Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of these terms

BidFern is a service operated by Yaroslav Solkh, an individual sole proprietor based in Sainte-Julienne, Quebec, Canada. BidFern is not a company, corporation or incorporated entity. Where these terms say "we", it refers to that sole proprietor; "you" means the person or business using the service.

By creating an account, subscribing to a plan or using bidfern.com, you accept these terms, the Privacy Policy, the Cookie Policy and the Refund & Cancellation Policy. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

2. What BidFern is — and is not

BidFern takes the job information you provide — typed or dictated notes, photos, measurements and your own price book — and produces an itemised estimate document that you can brand, send, and have approved and signed online. It also sends automatic follow-up messages on quotes you have sent.

To be explicit about the limits:

• BidFern is not a party to any contract, quote, estimate or agreement between you and your client. The agreement is between the two of you.
• BidFern does not guarantee the accuracy of any estimate, quantity, rate, measurement, tax figure or total it produces.
• BidFern does not provide construction, engineering, architectural, safety, building-code, permitting, licensing, tax, accounting or legal advice, and nothing it outputs may be treated as such advice.
• BidFern does not inspect properties, verify measurements, or confirm that a scope of work is complete, buildable or compliant.
• BidFern does not collect payment from your clients and does not act as an escrow, lender or payment agent between you and them.

3. Eligibility and your account

You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding agreement. Accounts are for business use — quoting paid work in a trade.

You must give accurate registration details and keep them up to date. You are responsible for everything done through your account, for keeping your password confidential, and for the conduct of anyone you invite to a team seat on the Crew plan. Tell us at contact@bidfern.com as soon as you suspect unauthorised access.

4. Plans, billing and renewal

All prices are in US dollars and exclude any applicable taxes, which are added where required. There are three plans:

• Day Pass — $2, billed every 24 hours. Charged $2 each 24-hour period, automatically renewing until you cancel. Includes up to 5 quotes per day.
• Contractor — $59, billed every 28 days. Charged $59 at the start of each 28-day period, automatically renewing until you cancel. Includes 150 quotes per period.
• Crew — $170, billed every 28 days. Charged $170 at the start of each 28-day period, automatically renewing until you cancel. Includes unlimited quotes and 8 team seats.

Every plan renews automatically until you cancel it, and the charge is taken from the payment method on file. Your renewal date is always shown in your dashboard. Cancellation is covered by the Refund & Cancellation Policy, and takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for.

Card details are handled by our payment processor. We do not receive or store full card numbers.

5. Price changes

Prices may change. You will be given at least 30 days' notice by email before a new price applies to your subscription, and the new price takes effect at the start of a billing period after the notice ends. If you do not want to pay the new price, cancel before that date; cancelling is always free.

6. Failed payments and suspension

If a renewal payment fails, we will retry it and email you. Access to quote generation may be paused immediately for a Day Pass, or after a short grace period of up to 7 days for a 28-day plan. If payment is still not received, the subscription is cancelled and the account moves to a closed state, after which the data-retention rules in the Refund & Cancellation Policy and the Privacy Policy apply. Updating your payment method restores access.

7. Usage limits and fair use

Quote allowances are stated per plan. One quote means one generated estimate for one job, including edits and re-sends of that same quote. Allowances reset at the start of each period — daily for the Day Pass, every 28 days for Contractor and Crew — and unused quotes do not roll over.

"Unlimited" on the Crew plan means unlimited normal use by the people holding your team seats. It does not permit automated bulk generation, generation on behalf of unrelated businesses, or volumes that destabilise the service. Where use is clearly outside normal human estimating work, we will contact you first and agree a reasonable limit before taking any other step.

8. Prohibited conduct

You agree not to:

• scrape, crawl, mirror or systematically extract the service, its pages or its outputs;
• resell, sublicense or repackage raw BidFern output as a competing quote-generation or content-generation service;
• upload unlawful, infringing, defamatory or malicious content, or content you have no right to upload;
• upload personal information about a third party — including a client's name, address or photographs of their property — without a lawful basis to do so;
• reverse engineer, decompile or attempt to derive the source code or prompts behind the service;
• use bots, scripts or automation to create accounts, generate quotes or evade plan limits;
• probe, scan or test the security of the service, or interfere with its normal operation;
• use the service to send spam, or to send quotes to people who have not asked for them, contrary to Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation;
• impersonate another trade, business or person, or misrepresent who is behind a quote.

9. Your content and who owns it

You keep ownership of everything you put in and everything you get out: your job notes, photos, measurements, price book, templates, client records and the quotes generated for you. We claim no ownership of them.

