Terms of Service

By creating an account, signing in, accepting these terms during setup, embedding the widget on a website, connecting a third-party account, or using any part of the service, you agree to these Terms of Service and to the Privacy Policy, which is incorporated by reference. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

Your acceptance is recorded with the version of these terms you accepted, the time, and the sign-in method used. If you accept on behalf of a restaurant or company, you represent that you are authorized to bind it, and "you" means that business.

These terms are effective on the date shown above. When we make a material change, we will notify the account email or present the change for renewed acceptance before it applies to you. The current version is always published at hiremaitre.com/terms.

Maitre is an AI host for restaurant websites. It answers guests' questions from the restaurant information you provide, can show dish photos, can take pickup orders through Square when you turn ordering on, and can hold a voice conversation when you turn voice on. It also provides an owner dashboard, menu import and editing tools, and a public website widget.

The service is offered in a controlled availability program. Features may be added, changed, limited, or withdrawn, and the service may contain defects or produce unexpected results. We work to reduce that risk, but no software service can guarantee error-free or uninterrupted operation. Do not use the service as the only record of important restaurant information.

The service is for restaurant owners and their authorized representatives who are at least 18 years old. You must provide accurate registration and restaurant information, keep it current, and not create an account for a restaurant or business you are not authorized to represent.

You are responsible for protecting your credentials, email access, trusted devices, and multi-factor methods, and for all activity performed through your account. Do not share credentials. Tell us promptly at team@hiremaitre.com if you suspect unauthorized access.

We may require email verification, authorization of an unrecognized device, or multi-factor verification. We may restrict access while account, device, payment, or security status cannot be verified, or where activity appears fraudulent or abusive.

You are responsible for the accuracy, completeness, legality, and timely review of everything the host can say about your restaurant: menu items, prices, taxes, modifiers, availability, ingredients, allergens, dietary and religious-diet claims, hours, locations, pickup details, policies, reservation links, ordering settings, contact details, and any other information you supply. Imported Square, menu, website, or Google information must be reviewed before you rely on it.

You are the merchant of record for every guest order placed through the service. Between you and Maitre, you alone are responsible for food preparation and safety, alcohol rules, order fulfillment, pricing, taxes and tax collection, receipts, refunds, cancellations, chargebacks, guest support, consumer disclosures, and compliance with food, health, consumer protection, accessibility, advertising, payment, privacy, and local laws. Maitre is not the seller of your food or services and is not a party to a guest's order.

You must give guests access to your own refund, cancellation, and fulfillment policies. Square hosts payment collection, itemizes the order, and issues the receipt; you are responsible for the accuracy of the items, prices, taxes, and fees it shows.

You must have all rights needed to upload, host, process, transform, index, and display the menus, logos, images, website material, FAQs, and other content you provide. Do not upload malware, payment card data, regulated health information, confidential third-party information, or unlawful or infringing content.

The widget runs on your website and records and processes conversations with your guests on your behalf. Recording and privacy laws vary by state, and several states require notice or consent from every party to a conversation. You are responsible for your website's compliance with the laws that apply to you, including maintaining a privacy policy on your website that discloses that guest conversations are recorded and processed by an AI service provider on your behalf, and any other notice or consent your jurisdiction requires.

The widget carries built-in notices. Beside the message box it states that the AI can make mistakes, that allergies and prices must be confirmed with staff, and that chats are recorded, with links to the guest terms and this privacy policy. That the guest is talking to an AI is shown in the chat header, the host's name and its opening message. You may not remove, hide, cover, or alter those notices, the guest terms link, or, where voice is enabled, the voice-start control and its consent wording.

The host is an AI and is presented to guests as one. You may not configure the host to claim to be a human, and you may not instruct it to deny being an AI when a guest asks.

AI answers may be incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, unavailable, or inconsistent, even when the underlying restaurant information is accurate. You must maintain accurate source information and review the guest experience for your restaurant. Availability of a particular model, provider, or response is not guaranteed.

Maitre does not guarantee allergy, cross-contact, medical, nutritional, dietary, religious-diet, legal, pricing, availability, accessibility, alcohol, or other safety-sensitive information. The host tells guests to confirm those matters with staff, and you must make trained staff available to do so. The widget must not be relied on for emergencies.

You may not use prompts, uploaded content, custom instructions, or connected data to carry out unlawful activity, compromise systems, evade safeguards, mislead guests, or cause harmful or discriminatory decisions.

