1. Acceptance of Terms
These Terms of Service govern your use of Basis Financial, operated by Basis Financial LLC, a Michigan limited liability company ("Basis," "we," "us," or "our"). By accessing or using the Service, creating an account, connecting a financial account, starting a subscription, or clicking to accept these Terms, you agree to be bound by these Terms.
If you do not agree, do not use the Service. Material changes will apply prospectively after notice unless you affirmatively accept them earlier. Changes to dispute-resolution provisions will not apply to disputes that arose before the effective date of the change unless permitted by law.
2. Eligibility, Accounts, and Security
You must be at least 18 years old and legally capable of entering into a binding contract to use the Service. You may not use the Service on behalf of another person or entity unless you are authorized to do so.
Basis is currently offered as a United States-only beta. By creating an account or continuing into protected product workflows, you confirm that you are using Basis from the United States. Basis does not collect date of birth for this eligibility check.
You are responsible for providing accurate account information, keeping your credentials secure, and all activity under your account. Notify us promptly if you believe your account has been accessed without authorization.
3. Description of Service
Basis provides educational, projection-based tools designed to help you understand tradeoffs across financial, household, career, and planning decisions. Current and planned tools may include:
- Vehicle cost analysis, including buy, lease, finance, and cash comparison
- Rent vs. buy housing analysis
- Career and job transition modeling, including compensation, benefits, location, employment-risk, and career-progression scenarios
- Investment Strategy Model outputs comparing modeled strategy presets, account-bucket assumptions, contribution and withdrawal paths, downside stress, run-out durability, and balance ranges
- Financial goal planning with stress-tested projections
- Budget tracking, optional read-only connected account sync through Plaid, and AI-assisted categorization
- Hosted subscription checkout and billing management through Stripe
- Reviewed transcript intake for draft-only planner and budgeting action previews, when enabled
- Scenario saving and comparison
- Behavioral risk assessment
These tools produce estimates, projections, explanations, categorizations, educational suggestions, and probabilities, not guarantees. Real-world outcomes depend on many factors our models cannot predict.
4. Connected Accounts and Third-Party Services
Connected account sync is optional, user-initiated, and read-only. If you choose to connect an account, you must own that account or be authorized to connect it. Basis uses Plaid as a third-party service to help you authorize access to connected account data for personal budgeting, planning, analytics, and financial modeling within Basis.
Basis does not receive or store your financial institution login credentials. Basis does not move money, hold funds, initiate payments, or provide banking services. Connected account data may be delayed, incomplete, inaccurate, or unavailable because it depends on Plaid, your financial institution, and connected-account service availability.
Plaid is governed by its own policies, including the Plaid legal and privacy policies. You should review Plaid's policies before connecting an account.
Basis also uses third-party services for authentication, hosting, billing, email delivery, analytics, error monitoring, AI processing, and other operational needs. Third-party services are governed by their own terms and policies. Feature availability may depend on those services.
5. Educational Use and No Advice
Basis is not a registered investment advisor, broker-dealer, financial planner, tax advisor, attorney, employment advisor, lender, insurer, broker, or employer decision service. All content, tools, simulations, outputs, estimates, projections, categorizations, explanations, and educational suggestions are for educational and informational purposes only. They do not constitute personalized financial, tax, legal, investment, employment, lending, insurance, or hiring advice. You are solely responsible for evaluating the merit and risks of any financial, employment, relocation, compensation, tax, legal, investment, or planning decision you make. Consult qualified professionals before acting on information provided through the Service.
6. AI, Data, and Model Use
Basis does not use your personal data, connected-account data, transaction data, balances, merchant names, financial inputs, behavioral assessment responses, transcripts, or chat content to train AI models or cross-customer machine-learning models.
Basis may use your own data to provide features to you, and may improve product behavior using synthetic data, test fixtures, public or non-user data, or manually reviewed internal examples. You must review AI-assisted assumption suggestions and transcript-derived drafts before applying or confirming them.
7. User Data and Service License
You retain ownership of information, inputs, files, prompts, transcript text, connected-account records, and other content you submit to the Service, subject to any rights held by third parties. You grant Basis a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide license to host, process, transmit, display, and use that data as reasonably necessary to provide, secure, support, maintain, and improve the Service as described in these Terms and our Privacy Policy.
Outputs are provided for your personal educational planning use. You may not use Basis outputs as an employer, lender, insurer, broker, investment advisor, hiring service, eligibility system, underwriting system, or other institutional decisioning tool.
8. Basis Intellectual Property
Basis and its licensors own the Service, including software, interfaces, designs, models, algorithms, formulas, assumptions, documentation, branding, trademarks, and other underlying intellectual property. These Terms do not transfer ownership of Basis intellectual property to you. Feedback, suggestions, or ideas you provide may be used by Basis without restriction or obligation to you.
