Legal

Terms of Service

Effective September 13, 2026

1. Who We Are, and What These Terms Cover

Bao Budget is a personal finance application that consolidates your accounts, categorizes your spending, tracks your goals, and reports your progress over time.

These Terms of Service ("Terms") constitute an agreement between you and NAS Innovation LLC, a Massachusetts limited liability company ("Bao Budget," "we," "us"). They govern your use of the Bao Budget website, web app, and mobile apps, and everything they include (together, the "Service").

Our Privacy Policy, U.S. State Privacy Notice, GLBA/Regulation P Privacy Notice, Subscription & Billing Terms, and Acceptable Use Policy are incorporated into, and form part of, this agreement. Where the Subscription & Billing Terms state something more specific about payment than these Terms do, the Subscription & Billing Terms govern.

2. Acceptance of These Terms

You agree to these Terms by creating an account or using the Service. If you do not agree to these Terms, you may not use the Service.

If you use Bao Budget on behalf of someone else — an organization, or another person's household finances — you represent that you have the authority to accept these Terms on their behalf.

3. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old to create or use a Bao Budget account. By creating an account, you represent and warrant that you are 18 or older, that you are able to enter into a binding contract in the jurisdiction where you live, and that you are not barred from using the Service under applicable law.

Bao Budget is not intended for, and may not be used by, children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child under 13 has created an account, email privacy@baobudget.com and we will delete the account and its data.

The Service is offered only to users located in the United States (see §23).

4. Your Account and Account Security

You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account. You agree to:

  • use an email address you control and a password you do not use for any other service;
  • enable multi-factor authentication, which we support through authenticator apps, backup codes, and passkeys;
  • keep your backup codes safe and confidential, since they can be used to access your account; and
  • notify us at legal@baobudget.com if you believe someone else has gained access to your account.

You must not share your account or allow anyone else to use your credentials. We may suspend an account we reasonably believe has been compromised, in order to protect you.

5. Connecting a Financial Account

You may add your financial accounts to Bao Budget in one of two ways: by entering them manually, or by connecting them through a bank data aggregator.

If you connect a financial institution, you will be directed to a secure flow hosted by Quiltt, our bank data aggregator, where you sign in directly with your financial institution.

  • We never see, receive, or store your bank username, password, or one-time codes. That information is transmitted to your institution through the aggregator, not through us.
  • By completing that flow, you give your express written consent — to us and to Quiltt — to access, retrieve, and use the account data described in the flow and in our Privacy Policy, on your behalf, for the purpose of providing the Service to you.
  • Quiltt's own terms and privacy notice also apply to its handling of that data.
  • Anything we derive from your connected account data is used solely for your benefit. We do not use it to build aggregate benchmarks, industry datasets, or models for any other purpose without asking you first.

You may withdraw this authorization at any time. Disconnect an institution in Settings, or delete your account (§16). When you disconnect, we request that the aggregator revoke our access to that institution. We do so on a best-effort basis; if the aggregator or your institution is unavailable at that time, the revocation may need to be retried, or completed through your institution's own portal. You may also revoke access directly with your financial institution and, where offered, through the aggregator's own portal.

Transaction history already synced to your Bao Budget account remains in your account after you disconnect, so your history and charts are preserved. Deleting your account (§16) removes it.

Some institutions charge a fee for this connection; others do not. That is a matter between you and your institution.

6. Scope of Bank Connectivity

As of the effective date of these Terms:

  • Our access is read-only. We read balances, transactions, holdings, and similar account details.
  • We do not initiate any transaction, payment, or transfer. Bao Budget currently has no ability to move your money — not between your accounts, not to us, and not to any third party.
  • We do not act on your behalf with your financial institution. We will not open, close, or modify an account, contact your institution as you, or authorize anything in your name.
  • We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it for advertising.

If we intend to do anything outside this list, we will ask for your consent first, as a separate step, and you may decline.

7. Bao Budget Is Not a Bank

Bao Budget is not a bank, credit union, or money transmitter.

  • We do not, and will not, hold, move, or have custody of your money. There is no Bao Budget balance, wallet, or account that holds funds.
  • Nothing in Bao Budget is FDIC-insured or NCUA-insured, because there is nothing here to insure. Any deposit insurance applicable to your money applies at your financial institution, on its own terms.
  • Balances shown in Bao Budget are a read-only representation of accounts held elsewhere. They are information about your money, not your money itself.

8. No Financial, Investment, or Tax Advice

Bao Budget provides information and tools. It does not provide advice about what to do with your money.

