Terms of Service

1.Who we are, and what this agreement is

Sitka Systems is a product of Brendan Jones, carrying on business as Orca Jones, a sole proprietorship based in British Columbia, Canada, operating from 4210 Almondel Road, West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In this document, "we", "us", and "Sitka" mean that business. "You" means the brokerage, team, or individual agent that holds the account, and everyone using a seat on it.

These terms are the agreement between us. They apply from the moment you create an account, and they cover the trial period as well as any paid subscription that follows.

They should be read alongside our Privacy Policy, our Acceptable Use Policy, and, for workspaces that need one, our Data Processing Agreement. Where these documents overlap, the more specific one wins: the Privacy Policy on how we handle personal information, the Acceptable Use Policy on what you may not do with the service, and the Data Processing Agreement on our obligations to you as a processor of your clients' personal information.

2.What Sitka Systems does, and what it does not

Sitka is a set of tools for real estate agents in British Columbia. It holds your client and listing records, drafts client emails and market updates for your review, writes listing marketing copy, produces a risk summary from strata documents, generates virtually staged photos, and lets you annotate contract PDFs.

There are some things it deliberately is not, and we would rather be blunt about them up front than have you discover them later:

• It is not a full CRM. There is no pipeline management and no automated re-engagement sequencing.
• It is not an e-signature product. The contract tool draws annotations and labelled boxes on a PDF. It captures no signatures, runs no signing workflow, and produces no execution audit trail. A document exported from Sitka is not an executed document.
• It has no MLS or DDF connection of any kind. Everything in your workspace is there because you or a teammate put it there.
• It is not a source of legal, financial, tax, or professional advice, and nothing it generates is a substitute for advice from someone qualified to give it.

3.Your account, your workspace, and your seats

An account is created by one person and belongs to one workspace: a brokerage, a team, or a solo agent. Admins on that workspace can invite additional seats, and can revoke them.

Everyone on a seat can see the workspace's shared data: its clients, listings, documents, and generated output. Two things are personal to a seat rather than shared: the contextual assistant's conversation history, and any Gmail account you connect. An admin cannot read your assistant conversations or send from your connected Gmail account.

You are responsible for what happens under your seats. Keep your password to yourself, tell us promptly if you think an account has been compromised, and revoke seats for people who leave.

You must be at least the age of majority in your province and legally able to enter this agreement. The service is built for licensed real estate professionals and the people who work with them. It is not intended for personal or consumer use, and it is not intended for anyone under 18.

4.Trial, pricing, and billing

New workspaces get a free trial of 30 days. No payment details are needed to start it, and it runs on our own clock rather than through our payment processor, so no charge exists until you deliberately start a subscription.

Sitka is sold per seat. Current pricing is shown at checkout. Enterprise arrangements may be negotiated separately and, where they are, the signed order form governs price and term. Prices are in Canadian dollars and are exclusive of GST, PST, and any other applicable tax, which we add where required.

Payments are handled by Stripe. We never see or store your card number. Our records hold a Stripe customer reference, a subscription reference, and the status of that subscription, and nothing more about your payment instrument.

Subscriptions renew automatically for the same period until you cancel. You can cancel at any time from the billing settings in your workspace, and cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. We do not prorate or refund a partial period unless you cancel within 14 days of your first charge, in which case we refund that charge in full applies.

We may change pricing. If we do, we will give you at least 30 days notice before the change affects a renewal, so you have a real chance to cancel or export first.

5.Usage allowances and fair use

Some features cost us real money per use, because they call an AI provider. Each subscription tier carries a monthly allowance measured in credits, and the app meters every AI call against it. When the allowance runs out, AI features stop until the next period or until the allowance is raised. Everything else in your workspace keeps working.

We also apply rate limits to protect the service. Automated or scripted use of the product, load testing, and resale of the AI capacity to people who are not on a seat are not permitted.

6.Cancellation, the grace period, and getting your data out

When a subscription ends, your workspace enters a grace period of 30 days. During that time the data is retained and remains exportable, so that a cancellation made in a hurry or by accident is recoverable.

Once the grace period ends, access to the workspace stops.

You can export your clients and listings to CSV yourself at any time from inside the app, with no involvement from us and no waiting on a support queue. Do that before you cancel, not after.

You can also ask us to delete the workspace and everything in it. An admin files that request from the data settings page. The request is scheduled rather than instant: it sits for a set period during which you can cancel it, and we then execute it. We execute that last step by hand on purpose. An irreversible cascade across every table and every stored file should have a person confirm it rather than fire from a single button click.

