Terms of Service

1.1These terms are an agreement between Slate Systems Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17243517) whose registered office is at 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ (Slate, we, us), and the business that opens a Slate account (you).

1.2You accept them when you set up your account, and again whenever we publish a new version (clause 21). We record which version you accepted, when, and the internet address you accepted it from.

1.3Slate is for businesses only. By accepting, you confirm that you are acting for a business based in the UK (a sole trader, a partnership or a company), not as a consumer, and that you may agree to these terms for it.

1.4How to reach us: help with Slate at support@slateos.co.uk; notices under these terms at legal@slateos.co.uk; your data at privacy@slateos.co.uk; a security problem at security@slateos.co.uk; misuse of a Slate number or sending address at abuse@slateos.co.uk. We write to you at the email address on your account.

1.5The Privacy Policy explains what we do with your own details. Schedule 1 covers the details of your customers that you keep in Slate.

• Your office line: the UK mobile number Slate gives your business, for your customers to ring.
• Your direct line: your own mobile or landline, which your office line rings.
• Your customers: the people and businesses whose details you keep in Slate, including anyone who rings your office line.
• Your crew: the people you invite to use your account.
• Your data: everything you and your crew put into Slate, and what Slate records for you: calls, messages, documents and payments.
• Slate, when we mean the service: the app at slateos.co.uk and its installed versions, your office line, and everything described in clause 3.

3.1Slate is software for running a trade business. Today it gives you:

• your office line. When a customer rings it, Slate rings your direct line for 15 seconds. If you answer, the call is put through to you. If you do not, Slate puts the job on your board, tells you, and texts the caller once for you (clause 11);
• a board of your jobs and customers, a diary, and your numbers: what your work is worth, what you are owed and what has been paid;
• quotes, invoices, booking confirmations, deposits and part-payments, sent by email from your Slate sending address (clause 12), and paid by card through your own Stripe account (clause 13) or by bank transfer to you;
• texts, WhatsApp messages and emails written for you and handed to your own phone to send, from your own number and accounts;
• your own quote and invoice designs, which an AI model may help Slate read (clause 14);
• the Advisor: a brief each month on what your own numbers say is worth doing, written with an AI model and checked against the figures (clause 14);
• your crew: other people working in your account (clause 4);
• the export: a copy of your data whenever you want it (clause 10);
• a run-through that shows you round, in your own account, when you start.

3.2Slate itself sends one kind of text: the missed-call text. Everything else goes by email from your sending address, or from your own phone.

3.3We keep improving Slate, so how it looks and works will change. If we take away something you rely on, we will tell you first (clause 21).

4.1You are responsible for your account and for what is done in it, by you and by your crew. Keep your sign-in to yourself, and tell us straight away at security@slateos.co.uk if you think somebody else has used it.

4.2Your plan includes 2 people using Slate, you included. More need the crew add-on (clause 6.3).

4.3You invite your crew by email, and an invitation lasts 14 days. Each member signs in with their own details. Their sign-in is theirs, and it stays theirs if they leave your crew or you close your account.

4.4Some things only you, the owner, can do: your plan and payments, closing the account, your office line’s registration and the photo ID it may need, and your sending address. Your crew work in your account alongside you, and can take the export too.

4.5If the crew add-on stops, your members keep their access to the end of the period it was paid for (on a trial, to the end of the trial; if a payment for it fails, for 7 days while the card is put right). We warn you and them first. Members beyond the 2 your plan includes are then signed out, never deleted, and adding the crew again restores them as they were.

5.1Your trial lasts 14 days, for every business, from the day you start it. The date it ends, which is the date of your first payment, is shown when you start and does not change. We ask for a card to start it and take nothing during it. One trial per business, ever.

5.2Your office line goes live once the carrier has approved its registration (clause 11.6), usually within a day or two. That does not change your trial's dates. If your line is still not live two days before your first payment, we will contact you to help, and if Slate is not right for you, you can stop before then or ask for your money back afterwards (clause 7.2).

