Terms of Service

1.1Thyme Studio is a salon and studio management platform operated by Clements & Catterall LTD, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16966378, whose registered office is at 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX ("we", "us", "our").

1.2Our main trading address is the same as our registered office. We are not currently registered for VAT, and all fees are stated exclusive of any tax that may become payable in future.

1.3You can reach us at support@thymestudio.co.uk. For privacy and data protection matters, including requests about personal data, contact privacy@thymestudio.co.uk.

1.4In these terms, "you" and "your" mean the business that holds the Thyme Studio account, and "the Service" means the Thyme Studio platform, including the software, the public booking pages we host for you, and any documentation we make available.

2.1These terms set out the basis on which we provide the Service to you. By creating an account, you accept them and they become a binding contract between you and us.

2.2You must be at least 18 years old and acting in the course of a business to hold an account. The Service is provided to businesses only. It is not offered to consumers, and the statutory protections that apply to consumer contracts do not apply to this agreement.

2.3You confirm that you have authority to enter into this agreement on behalf of the business named on the account.

2.4We may change these terms. If a change is material, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email or through the Service before it takes effect. If you do not accept the change, you may cancel before the effective date under clause 21. Continuing to use the Service after the effective date means you accept the change.

3.1The following documents also apply to your use of the Service and form part of this agreement:

1. (a)our Acceptable Use Policy, which sets out what you may and may not do with the Service;
2. (b)our Data Processing Addendum, which governs how we process personal data about your clients on your behalf; and
3. (c)our Privacy Policy, which explains how we use personal data for which we are ourselves responsible.

3.2If there is any conflict between these documents, the following order of priority applies: the Data Processing Addendum, then these terms, then the Acceptable Use Policy.

4.1You must give us accurate information when you create your account and keep it up to date.

4.2You are responsible for keeping account credentials secure and confidential. You must not share login details between people.

4.3You may give access to your staff, within the seat limit of your plan. You are responsible for everything done through your account, including everything your staff do, as if you had done it yourself.

4.4You must tell us promptly at support@thymestudio.co.uk if you become aware of any unauthorised access to or use of your account.

4.5Each account belongs to one business. A single staff login cannot be shared across separate businesses.

5.1New accounts receive a free trial of 3 days. No payment card is required to start a trial.

5.2Trial accounts have lower usage allowances than paid plans, and every SMS and email sent through the Service during the trial carries a line disclosing that it was sent from a trial account.

5.3At the end of the trial your account is locked until you subscribe to a paid plan. Your data is not deleted when the trial ends — it remains available to you if you subscribe, and is otherwise retained and deleted in accordance with clause 22.

5.4We may withdraw or change the trial offer at any time, but doing so will not affect a trial already in progress.

6.1The Service is offered on tiered subscription plans. The features, seat limit and monthly usage allowances for each plan are shown on our pricing page and in your account.

6.2Seat limits are enforced by the Service. You cannot add more staff than your plan allows — you will need to upgrade instead.

6.3Each plan includes monthly allowances for SMS messages, emails and AI usage. Allowances reset at the start of each monthly billing period and do not carry over.

6.4If you exhaust a monthly allowance, the Service will stop the affected function and prompt you to buy additional credits or upgrade. We will never automatically charge you for exceeding an allowance.

7.1Subscription fees are payable in advance for each billing period. Fees are shown on our pricing page.

7.2Payments are processed by Stripe. We do not receive or store your card details. Your use of Stripe's hosted checkout and billing portal is subject to Stripe's own terms.

7.3If a payment fails, we will tell you and give you at least 7 days to resolve it before suspending your account under clause 20.

7.4We may increase our fees. We will give you at least 30 days' notice before an increase takes effect, and you may cancel under clause 21 before it applies to you.

7.5Fees are non-refundable, except where the law requires otherwise or where we terminate for convenience under clause 25.3.

8.1You may buy additional SMS, email or AI credits on top of your monthly plan allowance. Credits are charged at the prices shown at the time of purchase.

8.2Credits are only drawn on once the relevant monthly plan allowance has been used up.