Deletion covers your records, your generated output, and your stored files. It does not cover our own operating records: the audit and usage logs described in the Privacy Policy, and the billing records we are required to keep. We will confirm in writing once a deletion has run.

Draft note: nothing currently executes a scheduled deletion automatically. The date is what the operator console sorts and highlights by, and a human runs the purge. The wording above says only that, and it must be revisited if a scheduler is added.

7.The information you put in, and the information about your clients

Your workspace data is yours. We do not claim ownership of your client records, your listings, your documents, or the output generated for you. You give us only the permission we need to run the service: to store that data, to process it, and to pass the relevant parts of it to the service providers listed in the Privacy Policy so a feature can do its job.

Most of what you put into Sitka is personal information about other people: your clients. Under Canadian privacy law you are the organization responsible for that information and we handle it on your behalf. That means a few obligations sit with you rather than with us:

• You must have the right to collect and use that information, and to give it to us to process.
• You must have obtained whatever consent your clients need to give, including consent to send them the emails you generate here.
• You must respond to your own clients when they ask what you hold about them, ask for a correction, or ask to be removed. We will help you find and act on their records, but the relationship is yours.
• You must not put information into Sitka that it is not built to hold. Do not upload government identification, SIN, banking credentials, or health records.

8.AI output: you are the one who reviews and sends it

Several tools produce drafts using AI. Those drafts land in a queue for you to read, edit, and approve. Nothing generated by Sitka is sent to a client automatically.

AI output can be wrong, out of date, or confidently mistaken about facts. It is a first draft written by a machine that has not met your client and has not seen the property. You are the professional in the loop, and you are responsible for what you send under your name and your licence.

Three tools carry specific cautions:

• Strata analysis produces a risk summary from the documents you upload. It is a reading aid, not a professional review, and it can miss things. It does not replace your own reading of the documents, or a review by a lawyer or a strata specialist.
• Virtual staging produces images of furniture that is not there. Every image Sitka generates carries a permanent disclosure watermark burned into the pixels, and marketing copy written from a staged photo carries a disclosure line. You must not remove, crop out, or obscure either one. Doing so may breach your own regulatory advertising obligations, and it breaches these terms.
• Contract annotation marks up a PDF. It does not execute one. See section 2.

As between you and us, the output generated for you in your workspace is yours to use. We do not claim rights in it. Bear in mind that AI output is not always unique, that similar prompts can produce similar text for other users, and that copyright in machine-generated material is unsettled law in Canada.

9.Connecting your email account

You can connect a Google account so that reports and updates send from your own address rather than ours. The permission we request is send-only (Google's gmail.send scope). Sitka cannot read your inbox, list your messages, or see anything you have received. That is a property of the access we ask Google for, not a policy we could quietly change without asking you again. If we ever wanted broader access, we would need to ask you to reconnect and grant it explicitly.

Signing in with Google, if you use that instead of a password, is a separate and narrower permission: your name and the email address on that Google account, nothing else. Granting one of these does not grant the other.

The tokens that let us send on your behalf are stored encrypted, and never in plain text. You can disconnect the account at any time from your email settings, which revokes our access with Google and deletes the stored tokens.

If you do not connect an account, outgoing mail sends from our own sending address instead.

10.Acceptable use

This section is a summary. The full Acceptable Use Policy is part of this agreement, and covers more ground than fits here. Do not use Sitka to:

• Send unsolicited commercial email, or email to people who have withdrawn consent or unsubscribed.
• Upload anything you do not have the right to upload, or anything unlawful.
• Misrepresent a property, including by presenting a virtually staged photo as an unedited one, or generate marketing copy that violates real estate advertising rules or human-rights and fair-housing style restrictions.
• Attempt to reach another workspace's data, probe or bypass our access controls, or test the security of the service without our written permission.
• Reverse engineer the service, scrape it, or build a competing product from it.
• Share a seat between people, or resell or sublicense access to the AI tools.

We may suspend access immediately where we reasonably believe it is necessary to protect the service, another customer, or someone whose personal information is at risk. We will tell you why, and we will restore access as soon as the cause is resolved.

11.Availability, support, and changes to the service

We aim to keep Sitka running and available, but we do not commit to a specific uptime figure and there is no service level agreement attached to these terms. The service depends on third parties, including our hosting, database, payment, email, and AI providers, and an outage at one of them can become an outage here.