  • We are not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, financial planner, accountant, or tax advisor, and nothing in the Service constitutes investment, legal, accounting, or tax advice.
  • We do not recommend securities, funds, asset allocations, or investment strategies, and we do not advise you on how much of anything to buy, sell, or hold.
  • Categorizations, budgets, net worth figures, savings-rate views, projections, and payoff orderings are informational. They describe your data; they do not instruct you on what to do.
  • Decisions about your money remain yours alone. For advice about your specific situation, please consult a qualified professional who can review your complete circumstances.

9. Accuracy of Displayed Information

We take care to display accurate figures, and money in Bao Budget is calculated to the cent. However, some of what you see depends on data obtained from third-party systems, and that data will sometimes be wrong, delayed, or incomplete. Specifically:

  • Sync lag. Connected account data reflects what your institution last made available to the aggregator. It is not real-time, and it can be hours or days behind. A transaction that shows as pending may change amount, date, or description when it posts.
  • Institution outages. Institutions and aggregators go down, change their systems, or drop a connection. When that happens, an account may stop updating, show a stale balance, or need to be reconnected. Where we don't know a balance, we say so rather than showing you a zero.
  • Categorization. Categories, merchant names, and recurring-payment detection are automated guesses. You can correct them, and a category you set by hand is never overwritten by our automation.
  • Derived figures. Net worth, cash flow, savings rate, goal pace, forecasts, and projections are calculated from the above. If an input is wrong or missing, the derived figure will be too.
  • Projections are estimates, not promises. Where we project, we show a range rather than a single number, and we decline to project at all when your history is too short to support one. A projection is not a guarantee of any future balance, return, or outcome, and this remains true wherever a projection appears — including in a notification, an email, or a share card.

Please verify anything important against your financial institution's own records before acting on it. Your institution's statement is the authoritative record of your account; Bao Budget is not.

10. Fees and Subscription

Bao Budget requires a paid subscription to use the app. We offer a monthly plan and an annual plan; current pricing for both is posted at https://baobudget.com/pricing.

Prices are stated in U.S. dollars and do not include any applicable taxes, which are calculated at checkout where required.

Where we offer a free trial, its terms are set out in the Subscription & Billing Terms §4 — including how a trial begins, how it converts, and what happens if it is started with an email address or payment method already used for a prior trial.

Your subscription renews automatically at the then-current price for the plan you selected — monthly for a monthly plan, annually for an annual plan — until you cancel it. Your affirmative consent to automatic renewal must be collected as a separate step at checkout; agreeing to these Terms alone does not constitute consent to recurring billing.

Payments are processed by Stripe. Your card details are transmitted to Stripe and never reach our servers. The complete billing terms — including how price changes are announced, when a cancellation takes effect, and our refund posture — are set out in the Subscription & Billing Terms, which should be read alongside this section.

11. Cancellation

You may cancel your subscription at any time.

To cancel: open Settings, select Manage billing, and you will be directed to the Stripe billing portal, where you may cancel your subscription. That portal is also where you manage your payment method and view your invoices.

Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. Cancelling stops the next renewal; it does not shorten your current access. You retain access to the paid app until the end of the current billing period, and you will not be billed again after that. We do not prorate or refund the period in progress (see the Subscription & Billing Terms and the Cancellation & Refund Policy).

Once that period ends, access to the paid app ends with it. Cancelling a subscription does not delete your account or your data — see §16 if that is what you intend.

If you cancel and later return, you may subscribe again; we do not reserve your prior plan, and the price you receive is the price in effect at the time you return.

12. App Store and Google Play Purchases

Subscriptions are currently purchased on the web. The mobile apps do not sell subscriptions in-app.

Apple is a third-party beneficiary of these Terms and may enforce them against you. This is true regardless of whether you purchase a subscription through the App Store. Where Apple bears any warranty obligation, its entire obligation is limited to refunding the purchase price, if any.

If you purchase a subscription through Apple's App Store or Google Play:

  • That store's terms govern the purchase, including its billing, renewal, and refund rules.
  • You must cancel through that store, not through us. Cancelling in the Stripe billing portal does not cancel an App Store or Play subscription, and we cannot cancel or refund one on your behalf.
  • Apple's App Store: these Terms are between you and us, not between you and Apple, and Apple has no obligation to provide support for the app.
  • You represent that you are not located in a country subject to a U.S. Government embargo or designated by the U.S. Government as a terrorist-supporting country, and that you are not named on any U.S. Government prohibited- or restricted-party list.

