Welcome to PayChute!

We're glad you're here! On PayChute you can discover, connect with, and form relationships with others by sharing your ideas, knowledge, experience, creations, and services. Others can, in turn, can express and show their appreciation, both in-kind and monetarily via tips, ChatBombs(TM), and more. Whether you're a creator interested in founding your own community, or an individual looking to discover and engage with creators you love, our goal is to provide you with exceptional value and a first-rate user experience. Before you dive in and explore all the possibilities available to you here, we urge you to read these terms in full. To make it easier, we provide subject headers and summaries for each section. But keep in mind that these aren't legally binding, only the full text is. If, after reading them, you have any questions about them, please write terms@paychute.com for clarification.

Effective date: January 22, 2024

As part of our commitment to continually improve our products and services, we will occasionally make changes or additions to these terms. The effective date of the current version of these terms--which are binding on anyone who uses the platform on or after their effective date--will always appear here.

By using PayChute, you are agreeing to these Terms

These terms govern your use of PayChute, whether as an individual, as a member of a creator's community, or as a creator yourself. In addition to these terms, our Privacy Policy applies to anyone using PayChute. Creators should also review the terms related to data processing contained in their Contract with Creators, as these terms protect the privacy of your community members. By accessing or using our website, located at https://paychute.com, or any of our related products and services, you are accepting these terms, including those contained in the above mentioned documents.

By means of your use or access of any PayChute site, product, or service, you thereby represent and warrant that you have the right, authority, and capacity to enter into an agreement based on these Terms (and those incorporated by reference, above), not only on your own behalf, but also on behalf of any entity that you represent for purposes of such access and use.

Your account

Summary: You must be at least 18 and accept responsibility for your own account to use PayChute

To use certain features of PayChute, you must register for an account and provide information about yourself, as required by prompts in our registration form. You represent and warrant that (a) all information you submit is truthful and accurate; and (b) you will maintain the accuracy of such information. To use PayChute--whether as an individual or as a founder of a community--you must be at least 18 years old. 

You are responsible for anything that occurs when anyone is signed into your account, as well as the security of your account itself. Please email us at support@paychute.com immediately if you suspect there has been unauthorized use of your account, or any breach of security. 

Account deletion or suspension

Summary: You can delete your account at any time in your account settings; we can suspend or terminate your account when we reasonably believe it could create a risk of legal liability for PayChute.

You may delete your account at any time, for any reason, by following these instructions. Subject to certain limitations below, you acknowledge and agree that submission of an account deletion request will result in permanent deletion of your account, and all associated User Content (defined below), from our databases. Finally, PayChute may suspend or terminate your account when we reasonably believe it could create a risk of legal liability for PayChute, in accordance with the section on Prohibited Conduct, below.

Prohibited conduct

Summary: Don't break the law or abuse our services.

As stated above, you are responsible for all activity on your account. If you post illegal content to PayChute, or otherwise use PayChute in the commission of a crime or other violation of rights, then we may terminate your account. Abuse of our services and systems--for example, excessive queries that indicate that the activity is being performed by a bot of some kind, or use of PayChute as a storage platform--may also result in account termination. Insofar as PayChute or our payment processors may be exposed to legal liability as a result of what creators do with funds disbursed to them, we may also consider relevant off-platform conduct in making decisions to suspend or terminate creators' accounts. Consult our Community Guidelines for more information. 

While PayChute is committed to facilitating and advancing, to the maximum extent possible consistent with the law, our users' fundamental rights to free thought and expression, all decisions as to Guidelines violations, suspensions, or terminations are made at our sole discretion.

Founding a Community on PayChute

Summary: Creators, Influencers, and Public Intellectuals are invited to found Communities where they can: engage with supporters; earn tips or ChatBombs; sell monthly subscriptions, merchandise, exclusive creations or experiences; and more. This section offers an overview of the steps required to found and manage a community on PayChute. Full terms for Creators are contained in our Contract with Creators, which community founders must read and assent to before withdrawing any earnings on PayChute.

