Terms of Service — Blocbear

1. Welcome to Blocbear

We built Blocbear to be a ridiculously simple sidekick for self-governed Homeowners Associations (HOAs). By accessing our services, creating an account, or interacting with the platform, you agree to these Terms of Service. We prioritize a human-first approach, so we have written these guidelines in plain, straightforward English. However, this remains a legally binding agreement between you and Blocbear.

2. Our Role and Scope of Service

Blocbear provides cloud-based interface software to help volunteer HOA boards collect neighborhood dues, schedule meetings, issue community updates, and streamline architectural requests. Blocbear is strictly a software provider. We are not a property management company, a licensed collection agency, a legal advisor, or a banking institution. The responsibility for governing your neighborhood, maintaining compliant legal records, and executing board votes rests entirely with your volunteer community board.

3. Account Registration and Account Access

Board Admins: When you claim a neighborhood portal on Blocbear, you explicitly declare that you are an authorized officer or representative of that HOA's legal entity, possessing the lawful authority to link its financial accounts and bind the association to these terms.
Residents: You must verify that you belong to a property in the neighborhood. If the board invited you, or your email is on the neighborhood list they uploaded, you can claim your home from a secure email link without linking a bank account. Residents who sign up without an invite may verify through our secure bank-linking partner (Plaid) or board approval. Linking a bank through Plaid is only required when you choose to pay dues online.

4. Subscriptions, Payments, and Processing Fees

Flat-Rate Board Subscription: The HOA board pays a flat subscription fee of $29 per month. This price remains identical whether your community contains 10 homes or 500. There are no hidden setup costs, no per-unit scaling fees, and subscriptions can be canceled at any time from your settings panel.
Online Bank Transfers: Residents paying online cover a 1.25% ACH processing fee. The HOA receives 100% of the dues amount. The fee is shown at checkout before the resident confirms payment.
Free Offline Options: Payments by check or other board-approved methods remain available without a Blocbear processing fee.
Fee changes: Current rates are $29/month for the board subscription and a 1.25% ACH processing fee for residents paying online. We may change these fees if our payment-processing or platform costs change. When we do, we will give at least 30 days' written notice by email to board admins (and, for the ACH fee, by updating the fee shown at checkout before anyone pays). Changes apply only to charges after the effective date. You can cancel the subscription anytime from settings; residents who prefer not to pay the online fee can still pay by check or other board-approved methods.

5. Integrated Third-Party Infrastructure (Plaid & Stripe)

To safely manage identity checks and bank routing without heavy infrastructure bloat, we offload sensitive financial operations to institutional-grade partners:

Plaid: Handles secure bank authentication when residents pay online, residency verification for invited and certain signup paths, and secure cryptographic token handoffs.
Stripe: Clears electronic ACH dues payments and, for boards, powers Connect onboarding so payouts can land in the neighborhood operating account.

By executing transactions or verifying your account within Blocbear, you simultaneously agree to the respective end-user terms and privacy policies of both Plaid and Stripe. Blocbear never sees, intercepts, or retains your banking credentials or raw bank passwords.

6. Termination of Service

There are no long-term contractual tie-ins. A board can deactivate its subscription at any point. Upon cancellation, the portal remains accessible under limited utility until the conclusion of the current billing block, after which database writes are suspended.

7. Limitations of Liability

We work intensely to maintain non-blocking hot paths and ensure absolute platform correctness. However, Blocbear provides its services strictly on an "as-is" and "as-available" blueprint. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Blocbear assumes no liability for direct, indirect, or consequential damages resulting from uncollected dues, neighborhood management deadlocks, property line conflicts, missed civic deadlines, or data entry errors made during resident list uploads.

8. Resident Referral Credit

When you share your tracked invite link and your board uses it to successfully sign up and verify your neighborhood, you earn a one-time $85 credit.

Here is how it works:

How it's applied: This one-time $85 credit is applied directly to your next HOA dues payment made through the Blocbear platform. You must pay via ACH through Blocbear to use this credit. Payments made by physical check, Zelle, or other outside methods are not eligible. It is funded entirely by Blocbear, not your HOA.
No carry-over: The maximum credit is $85. If your next Blocbear payment is less than $85, your bill drops to $0 and the remaining credit is forfeited.
One per neighborhood: We issue one credit per neighborhood. If multiple neighbors send invites, the credit goes to the person whose link the board actually clicked to sign up (first in, first wins).
Good faith only: You cannot refer yourself, and you cannot refer someone who lives in your own household.
The fine print: This credit has no cash value and cannot be cashed out. Credits expire 12 months after they are earned. We reserve the right to void credits for invite farming or fraud, and we may change or end this offer at any time.