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Gangway

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Terms of service

Terms of service

Last updated: July 31, 2026

1. The deal

You sign up. We give you the service described on the marketing page of whichever product you signed up for (Placet, Veneer, Cordon, Sluice, Duehatch, or Gangway). You pay for it — a subscription, prepaid credits, or both, depending on the product. The terms below cover the rest.

Who these products are for. All six are built and priced for business use — agencies, freelancers working for clients, and in-house teams. We expect you to be signing up in the course of a trade, business, craft or profession, and the terms below are written on that basis.

We don't gate signup on it, so if you are a consumer within the meaning of your local law, you may still use the service and your non-waivable consumer rights apply in full — they override anything in these terms that would give you less. Every clause where that matters says so explicitly: liability (§8), credit refunds (§6), changes to these terms (§10) and governing law (§9).

2. Your account

You're responsible for what happens under your account. Don't share sign-in links. If your account is compromised, email support@porthatch.app — we'll invalidate active sessions and help you regain control.

You must be 16+ to use the service.

3. Acceptable use

You may not:

  • run the service against people who haven't given you permission to (e.g. uploading email lists to Sluice that you didn't collect with opt-in consent);
  • attempt to access workspaces you don't own;
  • reverse-engineer, scrape, or otherwise abuse the service in ways that materially impact other tenants;
  • use the service to send spam, harass, defraud, or commit any unlawful act.

Sluice-specific: bulk email verification is intended for cleaning your own lists. Using Sluice to verify lists that you sourced without consent is misuse and may result in account termination.

Duehatch-specific: reminder emails are sent on your behalf to your own customers about invoices they genuinely owe you. You are responsible for having a lawful basis to contact each recipient and for the accuracy of the invoices you chase. Using Duehatch to pressure people who are not your customers, or over amounts that are disputed in bad faith, is misuse.

Gangway-specific: Gangway is a tool-assisted accessibility audit. It identifies issues that automated checks and structured review can find; it is not legal advice, and no automated tool can detect every barrier or guarantee compliance with WCAG, the European Accessibility Act, the ADA, or any other law. Compliance decisions remain yours (and your counsel's).

Sanctions: we do not offer the service to persons or entities located in, or ordinarily resident in, territories subject to comprehensive sanctions, or to sanctioned persons — including Russia and Belarus. Signing up is a representation that this doesn't apply to you, and we enforce the restriction ourselves on becoming aware of a breach. Our Merchant of Record (Paddle) screens paid transactions at checkout, which covers subscriptions and credit purchases — but not the free sample report, and not the trial credits described in §6. Accounts that evade these restrictions may be terminated and unused balances forfeited.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these rules. If we do, we'll tell you why and give you a reasonable window to download your data (Sluice results download from the dashboard; see Privacy Policy §6 for data requests).

4. Your content

You retain ownership of everything you upload, including:

  • Placet: posts you upload for client approval
  • Veneer / Cordon: the Airtable / Notion databases you connect (we proxy them — we don't store the content)
  • Sluice: email lists you upload
  • Duehatch: the invoice and customer records synced from the Stripe account you connect, and the reminder emails sent on your behalf
  • Gangway: the sites you submit for scanning and the resulting accessibility reports

By using the service, you grant us a non-exclusive licence to host, process, and display that content to the people you choose to share it with. We don't use your content to train AI models or repackage it into anything we sell to third parties.

Personal data you put into the service. Some of that content is other people's personal data: a Sluice list, a Duehatch customer record, a Placet reviewer's email, a Veneer or Cordon portal user. For all of it, you are the controller and we are your processor — see Privacy policy §1a. You warrant that:

  • you are entitled to hold that data and to have us process it on your behalf, on a lawful basis you can evidence;
  • you have given the people concerned the information Articles 13–14 GDPR require, including that a processor acting for you may hold or contact them;
  • for Sluice specifically: every address you upload was collected with opt-in consent or another lawful basis, and you are not using verification to launder a list you acquired otherwise;
  • for Duehatch specifically: every recipient genuinely owes the invoice being chased, and you have a lawful basis to contact them about it.

