Terms of use

These terms apply when you use zibby.ca, the Zibby dashboard or owner app, or view a website preview we’ve prepared. Zibby is a business of Sandcherry Systems Inc. (“we”, “us”). By using these services, you agree to these terms.

Website previews

We sometimes design a preview of a new website for a business before being asked, so the owner can see what’s possible. For those previews:

• They’re proposals. A preview is a design from Zibby. It doesn’t mean the business is our client, and the business hasn’t endorsed it.
• The business’s own material stays theirs. Names, logos, photos and other content that belong to a business remain the property of that business. We use them only to show the owner a possible design.
• Our design stays ours until you sign up. The layout, design, code and any images we created belong to Sandcherry Systems Inc. Please don’t copy or publish a preview, or use it to build your site elsewhere, without a written agreement with us.
• Previews may contain placeholders. Some details, such as wording or images, may be examples. Check anything you rely on before it goes live.
• We’ll take a preview down on request. If you own the business and want a preview removed, choose “Not for me” on your preview page, or email info@zibby.ca, and we’ll take it down right away and delete the rest within 30 days. If you have verified that the business is yours and you sign in to ask, it is all deleted at once and cannot be undone. Either way we keep only your website address on a do-not-contact list, so we don’t make another preview for it.

No commitment

Looking at a preview, using the lookup box or sending us a message doesn’t commit you to anything. You become a client when you choose to buy your website, and you’re shown its price and what’s included before you do. Nothing is charged until your website goes live (see Plans, billing and cancellation). If a written offer or agreement from us gives you a different price or terms, it applies instead of these terms.

Your content and permission to use it

You keep the rights to content you own. Content owned by someone else stays theirs. Only provide or approve text, logos, photos, videos and other material that you own or have the necessary permission to use and let us use as described here. You’re responsible for obtaining those permissions.

When you provide content to Zibby, or authorize us to use it for your business, you grant Sandcherry Systems Inc. non-exclusive permission to store, copy, process, format and display it to provide your Zibby services. This includes building, hosting and maintaining your website; showing website previews and drafts; displaying the content to you and people authorized to manage your business through the Zibby dashboard and owner apps; and publishing it on your website when you authorize publication. Our hosting and technical service providers may handle the content only as needed to provide those services, as explained in our privacy policy.

This permission is limited to providing those services while the content is part of your business’s Zibby service, subject to the backup and record retention described in our privacy policy or required by law. It doesn’t give us permission to use your content in unrelated advertising without your separate approval, and it doesn’t replace the separate consent we ask for AI-backed change requests. Deleting a person’s owner account doesn’t by itself cancel the business’s hosting or remove its website and business records.

• What you publish is yours to stand behind. When you change your website yourself, or publish a change the AI editor made at your request, you’re responsible for what it says — including claims such as awards, ratings, years in business or guarantees. We may ask you about a claim, and we may take down content that is unlawful or misleading.
• Pictures made by AI. Your designs can include pictures our AI made: your premises, people, products and work as a designer imagined them, or changes to your own photos, including the people in them. They can look like real photographs of things that don’t exist or didn’t happen. We keep a list of which pictures are made, and you’re responsible for the ones you publish like anything else on your website: check that you’re happy to show them to your customers, and that anyone whose photo is changed agrees. If a picture you ask for uses something that belongs to someone else, such as another company’s logo or a real person’s likeness, we’ll tell you, and using it is your responsibility.

What can’t go on a Zibby website

We host websites for real businesses, and we don’t tolerate objectionable content or abusive behaviour. Whether you write it yourself, upload it, or ask our AI editor to make it, don’t put anything on a Zibby website, preview or draft that:

• is sexually explicit, or sexualizes anyone under 18 in any way;
• promotes or helps human trafficking, the exploitation of children, or any other crime;
• threatens or shows violence, harasses or bullies anyone, or demeans people for their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability or another protected ground;
• shares someone’s intimate images or private information without their consent;
• is a scam, malware, or something you don’t have the right to publish.

Our AI editor is told to refuse requests like these, and the AI providers we use apply their own safety checks. Words typed straight onto a page are checked too, and refused when they plainly break these rules. When we find content like this, or someone reports it to us, we remove it, and we may pause the website and close the account of whoever added it. We report the sexual exploitation of children, and other serious crimes, to the authorities as Canadian law requires.

