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.

In these terms, a “table” is a space on your show’s floor plan that a vendor books. Some venues call it a booth.

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 table map, vendor applications, a checkout flow for tables and admission tickets, door check-in, and the reporting around them. That is the whole of what we provide.

We are not a payment processor, a marketplace, or a party to any sale you make. That includes admission tickets: we provide the software you sell them with, and you are the one selling them. Apart from our own fee, which Stripe separates from each charge as it is made, we do not take custody of vendor or ticket buyer money at any point. We do not set your prices, and we do not decide who may exhibit at, or attend, your show.

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

• Tax. Table rental is taxable in some places and not others, and is classified inconsistently. Admission can carry its own sales or admissions tax. Whether tax applies to your sales, and remitting it if it does, is yours. We do not calculate, collect, or remit tax on your sales: the price you set for a ticket is the price the buyer pays for it, before our service fee and any processing fee you add. Nothing in the product should be read as advice that tax does or does not apply.
• Refunds and cancellations. Your refund policy is yours, for tables and tickets alike. The product gives you full refunds and a cancel-the-whole-show job that refunds every paid booking and ticket order on the event and emails each vendor and buyer; when you use them, you are the one refunding. A ticket order is refunded whole, never ticket by ticket. Ticket buyers cannot refund or cancel an order themselves in the product; they ask you. The product also refunds a payment on its own, from your account, when it cannot be honoured: a second charge for something already paid, or a payment that arrived after its hold ran out and what it was for is no longer available.
• Disputes and chargebacks. These are raised against your Stripe account and answered by you, for ticket orders as for bookings. Any resulting loss or fee is yours, and a dispute does not return our service fee on a ticket order.
• The vendor and ticket buyer relationships. Your rules, your approvals, your standards, your admission policy, your correspondence. If a vendor or a ticket buyer has a complaint about your show, it is a complaint about your show.
• The door and the venue. Who is let in is decided at your door, by your team and the volunteers you give a check-in link to. A capacity you set on a ticket type limits how many of that type are sold online and nothing else: it does not count people who pay at the door or anyone else in the hall, and it is not a venue or fire-code limit. Keeping your show within what the venue allows is yours.

You are responsible for the rules and terms you present to your vendors and ticket buyers. We store the text of your vendor 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 and ticket orders already paid are unaffected, and tables and tickets already on hold keep their hold until it expires.

You may charge your vendors and ticket buyers a processing fee to recover Stripe’s costs. One setting covers everything sold on an event. That fee is yours, it is your decision, and we take none of it. On a ticket order it is calculated on each ticket’s price, rounded to the cent, and never on our service fee. It is included in the price each ticket shows.

On tables, we charge 5% of the table 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 table price plus any processing fee you chose to add.
• The 5% is calculated on the table 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 table, a $0 booking - carries no fee.

On admission tickets, you pay us nothing. The ticket buyer pays us a service fee of 3% + $0.50 per ticket, on top of your ticket price.

• It is included, with any processing fee you add, in the price each ticket shows, and it is itemised in the order summary before the buyer pays. Stripe takes it from the charge on your account at the moment of payment. It never comes out of your ticket price.
• It is worked out per ticket: 3% of the ticket’s price, rounded to the cent, plus $0.50. A $10 ticket carries $0.80; a $20 ticket, $1.10. It is never applied to your processing fee.
• Stripe charges its processing cost to your account on the whole of each charge, and on a ticket order that whole includes our service fee. Your processing fee is how you recover that cost if you choose to.
• When a ticket order is refunded through Captain Expo - from the console, by cancelling the event, or automatically - we return our service fee with it. In the rare case where Stripe cannot reverse the fee at that moment, the buyer is still refunded in full and the unreturned amount is recorded against the refund.

There is no subscription, no minimum, no per-event charge, and no limit on how many events or tables 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 tables and walls for you to correct, and we do not warrant that what it proposes is accurate.

Your event data is yours. Your vendors’ and ticket buyers’ 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. The same goes for ticket buyers. A buyer who ticks “Email me about your next show” has asked to hear about your next show; if you download the buyers who ticked it, what you send them is yours to answer for.

You can email every ticket buyer of a show from the console. Use it only to tell them about a change to that show, such as a new date, a new venue, or a cancellation. Do not use it to advertise another show or to sell anything. We receive a copy of every email you send this way, and each buyer can report it to us. We may turn it off for your organization if you use it for anything else.

Door lists you download, and the check-in links you give volunteers, are in your hands once they leave the console. A check-in link can check tickets in and download a door list without buyer emails, and nothing else. It stops working 24 hours after your show ends, or sooner if you revoke it. You are responsible for who you give one to.

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 tables at it or the public buying tickets to it;
• email your ticket buyers about anything other than a change to the show they bought tickets for;
• 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 table cannot be sold twice, because the database physically prevents a second claim on the same table. 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. A ticket type with a capacity is guarded the same way: its last ticket sells once.

Check-in needs an internet connection, and there is no offline check-in. If the connection fails at your door, the fallback is a door list, which you can download or print from the console before doors open.

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, tickets your buyers have already paid for remain their tickets, 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, the door list of paid ticket orders, and the ticket buyers who opted in to hear from you, 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 fees never applies retroactively to a booking or a ticket order 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.