Founding a Community. If you would like to found your own community on PayChute, simply launch a community page, and use the tools provided to showcase your brand and creations, interact with members of the PayChute community, invite your most engaged fans and followers to sign up for paid subscriptions, and more. Our subscription-tier tools provide maximum flexibility so you can tailor the benefits you wish to offer subscribers at each tier--from additional access, to exclusive content or merchandise, to engaging community experiences. In exchange for the value you provide your supporters, you will receive loyal support from them, including revenue from subscriptions, tips and ChatBombs, as well as purchases of your standalone offerings.  

Payments and withdrawals. IMPORTANT: Before you may withdraw any of your earnings on PayChute, you must read and assent to our Contract with Creators, and provide all the information and documentation requested. As a creator, influencer, or public intellectual who has founded a community on PayChute, you can earn tips/ChatBombs, make standalone, one-time offerings, and/or offer automatically-renewing monthly subscriptions. Payments for your offerings will be in the form of tokens, which allows supporters to stock up on tokens for minimal transactions fees, and disburse them in larger or smaller denominations, as desired. 

We try to provide timely access to the funds you've earned on PayChute, once the minimum withdrawal threshhold (currently $100) is met, so long as there are no pending chargebacks or payment disputes. In addition, regardless of your earning balance, withdrawals can be made only once every thirty (30) days. We may also withhold access to earnings for violations of our terms, or for compliance reasons. When this is necessary, we make reasonable efforts to communicate the reason to you promptly. If you have questions about access to your earnings being restricted, please write to support@paychute.com for assistance. If refunds to supporters or chargebacks put your account balance into the negative, we reserve the right to recover the funds from your future earnings.

Fees and taxes. As a PayChute community founder, you will incur a flat platform fee associated with all your earnings (tips, ChatBombs, supporter subscriptions, and one-time purchases). These fees are necessary not only to support operation of the platform, but also to reimburse payment processing fees incurred by PayChute. Future feature offerings may include merch. In that case, in addition to the platform fee, the cost of the merchandise sold will be deducted from your earnings. 

In order to satisfy our tax obligations, we or our partners collect tax information and, in certain circumstances, report this information and earnings to tax authorities as legally required. For example, if you are located in the United States or are a United States citizen, and you have earned at least $600 in a calendar year from the sales of goods or services on PayChute, we are required to issue you a Form 1099-K at the beginning of the next year. You are responsible for reporting any income, withholding, or other earnings-based taxes which may be due as a result of money you earn on PayChute. Learn more in your Contract with Creators, which you must read and assent to before requesting a withdrawal of earnings. 

Amounts payable under this agreement between a community founder and PayChute may include Value Added Tax ("VAT"), Goods and Services Tax ("GST") and other local service or sales tax in non-US locations (collectively referred to as “VAT”), as well as state sales tax in the United States. You agree that you will provide us with any information and documents for accurate tax determination and compliance, where and as we request or as otherwise required.

Restrictions. We don't allow creations, content, or benefits which violate our terms or policies. You can learn more by visiting our Community Guidelines. In summary, we don't allow:

• any creation, content, or subscriber benefit offering which violates the law of the relevant jurisdiction;
• creations, content, or subscriber benefits which are fraudulent;
• creations, content, or subscriber benefits which use others' intellectual property in a way that isn't protected as fair use, unless you have written permission to use it; or
• creations, content, or subscriber benefits which involve real people engaging in sexual acts.

If your followers include people under the age of 18, then please remind them that they will need to have a parent or legal guardian join PayChute and engage in all desired transactions (tips, ChatBombs, subscriptions, etc.) on their behalf. We are not required to allow any person or group of persons to access any offering or feature on PayChute.

As a community founder, you are also responsible for keeping your community members' data safe. See the Data Processing provisions of your Contract with Creators for more information.

Per your Contract with Creators, your account and communities are tied to your creative and intellectual output; they cannot be sold or transferred for use by other creators.