Reporting content

If you see something on a website we host, or on one of our previews, that breaks these rules, email info@zibby.ca with the website’s address and what’s wrong. Owners can also report it from the Zibby app: Report a concern on a draft, on a Zibby Vision suggestion or on a new design, or Report a concern about content on the Account screen. We look at every report within 24 hours, remove content that breaks these terms, and tell you what we did.

Plans, billing and cancellation

These apply once you become a client.

• When billing starts. Hosting and website care starts when your website goes live on your domain. Your plan is billed monthly in advance from that day. You aren’t charged for hosting while we’re still preparing or adjusting your site.
• Your billing date. After the first charge, you’re billed on the same day each month. If a month doesn’t have that day, you’re billed on its last day. The first charge is a full month; there are no partial-month charges. A few days before each monthly payment after the first, we email you its date and amount.
• Prices and taxes. Prices are in Canadian dollars, plus the sales tax for the province you’re in — HST in Ontario, GST and any provincial tax elsewhere.
• How you pay. Payments are processed by Stripe. When a payment is due, you can pay by pre-authorized debit from a Canadian bank account or by credit card. We don’t see or store your full card or bank account details. If you choose pre-authorized debit, you’ll agree to a debit authorization, and you’ll receive the notices required by Payments Canada rules.
• AI credits. Each business with a Zibby website gets 1,000 AI credits a month, included at no extra charge. On the first of each month (Eastern time) the business’s credits are brought back up to 1,000; credits left over don’t carry over, and a business that already has more than 1,000 keeps what it has. Credits belong to the business, not to you, so a second owner doesn’t add more. They aren’t sold, and they can’t be bought, transferred or exchanged for money.
• Using your credits. Asking the AI editor to change your website, including its pictures, uses credits for what the change took, with a minimum per change, once its draft is made, whether or not you publish it. Before it starts we set credits aside for it; it never uses more than that, and what it doesn’t use goes straight back. If there aren’t enough, the change doesn’t start, and the credits are topped up on the first of the next month. These use none: editing your pages’ words yourself; the everyday changes on your site’s menu that need no AI, such as hours, contact details and photos, and adding a project, service or review from it; and a change the editor can’t make and passes to someone at Zibby.
• Missed payments. If a payment fails, we’ll retry it automatically and let you know by email. If it’s still unpaid once the retries are done, about two weeks after the due date, we’ll email you the date your website will be paused, a week later. If it’s still unpaid then, your website shows visitors that it’s temporarily unavailable until it’s paid; it comes back by itself within minutes of the payment. Pausing doesn’t delete your website.
• Cancelling. You can cancel any time from your account at app.zibby.ca, or by emailing info@zibby.ca. You can change your mind until the end of the period you’ve paid for. Your website stays live until the end of the period you’ve already paid for, and we don’t refund partial months. From then, your website shows visitors that it’s no longer available. We keep its files for 90 days in case you come back, then delete them. What happens to your domain is under Your domain.
• Your website’s files. Once you’ve signed up, the website we built for you is yours to keep. While you’re a client you can download its pages and photos from your account at any time, to keep a copy or to take it to another host.
• We watch your website. We check every website we run once an hour. If yours stops answering, we fix it, and if it’s down for an hour or more, we email you.
• Price changes. We’ll give you at least 30 days’ written notice before any change to your price, so you can cancel before it takes effect.
• Your written offer. If the offer you accepted gives you a different price or different terms for anything in this section, your offer applies.

