Terms of Service

These terms are between BCK Systems, which operates Ringdown, and the business buying the service. You accept them by submitting the intake, by paying an invoice, or by letting Ringdown answer a call on your line, whichever happens first. The person accepting must be authorized to bind the business and to make decisions about its phone number. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, "you" means that company.

Ringdown is a configured AI receptionist that answers calls to a number you forward to us. Depending on how you set it up, it greets callers, answers questions from material you gave us, screens by service area and job type, captures details, checks availability and books appointments in a system you connect, sends confirmation texts, and transfers or escalates calls to people you nominate. It runs on third-party voice, language model and telephony platforms, listed in our Privacy Policy.

It is not an emergency service. It is not a licensed professional of any kind. It is not a substitute for your own judgment about a customer, a job or a case. And it is not a guarantee of business: nothing here promises that any call becomes an appointment or that any appointment becomes revenue.

Nothing Ringdown says on a call creates a professional relationship or constitutes professional advice.

We build your receptionist from what you give us and hand you a private test number. You are expected to call it, try to break it, and tell us what to fix. Your number stays with your carrier and untouched until you decide to forward it. Forwarding is your action, not ours, and the moment you forward it you are confirming the line is fit for your business. If you skip testing, that is your choice and the risk is yours.

Most of what can go wrong on a phone line is decided before the phone rings, which is why this list matters.

Setup is a one-time $500, invoiced when we begin building and not refundable once the line is built and delivered for testing. Monthly plans are billed in advance and renew automatically on the same day each month. Each plan includes a set number of answering minutes; minutes count only while Ringdown is connected to a call, and additional minutes bill at your plan’s published overage rate on the following invoice. Money-back guarantee: if you tell us within thirty days of your line going live that Ringdown is not working out for your business, we will refund that month’s subscription fee in full; this is the one exception to section 10’s no-refund rule. The guarantee applies once, to your first month of service only. The setup fee remains non-refundable as above. Refunds are issued to the original payment method. Prices exclude tax. Invoices unpaid after fifteen days may carry interest at the lower of 1.5% a month or the maximum the law allows, and we may suspend the line after written notice. We may change prices with thirty days’ notice, effective at your next renewal.

The agreement runs month to month from your first paid month. Either of us may end it with thirty days’ written notice, and service continues through that notice period; fees already paid are not refunded and the final period is billed in full. We may suspend or terminate immediately, without the notice period, for non-payment after warning, for use that breaks section 12, or where continuing would expose us to legal risk. On termination we stop answering, you move your forwarding back, and you have thirty days to export your data as described in the Privacy Policy.

Every call is recorded and transcribed, and the greeting tells the caller so. That notice exists to keep you on the right side of all-party consent states and of the growing set of state laws about disclosing automated systems. You agree not to ask us to remove it, and you agree that if a caller objects the receptionist will offer a person instead. You are responsible for any additional notice your jurisdiction or your profession requires. If a caller asks us to delete their recording we will, and we will tell you.

You will not use Ringdown, and you will not ask us to configure it, to do any of the following.

If you ask us to answer in a cloned voice, you represent that the voice is yours or that you hold written permission from the speaker for this exact use, and you agree to tell us immediately if that permission is withdrawn. You indemnify us against any claim arising from a voice you asked us to use. We use the voice only on your line, we do not license it to anyone, and we delete it on request.

Ringdown is general business software. If you are a law firm, a healthcare or dental practice, a mental health provider, an insurance agency, a lender or a childcare center, you are responsible for deciding whether an AI receptionist is appropriate in your setting and for configuring it accordingly. We are not a HIPAA business associate and Ringdown must not be used to create, receive, maintain or transmit protected health information unless we have first signed a business associate agreement. Talk to us before you put it on a clinical intake line.

Ringdown depends on services we do not control, including the voice platform, the language models, the phone carrier, and any system you ask us to write into. Their outages become ours, and their terms govern what they may do with content passing through them. The current position is summarised in our Privacy Policy and in section 17. We may change which model or provider powers your line in order to improve quality, reliability or cost, and where a change is likely to be noticeable on your calls we will give you at least fourteen days’ notice unless a security or vendor issue forces us to move sooner. A model change is not a service failure and is not a breach of these terms.