5.3We remind you a week before your first payment, and again the day before, with the date and the amount.

5.4If you stop during the trial, it ends that day and nothing is charged. You never need to stop early to be safe.

5.5Each business gets one trial, ever. Stopping and signing up again does not start another.

6.1Slate has one plan: £249 a month, or £2,490 a year paid in one go.

6.2The first 25 businesses to subscribe hold a founding price of £199 a month or £1,990 a year, for as long as their subscription stays active without a break. If it ends, the founding price ends with it, and the place can go to another business. Everything else is the same for everybody.

6.3For more than 2 people, the crew add-on is £50 a month or £500 a year, monthly or yearly whichever way you pay for your plan. It is billed on its own, on the same card. Added during your trial it is free until the trial ends; added later, its first payment covers only the days up to your plan’s next billing day. Settings always shows its next payment and the date. You can stop it at any time and it runs to the end of what you have paid for; a change between monthly and yearly takes effect when what you have paid for runs out, so nothing is paid twice. It cannot run without your plan: when your plan stops, the crew add-on stops with it, and crew time paid for and not used is refunded.

6.4You pay the price shown when you subscribe, and it does not change while your subscription runs. If we ever need to change the price of a subscription you already have, we will email you at least 30 days before, and you can stop before the new price applies.

6.5We are not registered for VAT, so no VAT is added to what you pay us. If we register, we will tell you by email at least 30 days before we start adding it.

7.1You pay in advance, monthly or yearly, by card through Stripe. Stripe takes the payment and keeps your card details; we never see them.

7.2If you move from monthly to yearly, we show you what you will pay today (the year, less the unused part of your current month) and take it straight away. If your card is declined, nothing changes.

7.3Apart from that, we do not refund payments, or parts of them, for time you do not use, except crew add-on time left when your plan ends (clause 6.3). When you stop, you keep Slate to the end of the period you have paid for (clause 9).

7.4If you pay for Slate while your office line is not yet live (for example, when you come back after your old number was released, clause 9.5), the days you paid for without a line come off your next payment once it goes live, at your plan’s daily rate, up to one period’s price. Trial days are free and are not credited.

7.5If we give you Slate free for a time, it ends on the date we told you. We remind you a week before and the day before. Nothing is charged; to carry on, start your plan.

7.6Refer a trade. Share your link or your code from Settings. A business that signs up through your link, or puts your code in when it starts or in its Settings before its first payment, is one you sent. It has the same 14 days trial as everyone. On the morning after its first payment’s 14 days money-back window closes, without that payment being refunded or taken back by its bank (“reward day”): one month of your plan (your monthly price, or a twelfth of your yearly price; never more than one month of that business’s plan; the crew add-on is not part of it) is credited to your account, and £100 is credited to theirs. Credit comes off the next bill before the card is charged, and anything bigger than a bill carries on to the next. It never expires, is never paid out as cash, and waits on your account if your plan has stopped. Each business you send can earn you one month, once, and there is no limit to how many you send. A business does not count if it shares a mobile number, a company number or a card with your account, or if it sent you. If the bank of a business you sent takes its first payment back and we lose the dispute, the credit that payment earned is taken back from both accounts, and added to the next bill; nothing else is ever taken back. You see the business name of each business you sent, where it stands, and the dates, and that business is told so when it uses your link or code.

7.7The payback promise, for a business whose first payment was before 5 October 2026. It was replaced by the promise above on that date, and a business that started paying before it keeps it, as written here. The 60 days start on the day of your first real payment, not during your trial. The bar is one month of your plan at your monthly price (£249, or £199on a founding place), whether you pay monthly or yearly. What counts is the figure on your Recovered page: money paid to you on jobs that began as a missed call to your office line that Slate texted back, counted from the day your line went live, including jobs you have since deleted. If that is under the bar, you can claim from Settings at any time before the 60 days end: every payment you have made for Slate comes back to the card it was paid with (your plan, the crew add-on and a year paid up front alike), and your plan ends that day as in clause 9.4. Once the figure reaches the bar the promise is kept and cannot be claimed. It can be claimed once per business, and not after a refund under “Changed your mind?”.