You grant us a limited licence to host, store, process, transmit and display that content only so far as it is needed to run the service for you — for example to generate a quote, deliver it to your client, produce a PDF, or restore a backup. That licence ends when the content is deleted. Your content is not sold and is not used to train third-party models, as set out in the Privacy Policy.

10. Your responsibility for every quote

You are also responsible for holding every licence, permit, registration, certification and insurance policy your trade and your jurisdiction require, and for meeting any consumer-protection rules that apply to estimates and contracts where you work — including, in Quebec, the requirements of the Consumer Protection Act and any licensing requirement of the Régie du bâtiment du Québec that applies to your work.

11. E-signatures and signed records

BidFern lets your client approve and sign a quote in a browser, and records the event: the quote version, the name typed or signature drawn, the timestamp and the IP address. That record is stored and made available to you.

We store these records; we do not validate them. We do not verify the identity of the signer, do not confirm that the signer had authority to accept on behalf of anyone else, and do not warrant that a given signature is enforceable in your jurisdiction. Whether an electronic signature is sufficient for your contract is for you and your client, and where the stakes justify it, your own legal advisor.

12. Our intellectual property

The BidFern platform — its software, interface, design, wordmark, clipboard-and-fern logo, prompts, templates, documentation and site content — belongs to the operator and is protected by copyright and trade-mark law. Your subscription grants a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service while it is paid for. Nothing in these terms transfers ownership of the platform to you.

13. AI output disclaimer

Quotes are drafted with the help of automated and AI systems working from what you supply. Those systems can be wrong. Line items may be missing, duplicated, mispriced or mismeasured; quantities suggested from photos are estimates, not takeoffs performed by a professional; tax and markup calculations depend on the settings you enter.

Every quote must be reviewed by you before it is sent. No guarantee is made that a quote will be profitable, competitive, accepted, or that using BidFern will improve your win rate.

14. Availability and maintenance

We aim to keep BidFern available at all times, but no uptime level is guaranteed. The service may be interrupted for maintenance, updates, provider failures, network problems or events outside our control. Planned maintenance is scheduled outside business hours in Eastern Time wherever possible, and material planned downtime is announced in advance by email or in the dashboard. Features may be added, changed or withdrawn; where a change materially reduces what a paid plan includes, affected subscribers are told at least 30 days beforehand.

15. Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any output will be accurate or suitable for a given job.

Nothing in this section removes a right you have under Quebec's Consumer Protection Act or other applicable law that cannot lawfully be excluded.

16. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the service — whether in contract, extra-contractual liability, or otherwise — is limited to the total amount you actually paid for BidFern in the 28 days immediately before the event giving rise to the claim.

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, punitive or consequential damages, nor for lost profit, lost jobs, lost or underpriced work, cost overruns, loss of goodwill, or loss of data, even if the possibility of such damages was known.

These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for bodily or moral injury, or for gross or intentional fault.

17. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless the operator of BidFern against any claim, demand, loss, liability or reasonable legal cost brought by a third party — including any of your clients — arising from the quotes you send, the work you perform or fail to perform, your breach of these terms, your infringement of another party's rights, or your uploading of personal information without a lawful basis.

18. Suspension and termination

You may stop using BidFern at any time and cancel from your dashboard in one click. We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches these terms, that is used unlawfully, that puts the service or other users at risk, or that has an unresolved failed payment. Except where a serious or unlawful breach makes it impossible, we will contact you first and give you a chance to put things right.

On termination, your right to use the service ends. Quotes and price book data stay exportable for 30 days and are then deleted, as set out in the Refund & Cancellation Policy. Sections 9 to 12 and 15 to 19 survive termination.

19. Governing law and venue

These terms are governed by the laws in force in the Province of Quebec and the applicable laws of Canada, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the service is to be brought before the competent courts sitting in the judicial district of Joliette, Quebec, and you and we agree to that venue.

If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory rules of the place where you live.

20. Changes to these terms

These terms may be updated. The "Last updated" date at the top always shows the current version. Material changes are announced by email to account holders at least 30 days before they take effect. Continuing to use BidFern after that date means you accept the updated terms; if you do not, cancel before the date.

21. Legal notices

Formal legal notices to the operator of BidFern must be sent by email to contact@bidfern.com and, where a written original is required, by post to the address in section 22. A notice is treated as received on the next business day for email, or on delivery for post. Notices to you are sent to the email address on your account, so keep it current.

22. Contact

Questions about these terms, and any formal notice, go to: