Terms of service

By signing in to Tend you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the service.

The service

Tend (operated by Convect Technologies Ltd) helps small shops sell and handle customer conversations from one place. It reads the Instagram DMs and comments your shop receives, classifies them, and organises the order details it finds. When you turn auto-reply on, it can answer customers automatically in your shop's voice. Auto-reply is off by default. There is no draft-review queue: with auto-reply on, the bot either replies on its own or holds a conversation for you when it is unsure, when you have blocked automated replies on that thread, or when you have taken the thread over yourself. You can take over any conversation at any time and reply by hand. Messages the bot sends count as your own. You remain the author, and the shop, behind every reply your account publishes.

Around those conversations, Tend also gives you: a storefront and checkout for your products; bookings and appointment scheduling; event ticketing, with QR-code door check-in and Apple and Google Wallet passes; delivery tools and shipping-label purchasing; scheduled messages to your own booked customers; a public marketplace at tendto.you where nearby shoppers can find you; a mobile app; and the Tend assistant, an AI agent that works on your shop for you and, on paid plans, has a computer of its own (see The Tend assistant below). Not every feature is switched on for every shop, and features change during the beta.

To operate and improve Tend we collect first-party product-usage analytics: which elements you see and interact with, and on which screen. This data is used only to run and improve the service and is never sold or shared with advertisers. The marketplace feed is also ordered for each signed-in shopper from their own searches, favourites and what they have already been shown. See our Privacy policy for exactly what is collected, how it's handled, and how long it's kept.

Marketplace listing

Tend runs a public marketplace at tendto.you. Once your shop meets the listing requirements (a public shop handle, a shop name, a location, and a connected Instagram account) it is listed there automatically, so nearby shoppers can find it. There is no payment-setup requirement to be listed. The listing is built from what you have published or entered: your shop name and handle, your location at the precision you choose in Settings, your products and prices, opening hours, published answers to common questions, and your public Instagram posts and stories. You are responsible for the accuracy and lawfulness of everything that appears there, the same as for any other content you put into the app. You control your public location precision in Settings, and your shop stays listed for as long as it continues to meet the requirements above.

How results are ranked. Results are ordered for the shopper who is searching, from four main things. First, the trade: a search that names one only returns shops that work in it, decided from your product titles rather than a category you pick. Then how closely what you sell matches what they asked for, which is the largest factor by some distance and is measured by comparing the meaning of their words against your products. Then how completely your shop is set up, which counts your logo, tagline, opening hours, published answers, how many of your products carry an image, how many products you list, your recent Instagram posts, and orders you have already completed. Then how near you are, when the search is about a place. In the browsing feed, a signed-in shopper additionally sees more of what their own searches and saved shops suggest they like, less of what they have already been shown, and nothing from shops they have muted. No shop pays for placement in any of this. Nothing here promises you placement, traffic, or sales, and we may reorder, demote, or remove a listing.

Shoppers sign in to search and message shops on the marketplace. When a shopper buys your goods, a service, or a ticket, the sale is between them and your shop, under your own terms. Tend creates the checkout and collects the payment on your behalf as described under Payments and fees below, and is not itself the seller.

Marketplace shoppers and buyers

If you use Tend as a shopper, you sign in to search and chat on the marketplace and to keep your orders and tickets together in one place. When you buy something, whether goods, a service, or an event ticket, your purchase is a contract with the shop you bought from, not with Convect Technologies Ltd, even though Tend collects the payment for the shop. The shop is responsible for what it sells you.

Event tickets carry a Tend service fee, shown at checkout as part of the price. If an order is cancelled or refunded, the shop refunds what you paid for the ticket but the service fee is not returned; the refund email shows the amount kept.

Checkout and order links are unguessable capability links: anyone who holds the link can view that order and pay it, so treat your order links like a password and don't share them. Your statutory rights as a consumer (against the shop, and where applicable against Convect Technologies Ltd) are not affected by these terms. If you have a complaint about a shop you found through Tend, reach us at hello@tendto.you and we'll route it as appropriate.

Beta service

Tend is currently offered as a pre-release beta. The service may be changed, suspended, or withdrawn at any time without notice; features may break, behave incorrectly, or be removed; data is held with reasonable but not extraordinary durability guarantees while in beta. You acknowledge that you're using the service knowing this and accept the increased risk that comes with pre-release software. Don't rely on Tend as your sole record of customer conversations during the beta period.

