Terms of service

Before You Go is a record-keeping service for rental security deposits. Landlords and tenants photograph a unit's condition at move-in and again at move-out, both sides sign the record, and it is sealed so neither of them can quietly change it afterwards. It also tracks the deadlines a state's deposit statute sets, and helps a landlord build an itemized statement where each deduction points at the photograph and the cost document behind it.

That is the whole of it. Everything in the next section is a thing we are telling you we will not do, so that nobody has to guess.

We never hold, move, transfer or refund money. There is no account here that a deposit sits in and no payment processing of any kind. The itemized statement DESCRIBES a refund; it never sends one. Paying the tenant back is the landlord's act, done however the two of you already do it, and any deadline for doing it is the landlord's to meet.

We never decide a dispute. We do not judge whether damage is ordinary wear and tear, whether a deduction is fair, or which of you is right. The product records what each of you documented and when, and shows it to both of you identically. If you disagree, you still disagree. What changes is that you have a better record of the facts.

We never take a side. Anything one party can see about a lease, the other party can see. There is no landlord-only view of a tenant's evidence and no tenant-only view of a landlord's.

Before You Go gives general information about deposit rules, with citations to the statutes it comes from. That is not legal advice, it does not create a lawyer-client relationship, and it is not a substitute for talking to a licensed attorney about your own situation.

Using Before You Go does not, by itself, satisfy any legal obligation you have. We do not promise that the deadlines, rules or checklists shown to you are correct or current for your situation, that a record kept here will be accepted by any court, agency or insurer, or that documenting something will change how a dispute turns out. Statutes change and are applied to facts we cannot see. The obligation stays yours.

We can show that a particular image reached our servers at a particular time, that it has not changed since (each file carries a SHA-256 digest recorded on arrival), that a named account signed a named version of the record, and that no one has edited or removed anything afterwards. Corrections are added as new entries; nothing is overwritten.

We cannot show that a photograph depicts what its caption says, that it was taken where or when the person taking it claims, or that a room was not cleaned, repaired or rearranged before the camera came out. A device's own clock and location can be wrong or set deliberately, which is why every timestamp is shown twice and labelled as such. You see the time the device asserted and the time our server received the file. Weigh them accordingly.

Keep your sign-in details to yourself and tell us promptly if you think someone else has them. You are responsible for what happens under your account.

A landlord inviting a tenant supplies that tenant's name and contact details. By sending an invitation you are telling us you got those details lawfully and that you have the person's permission to be contacted at them about this tenancy. We send that person only what the tenancy requires, every message says who invited them, and every message can be stopped.

Invitations are single-use and tied to the address they were sent to. The person accepting must prove that address is theirs before they see anything about the lease.

Notices, statements and reports are delivered electronically in the app and by email. By using the service you agree to receive them that way. You can ask for a paper copy of anything we have sent you, and you can withdraw this agreement, by writing to us; withdrawing it means the service can no longer be used for that tenancy, because the record is the product.

Some states require a specific delivery method for specific documents. Florida's claim notice must go by certified mail, for example. Where that is so, the product generates the document and asks the landlord to confirm they mailed it. Actually mailing it is the landlord's act, not ours, and the confirmation is a statement by the landlord, recorded as such.

Evidence on a shared lease is append-only. Photographs, notes, signatures and the audit trail cannot be edited or removed once recorded, by you, by the other party, or by us. A sealed walkthrough is sealed for both of you or it is worth nothing to either.

If you ask us to delete your account, we remove your name, email, phone number and login from our systems and you lose access.

We do not delete the photos, notes, attestations or audit records already on a lease you shared with a tenant. Those records are the other party's evidence as much as yours. They were created jointly, both of you were told at capture that neither of you could edit or delete them, and each of you may need them if a deposit is questioned later. Removing them at one party's request would destroy the other party's proof.

So lease evidence stays for that state's retention period described above, and your tenant keeps their access to it. We do not pretend that evidence is anonymous: it carries the property address, the lease dates, the other party's name, and the original photographs. Anyone holding it who already knows who lived there can connect it to you. If a dispute involving that lease has been reported to us, it stays longer, until the dispute is resolved.

How long records are kept, and why, is set out in the privacy policy.

We will try to keep the service running and your records retrievable, but we do not promise uninterrupted access. Do not rely on it as your only copy of anything that matters to you: a sealed walkthrough can be downloaded as a PDF, and you should keep your own copy.

We may change the service, and these terms, as the product and the law move. Material changes will be notified before they take effect, and the date this page last changed is shown at the bottom.

You may stop using Before You Go at any time. We may suspend an account that is being used to harass someone, to impersonate a party to a lease, or to break the law. In either case the evidence on a shared lease stays where it is, for the reasons above and for the retention period in the privacy policy.