Terms of Service

Shuli is software for running a shul: minyan times and zmanim, announcements, chat, shiurim, giving, sponsorships and seats. A shul signs up, invites its members, and runs its own community inside it.

TODO(eli): Name the legal entity that offers this service and its registered address. Everything below says “Shuli”, which is a product name and not a party to a contract.

You need an account to take part. Use a real name — your shul will see it, and so will anyone you post to. Keep your sign-in to yourself; anything done from your account is treated as done by you.

Belonging to a shul on Shuli does not by itself make you a member of that shul in any other sense. Membership, dues and standing are the shul’s own affair.

Anyone with an account can create a shul. By creating one you confirm that you are authorised to act for that community — a shul is not a hobby project, and creating one puts you in charge of other people’s information.

Whoever creates a shul becomes its first admin, and can appoint others. A shul must always have at least one admin; the software will not let the last one be removed.

Creating a shul that impersonates a real congregation, or using a shul to hold data for something that is not a community you are part of, is not permitted, and is grounds for removal.

A shul’s content is the shul’s. Its announcements, shiurim, records, schedule and member list belong to it, not to Shuli. Shuli holds them to run the service and does not sell them or use them to advertise.

What you post is yours. You keep whatever rights you have in what you write, record or upload. You give Shuli the permission it needs to store your posts and show them to the people you posted them to — that is what publishing to a channel is — and nothing beyond that.

Shuli’s software is Shuli’s. The service, its design and its code stay its own. You may not copy it, resell access to it, or take it apart to build a competing one.

TODO(eli): Counsel to draft the operative content licence — scope, duration, sublicensing to the hosting providers, and what survives an account being deleted. The paragraph above states the intent and is not a licence grant.

Every shul’s community follows the community guidelines, and a shul may add rules of its own. On top of those, and everywhere on Shuli:

• Nothing unlawful, and nothing that harasses, threatens or defames a person.
• Nothing sexually explicit or violent, and nothing inappropriate for a community that includes children.
• No spam, no unsolicited advertising, and no using a shul’s member list to market to it.
• Do not post another person’s contact details or private information without their permission.
• Do not attempt to reach another shul’s data, probe the service for weaknesses without permission, scrape it, or run automated traffic against it.
• Do not use Shuli to collect money you are not entitled to collect.

If you find a security problem, report it rather than exploit it — eli@elivated.com.

Each shul’s admins moderate their own community. A report filed on a message goes to that shul’s admins and to nobody else; they can remove content, mute a member so they can read but not post, or remove a member entirely. Any member can also block another, which hides that person’s messages from them at once.

Shuli does not read a shul’s conversations to police them. It may act on the service as a whole — for unlawful content, abuse of the platform, or a shul that will not moderate itself.

TODO(eli): Decide and state the platform-level enforcement path: what Shuli may suspend, on what notice, who decides, and how a shul appeals. Both app stores expect a named process, and the pilot is when somebody will first need it.

Your shul is the merchant. Each shul connects its own Stripe account, and donations, pledges, sponsorships, tickets and seat payments settle into that account. Shuli is not the merchant of record, does not hold your funds, and does not advance them. Refunds are issued by the shul.

Stripe’s terms apply. Accepting payments means agreeing to Stripe’s own agreement for connected accounts, in addition to these terms. Stripe decides who it will serve and on what conditions; Shuli cannot override that.

There is a platform fee. A small percentage of money that moves through Shuli is taken as a platform fee, on top of whatever Stripe charges the shul to process the card. It is 0% during the pilot and settles at 1.5–2% afterwards; the current figure is on the pricing page, which is part of these terms. Where donor-covers-fees is on, a giver is shown the covered amount before they pay.

Receipts and tax are the shul’s. Shuli records what was given and can print a statement, but whether a gift is deductible, and what a valid receipt must say, is between the shul and its own advisers.

TODO(eli): Confirm with counsel how the platform fee should be described for tax and charity-regulation purposes, whether Shuli needs to say anything about money transmission, and what to say about chargebacks and disputes — which land on the shul’s Stripe account and have no clause here at all.

Plans and prices are on the pricing page. There is a free tier for small minyanim with a member cap, and paid plans start with a 60-day trial of everything, with no card charged until it ends.

Subscriptions run month to month with no contract. A shul cancels itself from the billing portal and returns to the free tier; its data stays where it is.

TODO(eli): Decide the refund position for a part-month and for an annual plan if one is ever offered, how much notice is given before a price change, and what happens to a shul that is over the free tier’s member cap when it cancels. None of these are answered by the software today.

Shuli aims to be there when your shul needs it, but it is offered without a guaranteed level of service. Features are added, changed and occasionally removed.

Two deliberate behaviours are worth knowing about, because they look like faults and are not. Notifications are held from candle lighting until havdalah and are delivered afterwards. And no changes are deployed during Shabbos, Yom Tov, or the weeks around Tishrei — which means a non-urgent fix may wait.

Zmanim and the Shabbos gate are computed from the coordinates and the minhag a shul enters. They are checked carefully, but they are a convenience, not a psak: a shul is responsible for its own times, and should check them against its luach.

You can stop using Shuli whenever you like. A shul can cancel its subscription itself, and members can leave a shul by asking its admins to remove them.

Shuli may suspend or end access for a serious or repeated breach of these terms — for unlawful use, for abuse of other people, or for non-payment.

TODO(eli): Decide what notice a shul gets before suspension, how long its data is kept afterwards, and how it gets a copy of that data on the way out. The independence commitment on /trust promises data that exports freely; the exit path needs to be real before that promise is tested. There is no self-serve account deletion in the product today.

The intent, in plain words: Shuli is provided as it is, without promises that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and its liability if something goes wrong is meant to be limited to what is reasonable for a service at this price — while not attempting to exclude anything the law does not allow to be excluded.

TODO(eli): This is the section that must be written by counsel, not by anyone else. It needs the operative warranty disclaimer, the limitation of liability and its cap, the carve-outs that cannot be limited, and an indemnity from shuls for the content and conduct of their own communities. The paragraph above is a statement of intent and is deliberately not drafted as an enforceable clause.

TODO(eli): Blank on purpose. Pick the governing law and the forum, decide whether disputes go to arbitration and whether class actions are waived, and have counsel draft the clause. Guessing a jurisdiction here would be worse than leaving it empty, because a wrong one reads as a real one.

When these terms change in substance, the date at the top changes with them.

TODO(eli): Decide how a material change is announced and how much notice is given before it takes effect — and whether continued use counts as acceptance, which is the mechanism the signup lines currently assume.

Questions about these terms: eli@elivated.com.

TODO(eli): Replace with the legal entity’s name, registered address and a contact address for notices.