Your account

You sign in with Instagram, with Google, with Apple, or with an email address and password. You're responsible for keeping your sign-in credentials secure, for the accuracy of any policies, menus, or notes you enter into the app, and, where you connect Instagram, for ensuring you have the right to connect that Instagram account to Tend. If you authorise a teammate to use Tend on your behalf, their actions through the product count as yours.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Use the service to send spam, harassment, deceptive content, unlawful offers, or anything that violates Meta's Platform Terms or applicable law.
• Attempt to access another shop's data, reverse-engineer the service, scrape it, or interfere with its operation.
• Configure automated replies in ways that misrepresent your shop's availability, pricing, or capabilities. You are responsible for what Tend sends on your behalf, the same as for anything you send by hand.
• Use the service in regulated contexts (medical, legal, financial advice; sales of age-restricted goods; etc.) without ensuring your own compliance with the applicable rules.
• List, sell, or take payment for anything you are not lawfully entitled to sell, or misrepresent who you are, where you are, or what you are selling.

AI-generated content

Tend uses third-party AI models to classify DMs and comments, to write replies, to describe your public posts and stories so they can be searched, to answer questions on your storefront, and to run the Tend assistant. AI output can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or inappropriate for the situation; it can misread what a customer wants, or state something that isn't in your products or policies. You acknowledge this is inherent to AI and accept that:

• When auto-reply is on, the bot answers customers on your behalf. You are responsible for those messages as if you had written and sent them yourself.
• You control the automation: auto-reply is off by default, you can block automated replies on any conversation, and you can take over any thread and answer it by hand. The bot also holds a conversation for you when it is unsure.
• Tend makes no representation that AI output will be accurate, suitable, or fit for any particular purpose, and provides no warranty as to its quality.

The Tend assistant

The Tend assistant is an AI agent you talk to in the dashboard, in the app, or over WhatsApp. It can look things up in your shop and make changes to it: products, prices, orders, bookings, events, settings, and the emails your shop sends. Each change is something it asks you to approve, and it shows you what it will do before it does it.

Manual and Auto. On Manual, the assistant does nothing to your shop until you say yes. On Auto, it makes the changes it would have asked about the moment it decides to, and shows them to you as done. That includes changes such as setting a price or a delivery fee, creating an order, turning automatic replies or customer emails on, and marking an order dispatched. Even on Auto it still asks first before anything that removes or cancels something or that cannot be undone, such as sending a message to a customer, refunding, or cancelling an order. You choose the mode, and you can switch back to Manual at any time. What the assistant does on your shop, in either mode, counts as done by you, the same as anything you do by hand.

Its computer. On paid plans the assistant has a computer of its own, with a web browser, that it uses to work on other websites for you: finding things, filling in forms, and using accounts you have signed it in to. On those websites it acts for you, under your sign-in, and:

• You are responsible for what it does there, including anything it submits, buys, books, or agrees to, and for being allowed to use those websites and accounts this way under their own terms. The assistant is instructed to ask you before doing anything a website cannot take back, such as paying or submitting, but that is a safeguard, not a guarantee.
• Do not sign it in to accounts you are not entitled to use, and do not use it to do anything you could not lawfully do yourself, to get around a website's limits or protections, or to send spam.
• Computer time is limited by your plan, counted per calendar month. When the month's hours run out the computer stops until the next month or until you change plan; it is never billed as overage.

You can also schedule work with the assistant, and it will carry it out at the time you set, without you being there. Everything above applies to scheduled work too.

Reviews and other content people post

Buyers can leave a review of an order: a rating, written text, and photos. Reviews are shown to the shop that was bought from and back to the buyer on their own receipt. If you write one, you must own or have the right to post what you upload, it must be your honest account of what actually happened, and it must not be unlawful, abusive, or about anyone other than the transaction. You keep ownership of what you post and grant Convect Technologies Ltd a licence to store, reproduce, and display it inside Tend for the purpose of running the service. A review can be edited for 48 hours after posting.

If you run a shop, you cannot edit or delete a review a customer left you. We can remove content that breaks these terms, and we may act on reports, but we don't vet reviews before they appear and we don't guarantee that any particular review is accurate. Report anything that breaks these rules through the in-product report option or at hello@tendto.you.

Notifications

Tend sends operational notifications about things that happen to you: a sale, a booking, an order paid, dispatched, or refunded. These can arrive by push, email, or WhatsApp. Push needs your device's permission, and every topic can be switched off in Settings. Some messages are part of the service itself and will keep coming while you use it, for example a receipt for an order, a verification code, or a notice about your account. We do not send you marketing email.

