Terms of Service

Last updated 25 August 2026

CheckTheCal watches iCalendar feeds you point it at and emails you when an event is added, moved, or cancelled. These terms are the agreement between you and us about that. They are written to be read: where a sentence could be plain or could be lawyerly, it is plain.

1. Who we are

The service is operated by CheckTheCal in California, United States — "we", "us", "our". Our postal address is P.O. BOX 57770, Tarzana, CA 91357, US. Our contact address for everything in this document is support@checkthecal.com.

"You" means the person or organization holding a CheckTheCal account. "The service" means our website, your account area, the calendar checker described on our calendar checker page, and the emails, webhooks and Slack messages we send on your instruction.

2. Accepting these terms

Creating an account, or using the service, means you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

You must be 18 or older to hold an account. If you are 16 or 17, you may use the service only with a parent or guardian who accepts these terms on your behalf and is responsible for the account. The service is not for anyone under 16.

If you are agreeing on behalf of an employer, a club or a school, you confirm you are authorized to bind them, and "you" means that organization.

3. What the service does, and what it does not do

We fetch a calendar feed at a URL you give us, compare what it now contains against what it contained last time, and tell you what changed. That is the whole product.

We do not connect to your Google, Apple or Microsoft account. We ask for no calendar permissions and hold no calendar credentials. We never write to, edit, or delete anything on any calendar. We read a published feed exactly as any calendar app subscribing to that feed would, and the software that does it — the exact identifier it sends, the addresses it connects from, and how to allow or block it — is documented publicly on our calendar checker page.

4. Your account

Sign-in is by emailed link, so your email account is your password. Keeping access to that inbox secure is your responsibility, and anyone who can read it can sign in as you. Tell us promptly at support@checkthecal.com if you believe someone else has access to your account.

You are responsible for everything done through your account, including by anyone you let use it.

5. What you may ask us to watch

For every feed you add, you confirm that:

• You are entitled to subscribe to it and to receive its contents — because it is public, because it was shared with you, or because you own it.
• You obtained the URL legitimately. You may not add a feed whose address you got without authorization, and you may not use us to reach a feed behind a login, a paywall, or an access control by working around that control.
• You are entitled to have its contents emailed to the addresses you nominate.

Feeds are shared behind the scenes: when several accounts watch the same calendar we fetch it once and compute the difference once. That means the URL you add may be fetched on behalf of other people too, and it is another reason the confirmations above are not a formality.

You may not use the service to monitor a private individual, and you may not use it to build a profile of someone's movements. If a publisher asks us to stop fetching their feed, we will stop, and any watch on it will stop with it.

6. Recipients

You can have alerts sent to addresses other than your own. Because that means us mailing someone who never signed up, three rules apply and none of them are negotiable:

• Every address is confirmed before anything is sent to it. We email the address once, asking it to confirm. Until it does, we send it nothing. There is no way to switch this off.
• You may only add an address whose owner has agreed to receive these alerts. You are responsible for having that agreement.
• An unsubscribe is final and belongs to the recipient, not to you. Every alert carries a one-click unsubscribe. If a recipient uses it, we stop mailing that address for that watch and you cannot re-subscribe them. Only they can, by confirming the address again.

If an address hard-bounces or reports us as spam, we stop sending to it everywhere on the service, for every account. That record is kept, and it is kept indefinitely.

Using the service to send unsolicited mail is a serious breach of these terms and we will suspend an account for it.

7. Plans and limits

Plans differ in how many calendars you can watch, how often we check them, how many emails a month the plan covers, how long we keep change history, and whether filters, webhooks and Slack are included.

The operative numbers are the ones shown on our pricing page and in your account under Usage & billing. They are not restated here on purpose: those pages are generated from the same configuration limits the software enforces.

The monthly and daily email allowances exist to catch runaway feeds and abuse, not to ration ordinary use. Normal usage tracks how often your calendars change, not how often we check, and most checks find nothing.

