Terms of Use

The terms that govern your use of fons.vc. Short, in plain English.

1. Who you are agreeing with

By using fons.vc you enter an agreement with Lewis Rogers, trading as Fons.vc, based in the United Kingdom ("Fons.vc", "we", "us"). If you do not agree with these terms, please do not use the site.

2. What Fons.vc is

Fons.vc helps people, companies, and products build intelligent profiles that can be discovered, understood, and trusted by humans and AI agents. Today the site lets you create an account and a public profile, register a company (optionally uploading a pitch deck so we can pre-fill your profile), claim your handle, and export your profile as an agent-readable .md file. An optional paid Founding Member subscription unlocks additional features (see §7). Some pages — including the decision-engine harness and any operator dashboards — are internal-only and gated behind authentication.

We are not investors. We do not provide funding, financial advice, legal advice, tax advice, or any kind of regulated activity. Anything we say about a business, its readiness, or its likely outcome is informational only and must not be treated as a recommendation to invest or as a basis for any investment decision.

3. Your account and your information

• The information you submit must be accurate and yours to share. If you submit information about a company, you confirm that you are authorised to do so (typically: you are a founder of that company).
• If you upload a pitch deck, you confirm you have the right to share it with us for the purpose described in our Privacy Policy.
• Keep your registration details up to date. Email us if anything changes.

4. Acceptable use

Don't use the site to:

• Impersonate another person, founder, or company.
• Submit content that is unlawful, defamatory, infringing, or fraudulent.
• Upload malware, attempt to break, probe, overload, or reverse-engineer the service, or extract data at scale without our written permission.
• Bypass authentication, rate limits, or technical controls.
• Resell or republish material from the site without permission.

We may suspend or terminate access for any breach, and remove content at our discretion.

5. Intellectual property

The Fons.vc name, logo, decision engine, scoring methodology, content, and codebase are owned by us (or licensed to us). You may share links to fons.vc and reference us in articles, decks, and posts with a credit. Anything else — copying our content, redistributing our methodology, scraping the directory — requires written permission.

You keep ownership of everything you submit (your company details, your pitch deck, your profile data). You grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, process, and use your submission for the sole purpose of operating Fons.vc and providing the service to you. If we ever want to use your information for anything else — for example, public case studies or aggregated analyses that could identify you — we will ask first.

6. Decision-engine output

Where the site exposes any scoring, banding, or qualitative feedback (for example, a Launch Readiness Score band on a founder profile), it is generated by our deterministic rubric plus, where used, a structured language-model pass. It is intended as a structured signal for the founder, not as a guarantee, a credit rating, an audit, or an investment opinion. Investors who view a profile draw their own conclusions; outcomes are theirs.

7. Founding Member subscription

Some features are part of an optional paid membership ("Founding Member"). The rest of the site — registration, your public profile, and your auto-assigned handle — stays free.

• Price and billing. Founding Member is £29 per month (pounds sterling). It is a recurring subscription that renews automatically each month until you cancel. Payments are taken by our payment processor, Stripe; we don't store your card details. Any taxes that apply are shown at checkout.
• Price lock. The price you join at stays the same for as long as your membership remains active and continuous. We may set a different price for new members or for a membership you restart after it lapses; we will give at least 30 days' notice before changing the price of an existing, continuous membership.
• What it unlocks. Currently: choosing your own handle, creating a company page, exporting your profile as markdown (/your-handle.md), and the Founding Member badge. Membership benefits may change over time; we won't remove a material benefit you are paying for without reasonable notice.
• Cancelling. You can cancel anytime from your account (the billing/customer portal). Cancellation stops the next renewal and takes effect at the end of the billing period you have already paid for — you keep access until then.
• Immediate supply and your 14-day right (consumers). Membership delivers digital content and services immediately — your handle, your company page, profile.md, the badge, and AI usage are available as soon as you subscribe. At checkout you expressly ask us to begin straight away and you acknowledge that you therefore lose the statutory 14-day right to cancel for that billing period. You confirm this by ticking the consent box before payment.
• Non-refundable. Because the service is supplied immediately and consumes AI usage from the moment you join, membership fees are non-refundable — including the current period if you cancel partway through. This does not affect your statutory rights: if the paid service is faulty or not as described, you remain entitled to the remedies the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives you, and nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.
• Failed payments. If a renewal payment fails, we may suspend or end the membership (and its paid features) until payment succeeds.

8. Availability and changes

Fons is evolving quickly, and we may add, change, or remove features as the product develops — but we won't remove a material benefit you are paying for without reasonable notice (see §7). We do not promise uninterrupted availability of the site. We may also change these terms — we will update the "Last updated" date at the top and, for material changes, give registered users reasonable notice.

9. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

• The site is provided "as is", without warranties of any kind, express or implied (including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement).
• We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive losses, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, opportunity, or data, arising out of or in connection with your use of the site.
• Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for fraud.

10. Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms and any dispute or claim arising out of or in connection with them are governed by the laws of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, except that we may bring proceedings in another jurisdiction to protect our intellectual property rights.

11. Contact

Questions about these terms: admin@fons.vc.