Terms of Service

1. The Agreement

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a binding agreement between Useful Trouble LLC, a Texas limited liability company doing business as Good Standing TX ("we," "us," or "Company"), and the individual or entity that creates an account ("you," "Customer," or "Firm"), governing use of the GoodStandingTX service at goodstandingtx.com (the "Service").

By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of a firm or other entity, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

2. What the Service Does

The Service monitors publicly available Texas franchise tax and Secretary of State registration information for business entities that you choose to track, and notifies you by email when it detects a change in that information. It also provides search across publicly published Texas franchise taxpayer records.

All entity information presented by the Service originates from public records made available by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. We do not obtain information from your clients, from tax returns, or from any non-public source.

3. Beta Accounts

For a beta account, the Service is provided free of charge, may change without notice, may be interrupted, and may contain errors. Monitoring may be incomplete or delayed. You should not rely on the Service as your only means of tracking an entity's status.

We may end a beta designation at any time on notice to your account email address. Continued access after a beta designation ends is subject to Section 11, and no charge is incurred unless you elect to begin a subscription.

4. Accounts and Access

• Accounts are created following a request for access that we approve. We may decline or revoke a request at our discretion. You may not share, sell, or transfer account credentials or any access code issued to you.
• You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your credentials and for all activity under your account.
• You must provide accurate registration information and keep your notification email address current. Alerts are delivered to the address on file; we are not responsible for alerts you do not receive because that address is wrong, full, or filtering our messages.
• You must notify us promptly at the support address in Section 19 if you believe your account has been accessed without authorization.

5. Data Sources and Accuracy

This section describes real, known limitations of the underlying public data. Please read it.

The Service draws on two sources published by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts: a live account lookup interface, and a bulk dataset of active franchise taxpayers. Both are maintained by the State of Texas. We do not control, correct, or independently verify either one.

Known limitations include, without limitation:

• Former entities are searchable but frozen. Entity search draws on two published sources: the Comptroller's file of entities that currently have Texas franchise tax responsibility, and its Open Records export of entities whose responsibility has ended. Entities from the second source are labelled with the date the State recorded the responsibility as ending, sort below current entities, and can be excluded from a search. Their details are fixed as at the date of that export and will not change unless the entity returns to the active file.
• Records are not uniformly current. The published data is refreshed periodically, but individual records within it are updated only when the State changes them. A given record may not have changed in several years.
• Addresses are self-reported and unverified. The address shown for an entity is the address that entity reported in its own filings with the Comptroller or the Secretary of State. Neither agency verifies that an entity is located there, and neither do we. It is frequently a registered agent's, accountant's, or attorney's office rather than a place the entity operates, and it may be out of date. Address and city search results identify entities that reported a given address; they are not evidence of where a business is located or does business.
• The State's sources are not identical. The Comptroller publishes information through more than one channel, and those channels do not always carry the same fields, or the same values, for a given entity at a given moment. Where the Service displays such information, it reflects what the source reported.
• Detection depends on the State publishing a change. The Service can only report a change after the Comptroller's systems reflect it. Delays in state processing will delay or prevent notification.
• Delivery is not guaranteed. Email may be delayed, filtered, or undelivered for reasons outside our control.

You are responsible for independently verifying any information on which you intend to rely, directly with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts or the Texas Secretary of State.

6. Not Professional Advice

The Service provides information only. It does not provide legal, tax, accounting, or other professional advice, and using it does not create any professional or fiduciary relationship between you and us. Nothing in the Service is a substitute for your own professional judgment or for verification with the relevant state agency.

7. Your Data and Our Confidentiality Obligations

"Customer Data" means information you submit to the Service, including the identities of entities you elect to monitor, any names, notes, or groupings you record, and your account information.

As between you and us, Customer Data belongs to you. We claim no ownership of it.

We commit to the following, and these commitments survive termination of your account:

• We will treat Customer Data as confidential and will use it only to provide and support the Service to you.
• We will not sell, rent, license, or otherwise disclose Customer Data to any third party, except to the categories of service providers described in our Privacy Policy — including hosting, payment processing, and email delivery — acting on our behalf under confidentiality obligations, or where required by law.
• We will not use your client list, or the identity of any entity you monitor, to market to those entities or to contact them for any purpose.
• We will not use Customer Data to compete with you or to solicit your clients.
• We will limit access to Customer Data to personnel who need it to operate or support the Service.

