opted into: a transfer, a waitlist offer, a cancellation. How we handle their data, and the fact that you are the controller of it and we are your processor, is in the privacy policy.

7. What you must not use it for

• Selling tickets to anything illegal where you or your buyers are.
• Taking payment for events you do not intend to hold, or selling inventory you do not have.
• Deliberately misrepresenting the total price, or working around the all-in display.
• Attacking the service: probing other venues’ data, scraping, load that is meant to be load rather than sales.
• Uploading artwork you do not have the rights to. You keep the rights to everything you upload; you give us permission to store and serve it in order to run your box office, and nothing else.

8. Availability and support

We do not offer a service level agreement, and we would rather say so than print one we have no operations team to honour. What we do offer is a person who answers, and a door scanner built so that our being down is not your problem: it holds the whole night in the browser, decides every scan locally, and syncs later.

We may change the software. We will not remove something you depend on without telling you first.

9. Stopping

You can leave whenever you like. There is no contract term, no exclusivity clause and no notice period. Cancel from the same billing page you subscribed on.

We can end this agreement if you breach section 7, if a payment goes unpaid well past the grace window, or on 30 days’ notice for any reason. If we ever do it for our own convenience rather than because of something you did, we will refund the unused part of a term you have paid for.

What happens to your tickets

They keep working. They were always charges on your own Stripe account and passes issued in your name, so a buyer who has one is not holding something of ours. Your own domain is a DNS record you control and pointing it somewhere else is your decision, not a request you have to make of us.

What happens to your data

You can export your settlement, refund and per-tier figures as CSV at any time, including after you cancel and before the account is removed. Ask us for anything the interface does not export and we will get it for you. We keep your data for 90 days after an account closes so a mistake is recoverable, then delete it.

10. Liability

Gatehouse is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error-free.

Our total liability to you for anything arising out of this agreement is capped at what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. We are not liable for lost profit, lost sales or lost goodwill.

Nothing here limits liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Some jurisdictions do not allow some of these exclusions, and where that is so, they do not apply to you.

11. Changes to these terms

We will post any change here with a new date at the top, and tell you about a material one at least 30 days ahead, to the address on your account. Continuing to use Gatehouse after a change takes effect is acceptance of it. If you would rather not, cancel first.

12. The legal bits

This agreement is the whole agreement between us about Gatehouse, and replaces anything said before it. If a court finds one part unenforceable, the rest stands. Not enforcing something once does not waive it. You may not assign this agreement without our consent; we may assign it to a successor if the business is sold, and we will tell you if that happens.

The governing law and the courts that hear any dispute are those of the place Gatehouse is registered. Write to hello@gatehouse.app before going anywhere near a court: almost everything is a misunderstanding about a payout, and almost all of those are fixed the same day.