Steadmere is operated by Russ Gohl, an individual doing business as Steadmere in California. In this document, "we" and "us" mean that operator, and "you" means whoever is using the service — either a repair shop and its staff, or a customer reviewing an estimate.
We expect to move the business into a California limited liability company. If that happens, this agreement moves with it, and we'll note the change here. See section 22.
Two different people end up reading this. Sections 3 to 13 are the agreement between us and a shop that uses Steadmere to run its work. Sections 14 to 16 are for a customer who received a link to an estimate or invoice and never created an account. Everything from 17 onward applies to both.
A customer approving an estimate is agreeing with the shop about the repair. We provide the software the estimate is written and signed in; we are not a party to the repair itself.
Steadmere is job-management software for paintless dent repair shops. It records customer and vehicle information, builds estimates, schedules work, tracks payments against a job, and shares estimates and invoices with customers for review and approval. Each shop's data is separate from every other shop's.
Accounts are approved by hand while Steadmere is opening to shops a few at a time, so requesting one is not the same as having one, and we can decline a request without giving a reason.
Staff sign in with an email address and either a password or a one-time link sent to that address. Whoever accepts this agreement for a shop confirms they're authorized to do so. The shop is responsible for what its staff do in the account, for inviting and removing them, and for telling us promptly if it believes an account has been accessed by someone who shouldn't have it.
Everything a shop puts into Steadmere — customers, vehicles, estimates, invoices, photos, notes — belongs to the shop. Storing it with us gives us permission to hold, process, and display it back to the shop and to whoever holds the share link for a job — which is how a customer sees their own estimate, and which means the link itself is the only thing standing between that job and anyone else — for the purpose of running the service and nothing else. We don't sell it, and we don't use it to train anything.
Most of that data is information about the shop's own customers. The shop decides what to collect and why; we hold it on the shop's behalf and act on the shop's instructions. The shop is responsible for having the right to give us that information in the first place, and for answering its own customers when they ask about it.
One exception you should know about, because "nothing else" is doing real work in the paragraph above. A Steadmere platform administrator can open a read-only view of a shop's account in order to answer a support question. It is restricted by design rather than by policy: nothing can be changed while that view is open, customer names and contact details are replaced with placeholders before the data leaves our server, VINs, service addresses, signatures, internal notes and share links are not included at all, and every time it is used a record is written of who opened which shop and when. We would rather describe this than have a shop discover it.
A shop owner can export the shop's records — the business details, staff list, customers, vehicles, jobs, line items, payments, pricing, and the record of who accepted these terms and when — as a single file from Settings, at any time, without asking us and without closing anything. An export you can only obtain by quitting is not portability. Photographs are the one thing the file does not contain. Each photo's record is in there — which job it belongs to, when it was taken, where it is stored — but the image itself is not, because a file with the pictures inlined would run to hundreds of megabytes and be unusable. Download the photos you want from the job pages before you close anything.
Three different things can end a shop's data, and they work differently. They are set out separately here because a single "retention period" would be wrong for at least two of them.
Steadmere is free right now. It will stay free for your shop until we tell you otherwise in writing, with at least 30 days' notice before the first charge. Nothing in section 8 costs you anything until that notice has been given and the period has run. If you'd rather stop than start paying, close the account before the date in the notice and you owe nothing.
Once a shop is paying, subscriptions are billed monthly in advance and invoiced directly — there is no card on file and no automatic renewal charge. Invoices are due within 15 days. Fees don't include sales or use taxes, which are yours where they apply.
If an invoice goes 15 days past due we may suspend access after telling you first. Suspension doesn't delete anything; section 6 still governs what happens to the data. Payments already made aren't refunded, and cancelling stops the next invoice rather than reimbursing the current one — you keep access through the period you paid for. We'll give at least 30 days' notice by email before a price change takes effect.
We don't promise any level of uptime, any response time, or any maintenance window, because we haven't built the monitoring or the staffing that would make such a promise honest. Steadmere is one person's software. It is provided as it is, and features may change or be removed.
Support is best effort, by email. If your shop needs a guaranteed service level, Steadmere is not the right tool for you yet, and we would rather say so here than have you find out during a busy week.
Our database provider keeps its own backups, but we have not tested restoring from them and we don't promise that we can recover your data after a failure or a mistaken deletion. Export your data periodically using section 6 and keep the file somewhere you control. That is the only copy we can promise you'll have.
Photos are stored privately and are not reachable from a public web address; the app generates a short-lived link each time one is displayed. Don't upload anything you don't have the right to upload. Vehicle photographs often capture licence plates and VIN plates, so treat them as identifying the customer, not just the car.
Steadmere contains features that would use an outside AI service to turn a messy note or a photo into structured job details. No AI provider is configured on the live service, so nothing you type or upload is sent to one. Being straight about what that is: it is a setting we have chosen not to turn on, not a capability that has been removed from the software. What stops it changing without you knowing is this promise rather than the architecture — if we turn these features on, we will say so here and in the Privacy Policy, naming the provider and its terms, before rather than after. We will not use a provider whose terms allow your data to train its models.