8.3Credits do not expire. Unused credits roll over indefinitely for as long as your account remains active.

8.4Credits are forfeited when this agreement ends, for any reason, and are not refundable.

9.1We will provide the Service with reasonable skill and care.

9.2We do not guarantee that the Service will be uninterrupted or available at any particular level. We will use reasonable endeavours to keep it available, but we do not offer a service level agreement and no service credits are payable if the Service is unavailable.

9.3We may carry out planned maintenance. Where we can, we will give at least 48 hours' notice, and planned maintenance announced in this way does not count as unavailability.

9.4We provide support by email during UK business hours. We aim to respond to routine queries by the next business day, and to respond faster where the Service is unavailable. These are targets, not contractual commitments.

9.5The Service depends on third-party providers, including our hosting, payment, messaging and AI providers. A current list is published on our sub-processors page. We are responsible for choosing these providers carefully, but we are not liable for their acts or omissions beyond the limits set out in clause 23.

10.1We are continually developing the Service. We may add, change or remove features.

10.2If we make a change that materially reduces the functionality you rely on, we will give you at least 30 days' notice. You may then terminate under clause 25 and we will refund fees you have paid for the unused part of your current billing period.

11.1We may make features available on a beta, preview or early-access basis, and will identify them as such.

11.2Beta features are provided "as is". They are excluded from the commitments in clause 9, may contain errors, and may be changed or withdrawn at any time without notice.

11.3You use beta features at your own risk and should not rely on them for anything business-critical.

12.1You must comply with our Acceptable Use Policy at all times.

12.2In particular, you must not use the Service to send unsolicited marketing, spam, or any message to a person who has not consented to receive it, and you must not use it for any unlawful, fraudulent or abusive purpose.

12.3You must not copy, modify, reverse engineer, decompile, scrape or attempt to derive the source code of the Service, nor resell or make it available to any third party except as expressly permitted in these terms.

12.4You must not introduce any virus, malware or other harmful code into the Service, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to it or to any other customer's data.

12.5Breach of this clause or of the Acceptable Use Policy entitles us to suspend your account immediately under clause 20.

13.1You own your data. As between you and us, you retain all rights in the data you and your staff put into the Service, including your business records and the records of your own clients.

13.2You grant us a limited, non-exclusive licence to host, copy, transmit and process that data solely to the extent necessary to provide the Service to you, and to comply with our legal obligations.

13.3You are solely responsible for the accuracy, quality, legality and reliability of the data you put into the Service, and for having the right to put it there.

13.4Where the Service processes personal data about your own clients, you are the data controller and we act as your processor. Our Data Processing Addendum governs that processing and forms part of this agreement.

13.5You are responsible for having a lawful basis for the personal data you enter, and for giving your clients the privacy information the law requires them to receive.

13.6The Service allows you to record medical notes and signed consent-form responses about your clients. This is special category personal data. You are responsible for ensuring you have a valid condition under Article 9 of the UK GDPR — normally the client's explicit consent — before recording it.

14.1We may create aggregated and anonymised data from use of the Service — for example, statistics about how features are used, or benchmarks across the platform as a whole.

14.2We may use that aggregated and anonymised data to operate, maintain, improve and market the Service.

14.3Aggregated and anonymised data will never identify you, your business, your staff or any of your clients, and will never include personal data.

15.1The Service can send SMS messages and emails to your clients on your behalf, including booking confirmations and marketing campaigns.

15.2You are the sender of those messages. You are responsible for their content and for complying with all applicable law, including the UK GDPR and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003.

15.3The Service will only send a marketing campaign to clients who are recorded as having opted in. You remain responsible for ensuring that the consent you recorded was validly obtained.

15.4SMS messages are sent from a shared platform number and are prefixed with your business name so that recipients can identify you.

15.5We detect and process common opt-out keywords, such as STOP and UNSUBSCRIBE, automatically. Because the sending number is shared across all customers, an opt-out from a phone number that belongs to clients of more than one Thyme Studio customer is applied to the business that most recently messaged that number. You should not rely on our automatic handling alone as your record of consent.

15.6Before you can send any SMS, you must verify a genuine business mobile number. This protects the shared number from misuse and is a condition of sending.