Third-party integrations

Some features rely on you connecting third-party accounts to Tend. Today those are:

• Instagram (Meta): the Instagram account your shop runs on, connected via Meta Login. Connecting identifies your shop and reads your public profile and posts; permission to read your DMs and reply on your behalf is asked for separately, at the point you turn on automatic replies.
• Stripe: your Tend subscription billing, and, via Stripe Connect, taking card payments from your own customers and receiving your payouts.
• Paystack: an alternative rail for taking payments from your own customers, through a per-shop subaccount.
• Google Calendar: optional, syncing your bookings into a single dedicated calendar in your Google account.
• Acuity: optional. Your Acuity appointment types, booking questions, and appointments are copied into Tend, and bookings customers make through Tend are placed on your Acuity account. Appointments already copied stay in your Tend records if you disconnect.
• Shopify: optional, a read-only sync of your product catalogue (titles, images, prices). We do not read your Shopify orders or customers.
• Eventbrite: optional, importing your Eventbrite events as listings.
• Packlink and An Post: optional, for buying delivery labels for the orders you fulfil, on your own account with that carrier or broker.

When you connect one of these:

• You authorise Tend, acting on your behalf, to use that third party's API for the feature it powers. The scope of access is shown to you on the third party's consent screen when you connect.
• You remain subject to the third party's own terms (the Meta Platform Terms, the Stripe Services Agreement, Paystack's terms, Google's API terms, and so on). Their behaviour, availability, and pricing are outside our control.
• You can disconnect at any time from Settings in Tend, or by revoking access on the third party's own dashboard. On disconnect we stop using the integration and delete the corresponding tokens we hold. Data already written to those platforms remains under your control there.
• Specifically for Google Calendar: Tend creates one dedicated calendar called “Tend” inside your Google account and only writes bookings into that calendar. We never read or write your primary calendar or any other calendar you own or share. Our use of Google API data is subject to the Limited Use requirements of the Google API Services User Data Policy. See the Privacy policy for the full disclosure.

We no longer offer SumUp for new payments. Shops take customer payments through Stripe or Paystack.

Some marketplace listings and imported items link out to an external platform: for example a Booksy or Acuity booking page, a Shopify storefront, or an Eventbrite event. When a shopper follows one of those links, any booking or purchase they complete there is entirely between the shopper, the shop, and that platform; Tend is not involved in it and is not a party to it.

If you create or authorise an API token, or connect Tend to an external tool or assistant (for example over MCP), that token acts with your own access to your account: whatever you can see and change, it can see and change. You are responsible for anything done through it, the same as if you had done it yourself, and for what the tool you connected does with the data it reads. Revoke a connection from Settings at any time.

Owner calls

Tend can call you when the bot is unsure how to answer a customer, ask you the question, listen to your answer, and turn it into the customer-facing reply. These calls come to you over WhatsApp. To set this up you verify a phone number with a one-time code we send over WhatsApp or by SMS; by verifying the number you consent to receiving these calls and to our recording and transcribing them for the duration of each call. You can pause owner calls at any time, set quiet hours, or remove your number to opt out entirely. Your phone number is never shared with customers and is never used for marketing.

Your customers' data

Customer messages and orders routed through Tend contain personal data of third parties (your customers). For data-protection purposes, you are the data controller for that content and Tend acts as a processor on your behalf. You're responsible for having a lawful basis to process customer messages and order details (typically the customer initiating contact with, or buying from, your shop) and for any privacy notices you owe customers under applicable law. Where you add your own checkout questions, you are responsible for what you ask: collect only what you actually need and are lawfully entitled to collect. A data processing addendum (DPA) is available on request.

Messages you send your customers

You can email your own customers through Tend: messages tied to a purchase or booking, such as a reminder before an appointment or event or a follow-up afterwards, and one-off emails to a group of your past customers chosen by what they bought or booked and when. You write them and choose who gets them and when; Tend sends them to the address on the order or booking, under your shop's name, from a no-reply address on our domain.

They are your messages. You are the sender for the purposes of email and marketing law, and you are responsible for having a lawful basis to send each one (for an email that promotes your shop, that usually means the person bought from you, was given a chance to opt out, and has not), for what they say, and for honouring a request to stop. There is no automatic unsubscribe link today, so if a recipient asks you to stop, remove them from what you send; if they ask us, we will pass the request on to you and expect you to act on it. Do not use these emails to contact people who have not bought or booked from you, or for anything unlawful. We may suspend the feature for a shop that does, and we may suspend it where the sending reputation of our domain is at risk.

