Terms of service

Last updated 2026-10-30

These terms cover the Groundwork website, the Groundwork web application, and prospect packets we prepare for you. Using any of them means you agree to these terms. If you are using Groundwork for a company, you agree on its behalf.

What Groundwork is

Groundwork is a site-viability analysis tool for franchisors and the people who help them pick locations. It combines public demographic data, business listings and routing data with the criteria you set, and produces a scored verdict, reports and a packet of files. It is a decision aid. It does not replace a site visit, a lease review, a market study you commission, or professional advice.

Accounts and workspaces

• You need an account to use the application. Keep your password private and tell us if you think someone else has used your account.
• A workspace belongs to the company that created it. Workspace admins decide who is a member and what they can see. Anything a member adds to a workspace (criteria, units, prospects, uploads, notes) is the workspace's data.
• You are responsible for what your team uploads. Do not upload data you do not have the right to use.

Plans and payment

• Packets are priced per prospect packet and paid in advance, by invoice or, where card payment is offered, by card through Stripe. We start work when payment clears and deliver by email. If you start an annual plan within 30 days of a packet's delivery, that packet's price is credited against the plan's first invoice.
• Subscriptions (Brand, Group, Agency) are billed monthly or annually in advance, by invoice or, where card payment is offered, through Stripe. Cancel at any time; see Refunds below.
• Prices are listed on the website and can change for new periods with at least 30 days' notice by email. The founding offer (25% off for the first 24 months, first 5 customers) applies to annual plans paid in advance and holds for those 24 months while the subscription stays active without interruption; after that the plan renews at list price. In return, a founding customer agrees to take part in a short case study (they approve the wording before anything is published) and allows their recorded site decisions to be used to tune the scoring in their own workspace. Their data is never used for another customer.
• Taxes, where they apply, are added at checkout or on the invoice.

Refunds

• Done-for-you packets. If the packet is not better than what you had before, tell us why within 14 days of delivery and we refund the full packet price ($950). That is the only refund we offer on packets; a packet cannot be cancelled once work has started, but it can be refunded under this clause.
• Subscriptions. Cancel at any time; the plan stays active until the end of the period you have paid for. There are no refunds for partial months or partial years.

Your data and ours

• Your workspace data stays yours. We use it only to run the service for you and to support you. We do not show one customer's criteria, units, prospects or history to another customer, and we do not use them to build other customers' models.
• The software, the default framework, the report templates and the website are ours. You get a licence to use them while you have an account or a packet in progress; you do not get to copy, resell or reverse-engineer them.
• Reports and packets we produce for you are yours to use with your prospects. Third-party data inside them stays subject to the providers' terms listed on the data sources page.

Acceptable use

Do not use Groundwork to break the law, to scrape or bulk-extract the underlying datasets, to run analyses for a competitor of ours as a reseller without a written agreement, or to overload the service. We can suspend accounts that do.

Accuracy and liability

• Data comes from third parties (listed on the data sources page) and can be late, incomplete or wrong. Where the engine cannot resolve enough signals it says "Incomplete" rather than guessing, but it cannot catch every error upstream.
• Groundwork is provided "as is". To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, consequential or lost-profit damages arising from your use of it, and our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.
• Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

Ending the agreement

You can close your account at any time by asking us. We can end the agreement with 30 days' notice, or immediately if you break these terms. On closure we delete your workspace data within 30 days, except what we must keep for tax and accounting.

Changes and law

We may update these terms; material changes are announced by email at least 14 days before they take effect. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New Jersey, USA, and disputes go to the courts there.

Contact

Questions about these terms? Email christian@groundworkintelligence.net.