Don't use Steadmere to store or send anything unlawful, to reach another shop's data, to resell access to shops that haven't agreed to these terms, to interfere with how the service runs, or to get around its security. We may suspend an account immediately for any of these.
A customer estimate can be shared as a link that doesn't require the customer to create an account. Through that link, a customer can approve an estimate and sign it using a typed name and a drawn signature. This is a record of the customer's agreement kept in our system — it is not a notarized or third-party-verified electronic signature service, and its legal weight depends on the circumstances and applicable law. If you need a signature with stronger legal guarantees for a particular transaction, use a dedicated e-signature provider instead.
Once an estimate is signed, the drawn signature is shown on the share page, on the shop's copy of the job, and on the PDF the shop can produce. The link that shows it does not require a login, so anyone holding the link can see the signature until the link expires or the shop replaces it. If that matters for a particular job, ask the shop to replace the link after you sign.
Share links stop working 30 days after they're created, and a shop can replace a link at any time, which immediately retires the old one.
Steadmere lets shop staff record payments — cash, check, card, Zelle, Venmo, PayPal, or anything else — against a job so the balance stays accurate. Steadmere does not process card payments and never handles card details. Where a "Pay now" link appears, it sends you to a payment service the shop chose, and that transaction happens on that company's platform under its terms, not ours. Questions about a charge, a repair, or a refund go to the shop.
The shop holds the relationship with you and decides what to keep. Ask the shop first, using the contact details on your estimate or invoice. They can correct or delete your record directly. The Privacy Policy explains what is stored and how long records are kept.
A shop can stop using Steadmere at any time. We can suspend or end access for a breach of these terms, for non-payment under section 8, or if we stop running Steadmere altogether. In that last case we'll give at least 30 days' notice, so every shop has time to export its records first. Sections 5, 18, 19, 20, 23 and 24 survive the end of this agreement, and section 6's deletion timeline runs after it ends — that is when it does its work.
Steadmere is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, to the fullest extent the law allows. We don't warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any estimate, price, or calculation it produces is correct. Checking the numbers before they go to a customer is the shop's job.
To the fullest extent the law allows, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, or for lost profits, lost business, or lost data. Our total liability for any claim relating to Steadmere is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or $100 if you haven't paid us anything. Nothing here limits liability the law doesn't allow to be limited, including for fraud.
A shop agrees to cover us against claims brought by a third party — most obviously one of the shop's own customers — that arise from the shop's use of Steadmere, the data it put in, or the repair work itself. This doesn't apply where the claim is caused by us breaking this agreement.
We may update these terms as the service changes. For a material change affecting a shop, we'll give at least 30 days' notice by email to the shop's owner before it takes effect, and continuing to use Steadmere after that date means accepting the new version. Minor corrections take effect when posted, with the date at the top updated.
You may not transfer this agreement without our written consent. We may transfer it to a company we form to operate Steadmere, or to a buyer of the business, provided that company takes on these same obligations. Nothing about your shop's rights changes because the name on our side does.
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict-of-law principles. Any dispute goes to the state or federal courts in Orange County, California, and both sides agree those courts can hear it. There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver here — if we ever add one, section 21 governs how you find out.
These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about Steadmere and replace anything said earlier. If a court finds one part unenforceable, the rest still stands. Not enforcing something once doesn't waive it. Neither side is the other's partner, employee, or agent.
Questions about these terms can go to the operator. If you're a customer with a question about a repair, an estimate, or a charge, contact the shop directly using the details on your estimate or invoice.
This section is last because it was added last, not because it matters least. It binds both parties: the shop, in the way sections 3–13 do, and the vehicle owner who receives a message, in the way 14–16 do.
Steadmere is the sender of record. Messages go out from our number under our carrier registration, not the shop's. We carry the compliance obligations that come with sending. It also means a customer who replies STOP is opted out across the whole service rather than only at the shop that sent the last message — one number, one list — and the same applies to a customer who has never dealt with us before and texts STOP anyway.
Consent is collected from the customer, by the customer. The only thing that puts a number on the list is that person ticking the box on the shop's request page themselves. A shop cannot tick it for them, import a list of numbers into it, or reverse an opt-out — and a shop agrees not to work around that, including by asking a customer to text START on the shop's behalf. Nothing in the product allows it; this clause makes it a term as well as a limit of the software.
Messages are transactional and about one job: an estimate is ready, an appointment is tomorrow, the car is done. Marketing texts are not a feature of this service and are not permitted through it.
There is no inbox. Nothing a customer texts back other than STOP, START or HELP reaches the shop, and a shop must not tell customers otherwise. Message and data rates may apply to the recipient.
Sending is included at no extra charge during early access. If that changes, the thirty days' notice in section 4 applies before any charge, the same as for everything else.
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