Your domain

• It’s included. One domain is part of your hosting plan: we move it to us or register it for you, and we pay to renew it every year for as long as you’re a client. There’s nothing extra to pay for it, and the plan costs the same whether you use it or not. Not every domain ending can be moved to us, and some cost far more than others — tell us your address and we’ll tell you what we can do with it before you commit. Premium names and high-cost endings are quoted separately before we do anything.
• Renewing and restoring. Renewal is included, and there’s never a renewal charge. If a domain is allowed to expire and has to be pulled back out of the registry’s redemption period, restoring it costs C$30, which includes the year’s renewal the registry requires as part of a restore. We’ll always tell you before a domain reaches that point, and we’d rather renew it than restore it.
• It’s yours. It’s registered in your business’s exact legal name, and you’re its registrant and every contact on it: it belongs to you, not to us. We look after it through our registrar account — renewing it, pointing it at your website, and keeping the transfer lock on — without it ever being in our name. You can ask us for the transfer code at any time, for any reason, from your account at app.zibby.ca, and we’ll email it to you. We never charge to release a domain, and we’d never hold one over money owed.
• When you leave. We give you the transfer code so you can take it to another registrar, free. Since the domain is included in the plan rather than sold separately, we stop paying to renew it once you leave — so move it before it next comes up for renewal; we email you the transfer code and that date when your plan ends.
• A new domain can’t move for 60 days. The registries don’t allow a domain to change hands within 60 days of being registered or transferred. That’s their rule, not ours, and it applies no matter who you’re with.

Contact forms and appointments on your website

Messages and appointment requests through your website are between you and the person who sent them. Once one reaches you, it’s yours to handle under your own privacy obligations.

• Messages. We email each message to the address you give us (or the one you sign in with), keep it for you to read for 90 days, and hold back messages that look like spam without emailing them. We pass messages on; we don’t answer them.
• Appointments. We show your free times from the hours you give us, hold a time for each request until you confirm or decline it, and email the person who asked when you answer, if they gave an address. Keeping an appointment, or rearranging it, is yours to do, and requests you don’t answer before their time lapse. Your hours here don’t know about appointments you take any other way, so block that time off, or confirm only what you can keep.

Quotes and invoices

If Zibby’s quotes and invoices are turned on for your business, you can use them to keep a list of your clients and to send them quotes and invoices. They’re your documents: you’re responsible for what they say, for the prices and taxes on them, for your tax registration numbers, and for collecting what you’re owed. Zibby works out the totals from what you enter, but doesn’t give tax or accounting advice.

Keep your own copy of your invoices. You can download them at any time, and you may have to keep them for years for tax purposes. We keep them for as long as you use Zibby, and we won’t delete your account’s records while it holds invoices you haven’t downloaded. We email your quotes and invoices to the addresses you give us, under your business’s name, so only send them to people who expect them from you.

Selling through a shop we run

If card checkout is turned on for your shop, your customers buy from you: you’re the seller, and each sale is between you and them. You take payments on your own Stripe account, which you set up on Stripe’s page and which is yours under Stripe’s own agreement with you. Stripe’s fees come out of your sales, Stripe pays them out to you, and refunds and disputes are handled in your Stripe dashboard. Zibby doesn’t hold your money and can’t refund or pay out on your behalf.

You’re responsible for what you sell and for its prices, stock counts, shipping charges and taxes, for your tax registration numbers, for sending what’s ordered, and for your own returns and refund policy. Zibby works out each order’s totals and tax from what you enter, by the province it ships to, and holds stock while a customer checks out, but doesn’t give tax or accounting advice, and stock sold elsewhere (at your counter, for example) isn’t counted unless you change it. Zibby charges no fee on your sales; if that ever changes, it will be agreed with you first. Turning checkout off stops new orders, and keeps every order already paid. You can disconnect your Stripe account from Zibby at any time from your Stripe dashboard.

Using this website

Please use zibby.ca lawfully. Don’t try to disrupt the site, submit false or automated requests, or send someone else’s contact details without their permission. The content of zibby.ca, including text, design and graphics, belongs to Sandcherry Systems Inc. and may not be copied without permission. The sample website designs on the home page are for fictional businesses.

We try to keep the information on zibby.ca accurate, but it’s provided “as is” and may change. Nothing on the site is a binding offer; you’re shown the price and what’s included before you buy. We may link to other websites, including our parent company’s site and previews hosted on our other domains, and we aren’t responsible for the content of websites we don’t control.

Limitation of liability

To the extent permitted by law, Sandcherry Systems Inc. isn’t liable for any indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of zibby.ca or a preview. Nothing in these terms limits rights you have that can’t be limited by law.

Privacy

Our privacy policy explains how we handle information you share with us.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there.

Changes and contact

We may update these terms from time to time; the date at the top shows the latest version. Questions? Email info@zibby.ca or write to Sandcherry Systems Inc., 103-2201 Brant St., Burlington, Ontario L7P 3N8.