Terms of Service

This agreement

VouchMe (vouchme.pro and the VouchMe app for iPhone) is run by VouchMe (“we” or “us”). By using VouchMe, you agree to these Terms and to our Community Guidelines, which are part of them. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle your information.

If you use VouchMe on behalf of a business, you agree to these Terms for that business too.

Who can use VouchMe

• You must be at least 16 years old to use VouchMe.
• You must be at least 18 to create a professional profile.
• You can’t use VouchMe if the law forbids it, or if we’ve previously closed your account for breaking these Terms.

Your account

You can sign in with a mobile number or an email address, or with Apple or Google where offered. Some actions, like posting a Vouch or creating a professional profile, also need a mobile number confirmed with a text code.

• One person per account. Use your real name and keep your details accurate.
• Keep access to your account secure. You’re responsible for what happens under it.
• Tell us at info@vouche.pro if you think someone else is using your account.

Professional profiles

A professional profile exists only because the professional created it. Nobody can create or claim a profile about someone else.

• It must be you. Use the name your customers know you by, and keep your role, employer and history accurate. Career history is self-reported unless it carries a verification badge.
• One profile per account. Your link (like vouchme.pro/maria) stays the same wherever you work. We may change a link that impersonates someone, misleads, or infringes someone’s rights.
• You control your profile’s details: About, specialties, languages, and whether you accept Contact messages.
• You don’t control the Vouches. You can’t edit or delete a Vouch, or change where or when it happened. When you change employers, each Vouch stays tied to the business, role and date where the work happened.
• Badges mean exactly what they say. A confirmed phone isn’t an identity check, and Employment verified doesn’t verify any single transaction. Don’t describe your profile as more verified than it is.

Vouch rules

A Vouch is a public account of a direct professional experience with one person. When you post one:

• It must come from direct professional experience. You were their customer, or you worked with them or did business with them. If you haven’t worked with them, you can’t Vouch for them.
• It must be honest and yours. Share your real opinion, and only state facts you believe are true.
• No fake, paid or incentivized Vouches. Nobody may offer, give or accept money, discounts, gifts, prize entries or anything else of value for a Vouch, whether it’s positive or negative.
• No conflicts of interest. Don’t Vouch for yourself, a family member, someone you manage or employ, or staff at a business you own or manage. Don’t trade Vouches, and don’t Vouch against a competitor.
• One Vouch per person, per professional, every 30 days.
• Keep private details out. No phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, VINs, deal or account numbers, or links.

Vouches can’t be edited after they’re posted. We may hold a Vouch for review before it appears, for example when it seems to contain private details. Professionals must not pressure anyone to write, change or remove a Vouch.

Moderation and disputes

Anyone can report a Vouch or a profile, and a professional can dispute a Vouch on their profile by reporting it. VouchMe moderators review reports against these Terms and the Community Guidelines. While a Vouch is under review, it’s hidden and doesn’t count toward a rating. After review, it’s published or removed.

We don’t remove a Vouch because it’s critical, or because a professional or business asks. We remove Vouches that break the rules or the law. We may also remove other content, limit features, or suspend or close accounts, especially for fake or paid Vouches.

If you think we got a decision wrong, email info@vouche.pro with a link and we’ll look again.

Trust isn’t for sale

Money never buys a rating, removes a Vouch or changes search ranking. People are ranked by how well they match a search, how close they are, and the evidence in their Vouches. If we ever offer paid tools, for example for professionals or businesses, they won’t affect Vouches, ratings or ranking.

Contact messages and requests

Use Contact only to reach a professional about their work. No spam, solicitations or harassment. Professionals can turn Contact off and block senders.

Professionals: ask for Vouches only from people you actually served. VouchMe gives you a personal link; you send it from your own phone or email, so you’re responsible for having permission to contact that person and for following the laws on texts and email where you are.

Things you may not do

• Pretend to be someone else, or misrepresent your connection to a person or business.
• Post someone else’s private information, or harass, threaten or discriminate against anyone.
• Scrape, copy in bulk or resell VouchMe content or data, or build a competing database from it.
• Get around rate limits, verification or security, or interfere with how VouchMe works.
• Use VouchMe to decide someone’s eligibility for credit, employment, housing or insurance. VouchMe isn’t a consumer reporting agency.
• Break the law, or help anyone else break these Terms.

Your content

You own what you write on VouchMe: your Vouches, business ratings, profile details and messages. You’re responsible for it, and you confirm you have the right to post it.

So we can run VouchMe, you give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, display, format and distribute your content on VouchMe and in connection with it (for example in search results, link previews and share cards), and to let our service providers do the same for us. We won’t change what your content says.

Because a Vouch is part of a professional’s record, this license for your Vouches continues after you delete your account, while the Vouch stays published. You can delete a Vouch you wrote in the app, or ask us to, except one we removed. While a moderator has it, or its business rating, hidden for a closer look, it can’t be deleted until the moderator decides. A professional may share the Vouches on the professional’s own profile, unaltered, with its VouchMe link.

VouchMe’s name, design and software belong to us. You may link to VouchMe pages freely; please don’t use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse you.

For businesses

Business pages describe the place: its name, address and details, and customers’ ratings of the business itself. Those ratings are separate from the professionals who work there. A business doesn’t control its professionals’ profiles or their Vouches.

How business pages get here

Our team adds business pages from public listings. When a professional adds their current job at a business that isn’t on VouchMe yet, a page for that business appears right away, marked Unclaimed. Our team doesn’t check these pages before they appear. We review them afterward, and we may correct, merge or remove them. Earlier jobs never add a page.

