Legal

Terms of service

This is the agreement between you and Plot. It says what you are getting, what it costs, how to stop, and where the limits of a one-person gardening app honestly lie. It is written to be read rather than to be survived.

1. The short version

Plot works out sowing, planting, harvest and pruning dates for the postcode area you give it, and tells you what the coming week's weather means for the plants you said you have. The planner is free to use without an account. An account adds the dated views, the forecast and sync across your devices: fourteen days free, no card, then £19 a year.

Plot's dates are estimates built from regional averages. They are a well-informed starting point, not a guarantee about your particular garden, and the weather is supplied by somebody else. Decide what to sow and when to cover it using your own judgement about your own ground.

You can cancel whenever you like, get your data out in one click, and delete your account and everything in it without asking anyone's permission. Nothing here takes away the rights UK consumer law gives you, and where these terms and the law disagree, the law wins.

2. What Plot is, and what it is not

Plot is a website that also installs as an app. It calculates dates for the growing spaces and plants you describe, from published regional climate data, first and last frost averages, and the rules of thumb that gardeners have used for a century. It then adjusts what it suggests for this week using a public weather forecast.

Every date Plot shows is a modelled average for an area, applied to a description you typed. It is arithmetic, not observation. A garden four miles away and forty metres higher will behave differently, and so will a walled town garden a mile from an exposed field. Treat Plot's dates as the opening argument, and your own eyes as the decider.

The weather forecast comes from Open-Meteo. Forecasts are wrong sometimes, and services go down. Plot has no control over either.

Plot is intended for people aged 16 or over, in the United Kingdom. The date calculations are built for UK conditions and will be of little use elsewhere.

3. Using Plot without an account

You do not have to sign up to use the planner. Enter a postcode area, describe your growing spaces, and the plan lives in the address of the page itself with a copy kept on your device. No account, no email address, no personal data. This is a real mode of use rather than a teaser, and these terms apply to it just as much as to an account.

Because that plan lives in your browser and in the page address, it is yours to keep and yours to lose. Clearing your browser storage will remove it. Bookmark the page or export the plan if it matters to you.

4. Your account

• You need a working email address and a password. Confirm the address, or the account cannot sign in.
• An account is for one person. Do not share your password. If you think someone else has it, change it, and tell us if you would like help.
• Give a real email address. It is the only way to reset a password or reach you about the account, and Plot sends nothing else to it — there is no newsletter.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account while it is in your control.
• A household can put the same plan on several devices by signing in on each. That is expected and fine.

5. The free trial

A new account gets fourteen days free, starting when the account is created. No card is required, and no payment details are collected to start a trial, so nothing can be charged at the end of it by accident.

The clock is kept on Plot's server, not on your device, which is why changing your device's date does not lengthen a trial. The account panel shows the days remaining and the exact date the trial ends.

One trial per person. Creating a series of accounts to repeat the trial is not a clever workaround, it is a breach of section 10.

6. Price, payment and renewal

Payment is not switched on yet. At the date of this version, Plot cannot take money at all: there is no live checkout, and no card details exist anywhere in the system. If your trial ends before payment goes live, section 8 describes what you keep, and you will not owe anything for the period in between.

When payment does go live, this is how it will work, and this page will be updated to say so:

• The price is £19 a year, including any VAT that may become due.
• Payment is taken by Stripe. Card details go to Stripe and never reach Plot's servers or database.
• A subscription runs for a year and renews automatically at the end of it, so that a plan does not silently stop working in the middle of a growing season.
• We will email you at least 14 days before each renewal, saying the date and the amount. Cancel any time before then and nothing is taken.
• If the price changes, the new price applies only from your next renewal, and only if we told you before that renewal. A price rise never applies to a year you have already paid for.
• If a payment fails, access to the paid parts stops until it succeeds. Nothing is deleted for non-payment — see section 8.

7. Cancelling and refunds

Cancel whenever you want. There is no minimum term beyond the year you have paid for, no cancellation fee, and no retention telephone call. Email hello@plotapp.uk and it is done, or cancel from the account panel once payment is live.

Your statutory right to change your mind. Because you are buying online, the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 give you 14 days from the day after the contract is made to cancel and get your money back (SI 2013/3134). For digital content that starts immediately, a trader is allowed to ask you to give that right up. Plot does not do that. You get the full 14 days whether or not you have used the paid features, and the refund is the whole £19.

