Terms of Service | HeavyCivilHelper

1. Agreement to Terms

By accessing or using HeavyCivilHelper ("the Service," "the Platform") at heavycivilhelper.com, you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service. If you do not agree to these terms, do not use the Service. These terms constitute a binding agreement between you and HeavyCivilHelper.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years of age to create an account and use the Service. By registering, you represent and warrant that you are 18 or older and have the legal capacity to enter into this agreement. If you are using the Service on behalf of a company or organization, you represent that you have the authority to bind that entity to these terms.

3. Nature of the Service

HeavyCivilHelper is an organizational and coordination platform designed to help construction teams manage projects, track records, and coordinate field work. It does not provide licensed engineering, surveying, legal, safety, or construction management services. Nothing in the platform or its outputs constitutes professional advice of any kind. Users remain solely responsible for all project decisions, field verification, regulatory compliance, safety practices, and any professional review required for their work.

4. Your Account

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials. You agree to notify us immediately at [email protected] if you suspect unauthorized access to your account. We are not liable for any loss resulting from unauthorized use of your account. You may not share your account with others or create accounts for the purpose of circumventing subscription limits.

4a. Email Communications and Marketing Preferences

By creating an account, you agree to receive transactional emails necessary to operate your account, including email address verification codes, password reset links, subscription receipts, and important service notices. These emails are required for account function and cannot be opted out of while your account is active.

During registration, you may separately opt in to the following non-transactional communications:

Promotions, case studies, and special offers. Periodic marketing emails about HeavyCivilHelper plans, pricing, and promotional offers.
Product updates, new features, and tips. Announcements about new platform features, improvements, and usage guidance.

Both options are pre-selected during registration for your convenience and represent the most common preference of our users. You may deselect either option before completing registration, or update your preferences at any time through your account Settings page. Unsubscribe links are included in all marketing and product update emails.

We do not sell, rent, or share your email address with third parties for their marketing purposes. Your email is used solely by HeavyCivilHelper for the communications you have consented to receive.

5. Subscription and Billing

HeavyCivilHelper offers a no-cost Free plan and the following paid plans. Free access is available to eligible new signups without starting paid checkout. Paid plans provide the subscription access and entitlements described below:

Free: One seat with limited access to core mapping and project features. Free access has lifetime limits and does not include paid-only features.
Lite: $20.00 per month, or $216.00 per year ($18.00 per month equivalent). Includes one seat, one active project and 10 GiB account storage.
Individual — Monthly: $30.00 per month, billed monthly. Includes one seat, five active projects and 20 GiB account storage.
Individual — Annual: $27.00 per month, billed as $324.00 per year (10% discount). Includes one seat, five active projects and 20 GiB account storage.
Team — Monthly: $40.00 per seat per month, billed monthly. Available for 1–10 purchased seats, with ten active projects shared across the team and 30 GiB storage per purchased seat.
Team — Annual: $36.00 per seat per month, billed as $432.00 per seat per year (10% discount). Available for 1–10 purchased seats, with ten active projects shared across the team and 30 GiB storage per purchased seat.
Enterprise: Custom pricing for teams requiring more than 10 seats. Contact [email protected] for a quote.

Free access is intentionally limited. A Free account may create one project for its lifetime, five Custom Pin categories in total for its lifetime, up to 100 user-created pin placements for its lifetime, up to five drawn lines and five zones for its lifetime, and a 200 MiB lifetime file allowance shared across Web, HCH Field and HCH Lens. Attachments and plan overlays have no separate item-count allowance; successful source uploads and stored processed files, including plan images and finalized derivatives, consume the same lifetime byte allowance. One MiB is 1,048,576 bytes. Deleting or removing an allowed item does not restore its lifetime allowance, and a counted project, pin, or Custom Pin category cannot be removed to reset access. Free does not allow project archiving. Files may be deleted through available controls or the API, reducing actual stored data, but successful Free file bytes remain permanently consumed, including an accidentally uploaded or incorrect plan. A completed upload retry does not consume additional bytes. Failed, uncommitted file saves do not consume allowance; a successfully staged or saved source file does, even if later processing is cancelled or the file is removed. Free accounts have one seat and cannot invite or join a team. Free members may access their authorized project in HCH Field; its other features remain subject to their plan and project permissions.

HCH Lens: HCH Lens local capture is free, including map, satellite, blueprint and plan context, JPG/PNG overlays, pin stamping, local Library storage, and sharing. Lens finalizes the stamped image on the device. An activated Free or qualifying paid HeavyCivilHelper plan is required to connect Lens and push finished photos into authorized HCH projects. Those pushed photos become project attachments subject to the project's access controls. The 200 MiB lifetime Free file allowance is shared with Web and Field, not renewed for each project, pin, device or app. Lens local capture remains available without an HCH plan, but project uploads require an activated account.

