Terms of Service

1 · The agreement

These terms are between you and Self Service Notary, operated at selfservicenotary.com (“we”, “us”). They govern your use of the service. You accepted them when you created your account — the version and the moment are recorded against it — and you accept each material revision the same way before you can carry on using the product.

If you accept on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you may bind it. Our Privacy Policy and, for the personal data your own clients entrust to you, our Data Processing Addendum form part of this agreement.

2 · A platform, not a notary

Self Service Notary is software. We are not a notary, not a law firm, and not a party to any notarial act, signature or transaction carried out with it. Nothing here or in the product is legal advice, and using it creates no notary–client and no attorney–client relationship between you and us.

Your clients are yours. The engagement, the fee, the advice and the act itself are between you and them; we provide the tooling and the evidence trail, and we take no part in the underlying matter.

We do not guarantee that any court, registry, bank, embassy or other third party will accept a document processed here. Whether a particular recipient accepts a particular instrument is a question of their rules and your jurisdiction's, and it is not one software can answer.

3 · Your professional responsibility

You act as an independent professional. Every notarial or legal act you perform through the product is yours: your determination, your commission, your seal, your record. We do not review, approve or supervise it, and we cannot judge whether it is well founded.

By using the service for professional acts, you represent — each time — that:

• you hold a valid, current commission, licence or appointment for every jurisdiction in which you act, and you are not suspended or restricted;
• the act is permitted in that jurisdiction in the manner you perform it — including whether a remote or electronic act is allowed at all, and any technology, witness or recording rules that apply to it;
• you carry the insurance, bond or professional cover your jurisdiction requires;
• you satisfy your own identification, journal, retention and reporting duties — the audit trail here supports them, it does not replace them; and
• anyone you invite into your workspace acts under your supervision, and you are responsible for what they do with it.

You are also responsible for the security of your credentials and for the accuracy of the identity details on your account.

4 · What we provide

A signing and sealing service, an append-only transparency ledger, identity verification via third-party providers, live video sessions, a customer portal you can publish under your own domain, and a public verification surface. We publish the ledger head and issuer public keys so that verification of any sealed document does not depend on our continued availability.

5 · Service-specific terms

Identity verification. Checks are performed by a third-party provider. A result is evidence for your own determination of identity — it is not that determination, and it does not transfer any part of your duty to us or to the provider. Where a check involves photo-ID and liveness capture, the person being checked gives their explicit consent at the point of use.

Qualified electronic signatures. A QES is issued by a qualified trust service provider, not by us. That provider's terms and certificate policy also apply to it.

Live video sessions. Where you record a session, you are responsible for telling the participants and for obtaining whatever consent your jurisdiction requires. Recordings are stored in your workspace and kept for the retention period you choose.

Your customer portal. The content of a portal you publish, and the terms and privacy information you give the clients who use it, are yours. If you connect your own domain, you are responsible for that domain and for the rights to the branding you put on it.

Automatic summaries. Where this is switched on, a short summary of a job is generated from its recorded activity — statuses, timestamps, counts. The contents of your documents are never sent to a model. A summary is advisory, it may be wrong, nothing seals or refuses on it, it is not part of the notarial record, and you review it like any other note.

Text messages. One-time codes and appointment reminders may be sent by text to numbers you or your clients provide, within the monthly allowance of your plan. Carrier delivery is outside our control.

6 · Your content and the ledger

You keep all rights in the documents you upload. You grant us only the licence needed to store, encrypt, render, seal and deliver them, and to compute the hashes recorded in the ledger. Ledger entries are, by design, permanent: an entry cannot be withdrawn from an append-only record. Revocation and retraction change the verdict a verifier sees; they do not erase history.

7 · Our software, and your suggestions

The service, its software and our marks remain ours; nothing here transfers them. If you send us a suggestion or an idea for the product, we may use it without obligation or payment — that is what lets us act on feedback quickly, and it does not touch any right in your own documents or data.

8 · Payments between you and your clients

If you collect payment from your own clients through the product, you do so through your own payment account. You are the merchant of record: your pricing, your invoices, your refunds, your chargebacks, your tax. Your name appears on your client's statement, not ours, and we are not a party to that transaction. The payment provider's own agreement for connected accounts applies between you and them, and you accept it during their onboarding: they hold the funds, they pay out, and they handle disputes and chargebacks. Any platform commission is shown on the pricing page before you switch payments on.