By default the widget only runs on the websites you approve. You are responsible for approving the exact websites where it should run, and for the per-website settings you choose for chat, ordering, and voice. You may deliberately select an allow-any-website mode after a warning; doing so means the public embed code can run on copied websites while usage and abuse limits still apply.

You may not copy or use another restaurant's widget without authorization, impersonate another business, consume another tenant's allowance, scrape or automate abusive requests, bypass message or rate limits, forge sessions, submit malicious files, manipulate payment or plan data, create fraudulent accounts, reverse engineer the service except where applicable law does not allow that restriction, or interfere with service availability.

Domain and browser-origin checks stop ordinary copied embeds but are not authentication against a custom non-browser client. Quotas and abuse controls apply and may occasionally block legitimate traffic or fail to stop determined abuse.

Before or during setup you may use preview features: a website import, a PDF or pasted menu import, an AI-assisted import that searches the web for your menu, an interactive text or voice preview, and a Square preview connection. These terms and the Privacy Policy apply to those features as soon as you use them.

You represent that you have the right to import the website, documents, images, and catalog data you submit, and that you are the restaurant or acting for it. Imported material is transmitted to our AI providers to extract and organize menu information, and the result is shown to you for review; nothing is published to guests until you approve it.

When you connect Square, the authorization screen lists the permissions requested. You authorize Maitre to use those permissions to read and synchronize your restaurant, location, catalog, menu, modifier, and availability information and, where ordering is enabled, to create orders and hosted checkout links on your behalf. You can revoke the connection in the dashboard or in your Square account at any time.

For personal information about your guests that the service collects on your website (chat messages, voice audio and transcripts, cart and order details, and network-derived data), you are the business and Maitre is your service provider and processor. This section is the data processing agreement between us and is intended to satisfy the service provider and processor requirements of the California Consumer Privacy Act, the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act, and similar state laws.

Maitre will process guest personal information only to provide the services described in these terms and the Privacy Policy, on your documented instructions given through the dashboard and the service's settings. Maitre will not sell or share guest personal information, will not retain, use, or disclose it for any purpose other than providing the services (including any commercial purpose of its own), will not retain, use, or disclose it outside the direct business relationship between you and Maitre, and will not combine it with personal information received from another source except as permitted for a service provider by law. Maitre does not use guest conversations to train its own models or to build profiles across restaurants.

Maitre will apply reasonable security appropriate to the information, will notify you without undue delay after becoming aware of a breach of security affecting guest personal information in its possession, will assist you in responding to verifiable consumer requests that reach Maitre, and will forward requests it receives that concern your restaurant. Maitre uses the subprocessors listed in the Privacy Policy and will update that list when it changes. On termination, Maitre will delete or return guest personal information in accordance with the Privacy Policy's retention rules, except where retention is required by law or for security, fraud prevention, billing, or dispute purposes.

You are responsible for your own compliance as the business, including notices, consents, honoring consumer rights, and the lawful basis for the processing you instruct. Maitre certifies that it understands the restrictions in this section and will comply with them. You may take reasonable steps to ensure that Maitre uses guest personal information consistently with your obligations, and to stop and remediate unauthorized use, by contacting team@hiremaitre.com.

Plan prices, billing intervals, and included allowances are shown on the pricing page, order form, or hosted checkout and may change for future purchases. Specific message quantities are set by the plan or order form in force for your account.

One billable guest message is a public-widget guest request that produces a useful answer for the restaurant. Authenticated owner previews count against the account's allowance when the dashboard says so. Requests rejected before AI execution do not count; a useful response counts even if the guest disconnects; and a provider failure before useful output releases the reservation.

Usage is determined by server records and the authoritative billing period, not by a browser counter, clock, cookie, or checkout-return page. Allowances reset once per billing period. Unused messages do not roll over unless an order form says otherwise. Attempts to bypass usage accounting or obtain repeated resets are prohibited.

Paid subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each monthly or annual term, and your payment method is charged the then-current price for your plan at each renewal, until you cancel. Before you are charged for the first time, the hosted checkout shows the price, the billing interval, the fact that the subscription renews automatically, and how to cancel; your confirmation there is your express authorization for the recurring charge, given separately from your acceptance of these terms.

