Terms of service

Who we are, and what this covers

Bludge is operated by [Company legal name] (ABN [ABN]) of [registered address]. In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean that company. "You" means the business that opens an account.

These terms apply from the moment you open an account, sign an order form, or start using the service — whichever happens first. If you are agreeing on behalf of a business, you are confirming that you are allowed to bind it.

They apply together with our acceptable use policy, our privacy policy, and any order form or pilot agreement we sign with you. If an order form we have both signed says something different, the order form wins.

Bludge is a service for businesses. It is not offered to consumers for personal, domestic or household use.

The service

Bludge calls the people who enquire with your business. When an enquiry arrives from your web form, your CRM or a spreadsheet you upload, the service phones that person, in a voice you choose, and:

• says it is an AI in the first sentence;
• asks the questions you wrote;
• answers from the notes you wrote, and says it does not know when it does not;
• books an appointment into your calendar, if you have switched that on;
• sends a confirmation text.

If nobody answers, the service may try once more inside your calling hours and then send a follow-up text. Calls are capped in length. Everything the assistant says comes from the configuration you control.

It also answers. The number we give you is answered by the same assistant, in the same voice, from the same notes. It says it is an AI in its first sentence there too, it can book, and it can take a message. Calls made to you are answered whenever they arrive, including outside your calling hours — the hours in section 5 govern the calls the service places, not the calls it takes.

We may change how the service works, add features and retire them. If a change materially reduces what the service does, we will tell you before it takes effect.

Your account and your operators

You are responsible for everything done through your account, including by anyone you give access to.

• Give access only to people who need it, and remove them when they leave.
• Sign-in is by a code sent to an email address. Keep those inboxes secure — anyone who can read the inbox can sign in.
• Tell us promptly at [support email] if you think someone has access who should not.
• Keep your account details accurate, including your billing contact.
• You must be at least 18 and entitled to run a business in the country your account is set to.

Consent: the promise that matters most

Each time you load, connect or import a person, you warrant to us that:

1. They contacted you. They made an enquiry with your business — through your website, your phone, your form, an ad you ran, or a channel you can point to.
2. They consented to be contacted about that enquiry, on the number you gave us, by phone and by text, including by an automated or artificial voice.
3. Your form captures that consent in writing where the law requires it. In the United States, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act requires prior express written consent for calls made with an artificial or prerecorded voice. In February 2024 the Federal Communications Commission confirmed that an AI-generated voice is an artificial voice under the TCPA. Your form must say clearly, near the submit button, that the person agrees to receive calls and texts including by automated or artificial voice, must name your business, must not make that agreement a condition of buying anything, and you must keep the record.
4. You keep proof. You can produce, on request, the date, time, wording and source of the consent for any person in your account.
5. You will not load cold, purchased, rented, scraped or list-broker data. Not once, not to test, not "just this batch". See the acceptable use policy.
6. You have washed your list against any do-not-call register the law requires you to check in your country, and you hold whatever registration or licence local law requires of a business that makes marketing calls.
7. You will not load anyone who has opted out of hearing from you, on any channel, and you will not load anyone under 16.
8. Your own privacy notice covers this. You have told the people who enquire with you that you may use a service like ours to call them back, and you have a lawful basis for giving us their details.

These warranties are given every time a record enters the service, not once when you sign up. Breaking one is a material breach of these terms.

People who call you are yours as well. Somebody who rings a number you have pointed at Bludge is your caller, not ours. You are the controller of what they say and of the record the call leaves behind; we process it on your instructions, as our privacy policy describes. Your own privacy notice has to cover them — that an AI assistant answers your phone, that the call is transcribed, and what you then do with it — and you must only point at Bludge a number your business owns or controls.

Calling rules, hours and the AI disclosure

The service ships with calling rules switched on. They are set per country and they are the floor, not a suggestion.

• Calling hours. Calls are placed only inside the permitted hours for the person's own time zone, and never on Sundays or public holidays. You may narrow these hours. You may not widen them. The admin will refuse a schedule that opens earlier, closes later, or adds a day the country's rules do not allow.
• Overrides. Only we can lift the default window, only for a stated reason, and only where you have told us in writing that you hold consent that supports it. The reason is recorded. Asking for an override does not make the underlying call lawful — that remains your responsibility.
• The AI disclosure. Every call opens by saying it is an AI, on whose behalf it is calling, and what it is calling about. You may add to that sentence. You may not remove it, shorten it past the point where it is a disclosure, or instruct the assistant to deny that it is an AI.
• Consent age. An enquiry older than the country's window — 90 days as things stand — is not called automatically. Rows older than that are skipped on import and reported to you.
• Opt-out. Replying STOP to a text, or an administrator marking a person do-not-call, suppresses that number across your whole account, for calls and for texts, permanently. You must not undo it, and you must not reach that person through a different number or a different account.
• Stated opt-outs on a call are not detected automatically. If someone asks on the phone not to be called again, you must record it in the admin. Read your transcripts.

