Terms of service

These terms are an agreement between you and Vove.AI Pty Ltd (ABN 66 682 176 414), the company that operates AEC Assistant. They apply to the website at www.aecassistant.com.au, the application at app.aecassistant.com.au, the free calculators, and everything else we provide under the AEC Assistant name (together, the Service). By creating an account or using the Service you agree to these terms, to our Privacy policy and to ourUsage policy. If you use the Service on behalf of a firm, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it, and "you" includes the firm.

In short

• AEC Assistant is a research and drafting tool. Every answer cites its source so you can check it. The professional judgement, the certification and the liability for a project remain yours.
• You own what you upload and what you write. We use it only to run the Service for you, and it is not used to train models.
• Core is free. Plus and Max are charged per seat, monthly or yearly, in Australian dollars, through Lemon Squeezy. You can cancel at any time and keep access until the end of the period you have paid for.
• You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from Settings. Deletion is immediate.
• Nothing in these terms takes away rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law.

1. The Service

AEC Assistant answers questions about the National Construction Code, state and territory building and planning legislation, ABCB handbooks and the standards the Code references, and cites the provisions it relied on. Paid plans add projects, document upload, planning information gathered for a project's address, reports written into the project, and deeper knowledge of the referenced standards. The calculators are deterministic code, not a language model, and need no account; exporting a calculation report or sharing a calculation needs a free account.

We improve the Service continually. Features may be added, changed or withdrawn. If we withdraw or materially reduce a feature you are paying for, we will tell you before it happens, and you may cancel under section 6 if you no longer want the plan.

2. Your account

• You must be at least 18 years old and using the Service for work in, or study of, the built environment.
• You sign in with a one-time code sent to your email address, or with a Google or Microsoft account. There is no password. Keep control of that email account and of any device that stays signed in; anything done through your account is treated as done by you until you tell us otherwise.
• Give us accurate details and keep them current. We use your email address for the notices in section 10.
• An account is for one person. It may not be shared, and credentials may not be passed to someone else. A firm buys seats for its people instead.
• Tell us at support@aecassistant.com.au straight away if you believe your account has been used without your permission.

3. Teams

A firm on Plus, Max or Enterprise may create a team. The person who creates it is the team owner. The owner buys seats, invites and removes members, and is responsible for how the team uses the Service. When a member is removed or leaves, their access to the team's shared projects ends and their signed-in sessions are closed. Projects belong to the person who created them and are private until shared, either with named people or with everyone in the team. Membership of a team never gives access to a project on its own.

4. Plans and prices

Plans and their current prices are on thepricing page. Prices are in Australian dollars per seat and exclude GST unless the page says otherwise; tax is added at checkout according to where you are. A team is billed for at least two seats. Enterprise is quoted and agreed separately, and where an Enterprise agreement differs from these terms, the agreement prevails.

We may change prices. A change never applies to a period you have already paid for. We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before a new price takes effect at your next renewal, and you may cancel before then.

5. Payment and renewal

• Payments are processed by Lemon Squeezy, which sells the subscription to you as merchant of record, issues the receipt and handles tax. We never hold your card details. Lemon Squeezy's own terms apply to the transaction.
• Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each monthly or yearly period until cancelled.
• A change of plan or of seat count takes effect immediately. Lemon Squeezy pro-rates the difference for the rest of the current period: an increase is charged at once, and a decrease is credited toward your next payment. Seats cannot be reduced below the number of people in the team; remove members first.
• If a payment fails and is not resolved, we may move the account to Core. Projects and documents are then kept as described in section 9.

6. Cancelling

Cancel at any time from Settings, or by contacting us. Access to the paid features continues until the end of the period you have paid for, and nothing further is charged. We do not refund the unused part of a period, except where the Australian Consumer Law or another law requires it, or where we have withdrawn a paid feature under section 1.

7. Usage limits

Every plan carries an allowance of work over a rolling period, so one person's heavy use does not degrade the Service for everyone. The allowance is measured on the computing cost of what you ask, not on a count of questions, and it scales with the plan. When you reach it, the assistant tells you and asks you to wait. TheUsage policy explains how the windows work. Automated access, scraping and any attempt to circumvent a limit are not permitted.

8. Your content

You own the questions you ask, the documents you upload, the project details you enter and the notes the assistant keeps for you. You grant us a licence to store, process, copy and display that content only as needed to provide the Service to you and to the people you share it with. The licence ends when the content is deleted, apart from copies in backups, which are overwritten in the normal course. We do not use your content to train models, and our AI provider does not either.

You are responsible for having the right to upload what you upload. Drawings, specifications and reports produced by others may be subject to copyright or to confidentiality obligations; check before you add them to a project. Do not upload material you have no right to use.

A public share link publishes a snapshot of a conversation to anyone who has the link. You choose when to create one and when to revoke it, and you are responsible for what it contains.