13. Acceptable Use

Bao Budget is intended for understanding your own finances. Our Acceptable Use Policy sets out the full list of restrictions; in summary, you agree not to:

  • use the Service to violate the law, or to harass, defraud, or impersonate anyone;
  • access an account, or connect financial data, that is not yours or that you are not authorized to use;
  • attempt to breach, probe, overload, or circumvent our security, rate limits, or paywall;
  • scrape, crawl, or bulk-extract data from the Service;
  • reverse engineer, decompile, or copy the Service, except where applicable law permits;
  • upload malware, or content that infringes another person's rights; or
  • post content to shared surfaces — share cards, display handles, leaderboard entries — that is abusive, obscene, deceptive, or not your own.

We may suspend or terminate access that we reasonably believe involves any of the foregoing.

14. Your Content and Data

Your data belongs to you. Everything you enter into Bao Budget, and everything we sync on your behalf, remains yours. We do not claim ownership of it.

To operate the Service, you grant us permission to host, store, process, back up, transmit, and display your data — to you, and to the vendors identified in our Privacy Policy who help us operate — for as long as you maintain an account. This permission exists solely to provide the Service to you and ends when the data is deleted.

If you choose to publish content — a share card, a display handle on a leaderboard — you grant us permission to display it in that context for as long as it remains published.

Feedback and suggestions you provide to us are given freely: we may use them without restriction and without owing you compensation.

15. Our Content, Brand, and Your License to Use the App

15.1 Ownership

The Service itself — the software, design, the Grove, Bao, Shoots, the name "Bao Budget", our logos and copy — belongs to us or our licensors, and is protected by copyright, trademark, and other laws.

15.2 License Grant

Subject to these Terms, we grant you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable licence to:

  • install and use the Bao Budget mobile app on a mobile device that you own or control, and
  • access and use the Bao Budget web app,

in each case for your own personal, non-commercial use, and only while your account is in good standing and your subscription is active. This licence covers the app as we make it available to you, including any updates we provide.

15.3 License Restrictions

Except where the law expressly gives you the right regardless of what a contract says — and except as permitted by the licence terms of an open-source component we include — you may not:

  • copy, modify, adapt, translate, or create derivative works of the app or the Service;
  • rent, lease, lend, sell, sublicense, distribute, or otherwise transfer the app or your licence to it;
  • reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or attempt to derive the source code of the app or the Service;
  • remove, obscure, or alter any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notice;
  • use the app or the Service to build or train a competing product or dataset; or
  • use the app or the Service other than as permitted by these Terms and the Acceptable Use Policy.

15.4 Reservation of Rights

All rights not expressly granted to you in §15.2 are reserved by us and our licensors. This is a licence, not a sale: nothing in these Terms transfers ownership of the app, the Service, or any intellectual property to you. The licence ends when your account or your subscription ends, or if you breach these Terms, and on termination you must stop using the app and delete any copies of it you control.

15.5 Platform-Specific Terms

  • iOS. Your use of the Bao Budget iOS app is also governed by Apple's standard Licensed Application End User License Agreement (https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/), which applies to apps distributed through the App Store. Where that agreement and §15.2–§15.4 differ as to the iOS app, Apple's standard EULA governs to the extent of the conflict. Apple is a third-party beneficiary of these Terms and may enforce them against you (see §12).
  • Android. There is no separate end user licence agreement for the Bao Budget Android app. §15.2 through §15.4 of these Terms are your licence to that app, alongside Google Play's own terms for distribution.
  • We do not publish any other end user licence agreement for Bao Budget. Any document you may see described as a Bao Budget EULA other than Apple's standard EULA is not in force.

16. Account Deletion

You may delete your Bao Budget account from Settings. Because deletion is permanent, we require you to type both DELETE and your account email address and — if you have enrolled a second factor (an authenticator app or a passkey) — to confirm your identity with it. If you have not enrolled a second factor, none is required.

Account deletion proceeds as follows:

  1. We request that the aggregator revoke our access to each of your connected institutions, on a best-effort basis (§5).
  2. Your account is immediately deactivated, and you lose access.
  3. After 30 days, your data is permanently deleted across our systems, including the accounts, transactions, goals, and history associated with it.

Certain records survive account deletion:

  • Security and audit records, which we retain to investigate account takeover and fraud, and because we are required to maintain them. Where a record identifies you, we replace the identifying elements with a tombstone.
  • Records we are legally required to retain, such as tax and payment records held by us or by Stripe, and anything subject to a legal hold at the time of deletion.
  • Data already held by others — anything the aggregator, Stripe, or your own institution retains under its own terms.