Beyond the 14 days. If you cancel later in the year, access continues to the end of the year you paid for and then stops. There is no automatic pro-rata refund for the unused months. If something has genuinely gone wrong — Plot was broken for you, or it was not what the site said it was — email and say so, and a refund is likely; see section 15, which is about your rights rather than our goodwill.

8. What happens when a trial or subscription ends

Nothing is deleted, and the planner does not lock you out of your own garden. When a trial ends or a subscription lapses:

• You keep your plan, both plant libraries, and this month's jobs, and you can keep editing them.
• You lose, until you subscribe the dated views — the timeline, succession planning and rotation — the export, and the weather forecast.
• Your data stays put. Your plan remains in your account, and the export in section 9 keeps working for as long as the account exists, so you can always leave with everything.
• Subscribing again brings the paid parts straight back, with your plan exactly as you left it.

If that balance ever changes so that more of Plot sits behind the payment, we will tell existing account holders before it applies to them, and it will not apply to a year already paid for.

9. Your plan and your content

Your garden plan is yours. Describing your plot, naming your beds and choosing what to grow creates content that belongs to you, and this agreement gives us no ownership of it.

We need a narrow, practical permission to run the service: to store your plan, to copy it between your devices, to render it on screen and into an export or calendar feed, and to keep the backups our database provider takes. That permission exists only to operate Plot for you, it is not exclusive, we are not paid for it, and it ends when you delete the content or the account — subject to backups ageing out and to the record-keeping described in the privacy notice.

Getting it out. The account panel has a "Download my data" button, which gives you everything held about you in a plain machine-readable file. No request, no waiting period.

Getting rid of it. "Delete my account and everything in it" does exactly that, immediately and without a confirmation email begging you to reconsider. It cannot be undone, so export first if you might want the plan later.

If you publish a calendar feed from Plot, remember that anyone holding that link can read the feed. Rotate the token from the account panel if you have shared it too widely.

10. What you may not do

• Do not try to break into other people's accounts or data, or probe for a way to.
• Do not attempt to defeat the payment or the trial, including by making repeat accounts, tampering with the code in your browser, or lying to the server about time.
• Do not extract the plant libraries, the regional data or the pruning guides in bulk, whether by hand, by script or by any automated collector, and do not republish them or use them to build a competing product.
• Do not attack the service — no denial of service, no deliberate flooding, no automated hammering of the weather or database endpoints.
• Do not upload or store anything unlawful, or anything you have no right to store, in the free-text fields.
• Do not resell, sublicense or rent access to Plot, or present it as your own product.
• Do not remove or obscure the copyright notices on anything you export.

If you do any of this, we may suspend or close the account. Where the breach is minor and fixable we will say what the problem is and give you a chance to stop first. Where it is serious — an attack, or an attempt to reach other people's data — the account may be closed immediately, and any part of the year you had paid for will be refunded pro rata unless the breach was fraudulent.

11. Who owns what

Plot's software, text, drawings, plant and pruning data, the compiled regional dataset and the name Plot all remain the property of Edward Harden. This agreement gives you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use Plot for your own gardening — including for the garden of a household you belong to — and nothing more.

What you may freely do: use Plot's output for your own garden, print it, put the calendar in your own calendar app, and show it to whoever you like. What you may not do is bulk-extract the underlying data or rebuild the product, as set out in section 10.

Some of Plot is other people's work, used under their licences: the Fraunces and Satoshi typefaces, and weather data from Open-Meteo. Their terms govern those parts.

12. Availability, and the fact that this is one person

Plot is built and maintained by one person, and it would be dishonest to promise enterprise-grade uptime. There is no service level agreement, no guaranteed response time and no support telephone number. What there is: an email address that reaches the person who wrote the code, and a genuine intention to fix things.

Plot may be unavailable for maintenance, or because a supplier it depends on is down. Where an outage is planned and likely to matter, we will say so on the site beforehand.

Plot is designed to keep working without a signal, which is the point of installing it: your plan, this month's jobs and the plant libraries are stored on your device. Sync and the forecast need a connection. If a device stays offline for a long stretch, Plot will eventually ask to check your subscription once before the paid parts come back.