Payments and fees

Your Tend subscription. Plans and prices are shown on our pricing page and at sign-up: a Free plan without the AI features, and paid plans that include a monthly allowance of AI drafts, owner calls, call minutes, and hours on the assistant's computer. A new shop starts on a free trial of a paid plan, with no card needed, and moves to the Free plan when the trial ends unless you choose a paid plan. The assistant's computer is available on paid plans only, not during a trial. Paid plans are billed monthly in advance through Stripe. If you turn on overage billing, usage beyond your allowance is billed at the per-unit rates on the pricing page at the end of each billing period; if you don't, usage beyond the allowance is not billed. Computer hours are never billed as overage. By providing payment information you authorise us, through Stripe, to charge your chosen payment method for the recurring fees and any overage you have turned on.

You can change plan at any time; the change takes effect straight away and is prorated. If you cancel, your plan runs to the end of the period you have paid for, and you can undo the cancellation until then. If a payment fails, the AI features stop until it is paid; the rest of your shop keeps working. Fees are non-refundable except where required by law, though we may at our discretion grant pro-rated credits for extended service unavailability. We'll give at least 30 days' notice before raising prices on an existing plan.

How your customers' money moves. When a customer pays for an order, Tend collects that payment on its own payment account, as your agent, and then pays it out to you. This applies to every order: goods, services, rentals, and tickets. Your shop stays the seller, and the sale contract is between you and the buyer. Tend is not the seller and is not a party to that sale, but it does hold the money in between. By connecting a payout account you instruct us to hold and pay out that money as these terms describe.

When you get paid. Money from each paid order is credited to your Tend wallet, less the payment processor's fee and any Tend platform fee. A credit becomes available to withdraw 72 hours after the order is paid. You can withdraw your available balance whenever you choose, and every Monday we send whatever is available automatically. A withdrawal sends the whole available balance in that currency, to the payout account connected at the time: through Stripe, to your connected Stripe account, or through Paystack, as a bank transfer to your Paystack payout bank account. How long it then takes to reach your bank depends on the payment provider and your bank.

What is deducted. The payment processor's own fee on each order's charge is yours to bear and is deducted from that order's credit (the share of it that relates to a refundable security deposit is not charged to you). On top of that, Tend charges a service fee on event tickets only, currently 1% of the ticket price. Goods, services, rentals, delivery, and deposits carry no Tend fee: collecting the money changes when you are paid, not how much. We pay Paystack's transfer fee on withdrawals ourselves.

Topping up your wallet. You can add your own money to your wallet, by card or by bank transfer, for example to cover a refund. Any card fee for a top-up is added on top of the amount and paid by you. Top-ups carry no Tend fee and are available straight away.

Refunds. Refunds are issued by the shop, at the shop's discretion and under the shop's own refund policy, and can be for a whole order or for individual items in it. A refund made through Tend is paid out of the money we hold for you in that currency: first that order's own credit, then your other credits, oldest first, whether or not they are available to withdraw yet. If what we hold does not cover the whole refund, nothing is refunded until you choose: refund the customer yourself, or top up your wallet and refund through Tend. When a whole order is cancelled or refunded after its money has been paid out to you, we may also recover that payout from your connected account where the payment rail allows it. Tend does not refund customers out of its own funds, and the payment processor's fee on a refunded sale is not returned to you. The ticket service fee is not refunded to the buyer.

Chargebacks. When a buyer's bank opens a chargeback, the disputed amount is taken from the money we hold for you from the moment it opens, in the same way as a refund. If the chargeback is decided in your favour, the money is credited back to your wallet.

Deposits. Where you rent something out, you can set a refundable security deposit, which is charged to the customer as its own line on the order and is not sale revenue. We hold the deposit until you settle it; whether and when it is returned, and what may be withheld from it, is between you and your customer under your own terms, and any amount you keep is credited to your wallet without a Tend fee. Where you take a booking deposit (part of the price paid up front), it is kept if the booking is cancelled, unless you choose to refund it.

Shipping labels. Delivery labels are bought from your own connected carrier or broker account (for example Packlink, or An Post) and are billed to the payment method you hold with that provider. The delivery fee you charge your customer is set by you and is independent of what the label actually costs. Tend is not the carrier, and delivery and fulfilment remain your responsibility.

Your obligations. Because we handle money on your behalf, you agree to keep your payout account details accurate, to give us the information a payment provider or the law requires of us to keep paying you, and not to use Tend to take payment for anything prohibited by Stripe, Paystack, or applicable law. We may hold money in your wallet beyond the usual 72 hours, or reverse a withdrawal, where we reasonably suspect fraud, a chargeback risk, or a breach of these terms, and we will tell you why.

