Terms of Service

These are the rules for using Loamhand. They are short because the product is simple: you record your garden, we help you plan it. If anything here is unclear, ask us.

You are agreeing with Loamhand LLC, 418 Broadway, Suite 10974, Albany NY 12207 ([email protected]) — that is who operates Loamhand and where notices to us by post or email should go.

1. Who can use Loamhand

You must be at least 13 years old to create an account. By creating one you confirm that you are, and that the information you give us is accurate. You are responsible for keeping your password private and for what happens under your account. If you think someone else has used it, change your password and use "Sign out everywhere" in Settings.

Loamhand works anywhere, but some of what it tells you is built on US sources: hardiness zones are looked up for US gardens only, and planting and care timings come from US extension services. Outside the US, treat those as a starting point and check local advice.

2. Your gardens, your data

Everything you put into Loamhand stays yours. You grant us only the permission we need to store it, show it to you and to the garden members you invite, and process it to run the product. You can export it or delete your account at any time from Settings, on any tier. Downgrading a paid plan never deletes your data.

When you share a garden, the other members see what their role allows. You are responsible for who you invite. If you leave a garden, the records you added stay with the garden so the other members' history remains intact.

Sensors and their readings

If you connect sensors, the readings are yours, like the rest of your records. We keep raw readings for 13 months and daily summaries for as long as your account exists; they follow the bed they are placed on, so only the people who can see that bed see them, and a sensor not yet placed is seen only by whoever connected it and the garden's stewards. They are in your export and are deleted if you delete your account. Home Assistant, if you use it, runs on your own hardware and is yours to run: we never receive its login, and you decide what it sends us. You can revoke a connection at any time, which disconnects that device at once. The Privacy Policy has the detail.

What you contribute

Some of what you put in reaches beyond your own records: plants you add to the catalogue for yourself, photos you upload, and reports you file about a catalogue entry. You keep ownership of all of it. You grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store it, copy it as running the service needs (backups, thumbnails), and show it to you and to the people you share a garden with — for example, a co-member who can see a plant you added once it grows in your shared garden. For reports, you also grant us the right to use what you wrote to check and correct the plant catalogue that every gardener sees; we will not publish your report or your name with it. You confirm you have the right to share what you upload. When you remove a plant or a photo we stop showing it to anyone who is not already growing that plant with you, and a removed photo's files are deleted as the Privacy Policy describes; corrections already made from a report stay in the catalogue. If you believe something a member posted infringes your copyright, see Copyright for our designated agent and how to send a notice.

3. Acceptable use

Please do not:

• Use Loamhand for anything unlawful, or to grow anything it is unlawful for you to grow where you are.
• Try to access accounts, gardens, or data that are not yours or not shared with you.
• Probe, overload, scrape, or interfere with the service, or run automated traffic against it beyond ordinary use.
• Upload anything abusive, deceptive, or infringing, or use garden invites to harass anyone.
• Resell or white-label the service without an agreement with us.

4. Gardening advice comes with no warranty

Loamhand suggests when to sow, water, feed, and harvest based on your location, its frost dates, the forecast, and a plant catalogue we maintain. These are suggestions, not guarantees. Forecasts are wrong sometimes, catalogues have errors, and your garden has conditions we cannot see. We tell you when we are not sure; you still decide.

The service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranty that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that following its advice will produce a harvest. We are not liable for lost plants, lost crops, or lost income that result from relying on it. Where the law does not allow us to exclude liability, our liability is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

5. Plans and payment

The free plan is free and stays free. If paid plans are offered, prices and what they include will be shown before you pay, and you can cancel at any time; cancelling moves you back to the free plan without deleting anything.

Connecting sensors comes with the Personal plan, and with a garden on the Community plan while you are a member of it. If you lose it, we stop accepting new readings from your devices and nothing else changes: what you already have stays readable and in your export, and nothing is deleted, the same as for any downgrade.

A garden that many households share can be put on the Community plan, which allows up to 100 beds and any number of people working in that garden, with its sensors for every member while they are a member. It gives nothing in a member's own garden, and the books stay each person's own: they are never shared with a garden. If a garden leaves the plan nothing in it is deleted; only adding more, past what its stewards' own plans hold, stops.

While the beta lasts, beta users have the Personal plan, sensors and the books ("I sell what I grow") at no charge. When the beta ends we will tell you at least 14 days before (section 7). Nothing you made is lost when it does: your gardens, records, readings and books stay yours, readable and exportable, under the downgrade rules above. What ends is only the ability to add new things beyond the free plan's limits, and to take new readings or record new sales or costs, until you are on a plan that includes them.

6. Ending an account

You can delete your account from Settings. There is a 30-day window during which it can be restored by signing in again; after that it is anonymised as described in the Privacy Policy.

Deleting means deleting, including your sales and costs if you record them. We do not keep a copy for ourselves and we cannot hand one back to you afterwards. If you sell what you grow you may have to keep records of it for your tax authority — that duty is yours, not ours, and we would rather say so than quietly keep your books to cover it. Download your data before you confirm; Settings offers it, and the deletion dialog offers it again.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaks these terms, abuses the service, or puts other users at risk. Unless it is unsafe to do so we will tell you why and give you a chance to export your data first.

7. Changes

We may change the service and these terms as the product grows. For changes that reduce your rights or affect how your data is handled we will email account holders at least 14 days before they take effect, and update the date at the top of this page. Continuing to use Loamhand after that date means you accept the new terms.

Earlier versions of these terms are kept, each with the date it took effect. Ask and we will send you the one that applied to you.

8. Everything else

These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and the State of New York, where Loamhand LLC is organised. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest still applies. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about Loamhand.

Questions: [email protected]. See also the Privacy Policy.