Adding a page doesn’t confirm that the professional works there, and it doesn’t let them manage the page. Anyone can suggest an edit to a page, or ask us to add a business with Add your business. Our team checks those first: nothing changes, and no page appears, until we have. You can also email info@vouche.pro.

Claiming a business page

• Claiming is free, and it’s never sold. Claiming a page, managing it or replying on it never changes a rating, a Vouch or anyone’s place in search.
• Only someone allowed to manage the business’s page may claim it: an owner, a manager, or office or marketing staff acting for the business. A pro who works there doesn’t claim the business: adding it as a workplace is enough, and every Vouch stays with the pro.
• We verify every claim. For now, that means a business document (a license, utility bill, lease or tax permit) and a photo ID with a matching name, which our team reviews within 5 business days. Nothing changes on the page until we approve the claim. We may add other ways to verify, and we’ll update these Terms when we do.
• You can withdraw a claim while it’s in review. Our team stops checking it, and its documents are deleted.
• A page someone already manages: you can ask its owners for access. We never show you the owners’ names.
• People with access: up to 15 per page, with one primary owner who decides who has access. Anyone added to a page waits 7 days before removing people, changing roles or taking other lasting steps.
• When something is wrong: if a page was claimed by someone who doesn’t run the business, or the business rules are broken, we may remove access, put the page back the way it was before the claim, hold replies for review and close accounts. To protect people or the service, we may also pause changes to business pages for a while. Owners can still see their page, and leaving a page or withdrawing a claim still works.

Business rules

Every business that claims a page on VouchMe agrees to these. They keep ratings honest for everyone. No business can:

• Edit, hide or remove ratings or Vouches
• Pay to rank higher or to remove anything
• Rate itself or vouch for its own staff
• Offer rewards for good ratings or set staff quotas
• See private notes or reviewers’ contact details
• Ask only the customers it expects to be happy. Ask every customer the same way, with one link or QR code for all.
• Offer anything in exchange for a rating or for changing one: no money, discounts, gifts, prize entries or staff quotas.
• Pressure or threaten a customer over a rating, or ask anyone to change or remove one.
• Use a contract, a form or the terms of a sale to stop a customer from posting an honest rating, or penalize a customer for posting one.

Contracts can’t stop customers from posting honest ratings. Based on the FTC’s rules and guides on reviews and the Consumer Review Fairness Act. In law: the FTC’s Trade Regulation Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials (16 CFR Part 465, which covers fake reviews, reviews by insiders, buying reviews and suppressing reviews), the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising (16 CFR Part 255, including asking only satisfied customers for reviews), and the Consumer Review Fairness Act (contract terms that limit honest reviews are void).

Replies, reports and your team

• One public reply per rating, shown as a reply from the business with the replier’s job title, never a person’s name. Replies post right away and are checked after. Keep private details out, and never offer anything in exchange for changing a rating.
• A business can report a rating that breaks the Community Guidelines. Our team decides, the customer isn’t told who reported it, and a report from a business is marked as one.
• Businesses can’t edit, hide, reorder, pre-approve, sort by sentiment or remove ratings. Every rating that follows our rules shows on the page, good or bad.
• A business can confirm that a pro works there, and the pro’s profile then shows Employment verified, saying the business confirmed it. A business can also mark a pro as no longer there. Our team reviews every mark before it changes anything on the page, and the pro stays listed until we decide. If we accept it, the pro is told and can dispute it with our team, and is listed again until we decide the dispute. A mark we accept also withdraws any confirmation that business gave. Neither a confirmation nor a mark changes the pro’s job history or Vouches.
• Owners and managers can’t rate the business or Vouch for its pros while they have access. Neither can anyone whose claim or access request for the page is open or in review. Coworkers can still Vouch for each other as “Yes, professionally”, which shows on the Vouch.

The service and the app

VouchMe is free to use. We keep improving it, so features may change, and we may pause or stop part of the service. We’ll try to give notice of changes that matter to you.

If you use the iPhone app

These Terms are between you and us, not Apple. Apple isn’t responsible for the app or its content, has no obligation to provide support for it, and isn’t responsible for any claims about it, including product liability, legal compliance or intellectual property claims. You must follow the App Store’s terms when you use the app. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and may enforce them against you.

Disclaimers

Vouches are the opinions of the people who wrote them, not ours. We don’t endorse or guarantee any professional or business, and a verification badge means only what it says. Use your own judgment before you hire someone.

VouchMe is provided “as is” and “as available.” To the extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, and we don’t promise the service will be uninterrupted or error-free.

Limits on liability

To the extent the law allows, VouchMe isn’t liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, data or goodwill, arising from your use of VouchMe or from content others post. Our total liability for any claim about VouchMe is limited to the greater of US$100 or what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.

If you break these Terms and someone brings a claim against us because of it, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of that claim. Some places don’t allow these limits, so they may not all apply to you.

Ending your use

You can stop using VouchMe anytime, and delete your account in the app under Account. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these Terms or puts others at risk. The parts of these Terms that should last, like the content license, disclaimers and limits on liability, continue after an account closes.

Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the place where VouchMe is established, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and disputes go to the courts there. If the law where you live gives you the right to bring a claim in your local courts or under your local consumer law, these Terms don’t take that away.

Before filing a claim, please email us and give us 30 days to try to resolve it. Most problems can be fixed that way.

Changes to these Terms

When we change these Terms, we’ll update the date at the top. If a change is significant, we’ll tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect. If you keep using VouchMe after that, the new Terms apply.

Contact us

Questions about these Terms, or anything else: info@vouche.pro.