Reaching an allowance never means silence. What happens at the limit depends on your plan, and each is a real commitment:

• On the free plan, alerts pause until the month resets and we email you once to say so. We keep checking your calendars throughout, so your change history stays complete.
• On Personal and Pro, nothing stops. Alerts roll into one digest a day until the month resets. Nothing is dropped; it arrives together.
• On Business, the monthly allowance is soft. We keep sending, and emails past the allowance are billed at $3.00 per 1,000 on your next invoice, charged per email rather than rounded up to whole blocks. The current rate is shown on the pricing page and on your usage page, and your usage page shows what has accrued so far in the period as it accrues, not for the first time on the invoice. We will give at least 30 days' notice before changing this rate. We will not block a business's operational alerts over a number, and if your usage runs consistently past the allowance we will contact you about a plan that fits it better.

We may change plan limits. If a change reduces what your current plan includes, we will email you before it takes effect.

8. Fees, renewal and cancellation

The free plan is genuinely free and asks for no card. Paid plans are billed as follows.

Automatic renewal

Paid plans are subscriptions that renew automatically. When you subscribe, you authorize us, through our payment processor, to charge your payment method the plan's fee every month until you cancel. Fees are in US dollars and are charged in advance for each monthly period. Your subscription will keep renewing and your card will keep being charged until you cancel it yourself. You can cancel at any time, in a few clicks, as described below.

How payment works

Payments are processed by Stripe, Inc. Card entry, card storage, invoices and receipts are handled entirely on Stripe's own pages. Card details never reach our servers and we never see or store your full card number. Your use of Stripe's checkout and billing portal is also subject to Stripe's terms and privacy policy.

Every payment emails you a receipt, and your full invoice history — including tax and VAT details you can edit yourself — is in the Stripe billing portal, reachable from your billing page.

Discount codes, where we offer them, apply at checkout, are single-use unless stated otherwise, and are not transferable or redeemable for cash.

Taxes

Prices are shown exclusive of sales tax, VAT, GST and any similar tax. Where we are required to collect such a tax, it is added at checkout and shown on your invoice. Where you are required to account for it yourself, that is your responsibility. You are responsible for keeping the tax details on your invoices accurate.

Changing plans

Upgrades take effect immediately, and Stripe prorates them — you are charged the difference for the remainder of the current period rather than a fresh month.

Downgrades take effect as your billing period allows. A downgrade degrades; it does not delete. If a lower plan covers fewer calendars than you are watching, we pause the newest watches until you are within the limit, tell you exactly which ones we paused, and leave their settings and history in place. Upgrading again brings them straight back. We will not delete your watches because you moved to a smaller plan.

Cancelling

You can cancel at any time from the billing portal, linked from your billing page. No email, no phone call, no retention conversation.

When you cancel, you keep everything you have paid for until the end of the current billing period. After that:

• The account drops to the free plan. It is not closed and nothing is deleted.
• Watches over the free plan's limit are paused, not removed.
• Your change history is kept for the free plan's retention window from then on.

Refunds

Fees are charged in advance and are not refundable in whole or in part, including for a period you cancel partway through, for time you did not use the service, and for a month in which no calendar you watched happened to change. Cancelling stops the next renewal; it does not refund the current period.

This does not affect rights you have under law that cannot be waived — including, if you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, any statutory right to withdraw from a distance contract. Nothing in this section limits those rights.

If you think you have been charged in error, email support@checkthecal.com and we will look at it properly.

Failed payments

If a payment fails, your subscription goes past due and Stripe retries it over the following days, emailing you each time. If it ultimately fails, the subscription ends and the account drops to the free plan on the terms above — watches over the limit pause, and nothing is deleted.

Price changes

We may change our prices. If a change affects your subscription, we will email you before your next renewal, giving you time to cancel first. Continuing after the change takes effect means you accept the new price.

9. Acceptable use

You may not:

• Use the service to send mail to addresses that have not confirmed, or that have unsubscribed.
• Resell or rebrand the alerts as a competing monitoring service.
• Use the service as a general-purpose mail relay or as a general-purpose HTTP fetcher.
• Attempt to make our fetcher reach a private, internal or cloud-metadata address, or otherwise use it to probe networks. We guard against this deliberately; trying to defeat that guard is a breach of these terms whether or not it works.
• Attempt to access another account's watches, recipients, history or billing.
• Deliberately overload the service, or evade plan limits by spreading one workload across multiple accounts.
• Break the law with it, or infringe anyone's rights with it.