8.1If a payment fails, Stripe tries your card again over the following days, and we tell you on the day it fails and several times after.

8.2Paying what is owed at any point opens everything again, as it was.

8.3If you stop Slate while a payment is unpaid, it ends at once and the unpaid invoice is cancelled, so no later retry can take the money.

9.1You stop Slate in Settings, in Slate. (The Stripe billing page shows your payments but does not stop Slate.)

9.2A paid plan runs to the end of the period you have paid for, and you can change your mind and carry on at any point before then.

9.3A trial, or a plan with a payment unpaid, ends straight away (clauses 5.4 and 8.3).

9.4When your plan ends, Slate closes. The export stays open.

9.5Your office line is held for you for 30 days, and we email you the date. Calls to it still reach you, and if you come back before that date it is still yours. After it, we return the number to the carrier and email you; coming back then means a new number, which needs the carrier’s approval again.

9.6Your Slate sending address is released 30 days after your plan ends.

9.7Your data stays in your closed account, so you can take a copy or come back, until you ask us to delete it (clause 10.4).

10.1Your data is yours. You allow us to hold it and use it only to run Slate for you, as Schedule 1 sets out.

10.2You can take a copy whenever you like, from Export in Slate: your customers and jobs (with the reviews they left), your diary, your money (quotes, invoices and payments), your costs, and your texts, emails and calls, as spreadsheet, contact and calendar files. It is never closed: not during a trial, not when a payment fails, not after your plan ends, and not while a new version of these terms is waiting for you.

10.3You can remove a customer, and everything about them, from their page in Slate at any time.

10.4To close your account and delete everything in it, email privacy@slateos.co.uk from your account’s address. We delete it within a month. The Privacy Policy lists the little we have to keep.

10.5For your customers’ details you are the controller and we are your processor. Schedule 1 is our agreement about that.

11.1Calls. Your office line rings your direct line, which must be a UK mobile or landline you answer: not a premium-rate, 070 or overseas number. A call can last up to 60 minutes.

11.2The missed-call text. When you miss a call, Slate sends the caller one text from your office line, in your words or ours. It only goes to UK mobiles, never to anybody who has replied STOP (START undoes that). In your quiet hours it sends your after-hours words instead; switch those off and nothing is sent in quiet hours. We may send it only the first time a number rings you, so that a customer who rings again is not texted again. You can switch the text off altogether.

11.3Fair use. Missed-call texts are included up to 1,500 a month, counted in text segments, so a long text, or one with an emoji in it, counts as more than one. If you reach that, missed-call texts pause until the next month begins. Calls and email carry on as normal.

11.4Your office line is for your business to use while you subscribe. You may not resell it or let another business use it, and you may not use it to make money from calls, for example by sending calls to premium-rate or overseas numbers.

11.5A call or text can fail for reasons outside our control, such as the phone network, the carrier or the caller’s phone. We do not promise that every call or text gets through.

The carrier registration

11.6To give you a UK number, the carrier must know who holds it. You give us true details for the registration and, if you are a sole trader or a partnership, a photo ID. We send them to the carrier and delete our copy of your ID once the carrier approves you, or after 90 days whatever happens.

12.1Slate sends your quotes, invoices, confirmations, reminders and review requests by email, with your business name on them, from a sending address we set up for your business on slateos.co.uk. Replies go to your own email address.

12.2If you set up your own mailbox in Slate before it sent from its own addresses, Slate keeps sending from that mailbox.

12.3To protect your sending address and every other business’s, you can send up to 500 emails a day (tell us if you need more), and we pause your sending if too many of your emails bounce or are reported as spam, until we have looked at it with you.