We aim to answer every call and we do not promise perfection. There is no service level agreement here, no uptime guarantee and no credit scheme. Carrier outages, platform incidents, misheard callers, connected systems that stop responding and maintenance all happen. Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by events outside its reasonable control.

As between you and us, you own your business information, your uploaded material, your call recordings, your transcripts, your call records and your brand, and you grant us the licence we need to run the service and to build and improve your line. One limit on that is worth stating plainly rather than burying. Your calls are processed by the third-party platforms named in section 15, and under those platforms’ own terms they retain a broad, perpetual, sub-licensable licence to use content passing through them in order to operate and improve their services. We cannot grant you rights we do not hold ourselves, so your ownership is subject to those platform licences. What we do control, we have set in your favour: we have opted out of model training on our platform accounts, we configure the shortest retention your setup allows, and we delete your data on request. We own Ringdown: the software, the configuration templates, the prompt engineering, the tooling and everything we develop while delivering the service, including improvements suggested by working with you. You may not resell the service or expose it to others as your own product without our written agreement. If you send us feedback we may use it freely.

Each of us will protect the other’s non-public information with at least reasonable care, use it only to perform this agreement, and not disclose it except to people who need it and are under similar obligations. This does not cover information that is public, already known, independently developed, or required to be disclosed by law, and it survives the end of the agreement by three years.

You will defend and indemnify us against third-party claims arising from your business information and uploaded material, from your instructions about how the receptionist should behave, from a voice you asked us to clone, from your compliance with the laws of your industry, from calls or texts you asked us to make, and from your breach of section 12. We will defend and indemnify you against third-party claims that the Ringdown software itself infringes a US intellectual property right, provided you tell us promptly, let us control the defence and cooperate. That indemnity does not cover claims arising from your material, from your configuration instructions, from outputs generated in response to your callers, from use that breaks these terms, or from any feature we described as beta or experimental. Accuracy and reliance claims are handled by sections 4, 19 and 20, not by indemnity.

These terms are governed by the laws of California without regard to conflict of laws rules. Before filing anything, both of us agree to try to resolve a dispute by talking, in good faith, for thirty days. If that fails, any dispute will be resolved by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Rules, in Riverside County, California, or in either party’s discretion in small claims court where the claim qualifies. Each of us waives a jury trial and agrees to bring claims only individually and not as a class or representative action. Either party may seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property or confidential information.

We may update these terms. If a change is material we will email the address on your account at least thirty days before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after the effective date means you accept the new version. If you do not, you may cancel under section 10.

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy and SMS Consent page, are the entire agreement between us and replace anything discussed beforehand. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest survives. Failing to enforce something is not a waiver of it. You may not assign this agreement without our written consent; we may assign it to a successor in a merger or sale. Nothing here creates a partnership, an agency or an employment relationship, and there are no third-party beneficiaries.

These are the terms of the messaging program itself, for the caller who receives a text as much as for the client whose line sent it. Program name: Ringdown Appointment Confirmations. What it is: when you call a phone line answered by a Ringdown AI receptionist — a subscribing business’s line, or Ringdown’s own demonstration line — verbally book an appointment, and give the receptionist your mobile number, we text you about that booking: the confirmation, a reminder shortly before the appointment, a notice when the technician or driver is on the way, and a message if the appointment is changed. Message frequency: typically two to four messages per booking. Every message concerns a booking you made on the call. No recurring subscription messages and no marketing messages. Message and data rates may apply. Opt out: reply STOP to any message and the texts stop permanently. Help: reply HELP to any message, or email us at the address below. Consent is optional and is not a condition of booking or of any purchase; a caller who declines the text still gets the appointment. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages. Supported on major US carriers, and capabilities vary by carrier. Confirmations sent from a demonstration line are labelled as demonstrations and confirm nothing real.