10. Suspension and termination

You can stop using the service at any time, and you can delete your account yourself from your billing page. Deletion is immediate and permanent: it stops your watches, cancels any active subscription with no refund for the remainder of the period, and removes your account data as described in our Privacy Policy. It cannot be undone.

We may suspend or terminate an account if it breaches these terms, if fees go unpaid, if it is being used to mail people who did not consent, or if continuing to serve it would expose us to legal risk. Where the circumstances allow it, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right. Where they do not — active abuse, a legal demand — we may act immediately and tell you afterwards.

If we terminate an account without cause, we will refund the unused portion of any period you have already paid for.

We may also withdraw the service entirely. If we do, we will give at least 30 days' notice by email and refund the unused portion of any prepaid period.

11. What we do not promise

We want you to rely on this service, so it matters that you know exactly what it can and cannot do.

• We can only see what a publisher publishes. If a school moves a match and does not update its feed, there is nothing for us to detect. We are not a source of truth about anyone's calendar; we report changes to a feed.
• Feeds break. Publishers go down, withdraw links, and put feeds behind logins. When we cannot reach a feed several times running we email the people watching it, but until it comes back we cannot tell you what changed on it.
• We sometimes hold a change back on purpose. If a fetch comes back looking wrong — an empty calendar where there were forty events — we suppress that round rather than emailing you that everything was cancelled. That is the right call almost always and occasionally delays a real change by a cycle.
• Email is not guaranteed. Messages can be delayed, filtered or refused by a receiving mail server. We work hard on deliverability; we do not control your mail provider.
• Checks happen on an interval. Your plan's interval is the worst case for how long a change can sit unreported.
• There is no uptime commitment and no service level agreement. We may take the service down for maintenance.

Do not use the service as your only safeguard for anything where being told late would cause real harm — a medical appointment, a legal deadline, a flight. It is a very good early warning. It is not a guarantee.

12. Your content and ours

Calendar URLs, watch settings, recipient addresses and the calendar data we fetch on your instruction remain yours. You give us permission to fetch, store, process and email that data as needed to run the service for you. We claim no other rights in it and we do not sell it — see the Privacy Policy.

The service itself — the software, the site, the name and the design — remains ours. These terms grant you the right to use the service, not any ownership of it.

If you send us feedback, we may use it to improve the service without owing you anything for it.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent the law allows, the service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that it will detect every change to every feed.

If you are a consumer, you may have legal rights that this section cannot exclude. Nothing here limits them.

14. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

• We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost opportunities, or losses arising from an event you were told about late or not at all.
• Our total liability to you for all claims is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or 50 US dollars.

These limits apply even if a remedy fails of its essential purpose, and they reflect the price of the service: this is a five-to-eighty-nine dollar a month monitoring tool, not an insurance policy against a missed appointment.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or under any consumer protection law that applies to you.

15. Indemnity

You will indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from:

• A feed you asked us to watch — including a claim that you were not entitled to its contents, or that fetching it was unauthorized.
• An address you nominated as a recipient — including a claim that it received mail without consent.
• Your breach of these terms.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top of this page always says when. For a change that materially affects your rights or what you pay, we will email the address on your account at least 14 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the updated terms; if you would rather not, cancel before the date.

17. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. You and we agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in California for any dispute, except that either of us may bring a claim in small claims court where it qualifies.

There is no arbitration clause here and no class-action waiver. If you are a consumer resident outside California, this section does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory law in the country where you live, or of the right to bring proceedings in your local courts where the law gives you that right.

Before starting anything formal, please email support@checkthecal.com. Almost everything is quicker to fix that way.

18. The rest

• If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
• If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent. We may transfer ours if the service changes hands, in which case we will tell you.
• These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between us about the service.
• Notices to you go to the email address on your account. Notices to us go to support@checkthecal.com.

19. Contact

support@checkthecal.com — a real address, read by a person.

CheckTheCal P.O. BOX 57770, Tarzana, CA 91357 US