Terms of service

Cordly is an online service that helps homeowners associations run their community: meetings and minutes, residents and households, architectural requests, violations, work orders, documents and messages. It is provided by [Company legal name], [type of entity and state] (“Cordly”, “we”, “us”), at cordlyhq.com and related addresses.

The homeowners association that subscribes to Cordly is our customer (“your HOA”). Board members, property managers, committee members and residents who sign in through an HOA are users. If you accept these terms for an HOA, you confirm you’re authorised to bind it, for example by a board resolution or as its managing agent.

By creating an account or using Cordly, you agree to these terms and to our privacy policy. If your HOA has signed a separate order form or agreement with us, that document wins where the two differ.

Cordly is invitation only. Your HOA decides who gets an account and what role they have (for example board, property manager or resident), and can change or remove access at any time. Roles decide what each person can see.

• You must be at least 18 and use your own account. Don’t share your sign-in link or password.
• Keep your contact details accurate, so sign-in links and notices reach you.
• Tell us at hello@cordlyhq.com straight away if you think someone else has used your account.
• Your HOA is responsible for the people it invites, the roles it gives them, and removing people who should no longer have access, such as a board member whose term has ended.

Cordly is sold to HOAs as a monthly subscription. Each subscription includes a monthly allowance of AI usage for features such as Ask Cordly, minutes drafting and letter drafts. When an HOA uses up its allowance, AI features pause until the next month unless the HOA buys more usage. Residents are never charged.

• Prices, the size of the allowance and the cost of extra usage are shown on our pricing page or your HOA’s order form. We’ll give at least 30 days’ notice before a price change takes effect for an existing subscription.
• Subscriptions renew each month until cancelled. Your HOA can cancel at any time, and the cancellation takes effect at the end of the current month.
• Unused allowance doesn’t carry over to the next month, unless your order form says otherwise. Extra usage you buy is used before it expires, as described when you buy it.
• Fees are due in advance and don’t include taxes, which your HOA pays where they apply. Except where the law requires otherwise, fees already paid aren’t refundable.
• If a payment is more than 15 days late, we may pause the account after telling the billing contact. Your data stays safe while it is paused.

Everything your HOA and its users put into Cordly (records, documents, minutes, messages, photos) and everything Cordly produces for you from it, including AI drafts, is your HOA’s content. Your HOA owns it. We don’t claim any ownership of it.

Your HOA gives us permission to store, copy, process and display its content only as needed to run Cordly for you, keep it secure, fix problems and follow the law. We don’t sell it, use it for advertising, or use it to train AI models.

Your HOA is responsible for its content and for how it uses Cordly, including having the right to upload what it uploads, giving any notices the law requires, and meeting its own duties under California’s Davis-Stirling Common Interest Development Act and its governing documents, such as records inspection, member privacy and executive-session confidentiality.

Some features use artificial intelligence to answer questions about your HOA’s documents, draft minutes and letters, and suggest next steps. AI can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, even when it sounds sure.

• Drafts need a person. Everything AI produces is a draft for a person to read, check and edit. Nothing is sent, approved or recorded on your behalf until someone in your HOA chooses to.
• Not legal or professional advice. AI answers aren’t legal, financial, insurance or engineering advice, and Cordly isn’t a law firm or a management company. For enforcement, fines, collections, hearings and disputes, check the governing documents and talk to your HOA’s attorney or manager.
• Check the source. Where Cordly cites a passage from your documents, read the passage itself before relying on the answer.
• AI requests count against your HOA’s monthly allowance. We keep a record of each request and its answer in your HOA’s account, so the board can see what was asked and what came back.
• We send only what a feature needs to our AI providers, under terms that don’t let them train their models on it. The privacy policy names them.