12.4Messages that Slate writes and hands to your phone or your own email app are sent by you, through your own accounts, not by us.

13.1Card payments from your customers go through your own Stripe account, which you connect to Slate, and Stripe’s terms with you apply to them. You are the seller. The money goes to your Stripe account, not through us, and we never hold it.

13.2If you add your bank details, we print them on your quotes and invoices, and they can go in the messages you send, so that your customers can pay you by transfer.

13.3A payment link asks for what is left to pay on the quote or invoice, after any part-payments you have logged.

13.4What you charge, the VAT on it and your records for HMRC are yours to get right. Slate helps (VAT on your documents, numbered invoices) but does not give tax advice.

14.1You can upload your own quote or invoice design, and Slate reads where your details go on it.

14.2If it has labels Slate does not recognise, and our AI reader is switched on, we send those label words to Anthropic, whose model suggests what each one is. It gets the words and nothing else: not the file, not your customers’ details, not any amounts. Treat what it suggests as a suggestion, and check your documents before you send them.

14.3The Advisor. Once a month, and once early in your free trial, Slate writes you a brief: what your own numbers show is worth doing, with the figures behind each point. You can also ask it questions about your numbers.

14.4Slate counts every figure from what is in your account. To choose what matters and write the words, we send Anthropic’s Claude model those figures, your first name, trade and town, and short descriptions of your jobs with your customers’ names, phone numbers, email addresses and street addresses taken out. Code checks every sentence against the figures before you see it, and a person at Slate may read a brief before it reaches you.

14.5To compare your website with the firms you name as the ones you lose work to, and others near you that a web search finds, Anthropic’s web tools open their public home pages, and Google’s PageSpeed Insights times each and runs Google’s SEO checks on it. Slate keeps only whether each page shows certain things (a phone number, prices, reviews and the like) and those scores, never the pages themselves. Where it suits your trade, the brief uses HM Land Registry’s public data. When you ask, Slate shows what Google Maps lists for your trade near you, read from Google at that moment and not kept, apart from the identifier of your own listing if you pick it.

14.6The brief and its answers are guidance drawn from your own numbers, not financial, tax, legal or other professional advice, and an estimate is labelled as one. What you do with them is your decision. Clause 20 applies to the Advisor as it does to the rest of Slate.

14.7Questions are part of your plan, up to 40 a month. We may pause the Advisor for an account whose use goes far beyond that, and we will tell you if we do.

14.8You can switch the Advisor off in Slate at any time. While it is off, no brief is written for you and nothing about your business is sent to Anthropic for it.

14.9If the brief ever shows what a kind of job sells for near you, drawn from other Slate firms’ work, the figure uses only jobs won at least a month ago, pooled from at least ten firms so that no firm can be picked out, and never any firm’s current prices. You agree that your own past won jobs may be pooled in the same way, without your name or your customers’ details. Switching the Advisor off takes your jobs out of the pool.

15.1You must use Slate lawfully. In particular:

• you decide who you contact, and you need a lawful reason to hold and use your customers’ details (UK GDPR). Marketing texts and emails need your customers’ consent, or the “soft opt-in” for your own customers, with a way to stop in every one (PECR). The missed-call text answers a call somebody made to you; it is not marketing;
• no spam: no bulk or unwanted messages through your sending address or your office line;
• nothing false, threatening, abusive or harassing, and nothing that breaks anybody’s rights;
• no attempt to break into, overload or test the security of Slate without our written permission (write to security@slateos.co.uk);
• no reselling your account, office line or sending address, or letting another business use them;
• true details for your account and for the carrier registration.

15.2You are responsible for what you and your crew send and store using Slate.

16.1We work to keep Slate available and working, and to fix problems quickly. It may sometimes be unavailable, for maintenance or because a company we rely on (the phone network, the carrier, our hosting, Stripe or email) has a problem. We do not promise that Slate will never be interrupted or never go wrong.