As we add or experiment with new or potential feature offerings, we may choose at our sole discretion to make such features or offerings available for use by a subset of creators. Access to any feature on PayChute is not guaranteed, and we may enable and disable any early-access, beta, or test features at our sole discretion. We may also make such features subject to additional restrictions and limitations not specified in these terms. 

Joining and Supporting a Community on PayChute

Summary: A community member is someone who creates a PayChute account and joins one or more communities in order to receive and interact with content in his or her feed. Community members may choose to purchase tokens on PayChute, which they then may use to tip, ChatBomb, or otherwise support communities via the purchase of subscriptions or one-time offerings. Community subscribers may receive benefits and interact directly with creators, as well as other community members, using tools provided on the PayChute platform.

As a community subscriber, you may receive special benefits the ability to direct message or email a creator, view or comment on exclusive content, receive shoutouts or answers in Q & A sessions, and more. Community offerings and subscription tiers are at the sole discretion of that community's founder. You will pay for these benefits in the form of tokens, which you can purchase in lots of various sizes, from a minimum of $10.00 to a maximum of $500.00 per transaction. In addition, you may choose to purchase tokens on a one-time basis, or to set up recurring token purchases, as desired. If you decide to purchase a subscription to one or more communities, you may find it more convenient to set up recurring token purchases to ensure your subscription doesn't lapse. PayChute is the merchant associated with charges for token purchases. If your primary payment method fails, we will attempt to charge backup payment methods you have configured, if any. You can view your token balance and your token transaction history in your PayChute Wallet.

Once you have a sufficient token balance, you can become a community member or supporter by using tokens to tip, ChatBomb, or purchase a subscription or other offering. Subject to these terms, to the extent a subscription or other offering affords access to one or more of a creator's creations, you will receive a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable license to access and enjoy those creations for your own non-commercial, private use. Unless otherwise specified by the creator at time of purchase, creations you gain access to in this manner will continue to be available to you indefinitely, but they may become unavailable at any time under conditions described below.

Paid subscriptions to communities automatically renew monthly until you toggle off “renew” via your settings under the “Communities” tab. Your recurring charge date may be earlier than the date you first subscribed for reasons including, for example, differences between your timezone and the timezone in which our billing systems operate, or variances in the length of months. The amount you are charged for a subscription may increase or decrease with notice to you. This enables community founders to, for example, adjust membership prices to account for new or different benefits, increased or decreased costs, or other changed circumstances.

You may cancel your subscriptions at any time. Canceling or lowering the tier of your subscription will impact your next recurring charge for renewal. Canceling your membership or lowering the tier of your community subscription may result in loss of your subscriber benefits, including exclusive community content and events to which you had access as a subscriber. You may also lose access to these if (a) your token balance falls below that which is required to renew your subscription, (b) we terminate your account, (c) you are banned from the community by its founder, (d) the community founder modifies or removes the relevant content from PayChute, or changes the access settings to that content, (e) we remove or restrict access to the relevant content, or (f) either we or the community founder remove the community from PayChute entirely. We are not required to allow you to access an offering, to be a subscriber to, or otherwise interact with a particular creator or community.

Community subscriptions and standalone offerings vary and PayChute controls neither the specific benefits a community offers, nor their quality. We attempt to screen for fraudulent communities, in part by requiring their founders to sign a contract and submit required documentation prior to withdrawing earnings. But we cannot guarantee the identity of community founders or the sincerity or validity of any representations or promises they make. Should you encounter a community that you suspect is fraudulent, please email report@paychute.com. 

If you are located in a jurisdiction in which PayChute is required to charge and collect tax, for example VAT or sales tax, then this tax is added to the total charge at the time you purchase tokens to add to your PayChute Wallet. This tax is shown to you at time of token purchase and can be viewed as part of your token transaction history in your Wallet. PayChute remits all tax collected to the applicable taxing authority. As tax is largely dependent on your location, you agree to keep your location complete and up to date in your account settings, in order to enable accurate collection of taxes. PayChute does not control the applicable tax that you may be charged and this amount may be increased without notice to you. In some cases, if you either pay for tokens with a foreign currency, or with a foreign payment instrument, you may be charged a foreign transaction fee for that purchase. PayChute does not apply this fee and does not receive any of the funds from that fee, but our choices about payment processing may impact or otherwise give rise to this fee.