The current rules for each country are on the calling rules page. We may tighten them at any time to keep the service lawful. Where our defaults for a country are conservative placeholders rather than a legal opinion, you are still responsible for meeting the actual law where you call.

Transcripts, recording and notice

Calls are transcribed. That is how the assistant understands the conversation. The transcript is stored against the call and you can read it in the admin. Treat it as what it is: a record of a conversation with an identifiable person.

We do not store audio recordings of calls today. If we ever offer recording, it will be off by default and you will have to switch it on. This is the same for a call the service places and a call it answers.

Recording and monitoring laws differ, and some of them require the consent of everyone on the call. It is your responsibility to give whatever notice the law where you call requires, and to switch on any additional announcement the service offers if your jurisdiction needs one. If you turn recording on when it exists, you warrant that you have the consent that jurisdiction requires from every party to the call.

Acceptable use

Our acceptable use policy forms part of these terms. In summary: call your own enquiries, do not call anyone else, do not pretend the AI is a person, and do not use the service for the industries and content that policy prohibits.

You must also not resell the service, use it to build a competing product, reverse engineer it, or take more of it than your plan allows, and you must not do anything that interferes with its security or availability.

Your indemnity

You will indemnify us against any claim, penalty, regulatory action, fine, loss, damage or cost (including reasonable legal costs) that arises out of:

• a breach of your consent warranties in section 4;
• a breach of the calling rules in section 5, or of our acceptable use policy;
• the content you configure the assistant to say;
• your handling of the personal information of the people you ask us to call, including a failure to give them the notice your own privacy law requires;
• a claim by one of your leads, or by a regulator, about a call or a text we placed on your instruction.

We will tell you promptly about any claim covered by this indemnity, let you conduct the defence if you confirm the indemnity applies, and cooperate at your cost. We may take part in the defence with our own lawyers at our own expense, and you may not settle a claim in a way that admits fault on our part or imposes an obligation on us without our written consent.

This indemnity survives the end of these terms.

What we do, and what we do not promise

We will:

• provide the service with reasonable care and skill, and to the standard a competent supplier would;
• enforce the calling rules, the AI disclosure and the opt-out register in the way section 5 describes;
• keep your data secure as our privacy policy describes;
• tell you if something goes materially wrong that affects your calls;
• give you your data back, in a machine-readable form, if you ask while your account is open or within [export window] of it closing.

We do not promise that:

• the service will book you any particular number of appointments, or any at all. It calls people; whether they answer, and whether they book, is not something we control;
• every call will connect, or that a telephone network, a carrier or a voice provider will not fail;
• the assistant will always understand a caller, or always answer correctly. It is a machine reading your notes, and it will sometimes get things wrong. Read your transcripts;
• the service will be available without interruption. We will keep planned maintenance out of calling hours where we reasonably can;
• the service meets any legal or regulatory requirement that applies to your business. It is built to help, not to be a substitute for your own compliance advice.

The compliance defaults in the service are our reasonable effort to be conservative, not legal advice, and not a warranty that a call is lawful. Get your own advice for the markets you call into.

Services you connect

You can connect your own accounts with third parties — a CRM, a calendar, a booking tool. When you do, you authorise us to send them lead details, call outcomes and bookings, and to read what we need from them.

Those services are yours, not ours. Your agreement with them governs what they do with your data and what happens when they fail. We are not responsible for their availability, their pricing, their changes or their mistakes, and if one of them stops working the service may lose that feature until it is fixed.

The phone numbers we provide for you come from our telephony supplier and remain subject to that supplier's terms and to the rules of the local numbering authority.

Pilot terms and what you pay

Founding pilots pay per booked appointment, with nothing to pay up front. Your phone number, the calls, the texts and the retries are included. The current figures are on the pricing page, and the ones that apply to you are the ones in your order form or the ones shown when you signed up.

On a plan, each month includes a number of booked appointments and a number of answered calls, and anything beyond what is included is charged per event at the rate for your plan. Section 12 defines both events and the rules that go with them.

