Terms of Service

These terms are between Captain Expo (“we”, “us”) and the organization that signs up to use it (“you”, “the organizer”). They apply whenever you use the service, whether or not you have sold anything.

You need authority to bind your organization. If you are signing up on behalf of a business, you are confirming you have that authority.

We give you tools: a floor plan editor, a public booth map, vendor applications, a checkout flow, and the reporting around them. That is the whole of what we provide.

We are not a payment processor, a marketplace, a ticketing company, or a party to any sale you make. We do not take custody of vendor money at any point, we do not set your prices, and we do not decide who may exhibit at your show.

Every booth sale is a sale by you to your vendor. Your name appears on the vendor’s card statement. As the merchant of record, you own:

• Tax. Booth rental is taxable in some places and not others, and is classified inconsistently. Whether tax applies to your sales, and remitting it if it does, is yours. We do not calculate, collect, or remit tax, and nothing in the product should be read as advice that tax does or does not apply.
• Refunds and cancellations. Your refund policy is yours. The product gives you full refunds and a cancel-the-whole-show job; when you use them, you are the one refunding.
• Disputes and chargebacks. These are raised against your Stripe account and answered by you. Any resulting loss or fee is yours.
• The vendor relationship. Your rules, your approvals, your standards, your correspondence. If a vendor has a complaint about your show, it is a complaint about your show.

You are responsible for the rules and terms you present to your vendors. We store the text of those rules as it stood when a vendor accepted them, so that the record of what they agreed to does not change when you later edit it.

Taking payment requires your own Stripe account, connected to us. Charges are created directly on that account and the money is yours from the moment it is charged. We never hold, transmit, or control it.

Your relationship with Stripe is separate from this one and governed by Stripe’s own agreement with you. Stripe decides whether your account may accept charges. If Stripe disables charges on your account, or you disconnect it, new checkouts stop - bookings already paid are unaffected, and booths already on hold keep their hold until it expires.

You may charge your vendors a processing fee to recover Stripe’s costs. That fee is yours, it is your decision, and we take none of it.

We charge 5% of the booth subtotal on each paid booking. It is collected automatically by Stripe at the moment of the charge and paid by you, the organizer.

• Your vendors are never charged a fee by us, and never see one. What a vendor pays is your booth price plus any processing fee you chose to add.
• The 5% is calculated on the booth subtotal only. It is never applied to your own processing fee.
• If you refund a booking, we return our fee. If the vendor got their money back, so did you. In the rare case where Stripe cannot reverse the fee at that moment, the vendor is still refunded in full and the unreturned amount is recorded against the refund.
• A booking that costs nothing - a comped booth, a $0 booking - carries no fee.

There is no subscription, no minimum, no per-event charge, and no limit on how many events or booths you create.

Automatic floor plan detection runs on credits. You get 2 when you create an organization and 5 more the first time your Stripe account is able to accept charges. Further credits are sold in packs of 10 for $10.

A credit is reserved when a detection run starts and returned if the run fails or never finishes, so only successful runs ultimately spend a credit. Purchased credits are non-refundable and have no cash value. Detection is a drafting aid: it proposes booths and walls for you to correct, and we do not warrant that what it proposes is accurate.

Your event data is yours. Your vendors’ personal information is yours too - we hold it on your behalf and process it on your instructions, which is what our Data Processing Addendum sets out in detail. Our Privacy Policy describes what we collect and who we share it with.

You are responsible for having a lawful basis to collect the vendor information you ask for, and for what you do with it - including any email you send your vendors through the product.

We may use aggregated, de-identified information about how the service is used to operate and improve it. We do not sell personal information.

You agree not to use the service to:

• sell anything you may not lawfully sell, or run an event you may not lawfully run;
• misrepresent an event - its dates, its venue, or whether it is going to happen - to the vendors buying booths at it;
• upload material you do not have the right to upload, including floor plans;
• attempt to access another organization’s data, probe our infrastructure, or interfere with anyone else’s use of the service;
• resell or white-label the service as your own product without a written agreement with us.

We aim to keep the service running and will not be careless about it, but we do not offer a guaranteed uptime commitment, and the service is provided “as is” without warranties of any kind, to the extent the law allows.

One property we do build for deliberately: a booth cannot be sold twice, because the database physically prevents a second claim on the same booth. Availability shown on a public map is calculated when the page is read rather than stored, so it does not depend on any scheduled job running on time.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits or lost revenue, arising out of these terms.

Our total liability arising out of or relating to these terms is limited to the total fees you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited - including fraud or wilful misconduct.

You may stop using the service at any time. You may disconnect your Stripe account whenever you like; that is done in Stripe rather than here.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches clause 8, or where we are required to by law. Except in urgent cases we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.

Termination does not touch money that has already moved. Bookings your vendors have already paid for remain their bookings, and any refund you owe remains yours to issue from your own Stripe account, which we do not control. You may export your vendor roster at any time while the account is open.

We may update these terms. If a change materially reduces your rights or increases what you pay, we will give you reasonable notice by email to the address on your organization before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that is acceptance; if you would rather not, you can stop using it.

A change to our fee never applies retroactively to a booking that has already been paid.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict of laws rules, and the state and federal courts located in California have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

If any clause is found unenforceable, the rest stands. These terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the Data Processing Addendum, are the entire agreement between us about the service.

Questions go to legal@captainexpo.com.