As we add or experiment with new or potential feature offerings, we may choose at our sole discretion to make such features or offerings available for use by a subset of community members. Access to any feature on PayChute is not guaranteed, and we may enable and disable any early-access, beta, or test features at our sole discretion. We may also make such features subject to additional restrictions and limitations not specified in these terms.

Refunds. Our policy is not to provide refunds, including if you lose access to one-time offerings or subscription benefits for reasons described above. We may allow for some exceptions to this policy, however, where refunds are granted in our sole discretion.

Enforcement of Terms, Community-Based Content Curation

Summary: Primary responsibility for terms enforcement or content curation within PayChute communities lies with our community founders. PayChute will review all reported content, and may also conduct proactive reviews to identify potential violation of these Terms.

PayChute believes that individuals should decide for themselves what content to view or support, and that community founders are best situated--and usually best qualified--to enforce terms and curate content within their own communities. For those unfortunate exceptions to this general principle, PayChute asks that users, whether community founders or supporting members, submit reports of potential violations of our terms by email to report@paychute.com, including URLs of any relevant content, as well as a description of suspected violation(s) of these terms. Investigations may take some time to complete, as PayChute may need to review off-platform as well as on-platform activity, in order to avoid risks associated with illegal disposition of funds earned on PayChute. 

In most situations, we will work with community founders and members to resolve potential policy violations without disbanding communities or suspending accounts of creators or supporters. We may resort to such measures, however, when we believe doing so is necessary to protect the rights and legitimate interests of others, whether in the broader PayChute community or in society generally.

Intellectual Property ("IP")

Summary: Creators keep full ownership of their IP, and community members keep full ownership of what they post on PayChute. Nonetheless, when you post content on PayChute, you give us permission to use that content as necessary to provide our services. It is your responsibility ensure that you own or have permission to use any IP you post on PayChute.

You keep full ownership of all IP and all content that you post on PayChute. However, in order to operate our services effectively--specifically to facilitate subscriptions and offerings you configure on PayChute--we need licenses from you to be able to distribute this content. Accordingly, by posting or making your creations and other content available on PayChute, you thereby grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable, worldwide license covering such IP or content, in all formats and channels now known or later developed to use, copy, reproduce, store, translate, transmit, distribute, perform, prepare derivative works, publicly display, and display in connection with any username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with it. In addition, you recognize that PayChute has a “legitimate interest” in any personal data contained in such IP or content, as required for successful conduct of the activities permitted within the scope of this license.

You agree that the creations or other content you offer or post on PayChute does not violate the IP or proprietary rights of others. In accordance with this provision, PayChute may remove creations or other content which violate its terms and policies. We will terminate, in appropriate circumstances, accounts of creators or other community members who are found to have repeatedly violated the IP rights of others.

If you are a copyright or trademark claimant, or its agent, and have a good faith belief that particular material posted or offered on PayChute infringes your IP right, then please submit a complaint notification of claimed infringement by email to ip@paychute.com. Please note that, in order to properly resolve these claims, we may pass along information contained in your complaint, including your name and contact information, to the PayChute creator or community member responsible for contributing the challenged content. If you prefer that your information not be shared in this manner, consider using an agent for purposes of submission of your complaint notification.  

Community members and subscribers may not use a community founder's creations in any unauthorized manner, including sharing such creations with those who are not subscribers or who have not otherwise purchased the offering.

PayChute's IP Rights

Summary: By communicating feedback to PayChute, whether to report a bug or other problem, or to suggest new features or enhancements, you grant PayChute ownership of any IP that may be contained in such feedback. Community founders on PayChute may use our IP to promote their communities, but not for anything else without permission in writing.

