Terms of Use

Effective October 29, 2026

These terms are the agreement between you and Heardby LLC (“Heardby,” “we”) for using heardby.co and the Heardby service. By creating an account or running a round, you’re agreeing to them. If you’re agreeing on behalf of a company, you’re confirming you’re allowed to.

Employees who take an interview don’t need an account and aren’t bound by these terms; what we promise them is on the screen they see before they start and in our Privacy Policy, which is part of this agreement.

1. Accounts

You need to be 18 or older and acting for an employer to create an account. Keep your password to yourself; what happens under your login is on you until you tell us it’s been compromised. One account per person; if several people at your company need access, each needs their own.

When you create an employer account we keep a hashed form of your network address and device type for 90 days to limit abuse of the free round; it is never linked to employee interviews.

2. Rounds, pricing and the report

A round is one set of interviews with one team, run from one link, producing one report. The report unlocks once five people have finished; below that there is nothing to show, and we won’t generate a partial one.

Your organization’s first round is free for a team of up to 40, provided neither your organization nor your work-email domain has already used it. Personal-email accounts require a card verified by Stripe, without a charge for the free round. Larger teams and later rounds require the price and order form to be agreed before payment. Each paid round costs the price shown on your order form for the team size you entered, between $250 and $2,600 per round, billed when you create the round, unless we've agreed something different in writing. Teams over 600 are quoted separately. The $250 round for teams of up to 14 includes the round, the report and its follow-up tools; the ongoing tools (open line, benefits line, team brief, job preview and the floor-language tools) come with a round at the $750 tier or above. If a report doesn’t tell you at least one thing you didn’t know, tell us within 14 days of the report being generated and we’ll refund that round in full; we’d rather lose $750 than have you pay for nothing. Prices can change for future rounds with 30 days’ notice; a round you’ve already paid for isn’t affected.

If more people complete interviews than the tier you paid for covers, the difference to the matching tier (as listed at the time you created the round) is due before the report is generated. You will see the exact amount and can pay it from the round page.

Practitioner support is included with every round as described on the order form — a planning call, a report walk-through, and questions in between — provided by Heardby's practitioners by email and scheduled call.

The 'Did they understand it?' round checks how an explanation landed. It does not verify that any employee was trained or understood a rule and may not be used to establish that.

What the report is. A summary written by software from what your employees said: themes with counts, edited quotes, and recommendations. It’s a starting point for a conversation with your team, not a finding of fact. Counts reflect who chose to take the interview, which is never everyone.

What the report isn’t. It isn’t a personnel investigation, evidence for a disciplinary decision, or a substitute for your own judgment or your own HR and legal processes. Quotes are edited to remove identifying detail; treat any apparent identification as an error to report to us, not a lead to follow.

Heardby cannot identify or produce any individual’s answers in response to any request, including yours, because the information needed to do so is never collected.

Heardby is not an investigator and not a mandatory reporter. When a report notes that something serious was raised, your own legal obligations to investigate and respond apply; Heardby has no way to identify who raised it and will not attempt to.

Referral partners. Heardby may pay a referral commission to an independent partner who introduced you to Heardby. Partners have no access to your account, your rounds, your reports or your employees’ answers, and nothing about your account is shared with them beyond your organization’s name and whether it has a free or paid round.

3. What you owe your employees

The service only works if employees believe the promises on the screen. So when you run a round, you agree that you will:

• Make the interview genuinely voluntary. You won’t require it, tell employees it’s required, track who did or didn’t take it, or treat anyone differently for taking it or not.
• Not try to identify who said what, whether by timing, by wording, by running a round on a team small enough to make the math easy, or by any other route, including by recording which one-time code was given to whom, and not ask us for transcripts. If you nonetheless work out who said something, you’ll treat it as if you hadn’t.
• Not take any adverse employment action against any person because of, or based on, anything in a report. This doesn’t stop you from acting on a safety, harassment or legal concern a report flags; you should, through your own processes, without trying to find the source.
• Comply with the employment, labor and privacy laws that apply to your workplace. You are solely responsible for complying with any collective bargaining agreement and labor law, including any duty to notify or bargain with a union before using Heardby. Heardby does not advise on or assume that obligation. Heardby's interviewer does not ask about union activity.
• Show employees the promise screen as we provide it, unchanged, and not tell them the interview is more anonymous or more private than that screen says, whether in a huddle, a text or a notice.

A job preview is your publication as the employer, and you must read and approve it as accurate for your team before using or sharing it.

You must not use a pay report or a How pay works here explainer to set or justify any individual employee's pay.

Any reward you offer for participation is your own program; Heardby does not run, fund, or verify it, and you remain responsible for its lawfulness and tax treatment.