9. Keeping and deleting data

• You can delete a project, a conversation, a document or your whole account from within the Service. Deleting your account removes it, your conversations and every project nobody else can reach from AEC Assistant immediately, and copies held by our AI provider and file storage are removed within 30 days. Projects you have shared stay with the people you shared them with. If you are the only owner of a team, transfer ownership or delete the team first. Deletion cannot be undone.
• When a paid plan ends, the projects and documents that plan allowed are kept for at least 30 days from the end date so you can renew or export. They may be removed after that.
• We keep billing records and the audit log for as long as tax and company law require.

The Privacy policy has the detail.

10. Notices from us

We send account notices by email: sign-in codes, receipts, changes to a team, changes to a plan, and notice of changes to these terms. You cannot opt out of those while you have an account, because they are how the Service tells you what has happened to it. Marketing email is separate and is sent only with your consent, which you can withdraw at any time from Settings or from the link in any such email.

11. Answers, and your professional responsibility

The assistant reads the source documents and cites them, and we work hard to make its answers accurate. Even so, an answer can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, and it can misjudge which edition, amendment or jurisdiction applies. Answers are information, not professional advice, and not a certification, a determination or an approval of anything.

You must check an answer against the cited source before you rely on it, and you must apply your own professional judgement. Where a decision needs a registered building practitioner, a building surveyor or certifier, an engineer or a lawyer, that person's judgement is what counts, and using the Service does not replace it. You are responsible for what you design, build, certify, submit and advise.

The calculators work from the NCC and the Standards it calls up, and each states the edition and the clauses or tables it works from. A calculator opens on example inputs, and its result is not yours until you enter your own. Some calculators are engineering checks that go beyond a Standard's own method; each says so, and a design that relies on one needs a Performance Solution. A calculation report records the inputs and the result; the person who prepares it and the person who checks it are responsible for it. A shared calculation link carries its inputs, and anyone with the link can open it.

A calculator result or a calculation report is a tool for a professional to check, not a compliance certificate.

12. Intellectual property

The Service, including its software, design, calculators, guides and the way it organises and presents regulatory content, belongs to Vove.AI Pty Ltd or its licensors. We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the Service under these terms. Do not copy, resell, reverse engineer or build a competing corpus from it.

The National Construction Code is published by the Australian Building Codes Board, and the standards it references are published by Standards Australia and others. The Service reproduces excerpts of those documents to answer your questions, and answers link to the source. It is not a substitute for a licence to the standards themselves, and you may not use the Service to extract or republish them in bulk.

The answers and documents the assistant produces for you are yours to use in your work. We may use aggregated, de-identified information about how the Service is used to improve it.

13. Acceptable use

The Usage policy sets out what you may and may not do with the Service. It forms part of these terms.

14. Availability

We aim to keep the Service available at all times, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted access. We may pause it for maintenance, and parts of it depend on providers we do not control. Where we can, we announce planned maintenance in advance.

15. Suspension and termination

You may close your account at any time from Settings. We may suspend or close an account if it breaches these terms or the Usage policy, if a payment is not made, if we are required to by law, or if we reasonably believe it is being used to harm the Service or other users. Unless the breach is serious or the law prevents it, we will tell you what the problem is and give you a chance to fix it first. Sections 8, 9, 11, 12, 16, 17 and 18 survive termination.

16. Consumer guarantees

Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies any right or remedy you have under theCompetition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth) or any other law that cannot be excluded by agreement. Where the law lets us limit our liability for breach of such a guarantee, it is limited to supplying the service again or paying the cost of having it supplied again.

17. Liability

Subject to section 16 and to the extent permitted by law:

• We are not liable for loss that arises from relying on an answer, a report or a calculator result without checking it against the source and applying professional judgement, as section 11 requires.
• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, data, goodwill or opportunity, however it arises.
• Our total liability to you in connection with the Service, in contract, tort, statute or otherwise, is limited to the amount you paid us for the Service in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or A$100 if you paid nothing.

You agree to compensate us for loss we suffer because content you uploaded infringed someone's rights, or because you used the Service in breach of the law or of these terms.

18. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of Victoria, Australia, and the courts of Victoria have jurisdiction. If a dispute arises, contact us first: most are resolved by talking. If we cannot resolve it within 30 days of either party raising it, we each agree to try mediation before starting proceedings, unless urgent relief is needed.

19. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. For a change that materially affects your rights or what you pay, we will give you at least 14 days' notice by email or in the Service before it takes effect. Other changes take effect when they are published here, with the date at the top updated. If you keep using the Service after a change takes effect, you accept it; if you do not accept it, close your account before then.

20. General

These terms, the Privacy policy, the Usage policy and any Enterprise agreement are the whole agreement between us about the Service. If a part of them cannot be enforced, the rest still applies. You may not assign your account to someone else. We may assign this agreement to a company that takes over the Service, and will tell you if we do. A failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it.

21. Contact

Vove.AI Pty Ltd, ABN 66 682 176 414
PO Box 420, Dingley Village VIC 3172, Australia
support@aecassistant.com.au