Before you delete your account, export your data if you wish to retain it. You may export from Settings — with your second factor, if enrolled — up to three times per day. The export is provided in JSON, not CSV, and it is a partial export, not a complete copy of everything we hold about you. Certain categories are currently excluded, including incentive and referral-reward history, shared-goal invitations and grants, and passkey device metadata. We do not list these exclusions exhaustively, as the list changes as the product evolves; please do not assume that anything not named here is included. Our Privacy Policy describes everything we hold. If you wish to request a complete copy, contact us at privacy@baobudget.com.

Inactive accounts. If your account has been unused for three years, we will send a warning by email and, if the account remains inactive 30 days thereafter, we may close and delete it.

17. Termination by Us

We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, if a payment fails and remains unresolved, if required to do so by law, or if maintaining the account open would create a genuine security or legal risk.

Where circumstances reasonably permit, we will notify you of the reason and provide an opportunity to cure it. If we terminate an account for a reason not attributable to you — for example, if we discontinue the Service — we will provide reasonable notice and an opportunity to export your data.

Provisions that by their nature should survive termination of this agreement do survive it, including §14 (your content), §15 (our content), §19 (disclaimers), §20 (limitation of liability), §21 (indemnification), §24 (dispute resolution), and any payment obligations already owed.

18. Copyright and the DMCA

We have designated an agent to receive notices of claimed copyright infringement, as 17 U.S.C. §512(c)(2) requires. Our designated agent is:

DMCA Designated Agent, NAS Innovation LLC c/o our registered agent, 82 Wendell Ave Ste 100, Pittsfield, MA 01201 legal@baobudget.com

If you believe something on Bao Budget infringes your copyright, send a notice to our designated agent at the address above with: your contact details, identification of the work, identification of the material you say infringes it and where to find it, a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized, a statement under penalty of perjury that your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act for them, and your signature.

If your material was removed and you think that was a mistake, you can send a counter-notice to the same address. To be effective under 17 U.S.C. §512(g)(3), a counter-notice must include: your physical or electronic signature; identification of the material removed and the location where it appeared before removal; a statement under penalty of perjury that you have a good-faith belief the material was removed as a result of mistake or misidentification; your name, address, and telephone number; a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of the United States District Court for the judicial district of your address (or, if you are outside the United States, for any judicial district in which we may be found); and a statement that you will accept service of process from the person who sent the original notice or their agent.

Repeat infringers. We terminate the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe copyright. We decide this based on the infringement notices we receive, giving weight to a notice that is facially valid and not withdrawn or successfully answered by a counter-notice, and we may act sooner in a clear case of deliberate, large-scale infringement. A notice that is plainly abusive, or generated automatically at volume without human review, does not weigh against an account.

This section is the authoritative statement of our repeat-infringer policy. Where any other Bao Budget document describes it, that document is a summary and this section governs.

19. Disclaimer of Warranties

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE DISCLAIM ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, OR THAT DATA OBTAINED FROM YOUR FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS OR FROM AN AGGREGATOR WILL BE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, OR CURRENT.

We describe our security practices on our Security page. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee that unauthorized access will never occur.

Some jurisdictions do not permit the exclusion of certain warranties, so portions of this section may not apply to you.

20. Limitation of Liability

Please read §20.3 first — it identifies the claims this section does not limit.

20.1 Types of Damages

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, NEITHER WE NOR OUR SUPPLIERS WILL BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST SAVINGS, LOST DATA, OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, TORT, OR ANY OTHER THEORY, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY.

20.2 Liability Cap

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SERVICE IN ANY TWELVE-MONTH PERIOD WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US FOR THE SERVICE IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100).

20.3 Exceptions to This Limitation

Neither §20.1 nor §20.2 applies to, and neither limits our liability for:

  • fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
  • willful injury or intentional misconduct;
  • gross negligence;
  • death or personal injury caused by our negligence; or
  • any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law.

20.4 Non-Waivable Rights

Nothing in these Terms waives, limits, or requires you to give up any right or remedy that cannot be waived under the consumer-protection laws that apply to you. Where a provision of these Terms would do that, it does not apply to you to that extent, and the rest of these Terms still stand. Some jurisdictions do not allow some of these limits at all, in which case they simply do not apply to you.

