Terms of Service
This is the agreement between Fadelio and the barbershops and salons that use it. It's written in plain English on purpose — but it's a real contract, and by creating an account or using Fadelio for your business, you agree to it. If you're a client booking an appointment at a shop that uses Fadelio, this page isn't for you — your booking is with the shop, under the terms shown on that shop's own booking site (how that works).
1Who we are, and who you are
“Fadelio”, “we” and “us” means The Operating Algorithm Ltd, the company that operates the Fadelio platform — a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17120198, with its registered office at 22 Connaught Road, Cardiff, CF24 3PT. You can always reach us at hello@fadelio.com.
“You” means the business that signs up — a barbershop, salon or similar — and the person accepting these terms confirms they are entitled to bind that business. You confirm you are entering this agreement in the course of business, and not as a consumer. These terms are a business-to-business contract; consumer protection rules that apply to individuals acting outside their trade do not apply to it.
2What Fadelio is — and what it isn't
Fadelio is the software. The shop, the chair and the haircut are yours.
Fadelio is software: a booking site at your own address, a dashboard, payments tooling, reminders, marketing tools and an optional AI receptionist.
What Fadelio is not: your business partner, your agent, or a party to any haircut. The contract for the services you provide — and for any deposit, no-show fee, product sale, gift card or membership you sell — is between you and your client. We are not liable to your clients for the services you provide, and you deal with client complaints about your services yourself. Your clients see your shop name, book with you, and pay you.
We don't vet, endorse or supervise shops on the platform, and we make no promise to your clients about the quality of your work — that reputation is yours to build and keep. You confirm you hold the licences, registrations and insurance your trade requires.
3Your account, staff logins and who owns the workspace
Keep your login details safe — you're responsible for everything done under your account. Staff logins you create are your responsibility: you choose who gets one, you hand over the password, and you remove access when someone leaves. Tell us straight away at hello@fadelio.com if you think an account has been compromised.
The information you give us — during signup, onboarding and Stripe payout setup — must be accurate and complete, and you'll keep it up to date.
The workspace belongs to the business, not to whoever holds the password. If people fall out — partners split, a manager leaves, an owner sells — we resolve any dispute over account control in favour of the legal entity that owns the shop and pays the subscription, based on the evidence (company records, the subscription's billing details, the Stripe account holder). We may freeze account changes while a genuine dispute is resolved.
4Subscription, billing and cancelling
Pick a plan, pay monthly, cancel whenever — full access to period end, and your data leaves with you.
Fadelio is sold on the plans published on our pricing page — currently Free, Pro (£29/month) and Max (£79/month) — with the features and allowances listed there when you subscribe. Prices exclude VAT where applicable. Paid plans start after any free trial we offer and renew monthly until cancelled. You can cancel any time from your dashboard or by emailing us; you keep access until the end of the period you've paid for. We don't refund part-months, and fees already paid are non-refundable except where these terms say otherwise. There are no exit fees, and export under section 9 survives cancellation.
The Free plan is genuinely free — no card, no time limit. Its feature set may change over time like any other plan (section 12); if we ever need to reduce what Free includes in a way material to your use, we'll give you at least 30 days' notice, and your data and export rights are unaffected either way.
If we change our prices, we'll give you at least 30 days' notice by email. The new price applies from your next renewal after the notice period — never retroactively — and if you don't like it, you can cancel before it takes effect.
If a payment fails, we retry the card and email you before anything else happens. If it stays unpaid after we've asked, we may suspend paid features or move your account to the Free plan until it's settled — your data stays intact and exportable throughout — and we may charge statutory interest under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998.
5Payments and Stripe
Your clients' money goes to your own Stripe account. Fadelio adds 0% and never holds it.
Card payments (deposits, no-show fees, checkout, memberships, gift cards) run on your own Stripe account, created for your shop when you set up payouts. Your clients' money goes directly to you — Fadelio takes 0% of your takings, never holds your clients' money, and is not a party to those payments. Stripe's standard processing fees apply and are charged by Stripe, not us.
Payment processing services for shops on Fadelio are provided by Stripe and are subject to the Stripe Connected Account Agreement, which includes the Stripe Terms of Service (together, the “Stripe Services Agreement”). By agreeing to these terms or continuing to operate as a shop on Fadelio, you agree to be bound by the Stripe Services Agreement, as it may be modified by Stripe from time to time. As a condition of Fadelio enabling payment processing services through Stripe, you agree to provide Fadelio accurate and complete information about you and your business, and you authorise Fadelio to share it and transaction information related to your use of the payment processing services provided by Stripe.
Fadelio is not a bank or a payment services provider. Your recourse for payment processing (settlement, payouts, account holds) lies with Stripe under the Stripe Services Agreement. You must not use the platform for any business on Stripe's prohibited and restricted list — barbering, hair and beauty are of course fine.
