Terms of Service

The service

The Backup Line is a service of The Backup Line LLC, a Michiganlimited liability company (“we,” “us”). We provide an AI receptionist that answers phone calls your team doesn't pick up — after-hours, during overflow, or when your lines are full — qualifies the caller, and captures the lead. Your published phone number never changes; calls only reach us when your team doesn't answer.

On every plan. The AI answers, identifies the caller and what they need, and captures the lead. You get the recording, transcript, summary and caller details in your portal, plus a follow-up list of leads that haven't been closed out.

On higher plans. Plans above the entry tier add urgent-call handling — the AI recognizes an emergency and we place an automated call and send an email so you can call the customer back — along with automatic follow-up reminders, the ability to add your own instructions for the AI, and a printable intake record of a call formatted for a claim. We don't control whether any insurer or adjuster accepts it. The plan you buy, and what it includes, are shown on our pricing page and on the checkout page before you pay.

What the AI never does. It does not book appointments, promise arrival times, quote prices, or transfer a caller to you live. Scheduling and pricing are always up to you.

Subscription, billing & automatic renewal

Please read this section carefully — it describes a subscription that renews and charges your payment method automatically until you cancel.

• Free trial. Most plans start with a 7-day free trial on your real phone line. We collect a payment method when you sign up, but nothing is charged during the trial — your first charge is made on the day it ends, and the exact date is shown at checkout and again in the confirmation email we send you. That first charge includes any one-time setup fee: on a trial the fee is charged then, not when you sign up. Cancel any time before that date and you are not charged at all. The trial is available once per business: if you subscribed before, a new subscription starts billing immediately with no trial and at standard pricing, unless we agree otherwise in writing.
• Paid plans. When you start a paid subscription you choose a plan and price, shown on our pricing page and again on the secure checkout page before you enter any payment information. A one-time setup fee may apply and is disclosed at checkout. Some plans include a 7-day free trial before the first charge.
• Included calls and extra calls. Each plan includes a set number of answered calls per billing period, shown on the pricing page and at checkout. The line never stops answering when you pass that number — additional answered calls are billed at $3each and appear as a separate line on your next invoice. You can see your calls used at any time in your portal. Call-back alerts to your own phone are free, and calls that end in silence with nobody on the line aren't counted.
• Automatic monthly renewal. Your subscription is a recurring, automatically-renewing plan. By entering a payment method and completing checkout, you authorize The Backup Lineand our payment processor (Stripe) to charge that payment method the plan's monthly fee — plus any one-time setup fee disclosed at checkout — and to charge the monthly fee again automatically at the start of each billing cycle thereafter, until you cancel. If your plan includes a free trial, the first charge is made when the trial ends and recurs monthly after that. The amount, billing interval, and any trial length are shown to you at checkout, and you must affirmatively agree to these terms to subscribe.
• Month-to-month, no long-term contract. Billing is month-to-month. We do not require an annual commitment, and there is no cancellation fee.
• Changing your plan. You can move between plans yourself in your portal. Moving up takes effect immediately, and we charge the difference in price for the remainder of your current billing period on the day you do it — there is no new setup fee. Moving down takes effect at the end of the billing period you are already paying for: you keep your current plan and its included calls until then, we do not refund or credit the difference, and the lower price starts with your next invoice. You can reverse a scheduled move down at any time before it takes effect, at no cost.
• Price changes. If we change the recurring price of your plan, we will notify you by email at least 30 days before the change takes effect. The new price applies only to billing cycles after that notice, and you may cancel before it takes effect.
• Referral credits. If you refer another business to us and they become a paying client, we credit $50against your monthly plan fee for each such client, every month, for as long as they keep an active paid subscription. There is no limit on how many clients you may refer. A referral counts once we have confirmed and recorded it, and it must be a business that wasn't already in discussion with us. Credits stop applying for any month in which the referred client is no longer an active paying client. Credits apply only to the recurring plan fee — not to setup fees or extra-call charges — cannot reduce an invoice below zero, have no cash value, are not transferable or redeemable for money, and any amount beyond your plan fee in a given month does not carry forward. We may change or end the referral program on 30 days' notice by email; that notice affects future billing cycles only.
• Failed payments. If a scheduled charge fails, we may retry it and may pause or suspend the service until payment succeeds.
• Refunds. Because the service is delivered continuously through each billing period, payments already made are non-refundable except where required by law. Cancelling stops future renewals; you keep access through the period you have already paid for.