Free users may use standard maps, basic routing, and plan overlays within the lifetime file allowance. No particular number of plan sheets is guaranteed: PDF and processed image sizes vary. Esri satellite imagery requires Lite or above. More file allowance requires paid access. Premium imagery, enhanced routing, AI features, Risk Reports, and the in-app Heavy assistant are paid-only features. Free limits and paid-only feature restrictions apply through the Service, including direct API access, and lifetime usage remains associated with the account through refreshes, deletion where allowed, upgrades, and paid cancellation.

Subscriptions automatically renew at the end of each billing period unless cancelled. Billing is processed securely through Stripe, Inc. Billing begins only after you explicitly authorize a selected paid tier through paid checkout. Free signup and use do not create a Stripe customer, checkout session, subscription, invoice, payment method, or charge. We disclose your verified account name and email to Stripe only when you initiate paid upgrade checkout, to create or reuse a customer and prefill the checkout. Prices are subject to change with 30 days' notice to active subscribers. Any price changes apply prospectively and do not affect billing periods that have already been paid.

You may cancel your subscription at any time through your account settings or by contacting support. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period; you will retain access to the Service until that date. We do not prorate partial billing periods.

While a Lite, Individual, Team, or Enterprise subscription is active, that paid tier's current entitlements and allowances supersede the Free restrictions. If paid access later ends, only an account originally created as Free returns to its preserved Free entitlement, including its original lifetime usage ledger. Usage during paid access is not retroactively charged against Free limits unless it was explicitly recorded as Free-tier usage.

Choosing a paid tier: Lite is a single-user plan for one active project at a time. A solo project engineer, or an employee tracking a job independently within a larger team, may archive a completed project before starting the next. Archived files remain stored and count toward Lite's 10 GiB account storage; archiving does not create additional storage. Individual supports one user managing up to five active projects, such as a project engineer or portfolio manager. Team supports shared multi-project work, purchased seats, and up to ten active projects across the organization. Working for the same company does not turn a Lite or Individual seat into a shared login or collaboration entitlement.

Paid storage measures current stored files, including archived project files. Successful paid uploads are not charged to the Free lifetime byte ledger. Deleting paid files can free paid storage space, but upgrading, downgrading, deleting, or changing devices does not reset previously consumed Free allowances. Estimated database-content figures are informational and are separate from file allowance enforcement. Enterprise inquiries may cover additional storage, seats, custom projects, or setup assistance at any team size.

5a. Organization Accounts and Team Seats

Each user account belongs to an organization. When you register, an organization is created automatically with you as the owner. The number of users who may be active in an organization at one time is determined by the number of seats included in your subscription plan. Free accounts are limited to one seat and cannot invite or join a team through the Free entitlement.

Organization owners may invite additional members by email, up to the purchased seat limit. Invited users who join while the organization's subscription is active will be granted immediate access. Users who join when the organization's subscription is inactive will be placed in a pending state until the owner activates the subscription or manually activates the member.

Organization owners may suspend or remove members at any time. Removed members are moved to an independent individual account and their paid access is revoked. You are responsible for managing seat allocations within your purchased plan. Seat limits can only be increased by upgrading to a higher-seat plan through the billing flow.

6. Refund Policy

New subscribers may request a full refund within 7 days of their initial subscription purchase. After the 7-day window, all charges are non-refundable. Refund requests must be submitted to [email protected]. Renewal charges are not eligible for refunds. We reserve the right to deny refund requests that appear to be abusive or in bad faith.

7. Acceptable Use

You agree not to use HeavyCivilHelper to:

Upload or distribute unlawful, harmful, or fraudulent content.
Violate any applicable local, state, national, or international law or regulation.
Attempt to gain unauthorized access to any portion of the Service or its infrastructure.
Scrape, crawl, or use automated tools to extract data from the platform without written permission.
Reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble any part of the Service.
Resell, sublicense, or otherwise commercialize access to the Service without authorization.
Infringe upon the intellectual property rights of HeavyCivilHelper or any third party.

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate accounts that violate these policies. Where circumstances allow, we will attempt to provide notice before taking action, though we reserve the right to act immediately where we determine it is necessary to protect the platform or other users.

8. Intellectual Property

Your Data: You retain full ownership of all project data, records, files, and content you upload to the platform. By using the Service, you grant HeavyCivilHelper a limited, non-exclusive license to store, process, and display your data solely for the purpose of providing the Service to you. We will not use your project data for any other purpose.

Our Platform: HeavyCivilHelper owns all rights to the Service itself, including the software, interface, design, trademarks, logos, and brand elements. Nothing in these terms transfers any ownership of the platform to you. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of our software or brand elements is strictly prohibited.

9. AI Features, Security Services, and Fair Use

HeavyCivilHelper uses OpenAI's API to power certain features, including automated record extraction, AI risk reports, and the Heavy assistant. While we work to ensure AI outputs are helpful and accurate, they are provided for informational and organizational purposes only. They should not be relied upon as the sole basis for legal, financial, engineering, safety, or construction decisions. We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for a particular purpose of any AI-generated content.

Certain features, including beta functionality and experimental AI capabilities, may change, be modified, or be removed without prior notice as we continue to develop the platform.