6Chargebacks, refunds and negative balances
Because the money is yours, so are the disputes. You are responsible for all refunds, chargebacks, disputes, reversals and related fees and fines arising from charges on your Stripe account — including deposits, no-show fees, checkout charges, gift card sales and membership payments. If a client disputes a charge, you'll give us (or Stripe) the evidence we ask for promptly.
If a chargeback, refund, fine or negative balance on your Stripe account ends up being funded by Fadelio (Stripe can require this of a platform), you must repay us that amount in full. We may recover it by deducting it from your Stripe balance or future payouts, by charging your payment method on file, or by invoice — and this obligation survives the end of this agreement.
7Deposits, no-shows, memberships, passes and gift cards
You set your own deposit and no-show policy — amounts, windows, which services. Because those charges are made to your clients under your policy, the policy must be lawful and fair: shown to the client before they book (the platform does this for you), proportionate to your genuine loss from an empty chair, and honoured as it stood when the booking was made. Don't charge a no-show fee for a slot you refilled, and if you cancel on a client, treat them at least as well as your policy treats a client who cancels on you.
Memberships and prepaid passes you sell through Fadelio are your contracts with your clients: you are the trader, you set the price and perks, and you're responsible for honouring them — including your clients' legal cancellation rights. The platform provides the machinery (sign-up, billing on your Stripe account, member status) and we'll keep that machinery in line with UK subscription rules as they evolve; you must not use it in a way that hides the price, the renewal, or how to cancel.
Gift cards are issued by your shop, not by us. When you switch gift cards on, you are the issuer: the balance a client buys is your liability until it's spent, the terms shown at purchase (value, where it spends, any expiry) are your promise, and statutory refund rights that apply to a purchase from your shop are yours to honour. The platform tracks balances and redemptions for you; it never becomes the issuer, and an unspent balance is never ours to keep.
8Text messages and marketing
Fadelio sends two kinds of messages for you. Service messages — booking confirmations, reminders, waitlist alerts — are part of running your diary and need no marketing consent, and we keep promotional content out of them. Marketing messages — win-back campaigns, offers — are different: they are your campaigns, sent at your instruction, and UK law (PECR) requires that every recipient either gave consent or is an existing client of your shop who was offered an opt-out.
You therefore warrant that: your client list was collected by your shop in the course of business (never bought, borrowed or scraped); recipients of marketing have a lawful basis under PECR; and you'll act on opt-outs immediately. The STOP mechanism and suppression list are built in and must not be circumvented. Because the regulator can fine the sender as well as the shop, we may pause your campaigns if we see signs of unlawful sending or unusual complaint rates — we'll tell you why.
Fair use. Each plan includes the message and AI allowances on the pricing page, with overage billed as published there. Allowances are for your shop's own clients in the ordinary course of business; volume that looks like bulk spam, list-washing or resale of the sending capability isn't what the allowance is for, and we may throttle or pause it while we talk to you.
9Your clients are yours
Your client list belongs to your shop — not to us, and never to a marketplace.
Unlike some platforms, we'll say this in the contract: your client list and booking history belong to you, not to us. We claim no ownership of your clients' data, we don't sell it, and we don't market other shops (or anything else) to your clients. You can export your client data at any time, free, and for 30 days after your account closes.
When we process your clients' personal data we do so as your processor, on your instructions, under our Data Processing Agreement. You are the controller of your clients' data — which also means it's your job to have a lawful basis for what you do with it (and, like almost every UK business, to pay the ICO's small annual data protection fee).
10Content you upload — and ideas you send us
Content you upload — your logo, photos, descriptions — must be yours to use, and you give us a licence to host and display it for the purpose of running your shop on the platform. It stays yours. Where a photo shows a person (a client's fresh cut, a barber at work), you confirm you have their consent to use it — that's your relationship, and the platform can't have it for you.
Feedback is a gift we can use. If you send us ideas, suggestions or feature requests, we may build and use them without owing you anything — that's the only way a product team can safely listen. Your shop's data is never “feedback”; it stays governed by section 9 and the DPA.
Our name stays ours. Fadelio's name, logo and look are ours; don't use them to imply we endorse your shop beyond “powered by Fadelio” where the product shows it. And in both directions: don't copy, scrape, reverse-engineer or resell the platform itself — the software you subscribe to is licensed to run your shop, not to build a competitor from the inside.
11Acceptable use
Don't use Fadelio to break the law, infringe anyone's rights, send spam, upload malicious code, probe or overload the platform, or mislead consumers (fake reviews, hidden fees, services you don't provide). The full Acceptable Use Policy is part of these terms — it's short, and it's the standard every shop on the platform can expect every other shop to be held to.
12The service itself
We build and run Fadelio with reasonable skill and care, and we work hard to keep it fast and available. But no software is perfect: we don't promise uninterrupted or error-free operation, and we may update, improve or change features over time. If we ever discontinue a feature material to your use, we'll give you reasonable notice. We back up platform data regularly; you're responsible for keeping your own copies of anything you'd be lost without (the free export exists for exactly this).