PayChute's IP, including the text on our website, our API's, embeds, logo, and codebase, is protected by copyright, trademark, and trade secret laws, as appropriate. Community founders are granted, via these terms, a license to use our logo and other relevant copyrighted or trademarked material to promote their PayChute communities. Any other use, distribution, display, reproduction, or preparation of a derivative work may be done only after obtaining permission in writing. To request such permission, send an email to support@paychute.com.

We welcome your feedback and suggestions--from bug reports to requests for feature additions or enhancements--via email at support@paychute.com. All such submissions will become the property of PayChute, so they may be used for the benefit of creators and community members on our platform. 

No Warranty

Summary: We do all we can to earn your business, but PayChute provides its platform and services “as is,” and does not offer a warranty of any kind. 

Specifically, these terms exclude, to the greatest extent permitted by law, warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any other warranty, whether express or implied. These disclaimers apply equally to our subsidiaries, affiliates, and third-party service providers. Should you be dissatisfied with any element of your user experience here, email us at support@paychute.com so we can make things right.

Limitation of Liability

Summary: If you suffer monetary or other losses due to your use of PayChute, the maximum amount you may be compensated is the amount of money we have earned from your use of our platform.

To the greatest extent permitted by law, we are not liable to you for any incidental, consequential, or punitive damages arising out of these terms, or your use or attempted use of PayChute, whether or not such losses are within the contemplation of the parties, or are reasonably foreseeable. Specifically, PayChute will not be liable in contract, tort (including, without limitation, negligence), pre-contract or other representations (other than fraudulent misrepresentation) or otherwise arising out of or in connection with these terms for:

• any economic losses (including, without limitation, loss of revenues, profits, contracts, data, business, anticipated savings or cost of substitute services);
• any loss of goodwill or reputation; or
• any special, indirect or consequential losses suffered or incurred by a party arising out of or in connection with the provisions of, or any matter under the Agreement;
• any loss associated with unfulfilled offerings and benefits and from losses caused by conflicting contractual agreements.

For purposes of this clause, “we” is defined to include our subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, directors, employees, agents, and third-party service providers.

Indemnification

Summary: If we are sued due to your conduct on PayChute, you will be required to help pay for our legal defense. 

You agree to indemnify and hold PayChute harmless from and against all damages, liabilities, losses, penalties, fines, expenses and costs (including reasonable fees and expenses of attorneys and other professionals) arising out of or relating to your use of PayChute. In addition, PayChute reserves the right to maintain exclusive control over the defense of any claim covered by this clause. This obligation to indemnify extends to claims incurred by our subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, directors, employees, agents, and third-party service providers.

Dispute resolution

Summary: Please contact us at support@paychute.com whenever you have a complaint about our services so we may resolve it. Unresolved disputes must be submitted to the American Arbitration Association for an arbitration proceeding to be administered in Kansas City, Missouri under Wyoming law.

These terms, and all claims or defenses based on, arising out of, or related to these Terms or the relationship between you and PayChute created hereby, whether sounding in contract, tort, law, equity, or otherwise, shall be governed by, and enforced in accordance with, the internal laws of the State of Wyoming including its statute of limitations, without reference to its choice of law rules or any principle calling for application of the law of any other jurisdiction.

Any controversy or claim arising out of or relating to these terms, or the breach thereof, shall be resolved by arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association in accordance with its rules, and judgment on the award rendered by the arbitrator(s) may be entered by a court in Kansas City, Missouri, to the exclusion of all other courts and fora. You irrevocably consent to the jurisdiction of, and venue in, such courts and waive any objection that such courts are an inconvenient forum. 

If any action is necessary to enforce these Terms, the substantially prevailing party will be entitled to reasonable attorneys' fees, costs, and expenses, in addition to any other relief to which such prevailing party may be entitled. A failure to enforce a right provided for by these terms does not waive the ability to enforce any rights in the future.

These terms and any referenced policies are the entire agreement between you and us. In the case of community founders, our Contract with Creators will also govern your relationship with PayChute. If any provision of these terms is held to be unenforceable, then that provision is modified only to the extent necessary to enforce it. If it is not possible to make a provision enforceable, then it is severed from these terms, with the remaining provisions still in force.