15.7During a free trial, every message sent through the Service carries a line disclosing that it was sent from a trial account.

16.1The Service includes AI-assisted features, which we call Sprout. These generate marketing suggestions and answer questions about growing your business.

16.2For its structured suggestions, Sprout receives only business-level and aggregate information — such as your service names, prices and booking volumes. It never receives your clients' names, contact details or individual records.

16.3The Sprout chat feature is free-text, so it will send whatever you type to our AI provider. You must not enter client names or any personal details into it. We display a permanent reminder of this in the chat.

16.4Sprout conversations are automatically and permanently deleted 90 days after they take place.

16.5Sprout output is a suggestion, not advice. We do not warrant that it is accurate, complete or suitable for your business. You are responsible for reviewing it before you act on it.

16.6You must not rely on Sprout for medical, financial, legal or regulatory decisions.

16.7As between you and us, you own the output Sprout generates for you. Our AI provider's own terms apply to the underlying model, and we describe that provider on our sub-processors page.

16.8AI features are subject to your plan's usage allowance and to fair-use limits we apply to keep the Service available to everyone.

17.1We own, or are licensed to use, all intellectual property rights in the Service, including the software, its design, our documentation and the Thyme Studio name and branding. Nothing in these terms transfers any of those rights to you.

17.2We grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service for your own business purposes for as long as your subscription lasts.

17.3If you give us feedback or suggestions about the Service, we may use them freely and without obligation to you.

18.1Each of us may receive information from the other that is confidential. Each of us agrees to keep the other's confidential information secret, to use it only for the purposes of this agreement, and to disclose it only to people who need it and are bound by equivalent obligations.

18.2This does not apply to information that is or becomes public through no fault of the receiving party, was already known to it, or is required to be disclosed by law or a regulator.

18.3These obligations continue for 5 years after this agreement ends.

19.1We may identify you as a customer and use your business name and logo on our website and in marketing materials.

19.2If you would rather we did not, email us at support@thymestudio.co.uk and we will stop.

20.1We may suspend your access to the Service immediately, without prior notice, if:

1. (a)we reasonably believe there is a security risk to the Service, to you, or to other customers;
2. (b)we are required to do so by law or by a regulator;
3. (c)you breach the Acceptable Use Policy or clause 12; or
4. (d)you misuse the Service, including by using it to send spam or unsolicited messages.

20.2We may suspend your access for non-payment, but only after giving you at least 7 days' notice and an opportunity to pay.

20.3We will tell you why we have suspended your account, unless the law prevents us, and we will restore access promptly once the reason for suspension has been resolved.

20.4You remain liable for fees during a suspension caused by your breach, and we will not refund fees for that period.

21.1You can cancel your subscription at any time through the billing portal in your account.

21.2Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. You keep full access until then, and we will not charge you again.

21.3We will not refund fees for the remainder of the billing period in which you cancel.

21.4If your subscription ends and you do not ask us to delete your account, we will keep your data for 90 days so that you can resubscribe and pick up where you left off. After 90 days we will delete it in accordance with clause 22.

22.1An administrator on your account can request full deletion from the Settings area. We ask for typed confirmation because the deletion is permanent.

22.2When you request deletion, we deactivate the account straight away, set your subscription not to renew, and email you to confirm.

22.3You then have 30 days to change your mind. During that period any member of your staff can reactivate the account and the deletion is cancelled entirely.

22.4After 30 days we permanently and irreversibly delete your entire dataset — including your clients, appointments, payments and messages — and delete the login credentials of every staff member who belonged to your account. All remaining copies, including backups, are purged within a further 90 days.

22.5We will keep financial records for 6 years where the law requires us to, and this is the only exception to clause 22.4.

22.6Export your data before you request deletion. You can export your financial records and client records from within the Service at any time. For a fuller export, email us at support@thymestudio.co.uk before deletion is processed.

Please read this section carefully. It limits what we are liable for.