Features marked beta or early access are offered as-is while we finish them: they may change, misbehave or be withdrawn without the notice a finished feature gets, and they're excluded from any promise about the finished product. We label them so you can choose.
Parts of the service run on providers we don't control — payment processing on Stripe, message delivery on the SMS and email networks. When one of them has an outage, we respond, reroute where we can and keep you informed, but we're not liable for a third-party network's downtime— and your subscription never pays for a service level we can't honestly promise.
13AI features
AI output is a suggestion, not advice — you review, you decide, you send.
Parts of Fadelio are produced by machine-learning models: the morning brief, the coach, drafted marketing copy, the assistant, and (when it launches for your shop) the AI phone receptionist. These features are genuinely useful and genuinely fallible: outputs can be wrong, incomplete or oddly confident, and they are suggestions — never legal, financial, medical or professional advice.
You stay the decision-maker. Review AI-drafted messages before they're sent to your clients (the product asks you to); check figures that matter against your own records; and treat AI-suggested prices, policies and predictions as a starting point, not an instruction. Where an AI feature acts inside guardrails you've configured (like the receptionist taking a booking), you're responsible for those settings the way you're responsible for a staff member's till access.
Your data reaches the AI providers on the sub-processor list only to produce the output you asked for, under the DPA. AI allowances per plan, and overage, are on the pricing page.
14Liability — the honest version
What we never exclude: our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law says can't be excluded. Nothing in these terms touches that.
What we don't cover: we're not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, anticipated savings or business opportunities — and, as sections 2, 5 and 12 say, we're not liable for the services you provide to your clients, for payment processing (which sits with Stripe), or for a third-party network's downtime.
The cap: for everything else, our total aggregate liability to you in any 12-month period is limited to the subscription fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim (or, if you're in your first year, the fees paid to date). Our pricing reflects this allocation of risk — it's part of how a low-cost subscription product like this can exist.
15Your indemnity to us
You'll compensate us (and our officers and staff) for losses, claims and costs — including reasonable legal costs — brought against us by third parties arising from: the services you provide (or don't provide) to your clients, including anything that happens at your premises; your deposit, no-show, membership and gift-card policies as you configure and apply them; your marketing campaigns and use of client data in breach of section 8 or 9; content you upload; or your breach of these terms. This is the mirror image of a simple idea: your business is yours, and so are its risks.
16Suspension and ending this agreement
You can leave any time (section 4). We can suspend or end your account if you materially breach these terms and don't fix it within 14 days of us telling you, if Stripe requires it, if you don't pay, or if your use creates legal or security risk for the platform or other shops — and immediately in serious cases. Where we reasonably can, we'll warn you first and explain.
A Free account with no activity for 12 months may be closed to keep the platform tidy — with at least 60 days' notice to your account email first, so one login (or one reply) keeps it.
After termination you get 30 days to export your data (client list, bookings, takings), after which we may delete it. Sections that by their nature survive — payment obligations, chargeback reimbursement, indemnities, liability limits, data protection — survive.
17Changes to these terms
We may update these terms to reflect new features, legal or regulatory changes, changes to Stripe's requirements, or pricing (section 4). For material changes we'll give you 30 days' notice by email or in your dashboard, and if a material change is adverse to you, you may cancel before it takes effect. Minor clarifications take effect when posted here, with the version and date changed — every change is listed in the version history. Changes never apply retroactively.
18The paperwork
These terms — together with the Data Processing Agreement, the Acceptable Use Policy and the pages they link to — are the entire agreement between us about the platform, and you confirm you haven't relied on any statement made outside them. If documents ever conflict: the DPA governs for data protection, these terms govern for everything else, and summaries — the Common Questions, marketing pages, a support reply — explain the documents but never change them.
The English text governs. Where we or a shop's booking site publish translations of any document for convenience, the English version is the one that binds.
Nothing in these terms creates a partnership, agency or employment relationship. If a court finds part unenforceable, the rest stands. You may not assign this agreement without our consent; we may assign it to a successor of the Fadelio business. Only you and we can enforce these terms — no third-party rights, except that our officers and staff may rely on section 15. Neither of us is liable for failure caused by events genuinely beyond reasonable control (a force majeure event) — except that it never excuses paying what is already owed.
Governing law: this agreement, and any dispute or claim (including non-contractual disputes or claims) arising out of or in connection with it, is governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. Talk to us first, though— email hello@fadelio.com, and we'll give a genuine written answer within 14 days and 30 days of good-faith effort to fix it before either of us reaches for a court. Almost everything is fixable by email.
Questions
Anything unclear, or anything you think is unfair — tell us: hello@fadelio.com. We'd rather fix the terms than hide behind them.