9. Acceptable Use
You agree not to:
- Use the Service for unlawful, fraudulent, harmful, abusive, or deceptive purposes.
- Connect accounts or submit data that you are not authorized to use.
- Share account credentials or bypass authentication, authorization, rate limits, or security controls.
- Probe, scan, attack, disrupt, overload, scrape, crawl, or interfere with the Service or related systems.
- Upload malicious code or content that violates another person's rights.
- Reverse-engineer, copy, redistribute, benchmark for competitive purposes, or build competing models or services from Basis models, outputs, or non-public features.
- Use connected-account data or outputs for lending, underwriting, insurance, employment, investment advisory, eligibility, or institutional decisioning.
- Use the Service in violation of export control, sanctions, or other applicable laws.
10. Accuracy, Availability, and Disclaimers
Our models use user-provided inputs, public or licensed data where available, standard financial formulas, and stress-tested simulation techniques. Results depend on your inputs and model assumptions. Market conditions, labor-market conditions, benefit designs, compensation practices, tax laws, investment returns, inflation, interest rates, and personal circumstances change. Projections are snapshots, not predictions.
The Service is provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent permitted by law, Basis disclaims all warranties, express, implied, statutory, or otherwise, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, availability, and reliability. Basis does not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or that outputs will be accurate or suitable for any particular purpose.
11. Subscriptions, Billing, Cancellation, and Refunds
Paid subscriptions, trials, checkout, billing portals, and payment processing are handled through Stripe or another payment provider. By starting a paid subscription, you authorize the applicable recurring charges, taxes, and fees shown at purchase.
Paid subscriptions renew automatically unless cancelled before the renewal date. You may cancel through the billing portal when available or by contacting us. Cancellation prevents future renewals but does not automatically entitle you to a refund for the then-current billing period unless required by law or expressly stated at purchase.
Failed payments, chargebacks, plan changes, price changes, trial eligibility, and access after cancellation may affect feature availability. We may change plan features or pricing prospectively after notice where required.
12. Account Deletion and Termination
You may initiate deletion of account data from active Basis systems. Account deletion removes Basis-controlled account data from active systems, subject to reasonable backup, legal, security, fraud-prevention, accounting, dispute-resolution, and compliance retention. Deleting your account does not automatically clear data stored locally on your device or data retained by third-party services under their own policies.
If you disconnect a connected financial account, Basis revokes Plaid access, deletes the local encrypted connection credential, and stops future syncs while retaining historical local budgeting records by default. You may also choose the separate disconnect-and-delete-local-history option for a Plaid connection, which deletes local Basis records tied to that connection after Plaid access is revoked. Full account deletion revokes active Plaid Items before deleting local connected-account records when revocation can be completed.
We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms, create security or legal risk, or misuse the Service. For details on how we handle your data, please see our Privacy Policy.
13. Limitation of Liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Basis Financial LLC and its founders, employees, contractors, service providers, and affiliates will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, punitive, or lost-profit damages, or for financial, employment, compensation, relocation, tax, legal, lending, insurance, investment, or planning losses resulting from decisions made based on Service outputs.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Basis's total liability for any claim arising out of or relating to the Service will not exceed the greater of: (a) the amount you paid to Basis in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) $100. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so some of these limits may not apply to you.
14. Indemnification
To the fullest extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Basis Financial LLC and its founders, employees, contractors, service providers, and affiliates from claims, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses arising out of or relating to your misuse of the Service, violation of these Terms, violation of law, violation of third-party rights, or submission or use of data you are not authorized to provide.
15. Governing Law and Dispute Resolution
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Michigan, without regard to conflict-of-law principles, except that the Federal Arbitration Act governs the interpretation and enforcement of the arbitration agreement in this section.
Before starting a formal proceeding, you and Basis agree to try to resolve disputes through good-faith informal negotiation. If the dispute is not resolved, any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its applicable consumer arbitration rules, except that either party may bring an individual claim in small claims court or seek injunctive relief for misuse of intellectual property, unauthorized access, or security abuse.
You and Basis waive the right to a jury trial and to participate in a class action, class arbitration, private attorney general action, or other representative proceeding. Arbitration will take place in Michigan unless the arbitration provider's rules or applicable law require another location or remote procedure. This dispute-resolution section survives termination of your account and these Terms.
16. Changes to the Service
We may modify, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service at any time. We will make reasonable efforts to notify users of significant changes via email or in-app notification. Feature availability may change between free and paid tiers, and beta or experimental features may be changed or removed without notice.
17. Contact Information
For questions about these Terms, contact us at support@basis-financial.com.