When you use Cordly, please don’t:

• break the law, or harass, threaten or discriminate against anyone, including in messages, discussions and notices;
• upload anything you don’t have the right to share, or other people’s private information beyond what your HOA needs to do its job;
• look at or try to reach records your role doesn’t allow, or another HOA’s data;
• probe, scan or test Cordly’s security, or get around usage limits, without our written permission;
• copy, resell or reverse engineer Cordly, or use it to build a competing product;
• send spam, or upload malware or anything meant to disrupt the service.

If someone breaks these rules, we may remove the content or pause their access, and we’ll tell your HOA.

For community records, your HOA decides what information goes into Cordly and why, and we process it on your HOA’s behalf and under its instructions. In privacy law terms, your HOA is the business (or controller) and Cordly is its service provider (or processor). We only use that information to provide Cordly, as these terms and the privacy policy describe.

We use the service providers listed in the privacy policy to run Cordly, hold them to confidentiality and security obligations at least as protective as ours, and stay responsible for their work. We’ll update the list before adding a new one that handles your HOA’s content.

We protect your HOA’s content with industry-standard safeguards, including encryption in transit and at rest, role-based access within each HOA, separation between HOAs, and limited, logged access by our own team. Our staff look at your HOA’s content only when your HOA asks for help, to keep the service secure, or when the law requires it.

If we learn that your HOA’s content has been accessed without authorisation, we’ll tell your HOA without undue delay, explain what we know, and help it meet any notice duties it has.

We improve Cordly often, so features will change. We won’t take away a core feature your HOA pays for without telling the HOA in advance. Features marked as a preview or beta may change or end at any time and come without any promise that they’ll keep working.

Your HOA can cancel at any time. We may end or pause an HOA’s subscription if fees go unpaid as described above, if the HOA or its users seriously break these terms and don’t fix it within 15 days of our notice, or straight away where we must to protect people, the service or the law.

After a subscription ends, the HOA’s content stays available to export for 30 days. We then delete it within 90 days, except for copies the law requires us to keep and backups, which are deleted as they expire. Remember that your HOA may have its own duty to keep records for longer, so export what you need.

We work hard to keep Cordly accurate and available, but it is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties not written in these terms, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We don’t promise Cordly will be uninterrupted or error free, or that AI output will be correct.

To the extent the law allows, neither your HOA nor Cordly is liable to the other for lost profits, lost revenue, or indirect, special, consequential or punitive damages, and each side’s total liability under these terms is limited to the fees your HOA paid Cordly in the 12 months before the claim.

These limits don’t apply to your HOA’s duty to pay fees, either side’s indemnity obligations, or liability that the law doesn’t allow to be limited, such as for fraud or wilful misconduct.

We’ll defend your HOA against a third-party claim that Cordly itself infringes their intellectual property, and pay any resulting damages a court awards or we agree to in a settlement.

Your HOA will defend us against a third-party claim arising from its content, its instructions to us, or its decisions as an association (for example a dispute with a member over enforcement, records or privacy), and pay any resulting damages a court awards or your HOA agrees to in a settlement.

These terms are governed by the laws of [governing law], without regard to its conflict of laws rules. Any dispute that we can’t settle by talking first will be heard only in [courts and county for disputes], and both sides agree to those courts’ jurisdiction.

We may update these terms as Cordly grows. For a change that matters, we’ll tell each HOA’s board contacts at least 30 days before it takes effect, by email or in the app. The date at the top shows when the terms last changed. If your HOA doesn’t agree to a change, it can cancel before the change takes effect.

• These terms, the privacy policy and any order form are the whole agreement about Cordly.
• If part of these terms can’t be enforced, the rest still applies.
• Not enforcing a term straight away doesn’t mean we’ve given it up.
• Neither side may transfer these terms without the other’s consent, except to a company that takes over its business.
• Neither side is responsible for delays caused by events beyond its reasonable control.

Questions about these terms: hello@cordlyhq.com. Legal notices: [Company legal name], [mailing address]. Residents with a question about their own HOA’s records or decisions should start with their board or property manager.