You can cancel at any time in the billing portal linked from the dashboard, which takes no more steps than signing up did. Cancellation stops future renewals; you keep access through the end of the period you already paid for. For annual plans, we send a reminder to the account email before the renewal date that states the renewal date, the amount, and how to cancel. If we change the price of your plan, we will notify the account email before the change takes effect at your next renewal, and you may cancel before then.

Stripe processes checkout, payment methods, invoices, and the billing portal. Stripe retains the records of your authorization, invoices, and charges as financial records. Upgrades, downgrades, proration, and plan changes follow the options and effective dates shown in the billing flow. Prior usage is retained when an allowance changes, and repeated plan changes do not create repeated free resets. Promotions apply only when Maitre or Stripe explicitly offers them.

A checkout success page is not proof of payment. Access depends on Stripe-confirmed state. A past-due, unpaid, incomplete, canceled, paused, refunded, disputed, or expired subscription may block paid access until the provider confirms recovery.

Subscription fees are non-refundable except as required by applicable law or as stated in this section. If you are charged in error, charged twice, or charged after a confirmed cancellation, tell us within 30 days at team@hiremaitre.com or through the authenticated support form and we will refund the erroneous charge. Cancelling stops future charges; it does not refund the current period.

A refund, reversal, chargeback, or dispute may restrict or suspend paid access while the authoritative payment status is resolved. A refund does not erase valid prior usage or records that must be retained for billing, fraud, tax, legal, or dispute purposes.

Refunds and disputes for a guest's restaurant order are your responsibility and are handled under your policies and Square's processes. Maitre is not the seller of your food or services.

If you turn ordering on, the host can add menu items to a guest's order and hand the guest to a Square-hosted checkout for payment. Item, modifier, quantity, availability, and price references are resolved and revalidated on our servers against your synchronized catalog before an order or checkout link is created; Square remains authoritative for the final checkout and payment. Ordering is pickup only.

You are responsible for Square account standing, item and location configuration, order acknowledgement in your point of sale, fulfillment, taxes, refunds, chargebacks, and guest support. You can turn ordering off for the whole account or for an individual website at any time in the dashboard; doing so hides ordering from guests but does not cancel orders already placed.

We may limit, suspend, or terminate access for nonpayment, fraud, illegal conduct, security threats, abusive automation, misuse of AI, infringement, interference with another tenant, payment manipulation, attempts to bypass plans or usage limits, removal of required guest notices, or other material violations of these terms. Where practical we will tell you why and give you a chance to fix it.

You may stop using the service, remove the widget, disconnect connected services, cancel your subscription, or request account deletion through the authenticated support form or at team@hiremaitre.com. Data handling after termination follows the Privacy Policy, including retention for security, billing, tax, dispute, provider, backup, or legal obligations.

Maitre and its licensors retain all rights in the software, interfaces, prompts, models, documentation, and branding. You retain ownership of the restaurant content you submit, subject to rights held by third parties.

You grant Maitre a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, copy, process, transform, index, transmit, and display your restaurant content as needed to provide, secure, support, and improve the service for you, and to create non-identifying aggregate statistics. You represent that you have the rights needed to grant that license.

If you send us feedback, suggestions, or ideas about the service, you grant Maitre a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license to use them without restriction or obligation to you. Feedback never includes your guests' personal information, which stays under Section 10.

Maitre depends on services such as Supabase, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Stripe, Square, Google, Resend, a weather data provider, web search and crawl providers used during menu import, and the restaurant websites the widget runs on. Their outages, errors, policy changes, account restrictions, or data practices may affect Maitre, and their own terms apply to your use of them. AI providers may retain inputs for a limited period for abuse monitoring under their own policies.

You are responsible for complying with the terms of the providers and websites you connect. Maitre does not control third-party systems and cannot guarantee their availability, accuracy, or continued compatibility.

We may perform maintenance, change features or providers, impose reasonable limits, suspend risky traffic, or discontinue features. The service may be interrupted by maintenance, provider failure, security response, capacity, or circumstances outside our control. Where a change materially reduces a paid feature, you may cancel and receive a pro-rated refund of prepaid fees for the unused period.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the service is provided on an as-is and as-available basis, and Maitre disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, and uninterrupted or error-free operation. AI output is not advice and is not a representation about the safety, ingredients, or characteristics of any food. Rights that cannot legally be waived remain unaffected.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Maitre and its owners, employees, contractors, and providers are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or business interruption, arising out of or related to the service, guest conversations, orders, food-safety incidents, fulfillment issues, payment disputes, or third-party failures, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.

