Hootworth Beta Tester Terms of Use

1. Agreement and beta purpose

These Beta Tester Terms of Use (the “Terms”) are an agreement between you and Michael Perea, the individual currently operating Hootworth for educational, academic, personal-development, and beta-testing purposes (“Hootworth,” “we,” “us,” or “our”).

By creating an account, accepting these Terms, or using Hootworth, you agree to these Terms and the Hootworth Privacy Policy. Additional notices apply when you connect a financial institution through Plaid or use household sharing.

Hootworth is a pre-release test service. It is being developed as a class project and personal software project and is not currently offered as a commercial subscription service.

2. No charges or payment information

Beta access is currently provided without charge. Paid subscriptions are not active. Hootworth does not currently collect payment-card information or other payment credentials for the purchase of Hootworth.

This is separate from financial-account information you may voluntarily authorize through Plaid. Plaid-connected account information is used for Hootworth account-balance and bill-tracking features; it is not collected to charge you for Hootworth.

3. Experimental service; features may change

Hootworth is in active testing and development. The beta may contain bugs, incomplete features, incorrect calculations, delayed or stale information, synchronization errors, outages, or other defects.

No current feature, screen, workflow, calculation, data field, integration, access rule, algorithm, design, limit, terminology, or level of availability is guaranteed to remain unchanged or to appear in a future version. We may add, change, replace, disable, roll back, or remove beta features as testing continues.

Beta data may need to be migrated, reformatted, corrected, reset, or removed when reasonably necessary for testing, defect recovery, security, provider changes, or changes to the product’s data model. Where practical, we will provide notice before a planned reset that materially affects active testers. Keep independent records of information you need to pay bills, verify account balances, document payments, or meet financial obligations.

4. What Hootworth does

Hootworth is a paycheck-centric bill-planning and tracking tool. It can help you organize bills around expected paychecks, track whether bills have been marked paid, display connected-account balances, generate schedules and warnings, and coordinate shared household bill information.

Most financial-planning information in Hootworth is information you or an authorized household member enter manually, including bills, amounts, due dates, income/paycheck schedules, and payment status.

Features such as Smart Schedule, Look Ahead, shortfall or insufficient-funds warnings, reservations, auto-pay status logic, and similar calculations are planning tools. Their output can be incomplete, delayed, or inaccurate.

5. Hootworth does not move money or pay bills

Hootworth does not hold, receive, transfer, debit, withdraw, deposit, or otherwise move funds on your behalf. It does not make payments to billers and does not guarantee that any bill will be paid.

A bill marked paid in Hootworth is a record inside the app. Current automatic paid-status behavior may rely on timing or information configured in Hootworth and is not proof that a bank, card issuer, or biller processed or received a payment unless the app explicitly identifies the status as confirmed from a cleared financial transaction.

6. No professional financial advice

Hootworth is an informational planning tool. It is not a bank, financial institution, payment processor, creditor, consumer reporting agency, credit repair organization, credit counselor, investment adviser, broker, accountant, tax adviser, lawyer, or insurance adviser.

Schedules, forecasts, reminders, warnings, and suggestions are not professional financial, investment, tax, accounting, legal, credit, or other advice. You remain responsible for reviewing your own biller records, account balances, due dates, payment instructions, fees, and financial decisions.

7. Connected financial accounts

If you choose to connect a financial institution, Hootworth uses Plaid to retrieve information from accounts you select.

The current beta uses Plaid-connected information primarily to display and monitor account balances. Hootworth currently retrieves information such as institution and account metadata, account type, masked account identifiers, and available or current balances.

Hootworth enables Plaid’s Transactions product so Plaid can maintain cached account information used by Hootworth. The current reviewed Hootworth implementation does not retrieve or store your Plaid transaction-history records. Plaid may process transaction information as part of providing its own Transactions service, subject to Plaid’s policies.

Hootworth may make an occasional live balance request through Plaid when you request a fresh balance. Live balance requests are used sparingly and may be rate-limited or throttled.

Future beta features may use transaction activity to recognize income deposits or identify transactions that appear to correspond to bills you track. If Hootworth begins retrieving or storing transaction-history records for those features, we will update the applicable disclosures and consent flow before using that information in a materially different way.