Your responsibilities

You're responsible for giving us accurate information about your business so the AI can represent it correctly, and for keeping it accurate as things change — your service area, your pricing, what you do and don't take on. If you add your own instructions for the AI in your portal, you're responsible for what they say and for making sure they're true.

You're also responsible for complying with the laws that apply to how your business communicates with its customers, and for having the right to forward the phone number you put on the service.

Recording notice. Because the calls are your business's calls, the notice we give your callers is given on your behalf. The AI tells every caller at the start of the call that it's an automated assistant and that the call may be recorded, before it takes any information. You agree that we may give that notice as your agent, that you want it given, and that you won't ask us to remove, shorten, or delay it. If you route calls to us from a line where callers were told something inconsistent with that notice, that's on you to correct.

Your data, and deleting it

The recordings, transcripts, summaries, and caller details from your calls are your business's records. We hold them to provide the service and we don't sell them or use them to market to anyone. The platform that powers the voice service may use call content to improve its own product, which our privacy policy explains, including what you can ask us to do about it.

You can ask us to delete them at any time, whether or not you're still a customer, by emailing us from the address on your account. We'll delete your call recordings, transcripts, and account records — including the copies held by the provider that powers the voice service — within 30 days, and confirm when it's done. Deleting them ends your access to them too, so export anything you want to keep first.

We keep billing and payment records after deletion, because tax and accounting rules require us to. Those records show what was charged and paid; they don't contain your call content.

Indemnity

If someone brings a claim against us because of information you gave us or instructions you added for the AI, because of the work your business did or didn't do for a caller, or because you didn't have the right to forward the number you put on the service, you agree to cover our reasonable costs and any damages from that claim. This doesn't apply to anything caused by our own negligence or our own breach of these terms.

AI limitations and emergencies

The AI receptionist is an automated system. While it's built to recognize urgent situations and alert you right away so you can call the customer back, it can make mistakes and is not a substitute for emergency services. Callers facing a life-threatening emergency should always be directed to call 911.

Automated alert calls to you

When the AI flags a call as urgent, we place an automated telephone call to the alert number you set in your portal and play a spoken message about the call. By providing that number and enabling alerts, you give your prior express consent to receive those automated calls and messages at that number from The Backup Line. These are informational service alerts about your own account, not marketing calls. You can stop them at any time by changing or removing the alert number in your portal settings, or by emailing us. Your carrier's normal charges may apply. You confirm that you are the subscriber or the customary user of the number you provide, that you are authorized to consent to automated calls to it, and that you will update it in your portal if that stops being true.

Call recording

Calls handled by the AI receptionist may be recorded and transcribed to provide the service and for quality review. The AI tells callers this at the very start of the call, before taking any information, so a caller who does not want to be recorded can hang up or ask to be called back. Recordings and transcripts belong to your business and are available to you in your portal.

Cancellation

You can cancel at any time, for any reason, with no cancellation fee. Sign in to your portal, open Settings → Subscription, and click Cancel subscription. There is one confirmation step, and that's the whole process — you don't need to give a reason, and we won't put you through a phone call or a retention conversation.

Your cancellation takes effect the moment you confirm it. We send you a written confirmation by email straight away. If you'd rather not use the portal, or you can't sign in, email us at hello@thebackupline.com from the address on your account and we'll cancel it for you — that cancellation is effective when we receive your email, not when we reply.

Cancelling stops all future renewal charges. Your service continues through the end of the billing period you've already paid for — we don't cut your line off mid-month for time you've paid for — and then your calls simply ring through as they did before you signed up. If you cancel during a free trial, you won't be charged. You can undo a cancellation yourself from the same screen any time before that date.

After your service ends you keep your login. You can still sign in and read your call history, transcripts, and leads — that record is yours — but you won't be able to change anything, and the AI line stops answering.

Disclaimer and limitation of liability

The service is provided "as is" and "as available." We work hard to keep it accurate and reliable, but to the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We don't warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that it will answer, understand, or correctly categorize every call.