Support is provided through the help option inside the app, or by email to support@sitkasystems.ca. We aim to respond within two business days on business days.

The product is under active development and features will change. We may add, alter, or retire parts of it. If we retire something you are relying on, we will give you reasonable notice and, where the feature holds data, a way to get that data out.

12.Our intellectual property

The software, its design, its name, and its underlying prompts and models of work are ours and stay ours. You get a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service for the duration of your subscription, and nothing more.

If you send us feedback or a feature suggestion, we may act on it without owing you anything for it. We will never quote you, name you, or use your brokerage as a reference publicly without asking you first.

13.Disclaimers and limits on our liability

Except where the law does not allow us to say so, the service is provided "as is". We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error free, or fit for a particular purpose, and we do not warrant the accuracy of anything an AI model produces.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, neither party is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, or consequential loss, or for lost profits, lost business, or lost data. Our total liability arising out of or relating to this agreement is limited to the total amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud, for wilful misconduct, or under British Columbia consumer protection legislation where it applies.

Draft note: the liability cap, and whether it carves out privacy breaches and indemnity claims, is a decision for the operator and their lawyer. It has deliberately been left unfilled rather than guessed at.

14.Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against third-party claims, losses, and reasonable costs arising from: your breach of this agreement or the Acceptable Use Policy, the information you upload or send through Sitka, your failure to have the rights or consents you need for that information, and your use of anything Sitka generates once you have approved and sent it.

We agree to indemnify you against a third-party claim that the unmodified Sitka software, as we provide it, infringes that party's intellectual property rights, provided you tell us promptly and let us control the defence.

Draft note: this is a standard mutual shape (you stand behind what you put in and send out, we stand behind the software itself), not a negotiated clause. Whether it should carry its own liability sub-cap, separate from the general cap above, is a decision for a lawyer.

15.Ending this agreement

You can stop using Sitka at any time and cancel from your billing settings. We may end this agreement if you materially breach it and do not fix the breach within a reasonable time after we tell you about it, or if you stop paying.

When the agreement ends, the grace period in section 6 applies, and the sections that are meant to outlive it (your obligations about client information, our intellectual property, disclaimers and liability, and governing law) continue to apply.

16.Changes to these terms

We will update this document as the product changes. For a material change we will give you at least 30 days notice by email to your account address, and update the date at the top of this page. If you keep using Sitka after a change takes effect, that is your acceptance of it. If you do not accept it, cancel before it takes effect and the grace period in section 6 still applies to your data.

17.General provisions

A few standard terms that apply regardless of what else happens.

• This agreement, together with the Privacy Policy, the Acceptable Use Policy, and, where one has been signed, the Data Processing Agreement, is the entire agreement between us about the service. It replaces anything said or written earlier.
• We are not liable for a failure to perform caused by something reasonably outside our control, including an outage at a hosting, database, payment, email, or AI provider we depend on, a denial-of-service attack, or an event of the kind insurers call force majeure. We will tell you if this affects you materially.
• If a court finds part of this agreement unenforceable, the rest of it still stands.
• Neither of us can assign this agreement to someone else without the other's consent, except that we may assign it as part of selling or restructuring the business, provided the new owner is bound by the same terms.
• A failure by either of us to enforce a provision on one occasion is not a waiver of the right to enforce it later.
• A formal notice under this agreement goes to your account's registered email address, or to us at the contact details in the section below.

18.Governing law and disputes

This agreement is governed by the laws of British Columbia and the federal laws of Canada that apply there. The courts of British Columbia, sitting in Vancouver have jurisdiction, subject to a good-faith attempt to resolve the dispute directly first, over a period of at least 30 days.

Before either of us starts a formal proceeding, we should try to sort it out directly. Write to us, tell us what is wrong, and give us a fair chance to fix it.

Draft note: British Columbia and the Vancouver courts are now chosen, and disputes go to court rather than to arbitration. Arbitration was not selected by default because it is not obviously in the customer's interest and, for a small BC-only customer base already inside this jurisdiction, it mainly adds cost. That trade-off is still worth a lawyer's second look.

19.Getting in touch

Questions about these terms go to legal@sitkasystems.ca, or by post to 4210 Almondel Road, West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Questions about personal information go to our privacy contact, named in the Privacy Policy. To report a security vulnerability, see our Security page, or write to legal@sitkasystems.ca directly.