Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing or using CostCreep ("Service"), operated at costcreep.com, you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service ("Terms"). If you do not agree to these Terms, do not use the Service. We may update these Terms from time to time — continued use after changes constitutes acceptance.

2. Service Description

CostCreep is a food cost visibility tool for independent restaurants. The Service allows you to upload supplier invoices, which are processed using optical character recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence to extract pricing data. The Service tracks price changes over time, detects pricing signals, and calculates financial impact to help you manage food costs.

CostCreep is an informational tool. It does not provide financial, accounting, or legal advice. You are responsible for verifying all extracted data and making your own business decisions.

3. Account Registration

To use the Service, you must create an account with a valid email address and password. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials and for all activity under your account. Each account is associated with one restaurant. You must be at least 18 years old to create an account.

You agree to provide accurate information during registration and to keep it up to date. We may suspend or terminate accounts that contain false or misleading information.

4. Email Verification

Upon registration, a verification email is sent to your provided email address. You have a 3-day grace period to verify your email. After this period, access to the Service will be restricted until your email is verified.

5. Subscription and Billing

CostCreep offers a 60-day free trial starting at signup. No credit card is required to begin the trial. After the trial period, continued access requires a paid subscription at $25 per month.

Payment is processed through Stripe. By subscribing, you authorize recurring monthly charges to your payment method. You may cancel your subscription at any time through the Stripe Customer Portal accessible from your account settings.

If your trial expires or your subscription is canceled, your account enters a read-only state. You can still view your existing data but cannot upload new invoices. Your data is not deleted upon expiration or cancellation.

6. Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

• Use the Service for any unlawful purpose
• Upload content that is fraudulent, misleading, or infringes on third-party rights
• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Service or its infrastructure
• Interfere with or disrupt the Service or its servers
• Use automated tools to scrape, crawl, or extract data from the Service
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble any part of the Service
• Exceed rate limits or abuse the invoice upload system

7. Invoice Upload Limits

To maintain service quality, invoice uploads are subject to rate limits: up to 10 uploads per minute and 25 uploads per rolling 7-day period per account. Exceeding these limits will result in temporary upload restrictions.

8. Intellectual Property

Your data: You retain all rights to the invoices, pricing data, and other content you upload to the Service. We do not claim ownership of your data.

Our platform: The Service, including its design, code, algorithms, and branding, is owned by CostCreep and protected by applicable intellectual property laws. You may not copy, modify, or distribute any part of the Service without written permission.

9. Third-Party Services

The Service relies on third-party providers to deliver its functionality:

• Microsoft Azure Document Intelligence — processes uploaded invoice files to extract text and structured data via OCR
• OpenAI — processes extracted text to identify and structure line items, prices, and supplier information
• Stripe — handles payment processing and subscription management
• Mailgun — delivers transactional emails including verification and password reset messages

By using the Service, you acknowledge that your data may be processed by these providers in accordance with their respective terms and privacy policies.

10. Data Processing Accuracy

Invoice data extraction is automated and may contain errors. The Service assigns confidence scores to extracted data and flags low-confidence results for review. You are responsible for reviewing extracted data and correcting any inaccuracies. CostCreep does not guarantee the accuracy of OCR results, price normalization, or signal detection.

11. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure.

12. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, CostCreep shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or any loss of profits, revenue, data, or business opportunities arising from your use of the Service. Our total liability for any claim arising from these Terms shall not exceed the amount you paid to CostCreep in the 12 months preceding the claim.

13. Termination

You may delete your account at any time from your account settings. Upon deletion, your account data — including invoices, extracted data, price history, and alerts — will be permanently removed.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you violate these Terms or engage in activity that harms the Service or other users. We will make reasonable efforts to notify you before termination except in cases of severe or repeated violations.

14. Changes to These Terms

We may revise these Terms at any time by posting the updated version on this page with a new effective date. Material changes will be communicated via the email address associated with your account. Your continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.

15. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the United States. Any disputes arising from these Terms or your use of the Service shall be resolved in the applicable courts.

16. Contact

If you have questions about these Terms, contact us at support@costcreep.com.