Prices are exclusive of GST, VAT, sales tax and any other tax, which we add where we must charge it. If you are outside Australia and a reverse charge applies, tell us and give us your registration number.

We may change our prices. For a pilot, we will not change the price of a booked appointment during the pilot term. Otherwise we will give you at least [notice period] notice before a change takes effect, and you may end your account before it does.

There is no lock-in. You can close your account at any time under section 13.

Booked appointments, answered calls, invoices and disputes

An appointment counts as booked when the assistant writes it into your calendar during a call with a lead you loaded, at a time the lead agreed to. That is the event we charge for. The definition in your order form, if there is one, governs.

An appointment does not count, and we will credit it, when:

• it was made during a test call you placed yourself, or in practice mode;
• it is a duplicate of an appointment already booked for the same person;
• the lead was not a real person, or the number was not theirs;
• [any other exclusion the order form sets out].

A lead who books and then cancels or does not turn up is still a booked appointment. The service got them into your calendar; what happens next is your sales process.

An inbound call counts as an answered call when somebody rings a number you have pointed at Bludge and the assistant answers and stays on the line with them for twenty seconds or more. Shorter calls are not charged, and neither are the ones that were never a conversation: a hang-up in the first few seconds, an automated or robocall, a wrong number, a silent line.

The fee rules for those calls are these.

• One event, one charge. An answered call that ends with an appointment in your calendar is charged once, as a call. It is not charged again as a booked appointment.
• Each call fee covers up to ten minutes. A call that runs past ten minutes is charged for the extra time at the per-minute rate on your plan.
• Unused inclusions roll over one month. Included calls you do not use in a month are available in the month after it, and then they lapse. They are not refunded and they do not accumulate further.
• Test calls do not count. A call you place to yourself to hear the assistant, or one made in practice mode, is not an answered call.

The amounts — what each plan includes, what an extra call or appointment costs, and the per-minute rate past ten minutes — are on the pricing page, and the ones that apply to you are the ones in your order form or the ones shown when you signed up. Where an order form defines these events differently, the order form governs.

We invoice [invoicing cycle] in arrears. Invoices are due [payment terms] from the date of the invoice. If you think an invoice is wrong, tell us within [dispute window] of receiving it, say which appointments or calls you dispute and why, and pay the rest. We will look at the transcript, the call record and the calendar entry and answer you within [dispute response time]. We may charge interest on amounts that are properly due and unpaid at [interest rate], and recover reasonable costs of collection.

Suspension and termination

You can leave at any time. Close your account in the admin or tell us at [support email]. Fees for appointments already booked remain payable; there is no refund of amounts already invoiced unless we agreed otherwise.

We can suspend your account immediately, without notice, if we reasonably believe that:

• you are calling people who did not enquire with you, or are using a purchased or scraped list;
• you are breaching the acceptable use policy or the calling rules;
• a regulator, a carrier or a supplier has told us to stop;
• your use is causing complaints, network abuse, or a risk to the service or to other customers;
• your account is being used without your authority.

We will tell you why as soon as we reasonably can, and we will lift a suspension when the cause is fixed. If it cannot be fixed, we may terminate.

Either of us can terminate on [notice period] written notice for convenience, or immediately if the other commits a material breach that is not fixed within 14 days of being told about it, or becomes insolvent.

When it ends: the service stops calling, you stop having access, and you pay what you owe. You can export your data before you close the account, and you can ask us for it within [export window] afterwards. We delete or return your data as our privacy policy and any data processing agreement require, except for do-not-call entries and records we must keep by law. Sections 8, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 20 survive.

You can take your phone number with you. A number we bought for you sits in our telephony supplier's account under our name, but we will not hold on to it. Ask whoever you are moving to for a port, and we will give that carrier the authority it needs, at no charge from us, provided your account is paid up. Porting is run by the carriers and the local numbering authority rather than by either of us, so allow a few weeks and keep your account open until the number has moved. The number's settings do not travel with it, and neither does our record of the people who have asked not to be called — ask us for that list and we will send it, so you can keep honouring it wherever you go.

Intellectual property

Ours stays ours. The service, the software, the prompts and models we build, the voices, the designs and the name are ours or our licensors'. You get a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service while your account is open, and nothing more.

Yours stays yours. Your leads, your transcripts, your bookings, your notes, your business name and your logo remain yours. You give us the licence we need to run the service for you, and nothing beyond it.