21. Indemnification

If a third party brings a claim against us or our affiliates, officers, or employees arising from your use of the Service, your breach of these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, or your violation of another person's rights, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold us and them harmless from that claim and from the reasonable costs and legal fees it incurs. We will notify you of the claim and permit you to control its defense, provided that you do not settle in a manner that admits liability on our behalf or leaves us responsible for any obligation.

22. Amendments to These Terms

We may update these Terms — but not at our unrestricted discretion, and never retroactively. The following limits are binding on us:

  • Prospective only. A change applies only going forward, from its effective date. It never applies to a dispute that has already arisen, and it never changes the terms that governed something that has already happened.

  • Direct notice, by email. For any material change, we will email the address on your account at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and the email will say what is changing. Posting a new version on our website is not, by itself, notice.

  • A real way out, two ways over. A material change takes effect for you at your next renewal, and never during a period you have already paid for. If you do not accept it, cancel before that renewal: the period you paid for runs to its end on the terms that applied when you paid, and you are not charged again. Nothing is prorated and nothing is refunded, because nothing you paid for is cut short.

    And if a material change ever does have to take effect during a period you have already paid for — for a legal or security reason we cannot defer — and you reject it, we will refund the unused portion of that period, pro rata. Tell us at legal@baobudget.com or support@baobudget.com, or cancel in the billing portal. That is the only circumstance in which we refund; subscriptions are otherwise non-refundable (see the Subscription & Billing Terms and the Cancellation & Refund Policy).

  • Non-material changes — fixing a typo, clarifying a sentence, updating a contact address — take effect on their effective date without the 30-day process.

  • Continuing to use the Service after a material change has taken effect, having received notice of it, means you accept the updated Terms.

§24 (Dispute Resolution) changes the same way as the rest of these Terms — by the notice process above — with one protection that applies only to §24: a change to it will never apply to a dispute for which you already have actual notice at the time we post the change. This is stated again, in the same terms, in §24.8.

23. General Provisions

  • Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The Federal Arbitration Act governs §24.

  • Where we operate. Bao Budget is offered only in the United States. The Service is operated from the United States and is intended solely for users located in the United States. We do not offer the Service to users in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, and you may not use it from those regions. Prices are in U.S. dollars only.

  • Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the documents named in §1, are the whole agreement between us about the Service, and replace anything said before.

  • Severability. If a court finds part of these Terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

  • No waiver. If we do not enforce something right away, we have not given up the right to enforce it.

  • Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, on notice to you.

  • Force majeure. Neither of us is responsible for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our reasonable control.

  • California users — Cal. Civ. Code §1789.3. Under California law, we provide this notice to California subscribers: the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs may be contacted in writing at 1625 N. Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or by telephone at (800) 952-5210. Our contact address and the price of the Service are stated in §10 and above.

  • Notices. We will send notices to the email address on your account; please keep it current. Send legal notices to us at legal@baobudget.com, and by post to NAS Innovation LLC, c/o our registered agent, 82 Wendell Ave Ste 100, Pittsfield, MA 01201.

  • No third-party beneficiaries, except Apple as described in §12 and §15.5.

  • Support. Help and contact options are at https://baobudget.com/support, or email support@baobudget.com.

  • Security. To report a security vulnerability, email security@baobudget.com.

24. Dispute Resolution

This section affects your legal rights. Please read it, and note the 30-day opt-out in §24.5.

A change to this section follows the same notice process as the rest of these Terms (§22), with one protection specific to it, described fully in §24.8: it will never apply to a dispute for which you already have actual notice at the time we post the change.

24.1 Informal Resolution

Before starting arbitration, please email legal@baobudget.com describing the problem and what you would like us to do. We will do the same before bringing a claim against you. We will each give the other 60 days to work it out. Any limitations period is paused while this step runs.

24.2 Arbitration

If we cannot resolve it in those 60 days, you and we agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be resolved by binding individual arbitration, administered by JAMS, under its Streamlined Arbitration Rules & Procedures (effective June 1, 2021, or the version then in effect) as modified by the JAMS Consumer Arbitration Minimum Standards (effective May 1, 2024, or the version then in effect) — JAMS applies the Minimum Standards to any arbitration between a business and a consumer under a pre-dispute clause, and they control over the base Rules wherever the two differ. Rather than in court. JAMS's rules are available at https://www.jamsadr.com. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section.

The arbitrator decides the dispute, including questions about the scope of this section — except that a court, not the arbitrator, decides (a) whether this section was ever formed as an agreement, and (b) whether §24.4 (no class actions) is enforceable.

An arbitration award may be entered as a judgment in any court with jurisdiction.

