Terms of Service

DataDost AI is an early-stage digital consulting brand based in India. These Terms apply to website visitors, demo users, consultation requests, proposal requests, and clients who engage DataDost AI for websites, AI agents, automation, dashboards, data services, consulting, marketing, support, or related work.

DataDost AI maintains MSME/Udyam registration in India. Formal entity, GST, and other registration details are provided where applicable in a signed proposal, invoice, onboarding document, or official communication.

By accepting a proposal, approving a quote in writing or by email, paying an invoice, instructing us to begin work, submitting a form, or using our website, demos, or customer portal, you agree to these Terms.

A Proposal or SOW is the document describing the work, fees, timelines, assumptions, dependencies, and deliverables we send and you accept. Services include websites, AI agents, automation, dashboards, consulting, marketing, hosting, support, and related work.

If documents conflict, the accepted Proposal or SOW comes first, these Terms come second, and other documents come after that unless expressly stated otherwise.

We start work after you accept a Proposal or SOW in writing or by email. Verbal or chat instructions are not binding unless confirmed in writing.

Any change to scope, timeline, or fees requires a written change request confirmed by both sides. We will identify the cost, time, and risk impact before starting out-of-scope work.

We perform services with reasonable skill and care in line with normal professional practice for similar digital consulting services. We may work remotely or from any office, and may use affiliates or subcontractors while remaining responsible for their work.

We do not guarantee specific commercial outcomes such as traffic, leads, conversion, search ranking, ad return, revenue, or ROI. Any benchmark, demo number, illustrative estimate, or ROI proposal is directional and not a promise about your business.

When a deliverable is ready, we will notify you. You have 10 Business Days to test it against the acceptance criteria in the SOW and either accept it or send a written list of specific defects.

If you do not respond within the review period, or if you use the deliverable in production, the deliverable is treated as accepted. Valid defects caused by our work will be fixed within a reasonable time and resubmitted for acceptance.

Fees are stated in the accepted Proposal or Statement of Work. Unless expressly stated otherwise, fees are exclusive of applicable taxes, government charges, third-party platform fees, payment gateway fees, hosting fees, API usage fees, AI model usage fees, advertising spend, WhatsApp Business API charges, domain costs, SMS costs, and other pass-through costs.

Default payment terms, unless the Proposal or SOW says otherwise: 50% advance before work starts, 40% when the deliverable is submitted for review or UAT, and 10% before production handover, go-live, or final delivery.

Monthly retainers, support plans, hosting plans, and managed services are payable in advance unless stated otherwise. Work may pause if payment is delayed, required approvals are delayed, or third-party costs are not funded by the client.

Fees paid to DataDost AI are non-refundable except where a refund is required by applicable law or where the accepted Proposal or SOW expressly says otherwise.

The client confirms that scope, fees, dependencies, assumptions, timelines, acceptance criteria, third-party costs, and known risks were reviewed before payment. Cancellation, delay, non-response, change of mind, internal business issues, lack of stakeholder approval, or abandonment by the client does not create a refund right.

Work already performed, booked delivery capacity, committed third-party costs, and approved milestones remain payable. If DataDost AI materially breaches the accepted SOW and fails to cure the breach after written notice and a reasonable cure period, the client's sole financial remedy is limited to the unused portion of fees for the specific undelivered deliverable, subject to the liability cap.

If an invoice is overdue, DataDost AI may pause or suspend work, hosted services, chatbot access, dashboard access, support, handover, or further delivery until payment is received. Timelines and SLAs extend by the period of delay or suspension.

The client is responsible for providing accurate information, business rules, content, approvals, data, access, licenses, permissions, consents, stakeholder availability, and timely feedback.

The client is responsible for ensuring that data provided to DataDost AI is lawfully collected and may lawfully be shared for the agreed work.

The client is responsible for sector-specific legal compliance, including healthcare, finance, education, consumer, advertising, tax, GST, employment, privacy, and customer-communication obligations that apply to the client's business.

If client inputs are inaccurate, delayed, incomplete, unlawful, or not approved internally, DataDost AI is not responsible for resulting delay, rework, defects, compliance issues, or business impact.

Our team members are our employees or contractors, not yours. You do not supervise, pay, or employ them directly even if they work with your team or at your premises.

During an engagement and for 12 months afterward, you must not directly hire, contract with, or engage a person who worked on your account without our written consent. Public job ads and wholly unsolicited approaches are excluded.

You keep what was yours before the engagement, including your brand, content, data, and existing systems. We keep what was ours before the engagement, including frameworks, methodologies, prompts, architectures, templates, internal libraries, and know-how.

Client-specific custom deliverables become yours after full payment, subject to embedded background IP, open-source licenses, third-party platform terms, and any restrictions in the SOW.

AI-generated outputs may be inaccurate, incomplete, biased, unsuitable, non-unique, or inappropriate for publication without human review. The client is responsible for reviewing and approving AI outputs before relying on them, publishing them, sending them to customers, or using them in business decisions.

Third-party platforms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Shopify, Stripe, Razorpay, cloud providers, data warehouses, analytics tools, ad platforms, email tools, SMS tools, and similar services have their own terms, pricing, uptime, policies, data rules, and limitations.

DataDost AI is not responsible for third-party outages, policy changes, pricing changes, API changes, account restrictions, model behavior, data-retention rules, deprecations, or platform decisions.

Each side will keep the other side's confidential information confidential, use it only for the engagement, share it only with people who need to know, and protect it with reasonable care.

Confidentiality does not apply to information that is public, already known without confidentiality, independently developed, lawfully received from a third party, or required to be disclosed by law.