23.1Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for:

1. (a)death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
2. (b)fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
3. (c)breach of the terms implied by section 2 of the Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982 or section 2(1) of the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977; or
4. (d)any other liability that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

23.2Except as expressly stated in these terms, the Service is provided on an "as is" basis, and all warranties, conditions and other terms implied by statute or common law are excluded to the fullest extent permitted by law.

23.3We will not be liable to you for any:

1. (a)loss of profits, business, revenue or anticipated savings;
2. (b)loss of or damage to goodwill or reputation;
3. (c)wasted expenditure;
4. (d)loss or corruption of data or information; or
5. (e)indirect or consequential loss.

23.4Subject to clauses 23.1 to 23.3, our total liability to you for all claims arising in any 12-month period, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty or otherwise, is limited to the greater of £5,000 or the total fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose.

23.5The limit in clause 23.4 applies to all liability arising under or in connection with this agreement, including liability under the Data Processing Addendum and liability under any indemnity we give you.

23.6You are responsible for the results you obtain from the Service and for any conclusions you draw from it.

24.1You will indemnify us against all losses, damages, costs and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) we suffer arising from:

1. (a)the data you put into the Service, including any claim that it infringes a third party's rights;
2. (b)any message sent through the Service on your behalf, including any claim under data protection or electronic marketing law;
3. (c)a claim brought by one of your own clients relating to your use of the Service; or
4. (d)your breach of clause 12 or the Acceptable Use Policy.

24.2Nothing in these terms limits your liability for unpaid fees, or for infringement or misuse of our intellectual property rights.

25.1This agreement continues until it is ended under this clause or under clause 21 or 22.

25.2We may end this agreement immediately by written notice if:

1. (a)you materially breach it and, where the breach can be put right, fail to do so within 14 days of us asking you to;
2. (b)you repeatedly breach the Acceptable Use Policy; or
3. (c)you become insolvent, enter administration or liquidation, or a similar event occurs.

25.3We may end this agreement for any other reason by giving you 30 days' written notice. If we do, we will refund the fees you have paid for the unused part of your current billing period.

25.4When this agreement ends, your right to use the Service stops immediately, unused credits are forfeited under clause 8.4, and your data is deleted in accordance with clause 22.

25.5Clauses 13, 14, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24 and 31 survive the end of this agreement, together with any other clause that by its nature is intended to.

26.1If a dispute arises, we each agree to try to resolve it in good faith by discussion for at least 30 days before starting court proceedings.

26.2Nothing in clause 26.1 prevents either of us applying to a court for an injunction or other urgent relief at any time.

27.1Neither of us is liable for failing to perform this agreement because of an event outside our reasonable control, including acts of God, war, terrorism, civil unrest, industrial action, epidemic, failure of public telecommunications or power networks, and failure or outage of a third-party infrastructure provider on which the Service depends.

27.2If such an event continues for more than 30 days, either of us may end this agreement by written notice, and we will refund the fees you have paid for the unused part of your current billing period.

28.1We may transfer this agreement to another business, for example if we sell or reorganise our business. We will tell you if we do, and it will not affect your rights under this agreement.

28.2You may not transfer this agreement, or any of your rights or obligations under it, without our prior written consent.

29.1We may send you routine notices by email to the address registered on your account, or through the Service itself. You may send us routine notices to support@thymestudio.co.uk.

29.2Notices ending this agreement, and any formal legal notice, must be sent by post to our registered office at 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, or by recorded delivery. We will send any such notice to you at your registered or trading address.

29.3A notice sent by email is treated as received on the next business day. A notice sent by post is treated as received two business days after posting.

30.1These terms, together with the documents listed in clause 3, are the entire agreement between us about the Service and replace anything said or written before.

30.2If any part of these terms is found to be unlawful or unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

30.3If we delay in enforcing any part of these terms, or choose not to enforce it on one occasion, that does not prevent us enforcing it later.

30.4Nothing in these terms creates a partnership, joint venture or employment relationship between us, and neither of us may act as agent for the other.

30.5This agreement does not give any right to any person other than you and us to enforce any of its terms, and the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 does not apply.

30.6These terms and any dispute arising out of them, including non-contractual disputes, are governed by the law of England and Wales.

30.7The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of these terms.