24.3 Venue and Costs

  • Small claims stay in small claims. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small claims court instead of arbitration, if the claim qualifies for that court. Filing in small claims court is not a waiver of this section for other claims. (This also matches JAMS's own Consumer Minimum Standards, which independently require this carve-out.)
  • You will never pay more than $250 to bring a claim. JAMS's Consumer Arbitration Minimum Standards cap what a consumer pays to initiate arbitration against a business at $250 — we pay everything else: the remaining JAMS filing fee, the case-management fee, and the arbitrator's professional fees, in full, regardless of the amount of your claim.
  • We commit to a remote hearing, as our own promise — not because JAMS requires it. JAMS's rules give the arbitrator discretion over hearing format and do not default to remote; we are independently committing that we will not require, and will not object to, a hearing conducted remotely — by telephone, video conference, or written submissions only — regardless of the amount claimed, unless both you and we agree to an in-person hearing instead. We will never ask you to travel, and there is no in-person venue you can be required to attend.

24.4 Class Action and Jury Trial Waiver

You and we each agree to bring claims only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims or preside over any form of a representative proceeding.

You and we each waive any right to a jury trial on any claim covered by this section.

If a court decides that this paragraph is unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim — and only that claim — will proceed in court, and the rest of §24 still applies to everything else.

24.5 Arbitration Opt-Out

You can opt out of §24 entirely, and it costs you nothing.

Email legal@baobudget.com within 30 days of first agreeing to these Terms, saying that you want to opt out of arbitration and including the email address on your account. That is all we need. There is no required subject line and no particular wording — any clear message that you are opting out works, and we will confirm receipt.

If you opt out, §24.1 through §24.4 and §24.7 do not apply to you, and disputes go to the courts identified in §24.6. Opting out has no effect on anything else in these Terms, and it will never affect your account, your price, or the service you get from us.

24.6 Excluded Claims

Regardless of anything above:

  • Sexual assault and sexual harassment. As provided by the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021, if your dispute is a sexual-assault or sexual-harassment dispute as defined in that Act, you may choose not to arbitrate it, and you may choose not to be bound by the class-action waiver in §24.4 for that dispute. That choice is yours alone.
  • Public injunctive relief. Nothing in this section waives, and no arbitrator may limit, your right to seek public injunctive relief — relief for the benefit of the general public — in a court, where applicable law gives you that right. If a claim for public injunctive relief is brought, that claim proceeds in court and is stayed pending the arbitration of any other claims between us.
  • Either of us may seek injunctive relief in court to stop infringement or misuse of intellectual property, or unauthorized access to the Service.

For any claim that is not subject to arbitration, you and we agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in Massachusetts, except where the law gives you the right to bring the claim where you live.

24.7 Mass Arbitration

If 25 or more claimants raising similar claims against us are represented by the same or coordinated counsel, we treat that as a mass filing, and the following applies between us — in addition to, not instead of, JAMS's own Mass Arbitration Procedures and Guidelines:

  • Bellwether claims first. Counsel for the claimants and we will each select 10 claims to proceed first (the "bellwether claims"). If we cannot agree, the arbitrator selects claims reasonably representative of the full range asserted. Bellwether claims proceed under the arbitration procedures described above and are completed within 120 days of selection, unless the arbitrator extends that for good cause.
  • Every other claim waits, without losing anything for waiting. The remaining claims are stayed until the bellwether claims are resolved. Any statute of limitations and any filing-fee deadline is tolled for every stayed claim for as long as the stay lasts.
  • Mediation. Within 30 days of the bellwether claims being resolved, we participate in a single mediation covering every remaining claim. We pay the mediator's fee.
  • If mediation doesn't resolve everything. The remaining claims proceed in batches of 50 at a time. No claimant waits more than 36 months from the date they filed their claim to have it heard.
  • Bellwether results don't bind anyone else. How a bellwether claim comes out doesn't decide any other claimant's case — it informs settlement discussions, and does not substitute for each person's own arbitration.

§24.4's prohibition on class, collective, and representative proceedings still applies regardless of how many similar individual claims are filed — this describes how individual claims proceed alongside each other, not a class mechanism.

24.8 Amendments to This Section

This section can be changed the same way as the rest of these Terms — see §22 — with one protection specific to it: a change to this §24 will never apply to a dispute for which you already have actual notice at the time we post the change. That dispute stays governed by the version of §24 in effect when you had notice of it. The 30-day window to opt out of arbitration, described in §24.5, is available once, when you first agree to these Terms — it does not reopen on a later change to this section.