We do not train our models on your data. We do use aggregated, de-identified information about how the service performs — call durations, response times, connection rates — to make it better. Nothing in that identifies you or your leads.

If you send us feedback or an idea, we may use it without owing you anything.

Confidentiality

Each of us may learn things about the other that are not public. We will each keep the other's confidential information confidential, use it only for this agreement, protect it as carefully as we protect our own, and share it only with people who need it and are under equivalent obligations.

This does not apply to information that is already public, that the receiver already had, that a third party gave lawfully, or that a court or regulator requires be disclosed — in which case the receiver will tell the other first if it lawfully can.

These obligations continue for [confidentiality period] after this agreement ends, and indefinitely for anything that is a trade secret or personal information.

Personal information and the DPA

For the people you ask us to call, you are the controller and we are the processor. You decide what to collect and why; we act on your instructions. Using the service is your instruction to call, text and book on your behalf, and to store the results.

We will:

• process that information only on your documented instructions, unless the law requires otherwise;
• keep it secure, as our privacy policy describes;
• bind our suppliers to equivalent obligations, and tell you before we add or change one;
• help you answer requests from the people whose information it is, and help you with breach notifications and assessments;
• tell you without undue delay if we become aware of a personal data breach affecting your data;
• delete or return it at the end, as agreed.

If you are in, or you call into, the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, our data processing agreement applies and forms part of these terms. It carries the Article 28 obligations, the Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK Addendum for transfers to Australia, our sub-processor list and our security measures. Ask at [privacy contact email] and we will send it; if you have signed one, it prevails over this section where they differ.

Liability

Consumer guarantees. Where a consumer guarantee under the Australian Consumer Law applies to the service and the service is not of a kind ordinarily acquired for personal, domestic or household use, our liability for failing to comply with that guarantee is limited, at our option, to supplying the service again or paying the cost of having it supplied again.

What neither of us is liable for. Neither of us is liable to the other for loss of profit, loss of revenue, loss of anticipated savings, loss of business or goodwill, or any indirect or consequential loss, however it arises.

The cap. Subject to the paragraphs above and below, our total aggregate liability to you arising out of or in connection with these terms — in contract, in tort (including negligence), under statute or otherwise — is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the [12] months before the event giving rise to the claim and [minimum cap amount].

What the cap does not cover. The cap and the exclusions above do not apply to:

• your obligation to pay fees;
• your indemnity in section 8;
• either party's breach of section 15 (confidentiality);
• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
• death or personal injury caused by negligence;
• anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Your own compliance. We are not liable for a claim, penalty or regulatory action that arises because you called someone who had not consented, because your consent wording was inadequate, or because you used the service outside these terms. That is what section 8 is for.

Each of us must take reasonable steps to reduce our loss.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change is material — anything affecting price, liability, your rights, or what you are promising us — we will give you at least [notice period] notice by email and on this page before it takes effect, and you may close your account before it does rather than accept it.

Minor changes, such as a clearer sentence or a corrected link, take effect when we publish them. The effective date at the top tells you which version you are reading.

General

• Whole agreement. These terms, the acceptable use policy, the privacy policy, any data processing agreement and any order form are the whole agreement between us about the service, and replace anything said before.
• No waiver. If one of us does not enforce something straight away, that does not mean it has been given up.
• Severance. If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest continues.
• Assignment. You may not transfer these terms without our written consent. We may transfer them to a company that acquires our business, and we will tell you.
• Notices. Ours to you go to the email address on your account. Yours to us go to [support email], and legal notices to [Company legal name], [registered address].
• Relationship. Neither of us is the other's agent, partner or employee.
• Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a delay caused by something genuinely outside our control — a carrier failure, a nationwide outage, a natural disaster — provided we tell the other and work around it as best we can.
• Publicity. We will not use your name or logo as a customer reference without your consent.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of Victoria, Australia. Each of us submits to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Victoria and the courts that hear appeals from them. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

If you are in the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area, the United States or Canada, this does not take away any right you have under the mandatory law of your own country that cannot be excluded by agreement.

Before starting proceedings, each of us will try to resolve a dispute by talking about it: write to the other setting out the problem and what you want, and we will each make a senior person available within 14 days.

Questions about these terms

If something here does not fit your business, ask us before you sign up rather than after.

• Support and contracts: [support email]
• Privacy and the DPA: [privacy contact email]
• By post: [Company legal name], [registered address]

See also our acceptable use policy, our privacy policy, the calling rules and the pricing page.