9 · Acceptable use

Do not use the service to misrepresent identity, to seal documents you have no authority over, to circumvent an identity check, to imply a notarial act that did not occur, or to carry out work you are not licensed to do. Do not use it where applicable sanctions or export-control law forbids it. Do not attempt to overwhelm, probe or scrape the public verification surface or the API beyond the published rate limits. We may suspend an account that does, and we will preserve the audit trail when we do.

10 · Fees

Subscription fees are billed monthly in advance — per workspace on Solo and Practice, per your agreement (including seats) on Firm — and renew automatically until you cancel. They are non-refundable for the period already begun.

Cancel at any time from Settings → Billing. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for; the workspace then continues on the free plan rather than closing. A plan change is prorated and the amount is quoted to you before you confirm it.

The trial needs no card, and when it ends the workspace drops to the free plan by itself — nothing is charged and nothing is deleted.

Usage-based add-ons — identity checks, qualified signatures — are billed monthly in arrears at the rates published on the pricing page at the time of use. Prepaid identity-check packs are consumed per completed check and are not refundable once bought; unused checks do not expire. Published prices may change, and a change applies from your next period. Prices exclude any taxes we are required to add.

11 · Data protection

For your own account data we are the controller. For the documents, signers and clients you process through the product you are the controller and we are your processor, on the terms of the Data Processing Addendum, which is incorporated into this agreement and needs no separate signature. The providers we use are listed at Sub-processors. How we handle personal data is described in the Privacy Policy.

12 · What we do not warrant

We do not warrant that a sealed document satisfies any particular statutory form requirement in any particular jurisdiction. A cryptographic seal is evidence of integrity, issuance and — where identity verification was used — attribution. It is not legal advice and not a determination of admissibility. The service is otherwise provided as is, without warranties that it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We give no availability commitment on the free plan or during a trial. Nothing in this section limits a right you have that cannot lawfully be limited.

13 · Indemnity

You will indemnify and hold Self Service Notary harmless against third-party claims, and the reasonable costs of defending them, arising from: the notarial, legal or professional acts you perform (or decline to perform) through the product; a breach of the representations in section 3; your relationships with your own clients, including the content of your portal and any payment you take from them; and your use of the service in breach of these terms or of the law. This does not apply to the extent the claim is caused by our own breach of this agreement.

14 · Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our aggregate liability is limited to the fees you paid in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred euros if you have paid nothing. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profit, goodwill or anticipated savings, nor for the legal consequences of an act you chose to perform. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

15 · Suspension and termination

Either party may terminate at any time. We may suspend an account immediately where the law requires it, where an account is being used in breach of section 9, or where continuing would put other users' data at risk — and we will tell you why.

EXPORT BEFORE YOU CLOSE. You can export your documents, audit trails, e-journal and settings at any time while the account is open, including while a subscription is lapsed. Closing a workspace or an account is immediate and irreversible: we delete the data at once and keep no copy of it. What survives is the public record (fingerprints and signed claims, never files), the published issuer keys, and the record of which terms you accepted — so sealed documents already in circulation remain verifiable.

16 · Changes to these terms

We version these terms. A material change is published with a new version number, and you are asked to accept it in the product before continuing to use it; we keep a record of which version you accepted and when. Where a material change is practicable to announce in advance, we will tell you by email and in the product at least 14 days before it takes effect. Corrections that do not change your rights or ours — wording, typos, formatting — take effect on publication.

17 · Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates as applied in the Emirate of Dubai, and the parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Nothing here limits rights you have as a consumer under mandatory local law, or removes a right you cannot lawfully waive where you live.

18 · What these terms do not decide

Several bodies of law decide what an electronic signature or a remote act is worth, and none of them is us. Depending on where you and your document are, that may include the US ESIGN Act and state UETA, the state statutes based on the Revised Uniform Law on Notarial Acts, the EU eIDAS Regulation, the UK Electronic Communications Act, Hong Kong's Electronic Transactions Ordinance — whose Schedule 1 excludes wills, oaths, affidavits, statutory declarations and powers of attorney from electronic form — or the UAE's law on electronic transactions and trust services.

We make no representation that a document processed here satisfies any of them. That is your determination as the professional performing the act, and this section exists so that nothing elsewhere on this site can be read as our having made it for you.

19 · General

If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stands. We may transfer this agreement to an affiliate or to a successor in a merger or sale; you may not transfer it without our consent. Neither party is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside its control. These terms, the Privacy Policy and the Data Processing Addendum are the whole agreement between us about the service, and where the Addendum differs from these terms on data protection, the Addendum wins. Notices to you go to your account address; notices to us go to the address in section 20. A right not enforced is not a right given up.

20 · Contact

Questions about these terms: legal@selfservicenotary.com. Data protection questions go to the address in our Privacy Policy.