We may generate and use aggregated, de-identified statistics about use of the Service (for example, total number of entities monitored across all customers) provided such statistics do not identify you, your firm, or any entity you monitor.

8. Security and Incident Notification

We maintain administrative and technical safeguards intended to protect Customer Data, including:

• encryption of Customer Data in transit and at rest;
• access to production systems limited to authorized personnel who need it to operate or support the Service;
• routine backup of Customer Data, held under the same confidentiality obligations as the Service itself.

No system is perfectly secure. We do not warrant that the Service or its infrastructure will be free from unauthorized access, and Section 14 applies to this section.

Incident notification. If we confirm a security incident involving unauthorized access to or disclosure of your Customer Data, we will notify you without undue delay at your account email address. The notice will describe what we then know about the nature of the incident, the Customer Data involved, and the steps we are taking.

A Data Processing Agreement covering our handling of Customer Data is available on request at the legal notice address in Section 19.

9. Your Responsibilities

• You represent that you have the right and any necessary authority to submit Customer Data to the Service.
• You are solely responsible for determining what authorizations, consents, or disclosures your own professional, ethical, regulatory, or contractual obligations require before engaging a third-party service provider, and for obtaining them. We do not make that determination for you and do not advise on it. Our confidentiality commitments in Section 7 are intended to support your compliance, not to substitute for your judgment.
• You are responsible for reviewing alerts and for verifying information before acting on it.
• You are responsible for the accuracy of the entity identifiers you submit. Monitoring the wrong taxpayer number will produce correct information about the wrong entity.

10. Acceptable Use

You may not:

• Use automated means to scrape, harvest, or bulk-extract data from the Service, or attempt to reconstruct the underlying datasets;
• Resell, redistribute, or provide the Service to third parties as a service of your own;
• Interfere with, overload, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Service or its infrastructure;
• Use the Service to violate any law, or to harass, stalk, or target any individual;
• Circumvent access controls, invitation requirements, or usage limits.

Public records made available through the Service remain subject to any restrictions imposed by the State of Texas on their use.

Not a consumer report

Monitoring an entity's franchise tax standing for your own business purposes — for example because you have a contractual, lending, leasing, or professional relationship with that entity that depends on it remaining in good standing — is a permitted use.

11. Fees, Trials, and Payment

Subscription fees. Access to the Service is provided on a subscription basis at the rates shown at signup or on our pricing page at the time you subscribe.

Free trial. We may offer new accounts a free trial of thirty (30) days. No payment details are required to begin a trial, and no charge is made during it. A trial does not convert to a paid subscription automatically. At the end of the trial period, access is suspended until you provide payment details and begin a subscription; because no card is held, nothing is charged if you do nothing. You may stop using the Service at any time during a trial with no obligation. We may modify or discontinue trial offers at any time, which will not affect a trial already in progress.

Billing period and renewal. Subscriptions are billed monthly in advance and renew automatically for successive monthly periods until cancelled in accordance with this section.

Payment authorization. Fees are payable by credit card. By providing payment details, you authorize us and our payment processor to charge that card the then-current subscription fee, together with any applicable taxes, on each renewal date until you cancel. You represent that you are authorized to use the payment method you provide, and you agree to keep your payment details current.

Taxes. Fees are exclusive of applicable taxes. Texas imposes sales tax on data processing services, and applicable Texas state and local sales tax will be added to each invoice and separately stated. You are responsible for all applicable state and local taxes arising from your purchase of the Service, other than taxes measured by our net income. If a taxing authority later determines that tax was due on a prior period and was not collected, we may invoice you for that amount, and you agree to pay it.

Cancellation. You may cancel your subscription at any time through your account settings or by writing to the support address in Section 19. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the then-current billing period. You retain access for the remainder of that period, and your subscription will not renew after it.

No refunds. Except where required by law, fees are non-refundable, and we do not prorate or refund partial billing periods — including where you cancel mid-period, stop using the Service, or your account is terminated for breach.

Failed payment. If a charge is declined, we may reattempt it periodically for up to ten (10) days. If payment has not been received after that period, we may suspend access to the Service. If payment has not been received within thirty (30) days of the original due date, we may terminate the account, and Section 13 governs what happens to Customer Data after termination.