16.2For help, use Talk to us in Slate, or write to support@slateos.co.uk.

16.3Parts of Slate work through other companies’ services, listed in the Privacy Policy. Where you use one directly, such as Stripe, its terms apply between you and it.

17.1We may pause your missed-call texts, or your email sending, straight away if they are being misused or put your office line, your sending address or other businesses at risk. We will tell you why.

17.2We may suspend your account if you seriously break these terms. If you do not put it right within 14 days of our telling you, or it cannot be put right (fraud, for example), we may end this agreement.

17.3A failed payment is handled as clause 8 says.

17.4We may also end this agreement for any reason by giving you 30 days’ notice, and we will refund any whole months you have paid for after it ends.

18.1Slate, its software and designs, and everything we make remain ours. We give you the right to use Slate while you subscribe.

18.2Your data remains yours (clause 10).

18.3If you send us ideas or suggestions, we may use them freely.

19.1Each of us keeps what we learn about the other’s business confidential, and uses it only for this agreement, unless the law requires otherwise or it is already public.

20.1Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow to be limited.

20.2Otherwise, neither of us is liable to the other for lost profit, business, revenue, work or goodwill, or for indirect losses. That includes work lost because a call or a text did not get through.

20.3Our total liability to you under this agreement, in any 12 months, is limited to what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.

20.4You are responsible for, and will cover us against, claims that arise from what you or your crew send through Slate, or from breaking clause 15.

21.1We may change Slate. If a change takes away something you rely on, we will tell you before it happens.

21.2We may update these terms. Each version is dated. When we publish a new one, Slate asks you to accept it the next time you use it, and you cannot use Slate until you do; you can still take a copy of your data, and still stop Slate in Settings. If you do not accept, you can stop, as clause 9 says.

22.1These terms, with the Privacy Policy and Schedule 1, are the whole agreement between us about Slate.

22.2You may not pass this agreement to anybody else without our written agreement. We may pass it to a business that takes over Slate, and will tell you if we do.

22.3Nobody else has any right to enforce these terms.

22.4If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest still applies.

22.5If either of us does not insist on something at once, we can still insist on it later.

22.6Neither of us is responsible for failures caused by events outside our reasonable control.

22.7Notices to us go to legal@slateos.co.uk; notices to you go to the email address on your account.

23.1These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales decide any dispute about them.

This schedule is the agreement UK GDPR (Article 28) requires between you, as controller of your customers’ details, and us, as your processor.

S1.1Your instructions. We process your customers’ details only to run Slate as you use it (your settings and what you do in Slate are your instructions), unless the law requires us to do something else, in which case we tell you first unless the law forbids it.

S1.2Our people. Everybody at Slate who can reach your customers’ details is bound to keep them confidential.

S1.3Security. We keep the measures described in the Privacy Policy (“Keeping data safe”) and improve them over time.

S1.4Other processors. You allow us to use the companies listed in the Privacy Policy. We will email you at least 30 days before we add or replace one. If you object on reasonable data-protection grounds, you can end this agreement, and we will refund what you have paid for time after it ends. Each of them is bound by terms that protect your customers’ details as this schedule does.

S1.5Helping you. Slate lets you copy your customers’ details (the export) and remove a customer completely. We help with any other request a customer makes to you under data-protection law, and with any assessment you need to make.

S1.6If something goes wrong. If your customers’ details are lost, stolen or reached by somebody who should not have them, we tell you without undue delay after we find out, with what we know, and keep you told.

S1.7Outside the UK. Where a company we use processes details outside the UK, the transfer is protected as the Privacy Policy explains.

S1.8At the end. You can take a copy at any time. When you ask us to delete your account, we delete your customers’ details within a month, except what the Privacy Policy says we must keep; our encrypted backups roll off within 90 days.

S1.9Showing we comply. We give you the information you reasonably need to show that this schedule is kept, and allow an audit on reasonable notice, at your cost, no more than once a year.