We process this data only on your documented instructions. If a claim reaches us because a warranty above wasn't true, that's on you.

5. Service availability

We aim for high availability, but we don't promise a specific uptime in these terms — that's reserved for a separate SLA on the Enterprise plan once it exists. For the standard plans we operate the service in good faith; if it's down for more than 4 consecutive hours within a billing period, email us and we'll refund that billing period's charge in full, per the Refund policy. If you bought Sluice credit packs and have no subscription, there is no billing period to refund: instead we return every credit spent on a run the outage disrupted, and if the outage leaves you unable to use what you bought, we refund the unused balance of that pack.

Scheduled maintenance gets announced at least 24h in advance. Emergency maintenance for security or stability happens whenever it has to.

6. Billing

  • Subscriptions and credit packs are sold through Paddle, our reseller and Merchant of Record. Paddle appears on your statement, handles payment and tax, and issues your invoice. Refunds are governed by our Refund policy.
  • New Sluice accounts start with a free allotment of trial credits, no card required, and a 7-day window to use them. When the window closes you can't start new verification runs until you buy a credit pack or subscribe. Results you already produced stay downloadable — the gate never blocks reads. Buying anything ends the trial window; purchased credits don't expire, and trial credits still in your balance become usable again alongside them.
  • Sluice credits are prepaid. Unused credits are refundable in full within 14 days of purchase — email us, per the Refund policy. Credits already spent on completed verifications are non-refundable, because the work and the per-verification vendor cost have already happened. Rows the cascade can't grade are the exception: they carry the unknown verdict in your downloaded CSV, land in the recheck segment in the dashboard, and their credit returns to your balance automatically — same rows, two labels, no action from you. If you are a consumer, any wider statutory withdrawal right you have applies on top of this and is not limited by it.
  • You can cancel a subscription at any time from /app/settings → "manage subscription" (the Paddle customer portal). Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period.
  • We don't issue partial-month refunds for cancellation alone — your workspace stays open until the period ends.

If a subscription payment fails, the account moves to a past-due state. Existing data and results stay accessible (the asymmetric gate described in the product docs), but you can't start new runs until the payment is resolved.

7. Termination

Either party can terminate the agreement at any time. If you terminate, you stop being billed and can request deletion of your data as described in the Privacy Policy (§5–6). If we terminate (only for cause — unpaid bills or rule violations), we give you a reasonable opportunity to download your data first.

8. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our liability for any claim arising from the service is capped at the fees you paid us in the 12 months preceding the claim. We're not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages — lost profits, lost data (beyond reasonable backup operations), business interruption.

This doesn't limit liability for things that can't be limited under applicable law: gross negligence, wilful misconduct, fraud, death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or any liability that can't be excluded under consumer-protection law.

9. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of the jurisdiction in which Porthatch is established. Disputes go to the courts of that jurisdiction unless you have non-waivable rights to use your local courts as a consumer.

Choosing that law doesn't take anything away from you: if you are a consumer, the mandatory protections of the country you habitually live in keep applying, and nothing in this section overrides them.

10. Changes

We may update these terms. Material changes get a 30-day email notice; your continued use after the effective date counts as acceptance. Non-material changes (typo fixes, clarifications that don't affect your rights) take effect immediately on publication.

If you are a consumer, continued use is not how we treat you as having accepted a material change. A change that affects price, or the rights you have under these terms, takes effect for you only if you accept it expressly. If you don't, you may terminate before the effective date and we refund the unused remainder of anything you've already paid for — pro-rated for a subscription, in full for an unused credit balance. Until you accept or terminate, the terms you signed up under keep applying to you.

11. Contact

support@porthatch.app for anything related to these terms.