Hootworth does not receive your financial institution username or password from Plaid. You may disconnect a linked institution through available controls. Disconnecting stops future retrieval through that connection but does not necessarily erase information already stored in Hootworth; see the Privacy Policy for deletion information.

8. Household sharing

Hootworth allows an account owner to invite another person to participate in a shared household. Household sharing can expose sensitive information, including bills, payment history, income/paycheck information, account names, and account balances, to authorized household members.

Authorized household members may be able to view, add, edit, or delete shared information. Use household sharing only with people you trust. Additional Household Sharing Terms appear later on this page and should be presented when a household invitation is created or accepted.

9. Notifications

If you enable push notifications, Hootworth may send due-date notices, bill totals, payment-status notices, shortfall warnings, and account-balance information to your device. Depending on device/browser settings, notification content may be visible on a lock screen or to another person with access to the device.

Notifications can be delayed, blocked, duplicated, or not delivered. Do not rely on a notification as your only method of determining whether a bill is due, paid, or adequately funded.

10. Your information and feedback

You retain ownership of information you enter into Hootworth. You authorize Hootworth to host, store, process, transmit, and display that information only as reasonably necessary to operate, secure, maintain, support, test, and improve the beta, comply with law, and enforce these Terms.

You may choose to provide bug reports, usability observations, ideas, feature requests, survey responses, or other feedback. You retain ownership of original material you provide, but grant Hootworth a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, analyze, and incorporate that feedback for developing, testing, improving, operating, and demonstrating the project.

Recorded usability sessions, interviews, or academic research activities should use a separate recording/research consent when applicable.

11. Acceptable use

You may use Hootworth only for lawful personal household financial organization and authorized beta testing. You may not:

• attempt to access another person’s account, data, administrative tools, APIs, or systems without authorization;
• bypass authentication, App Check, rate limits, security controls, or access restrictions;
• introduce malicious code, automated abuse, denial-of-service traffic, or other harmful material;
• scrape, systematically extract, resell, or republish Hootworth data or functionality except as expressly permitted;
• impersonate another person or use another person’s financial information without authority;
• use Hootworth to facilitate fraud, theft, harassment, unlawful surveillance, money laundering, or other illegal activity; or
• interfere with the integrity, availability, performance, or security of the Service.

12. Third-party services

Hootworth relies on third-party services, including Plaid and Google/Firebase. Those services have their own terms, privacy practices, availability, and security responsibilities. Hootworth does not control their systems.

If Hootworth provides a link to a biller or other external website, verify the destination before entering credentials or making a payment.

13. Availability and ending beta access

We may pause, restrict, or end beta access, a feature, an integration, or the beta program when reasonably necessary for testing, security, abuse prevention, provider requirements, legal compliance, or product development.

You may stop using Hootworth at any time. We may suspend access if we reasonably believe an account is being used unlawfully, is creating security risk, or materially violates these Terms.

14. Account and data deletion

You may use available account controls or contact support@hootworth.com to request deletion of your Hootworth account and stored data, subject to household ownership rules and limited information that may remain temporarily in provider backups, security logs, fraud/abuse-prevention records, or records required by law.

Deleting a household owner account may affect other household members’ access to shared data. The product should provide a clear warning before a deletion that affects shared household information.

15. Disclaimers

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the beta is provided “as is” and “as available.” Hootworth does not warrant that the beta, connected-account information, balances, bill dates, payment status, calculations, schedules, warnings, or notifications will be complete, current, accurate, uninterrupted, error-free, or preserved in their current form.

Your financial institution and biller records control if they conflict with information displayed by Hootworth.

16. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Hootworth and the project operator will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost data, missed or late payments, overdrafts, late fees, interest, penalties, or other financial losses arising from or related to use of the beta.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the beta will not exceed $100. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so some of these limitations may not apply to you.

17. Changes to these Terms

These Terms may change as the beta changes. Material changes will be communicated through the app, email, or another reasonable method. When affirmative consent is required, you will be asked to accept the updated version before the changed practice applies.

18. Governing law and contact

These Terms are governed by the laws of Arizona, except where applicable law requires otherwise. Questions may be sent to support@hootworth.com.