Maitre's total aggregate liability arising out of or related to the service, under any theory, is limited to the fees you paid to Maitre for the affected account in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or one hundred US dollars if you have paid no fees. These limits do not apply to liability that applicable law does not allow to be limited, and they are a fundamental basis of the bargain between us.

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Maitre and its owners, employees, contractors, and providers from and against any third-party claim, demand, loss, liability, damage, penalty, fine, cost, or expense (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or related to: your restaurant content and menu, allergen, dietary, price, or availability information; guest orders, fulfillment, food safety, and refunds; your website, including any failure to provide notices or obtain consents required by recording, wiretap, biometric, privacy, or consumer protection laws where the widget runs; your instructions to the host and any custom instructions; unauthorized connected accounts; your violation of these terms or of law; and any infringement by content you provide. This obligation does not apply to the extent a claim is caused by Maitre's own breach of these terms or by conduct that applicable law does not allow to be indemnified.

We will notify you promptly of a claim, let you control the defense with counsel reasonably acceptable to us, and cooperate at your expense. You may not settle a claim in a way that admits fault by Maitre or imposes obligations on Maitre without our written consent.

These terms and any dispute arising out of or related to them or the service are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia and applicable United States federal law, without regard to conflict-of-law rules.

Any dispute, claim, or controversy between you and Maitre arising out of or related to these terms or the service that cannot be resolved informally will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules, before a single arbitrator, seated in Arlington County, Virginia, and conducted in English. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. The arbitrator may award the same relief a court could award to the individual party, and judgment on the award may be entered in any court with jurisdiction. Either party may instead bring an individual claim in small claims court if it qualifies, and either party may seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property or to stop unauthorized use of the service.

YOU AND MAITRE EACH WAIVE THE RIGHT TO A JURY TRIAL AND TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS, COLLECTIVE, CONSOLIDATED, OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION. Claims may be brought only on an individual basis, and the arbitrator may not consolidate claims of different parties or preside over any form of representative proceeding. If this waiver is found unenforceable for a particular claim, that claim will proceed in court, and the state and federal courts located in Arlington County, Virginia will have exclusive jurisdiction, to which you consent.

You may opt out of arbitration by emailing team@hiremaitre.com within 30 days after you first accept these terms, stating your account email and that you opt out of arbitration. Opting out does not affect the governing law, venue, or class action waiver above. Before starting arbitration, a party must send the other a written notice of the dispute and allow 30 days to resolve it informally.

This section is for guests who use the Maitre widget on a restaurant's website. The host you are talking to is an AI operated by Maitre on behalf of the restaurant; it is not a person, and it will say so if you ask. By messaging or starting a voice call you agree to these guest terms and to the processing described in the Privacy Policy.

Your chat is recorded and processed by AI and by Maitre's service providers on behalf of the restaurant, and the restaurant can read it. Do not share information you do not want processed in that way, and do not share payment card numbers or passwords in the chat. If the restaurant has turned voice on, starting a voice call is your agreement that your audio will be sent to Maitre's AI provider in real time to transcribe it and to tell speakers apart; Maitre does not keep the audio after the call. Do not start a voice call if you do not agree to that.

The host can be wrong. Always confirm allergies, ingredients, cross-contact, dietary and religious-diet requirements, prices, availability, alcohol rules, and anything safety-related directly with restaurant staff before relying on it. The host is not for emergencies and cannot summon help.

If you place an order, your order is with the restaurant, which is the merchant of record and sets the prices, taxes, fees, refund policy, and pickup terms. Square processes your payment on its own secure page under its own terms; Maitre never sees your card number. You must be at least 18 to place an order, and the widget is not directed to children under 13.

You may not use the widget to send unlawful, abusive, or harassing content, to attack or overload the service, or to extract the host's instructions or another restaurant's information. Usage limits apply and may pause the host for a while.

We give notices to the email address on your account, in the dashboard, or by posting on hiremaitre.com. You give notices to Maitre at team@hiremaitre.com or through the authenticated support form in the dashboard. HireMaitre is based in Arlington, Virginia, United States.

If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect and the provision is enforced to the maximum extent permitted. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. You may not assign these terms without our consent; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. These terms, the Privacy Policy, and any order form are the entire agreement between us about the service and supersede prior agreements on the same subject. Sections 5, 10, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, and 24 survive termination.