Events and ticketing

When you sell event tickets through Tend, you are the event organiser and the seller of record for those tickets. You are responsible for the event actually happening as described, for admitting valid ticket-holders at the door, and for your own cancellation and refund policy. Tend provides the ticketing tools (the checkout, the QR-code tickets, Apple and Google Wallet passes, and door check-in) and collects ticket payments on your behalf as described in Payments and fees above. A platform fee applies to tickets only (see Payments and fees above).

If you cancel an event, you must refund buyers according to your policy, and where you have already withdrawn that money, settling those refunds is your responsibility. Events you import from Eventbrite are different: those listings link out to Eventbrite, and tickets for them are sold on Eventbrite under Eventbrite's own terms, not through Tend.

Referrals

Tend runs a referral programme. If we invite you into it, the rate, the qualifying conditions, how long a commission runs, and any cap are agreed with you individually and recorded against your referral code; they are not promised by this page. Referral earnings are paid to your own connected Stripe account, or otherwise as agreed. We can withhold or reverse a payment for a referral that turns out to be fraudulent, self-referred, duplicated, or otherwise not genuine, and we can pause or end the programme, or your place in it, at any time. Earnings already properly accrued at that point are still paid. Don't advertise a referral link with spam, misleading claims about what Tend does, or paid search on our own brand name. As a referrer you see how many shops you referred and what you earned, and never their customers, messages, or sales.

If you signed up through someone's referral link, any discount you were shown at sign-up applies for the period stated there. The referrer has no rights over your account.

Mobile app

Tend is also available as a mobile app, and these same terms govern your use of it. Your app-store provider's own terms apply on top of these. The app may update itself over the air, receiving new code from us without a separate app-store review. Downloading the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play does not make Apple or Google a party to these terms.

Termination

You can stop using the service at any time by disconnecting any linked accounts (for example revoking Instagram authorisation in your IG settings) or by emailing us to close your account. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these terms or that we reasonably believe pose a risk to the service, other customers, or third parties.

If we restrict, suspend, or close a shop's account, or remove its listing, we will tell you why, in writing, at the address on the account. We will do that before it takes effect where we reasonably can, and straight afterwards where we had to act immediately, for example on suspected fraud, a legal obligation, or a risk to other people. You can contest the decision by replying to that notice or writing to hello@tendto.you, and a person will look at it again. On termination we still pay out the money we hold for you, once it is available and less any refunds and chargebacks still to be covered, and you remain responsible for orders taken before it.

Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Convect Technologies Ltd, its directors, employees, and contractors from and against any claims, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to: (a) the messages your shop sends, including any the bot sends automatically on your behalf and any emails you send your customers, and what the Tend assistant does for you, on your shop or on other websites; (b) your use of the service in breach of these terms or applicable law; (c) the policies, menus, products, or other content you enter into the app; and (d) any dispute between you and a customer of your shop, including any sale, booking, event, refund, or chargeback.

Disclaimers

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including (without limitation) implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or uninterrupted availability. Instagram is a third-party platform; we depend on Meta's APIs and their behaviour can change without notice. We don't guarantee that AI replies will be accurate, that the assistant will do what you meant, that messages or notifications will be delivered, or that the service will be free from errors, bugs, or downtime.

Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Convect Technologies Ltd's aggregate liability for any claim arising out of or related to the service is limited to the greater of (a) the fees you paid for the service in the 12 months preceding the claim, or (b) one hundred euros (€100). This limitation does not apply to money Tend has collected from your customers on your behalf and owes you. We will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary, or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost goodwill, or business interruption, even if we've been advised of the possibility of those damages. These limitations apply to the fullest extent permitted by law and survive termination of these terms.

Governing law & disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of Ireland, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. The courts of Ireland have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or related to these terms or the service, except that nothing here prevents either party from seeking injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction. Consumer rights protections that cannot be waived under your local law are not affected by this clause.

Miscellaneous

These terms are the entire agreement between you and Convect Technologies Ltd about the service and supersede any prior agreement on the same subject. If any provision is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in effect. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later. You may not assign these terms without our consent; we may assign them as part of a merger or sale of the business. Nothing in these terms creates an agency, partnership, or joint venture between us, except the limited authority you give Tend to collect payments as your agent under Payments and fees.

Changes

We'll update these terms occasionally and bump the “Last updated” date above. Material changes will be communicated to active accounts before they take effect. Continued use after the effective date counts as acceptance.

Contact

Questions or notices under these terms can be sent to hello@tendto.you.