Heardby is not an automated employment decision tool. A report describes a team, not a person, and must not be used to make or inform any decision about an individual’s hiring, promotion, pay, hours, discipline or termination. The report must not be used as a factor in any decision about an individual, including under laws governing automated decision tools.

If you choose joint release, you agree that the report is released to the named representative at the same time as to you, that you cannot cancel that release after the report is generated, and that the five-person rule and Section 3 apply to the representative's use of it as they apply to yours.

Joint sponsorship. If you sponsor a round jointly with an employee representative, both of you approve the round before it opens: the representative approves it from their own account, and if you change what employees will see, they approve again. Both of you receive the identical report at the same moment. The representative's use of the report is bound by the same Section 3 limits as yours. You remain responsible for your own labor-law and bargaining obligations. You agree to ask the representative to accept this obligation before opening the report: This report is shared for labor-management purposes. Don't use it to try to identify any employee, and don't circulate it beyond the local's officers.

Benefits line. If you turn on the benefits line, you provide the plan documents it answers from, and you are responsible for their accuracy and for keeping them current. The line explains what those documents say; it makes no determination about anyone's eligibility, coverage, claims, choices, or tax or legal position. Heardby is not a plan administrator, fiduciary or advisor for any benefit plan. Anything about an individual employee's situation is handled by the contact you name, not by Heardby.

4. Acceptable use

Open line. A standing anonymous team link accepts separate, unlinked entries between rounds. Your monthly digest shows only topics supported by at least five distinct entries, with counts and a paraphrase, never quotes or raw entries. Serious safety, harassment, threat, discrimination or potentially illegal concerns appear anonymously regardless of count. Entries below the threshold may carry into the next month for up to 90 days, then are deleted; all raw entries are deleted after 90 days. Entries do not establish distinct people. Represented teams release the identical digest to the named representative and employer at the same moment. The restrictions in Section 3 apply to all open-line digests and responses, including no identification, retaliation or individual employment decisions.

Don’t use Heardby for anything other than stay interviews with your own workforce. Don’t send a link to people who don’t work for you, don’t enter other people’s personal information into a round, don’t probe or load-test the service, and don’t try to extract transcripts, prompts or model outputs beyond what the product shows you. We can suspend an account that does any of this.

5. Who owns what

Your reports are yours. Use them inside your organization however you like. The transcripts are held by us under the Privacy Policy and aren’t delivered to you, by design. Heardby’s software, prompts, name, logo and site are ours; a subscription doesn’t license any of that beyond using the product.

6. Confidentiality

We treat your rounds and reports as confidential and won’t show them to anyone outside Heardby except as the Privacy Policy describes. You agree to treat the service’s inner workings, including the interviewer’s questions and any non-public pricing we offer you, as confidential.

7. AI, accuracy and warranties

The interviewer and the report are generated by large language models. They are good and they are not perfect: a follow-up can miss the point, a count can be off by one, a summary can flatten something that mattered. We work to make that rare and we read reports as a quality check, but we don’t promise accuracy, completeness, or that a report will lead to any particular outcome.

The service is provided as is. To the extent the law allows, we disclaim implied warranties, including merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose.

8. Limits on liability

To the extent the law allows, Heardby’s total liability to you for anything arising out of the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, and neither of us is liable to the other for indirect, consequential or punitive damages, lost profits or lost data. Nothing here limits liability that can’t be limited by law, or either side’s liability for its own fraud or willful misconduct.

You agree to defend and indemnify Heardby against third-party claims, including claims by your employees, that arise from your breach of Section 3 or Section 4. The liability limits in this section do not apply to that obligation.

9. Ending things

You can close your account at any time from Settings or by emailing us; your rounds and reports are deleted at that moment, so export anything you want to keep first. We can suspend or close an account for breach of these terms, with notice and a chance to fix it unless the breach is one of the ones in Section 3, which we treat as serious. If we discontinue the service, we’ll give at least 60 days’ notice and a way to download your reports.

10. Changes to these terms

We’ll post changes here with a new effective date and email account holders at least 14 days before anything material takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that is acceptance. If you don’t accept, close your account before the date and we’ll refund any round you paid for and haven’t run.

11. Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Michigan, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Before either side files anything, we agree to try to resolve a dispute by talking for 30 days. If that fails, the state and federal courts in Michigan have exclusive jurisdiction, and each side consents to it.

12. Contact

Heardby LLC, a Michigan limited liability company formed October 23, 2026 (Michigan entity no. 900299531), 3003 East Michigan Ave., #1154, Lansing, MI 48912. hello@heardby.co.

13. General

These terms are the whole agreement between us about the service, and replace anything earlier. If a court finds any part unenforceable, the rest stands. Sections 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 and this section survive the end of the agreement. Nobody other than you and Heardby has rights under these terms; in particular, these terms don’t make any employee a party to or beneficiary of them, though we do expect you to keep the promises in Section 3 for their sake.