If Plot were ever to shut down for good, we would give account holders at least 60 days' notice by email, keep the export working throughout, and refund the unused part of any year already paid for.

13. Changes to Plot and to these terms

Plot will change. Features get added, and occasionally something is removed because it was wrong or nobody used it. We will not remove a feature you are paying for, during a year you have paid for, without either replacing it with something equivalent or refunding the unused part of the year.

When these terms change, the date and version at the top change with them. If a change materially affects you — the price, the renewal, what sits behind the payment, or your rights here — we will email account holders at least 30 days before it takes effect, rather than quietly republishing this page. If you do not accept the change, cancel before it applies and we will refund the unused part of the year.

Corrections that do not change the substance — a typo, a clearer sentence, a new postal address — are made without notice, and the version number tells you when.

14. Ending this agreement

You can end it at any moment: stop using Plot, cancel the subscription, or delete the account outright from the account panel.

We can end it by closing your account if you breach section 10, if payment fails and stays unpaid, or if Plot shuts down as described in section 12. Except in the case of a serious breach, we will email you first and tell you why.

When the agreement ends, your right to use Plot ends with it. Sections 9, 11, 16 and 17 survive, and so does anything the privacy notice says we must keep.

15. If something is wrong with Plot

Email hello@plotapp.uk and describe what happened. Bugs are useful information rather than an imposition.

Separately from anything in this agreement, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives you statutory rights over paid digital content: it must be of satisfactory quality, fit for the purpose it was sold for, and as described. If it is not, you are entitled to have it repaired or replaced, and to a price reduction — up to the full amount — where that is not possible or not done within a reasonable time. If Plot damages your device or your other files through a lack of reasonable care, you are entitled to have that put right or to be compensated. See Part 1, Chapter 3 of the Act, and the plain-English summary from Business Companion.

Nothing in this agreement limits those rights, and nothing in it requires you to go through us before exercising them.

16. Limits on liability

What is never limited. Nothing here excludes or limits our liability for:

• death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
• your statutory rights as a consumer, including those in section 15;
• anything else the law does not permit to be excluded.

What is limited. Subject to that:

• Plot is not liable for a loss caused by relying on its dates or its forecast in preference to your own judgement about your own garden — a crop that failed, a plant lost to a late frost, seed sown too early or pruning done in the wrong month.
• Plot is not liable for losses arising from a supplier's outage, from your device, or from your own browser storage being cleared.
• Plot is not liable for business losses. If you use Plot for anything commercial, you do so entirely at your own risk: no lost profit, no lost revenue, no lost contracts, no business interruption.
• Where liability can lawfully be capped, our total liability to you for everything connected with Plot is capped at the greater of £19 and the total you have actually paid us in the 12 months before the problem arose. Plot costs £19 a year and cannot carry unlimited risk.

We are responsible for loss that is a foreseeable result of our breaking this agreement or failing to use reasonable care and skill, and not for loss that is not foreseeable.

17. Complaints, law and courts

Raise it with us first at hello@plotapp.uk. Most problems are a bug or a misunderstanding, and both are fixable faster than any formal process. We aim to reply within five working days, and to say something honest rather than something soothing.

This agreement is governed by the law of England and Wales. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protections of your own country, and you can bring a claim in the courts there. Otherwise, the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. As a consumer you can always bring a claim in the courts of the part of the UK where you live.

Complaints about how your personal data is handled can go to the Information Commissioner's Office, as set out in the privacy notice.

18. The remaining small print

• The whole agreement. These terms and the privacy notice are the agreement between us about Plot. Marketing copy elsewhere on the site is not a separate promise, though we do try to keep it true.
• If one part fails. If any part of this is unenforceable, the rest stands.
• Not enforcing something once. If we do not enforce a term straight away, we have not given it up.
• Transferring it. You may not transfer your account or this agreement to anyone else. We may transfer it if Plot is sold or reorganised, and account holders would be told first, in time to export and delete — see the privacy notice.
• Nobody else's rights. This agreement is between you and us. No third party can enforce it.
• Things outside anyone's control. Neither of us is in breach for a delay caused by something genuinely beyond our control, though a long one entitles you to cancel and be refunded the unused part of the year.
• Language. This agreement is in English.