The service depends on phone carriers and other providers we don't control. Outages, delays, and misrouted calls upstream of us can happen, and we're not responsible for them. The AI is an automated system that can misunderstand a caller, and it is not a substitute for emergency services or for your own judgment about your business.

No indirect or consequential damages. To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business opportunities, lost or missed jobs or leads, or property damage arising from a call that wasn't answered, was answered late, or was handled incorrectly — even if we were told such damages were possible.

Cap on total liability. To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to the greater of the total amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or $100.

Who owns what

Ours.The service — the software, the website, the AI assistant's configuration and instructions, and everything we build to run it — belongs to us. While your subscription is active you have permission to use it to run your own business's phone line. That permission isn't exclusive, isn't transferable, and ends when your subscription does. You don't get the underlying software or the assistant's instructions, and you agree not to copy, resell, or reverse-engineer them, or use them to build a competing service.

Yours. Your business information, the instructions you add for the AI, and the recordings, transcripts, summaries and caller details from your calls stay yours. You give us permission to use them only to provide the service to you — which includes sending them to the providers that run the phone line and the AI, as described in our privacy policy. That permission covers nothing else: we don't sell your information, we don't use it to market to you or to your callers, and we don't use your business's name as a reference or in our own marketing without asking you first.

Ideas. If you tell us how the product should work — a question the AI should ask, something it should handle differently — we may build it, for everyone, without owing you anything for it. That applies to suggestions about our product only, never to anything about your business or your customers.

Things outside our control

Neither of us is responsible for failing to meet an obligation here when the cause is genuinely outside our reasonable control — a phone carrier or internet outage, a failure at one of the providers the service runs on, a power cut, a natural disaster, or an action of government. This doesn't excuse paying for service you've already received.

If something like that stops your line answering for more than two days in a row, tell us and we'll credit the affected days against your next invoice. If it runs past fourteen days, either of us can end the agreement immediately, and we'll refund the unused part of the period you've paid for.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Michigan, without regard to conflict-of-law principles.

Any dispute relating to these terms or the service will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Oakland County, Michigan, and both of us consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, both of us waive the right to a jury trial, and agree that any claim will be brought only in an individual capacity — not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, or representative proceeding.

Before filing anything, please email us and give us 30 days to sort it out. Most things get fixed with a phone call.

General terms

• Agreeing to these terms. You agree to these terms when you start a trial, complete checkout, or use the service. If you're agreeing on behalf of a business, you're confirming you have the authority to bind it.
• Changes to these terms. We may update these terms. If a change materially affects your rights or what you pay, we'll email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and you can cancel before then if you don't want to accept it. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the updated terms. Other changes take effect when we post them, and the date at the top of this page tells you when that was.
• How you may use the service. Use it for your own business's incoming calls. Don't use it for anything unlawful, don't route it a phone number you don't have the right to forward, don't use it to place marketing or automated outbound calls, and don't resell or resupply it to another business without a written agreement with us.
• Suspension and ending your account. We may suspend or end your account if payment fails and isn't resolved, if you use the service in a way this section prohibits, or if you materially breach these terms. We'll tell you why, and give you a chance to fix it first where the circumstances allow. If we end your account for a reason other than one of those, we'll refund the unused part of the period you've already paid for.
• The written terms control. These terms, together with the plan and price shown at checkout, are the whole agreement between us about the service, and they replace anything said or written beforehand. If something someone told you differs from what's written here, what's written here is what applies — so if a commitment matters to you, get it from us in writing before you sign up.
• If part of this is unenforceable. If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, it is limited or removed only to the extent necessary, and everything else stays in force. In particular, if the class-action waiver above is held unenforceable, only that waiver is removed — the governing-law, venue, and jury-waiver provisions continue to apply.
• What survives. Cancelling, deleting your data, or ending your account doesn't end the sections on your data, indemnity, disclaimers and limitation of liability, governing law and disputes, or these general terms. They continue to apply to anything that happened while you were a client.
• Transfers. You can't transfer your account or these terms to someone else without our written agreement. We may transfer them to a successor if our business is sold or reorganized, and your plan and price carry over unchanged.
• Notices, and not enforcing something. We send notices to the email address on your account, so keep it current; you send them to the address below. If we don't enforce a term right away, we haven't given it up.

Contact us

Questions about these terms? Reach us at hello@thebackupline.com or 1 (918) 223-4411.