Price changes. We may change subscription fees on at least thirty (30) days' notice to your account email address. A price change takes effect at your next renewal following the notice period. If you do not accept a new price, you may cancel before it takes effect; continued use after that date constitutes agreement to the new price.

12. Intellectual Property

The Service, including its software, interface, design, and branding, is owned by Useful Trouble LLC and protected by intellectual property law. These Terms grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the Service during the term of your account, and no other rights.

The underlying public records are the product of the State of Texas and are not claimed as our property.

If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without restriction or obligation to you.

13. Termination

You may stop using the Service and request deletion of your account at any time by writing to the support address in Section 19. Cancelling a paid subscription is governed by Section 11.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms, if your use threatens the security or integrity of the Service, or if we discontinue the Service. We will make reasonable efforts to give advance notice where practicable.

After your account is terminated or cancelled, we retain Customer Data for ninety (90) days, during which you may request its return or restoration. After ninety days it is permanently deleted and cannot be recovered. Backup copies are purged on our normal backup rotation.

Retention and confidentiality operate independently. The ninety-day retention period governs only how long Customer Data is kept; it does not limit our obligations under Section 7. Customer Data retained during that window, and any copy of it held in backup, remains subject to the confidentiality commitments in Section 7 for as long as we hold it.

Sections 7, 8, 12, and 14 through 18 survive termination.

14. Disclaimer of Warranties

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE; THAT ANY ALERT WILL BE SENT, DELIVERED, OR DELIVERED PROMPTLY; OR THAT INFORMATION OBTAINED FROM PUBLIC RECORDS AND PRESENTED THROUGH THE SERVICE IS ACCURATE, COMPLETE, OR CURRENT. SECTION 5 DESCRIBES KNOWN LIMITATIONS OF THOSE RECORDS.

15. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, NEITHER PARTY WILL BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, GOODWILL, OR BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US FOR THE SERVICE IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100).

YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT THE SERVICE IS A MONITORING AID DRAWING ON THIRD-PARTY PUBLIC RECORDS, AND THAT THESE LIMITATIONS ARE A FUNDAMENTAL BASIS OF THE BARGAIN BETWEEN US. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, in which case they apply to the fullest extent permitted.

16. Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Useful Trouble LLC and its members, officers, and agents from any third-party claim, loss, or expense (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of your Customer Data, your use of the Service, your violation of these Terms, or your violation of any law or third-party right, including any claim that you lacked the right or authority to submit Customer Data.

17. Binding Arbitration and Class Action Waiver

Any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service that is not resolved informally will be settled by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules. Arbitration will take place in Harris County, Texas, before a single arbitrator, and judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

Informal resolution first. Before initiating arbitration, the complaining party will send written notice describing the dispute to the other and allow sixty (60) days to resolve it in good faith. Notice to us under this section must be sent to the legal notice address in Section 19; notice sent to any other address does not start the sixty-day period. Notice to you will be sent to your account email address.

Class action waiver. Disputes will be arbitrated only on an individual basis. You and we each waive any right to bring or participate in a class, collective, consolidated, or representative action. The arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over any representative proceeding.

Exceptions. Either party may bring an individual claim in small claims court, and either party may seek injunctive or equitable relief in a court of competent jurisdiction to protect intellectual property or confidential information.

If the class action waiver is found unenforceable, the entirety of this Section 17 is void.

18. Governing Law and General Terms

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Subject to Section 17, the exclusive venue for any action is the state and federal courts located in Harris County, Texas, and each party consents to that jurisdiction.

Changes. We may modify these Terms. For material changes we will give notice by email to your account address or by notice in the Service at least thirty (30) days before they take effect. Continued use after that constitutes acceptance. If you do not agree, stop using the Service and request deletion of your account.

Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us regarding the Service and supersede any prior understandings.

Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, it will be modified to the minimum extent necessary and the remainder will stay in force.

No waiver. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including acts of government, outages of third-party services or networks, or unavailability or changes to the public records on which the Service depends.

Relationship. The parties are independent contractors. Nothing creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, or employment relationship.

19. Contact

Useful Trouble LLC d/b/a Good Standing TX
22001 Northpark Dr., Ste 245
Kingwood, TX 77339