Where DataDost AI processes personal data on behalf of a client, the client is normally the Data Fiduciary and DataDost AI acts as a service provider/data processor acting on the client's documented instructions, unless the SOW says otherwise.

For DataDost AI's own website, contact forms, consultation forms, proposal requests, support requests, billing contacts, account administration, and internal communication, DataDost AI acts as the Data Fiduciary.

DataDost AI uses personal data only for stated business purposes such as responding to inquiries, preparing proposals, delivering services, managing support, improving services, complying with law, and protecting systems from misuse.

DataDost AI will apply reasonable safeguards, restrict access on a need-to-know basis, and delete or retain data according to the Privacy Policy, applicable law, and the relevant SOW.

We follow standard industry security practices including TLS encryption in transit, encryption at rest where appropriate, role-based access control, least privilege, multi-factor authentication for admin accounts, access reviews, backups for hosted systems, endpoint security, and secure coding practices.

SLAs apply only where the SOW or retainer specifies them. SLA calculations exclude scheduled maintenance, force majeure, third-party outages, your delays, service suspension for non-payment, and emergency security maintenance. Service credits are the only financial remedy for SLA misses where credits are agreed.

DataDost AI will perform services with reasonable skill and care. DataDost AI does not guarantee traffic, leads, conversion, revenue, search ranking, ad performance, ROI, customer acquisition, business growth, operational savings, or any specific commercial outcome.

Deliverables are reviewed against the accepted SOW. The client must test and approve deliverables during the review period. Once a deliverable is approved, used in production, or not objected to within the review period, it is treated as accepted.

For 30 days after sign-off, DataDost AI will make reasonable corrections to confirmed defects caused by DataDost AI's work, if the defect materially prevents the deliverable from matching the accepted SOW.

This correction obligation does not apply to issues caused by client content, client instructions, client edits, third-party platforms, hosting outages, API changes, AI model behavior, payment gateways, WhatsApp/Meta/Google policy changes, plugins, open-source components, or systems not controlled by DataDost AI.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, DataDost AI is not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary, or punitive damages, including loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, anticipated savings, data, business opportunity, reputation, leads, traffic, ranking, conversion, or expected ROI.

DataDost AI's total liability for claims connected to a Proposal, SOW, website use, demo use, support request, or service engagement is capped at the fees actually paid to DataDost AI for the specific affected engagement during the 3 months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot legally be limited, including fraud, wilful misconduct, or liability that applicable law does not permit to be excluded.

Where the accepted SOW includes an intellectual-property defence, we will handle eligible third-party claims as stated there. This excludes AI outputs, open-source components, third-party content, your materials, your modifications, or your combinations with other systems.

You will defend us against third-party claims arising from your breach of confidentiality, your content, your instructions, your failure to obtain required consents, your end-customer claims, your tax issues, or your breach of your warranties. Indemnities are subject to the liability cap unless the law requires otherwise.

The engagement term is stated in the SOW. Project engagements may be terminated for convenience on 30 days' written notice, with payment due for work completed and non-cancellable third-party commitments. Monthly retainers may be terminated on 30 days' written notice ending at the end of a calendar month.

Either side may terminate for uncured material breach, insolvency events, or other termination rights stated in the SOW. We may suspend services where continued performance creates legal, regulatory, security, reputational, non-payment, or compliance risk.

Termination does not affect accrued rights or fees. Each side must return or destroy the other side's confidential information on request, except for one archival copy and any records required by law, audit, backup, or dispute handling.

On written request before termination, and at our standard rates, we may provide transition assistance for up to 90 days, including documentation, knowledge transfer, read-only access, and migration support where feasible.

Each side must comply with applicable law, including anti-bribery, anti-money-laundering, sanctions, tax, privacy, data protection, IT, consumer, and sector-specific laws that apply to its role.

Force majeure events excuse affected obligations for the duration of the event, except payment for services already performed. Where we deliver AI services, we support human-in-the-loop workflows, transparency, reasonable bias mitigation, and provider-policy compliance where relevant.

You must not reverse-engineer our software, copy or redistribute site content without permission, introduce malicious code, gain unauthorized access, run scans without permission, scrape content, misrepresent your identity, impersonate us, or submit another person's personal data without authority.

Demo data is simulated, not used for real transactions, and may be wiped at any time. Customer portal credentials must be kept safe, and suspected unauthorized access must be reported immediately.

Operational notices may be sent by email or post to the addresses in the SOW or the published DataDost AI contact routes for legal, data protection, security, accounts, and support matters.

Governing law, venue, and dispute forum follow the accepted SOW or proposal. If no accepted SOW or proposal says otherwise, Indian law applies, subject to mandatory local consumer, privacy, employment, and data-protection laws that cannot be contractually waived. Disputes first go through a 15 Business Day good-faith escalation between project leads and then founders or owners.

These Terms and the SOW form the whole agreement for their subject matter. If any clause is unenforceable, the remaining clauses continue and the unenforceable clause is read down to the maximum lawful scope.

No waiver occurs unless written. The parties are independent contractors. SOWs may be signed digitally or by exchange of signed copies. Rights under these Terms are cumulative and in addition to rights under law.

For privacy, data protection, legal, support, or security questions, users may contact DataDost AI through the published contact routes on the website.

Until a formal entity and named grievance officer are appointed, DataDost AI will use its published support/privacy email route for grievance handling.

DataDost AI will review grievances in a reasonable time and respond based on the nature of the request, information provided, and applicable legal requirements.