Our registration page is protected by Google reCAPTCHA to prevent automated abuse. By creating an account, you acknowledge that reCAPTCHA may collect information about your browser and device to assess whether your interaction is human. This processing is subject to Google's Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

HeavyCivilHelper uses Cloudflare to provide network security, DDoS protection, and web application firewall services. All traffic to the Service passes through Cloudflare's network. By using the Service, you acknowledge that your IP address and request metadata may be processed by Cloudflare as part of this security layer. Cloudflare's services are subject to the Cloudflare Privacy Policy.

AI and report processing (including record extraction, risk reports, and document analysis) is subject to fair use. We reserve the right to throttle, suspend, or apply additional charges to usage that materially exceeds typical individual or team activity, appears automated or abusive, or imposes disproportionate compute or third-party API costs. We will make reasonable efforts to notify you before taking action on your account.

9a. Location Data and Device Geolocation

HeavyCivilHelper uses your device's location on both the web platform and the mobile app to power field-oriented features such as the "You Are Here" map indicator, pin placement at your current position, and route planning start-point seeding. All location access is opt-in only — your location is never accessed without you explicitly triggering a location feature.

Web platform

The web Project Map includes a "My Location" button that uses the browser's Geolocation API to display a live position indicator on the map. Your coordinates are processed locally in your browser and are never transmitted to or stored on HeavyCivilHelper's servers. Tracking stops when you tap the button again or close/refresh the page. You can revoke permission at any time through your browser's site settings for heavycivilhelper.com.

Mobile app (iOS and Android)

The HeavyCivilHelper mobile app requests foreground-only location permission through the standard iOS and Android permission prompts. Location is accessed only while the app is actively in use — never in the background. A one-time position fix is retrieved when you use features such as centering the map on your position, placing a pin at your current location, or seeding the route planner start point. The app does not continuously track or log your movements.

The following applies to both platforms:

No server-side storage of raw coordinates. HeavyCivilHelper does not log, retain, or transmit your GPS position to our servers except when you explicitly save a pin or record with a location you have chosen to attach. Saved pin locations are stored as part of your project data and are subject to the data ownership terms in Section 8.
No third-party sharing. We do not sell, rent, or share your geolocation data with advertisers or analytics providers. Map tile imagery is fetched from third-party providers (OpenStreetMap, Esri, Mapbox, and others); your device coordinates are not transmitted to those providers as part of normal map use.
Accuracy disclaimer. GPS accuracy on construction sites varies based on device hardware, signal conditions, and obstructions. Position indicators are for general field orientation only. Do not rely on any HeavyCivilHelper location feature for precision staking, boundary determination, or any use requiring licensed survey-grade accuracy.
Workplace compliance. Use of location features on a project site may be subject to your employer's or agency's privacy policies, device management policies, or applicable labor regulations. You are responsible for ensuring your use of these features complies with any applicable workplace or contractual requirements.

To revoke location permission on mobile, update the app's permissions in your device's iOS Settings or Android Settings. Revoking permission disables location-dependent features but does not affect access to the rest of the platform.

10. Service Availability

We work to keep HeavyCivilHelper available and reliable, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted access. The Service may occasionally be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance, infrastructure issues, third-party provider outages, or updates. We are not liable for any loss or inconvenience resulting from temporary interruptions to service availability.

11. Inactive and Trial Accounts

We reserve the right to archive or remove inactive unpaid accounts — including expired trial accounts and abandoned accounts — and their associated project data after an extended period of inactivity. HeavyCivilHelper is not responsible for retaining project data indefinitely for accounts without an active subscription. Where practical, reasonable efforts may be made to provide notice before data is permanently removed.

12. Termination

Either party may terminate this agreement at any time. You may do so by cancelling your subscription and ceasing use of the Service. We reserve the right to suspend or terminate accounts for violations of these Terms, fraudulent activity, or as required by law. In most cases we will attempt to provide notice before account termination, though we may act immediately where the situation warrants it. Upon termination, your right to access the Service ceases. You may request export of your data prior to termination.

13. Disclaimer of Warranties

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. HEAVYCIVILHELPER DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE, OR FREE OF HARMFUL COMPONENTS. YOU USE THE SERVICE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

14. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, HEAVYCIVILHELPER SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOSS OF PROFITS, DATA, OR BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE. OUR TOTAL LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY CLAIM SHALL NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNT YOU PAID TO US IN THE 12 MONTHS PRECEDING THE CLAIM.

15. Governing Law

These Terms shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict of law provisions. Any dispute arising under these Terms shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in California.

16. Changes to Terms

We reserve the right to modify these Terms at any time. We will notify active subscribers of material changes by email at least 14 days in advance. Continued use of the Service after the effective date of updated Terms constitutes acceptance. If you do not agree with the updated Terms, you may cancel your subscription before the changes take effect.

16a. Accessibility

HeavyCivilHelper is committed to making the Service accessible to users of all abilities. We work toward conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the standard referenced by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. If you encounter an accessibility barrier, please contact us at [email protected]. For our full accessibility statement including known limitations and how to report barriers, see our Compliance page.

17. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Contact us at: [email protected]