The short version

Porchfest HQ is a tool for organizers. You’re still in charge of your Porchfest.

We built Porchfest HQ to make the hard parts of organizing a Porchfest easier — managing performers and hosts, matching them up, building a schedule, finding potential sound conflicts, and turning all of that work into a useful map and schedule.

We’ll do our best to make those tools accurate and reliable. But software doesn’t know your neighborhood the way you do. It might miss something. Your organizing team still makes the final calls about performers, hosts, schedules, locations, safety, permits, sound, and everything else involved in actually putting on your event.

Your event information is yours.

The performers, hosts, locations, schedules, notes, and other information you put into Porchfest HQ belong to you, not us.

We need permission to process that information so the software can do its job. We don’t gain ownership of it just because you put it into Porchfest HQ.

We don’t publish your event for you.

Porchfest HQ can produce maps, schedules, and other materials that are ready to share. But we don’t independently publish your host, performer, or event information to the public.

Your team decides what gets published, where it gets published, and when.

That also means it’s worth giving the final output a good look before you post it — especially if it contains someone’s home address, phone number, email address, or anything else you wouldn’t want published accidentally.

Auto-Match is a very capable assistant. It isn’t the boss.

Some Porchfest HQ tools can recommend matches, schedules, and ways to resolve conflicts automatically.

They’re recommendations.

If Auto-Match thinks the bluegrass trio belongs on Oak Street but you know Oak Street is directly behind the town’s loudest punk band, trust yourself. Local knowledge wins.

Don’t put information in Porchfest HQ that doesn’t belong there.

If you’re entering information about performers, hosts, or volunteers, make sure you have a legitimate reason to have it and use it.

And please don’t use Porchfest HQ to store Social Security or Social Insurance numbers, medical records, banking credentials, or other highly sensitive information. We don’t need it and the product isn’t designed for it.

You pay for the event plan you choose.

Porchfest HQ is sold by event rather than through an automatically renewing subscription. If your event grows beyond the limits of your plan, we’ll ask you to move to the appropriate plan.

No surprise renewal a year from now because somebody forgot to cancel a subscription.

Stripe helps us handle the messy parts of getting paid.

We use Stripe Managed Payments for eligible purchases. Sold through Link, LLC, a Stripe affiliate, acts as the merchant of record for those transactions.

In practical terms, that means Stripe handles the payment and can take care of things like applicable sales taxes, GST or VAT in the places it covers, as well as payment fraud, disputes, receipts, refunds, and payment-related support.

We’re still the people selling and providing Porchfest HQ. If you have a question about the product or your event, talk to us. If there’s an issue specifically with a payment, Stripe may be involved in resolving it.

Try it for 14 days. If it is not a good fit, ask for a full refund.

Contact help@porchfesthq.com within 14 days of purchase. Please tell us what did not work so we can improve, but feedback is optional and you do not have to prove you got no value from the tool.

Normal evaluation — even creating schedules, maps, or exports — does not take away the guarantee. We do protect against fraud and deliberate refund abuse, such as repeated purchases and refunds to keep using the tool without paying. A person reviews those concerns.

After 14 days, you can still ask. We consider refunds individually, taking product problems and your circumstances into account.

For Stripe Managed Payments purchases, Sold through Link can issue refunds within 60 days even if our own policy is more restrictive, and its refund policy controls where ours is more restrictive. That is not a promise that every request within 60 days will be approved. A full refund includes applicable sales tax paid on the purchase. Your non-waivable legal rights still apply, including any rights beyond these periods.

We’re not promising perfection.

We’ll work hard to provide a reliable product. But Porchfest HQ is software, and software occasionally breaks, misses things, or goes offline.

The legal Terms include the normal warranty disclaimers and limits on our financial liability that allow a small software business like ours to offer the service at a reasonable price.

And one disclosure that matters to us: Porchfest HQ came from Porchfest experience.

Porchfest HQ was created after years spent helping organize Porchfest Edmonds and watching the volunteer team spend countless hours confirming and matching performers and hosts, checking sound conflicts, reconciling spreadsheets, and rebuilding maps.

The creator of Porchfest HQ is still involved with Porchfest Edmonds.

But Porchfest HQ is an independent service. Porchfest Edmonds doesn’t get access to another event’s information, and neither do organizers of other Porchfests.

Your Porchfest is your Porchfest.

We’re building a planning tool, not a data business.

Porchfest HQ needs some personal information to work. Organizers have accounts. Performer and host rosters contain names and contact information. Hosts have addresses. That’s the nature of organizing a Porchfest.

We treat that information as something you’ve entrusted to us to help you run your event — not as an asset for us to sell.

We don’t sell your data.

Not your organizer information. Not your performer list. Not your host list.

We don’t turn those lists into marketing databases for other companies.

Your planning workspace isn’t public.

Information you put into Porchfest HQ isn’t automatically published to the internet.

The product can create maps, schedules, and other materials that your team can choose to publish. That’s your decision, not ours.

We use a few other companies to help Porchfest HQ work.

For example:

• Stripe helps us handle purchases and payment-related services.
• Google Analytics helps us understand things like website traffic and usage.
• Mixpanel helps us understand how people use the product so we can make it better.
• Cloudflare checks that a person, rather than a script, is asking for a sign-in link. Most of the time you will not notice it.

Those services receive information needed to do their jobs. We don’t intentionally send your performer and host rosters or private organizer notes into our analytics tools for advertising.

Stripe handles more of your purchase than a typical payment processor.

When you buy Porchfest HQ through Stripe Managed Payments, Stripe and its affiliates may handle information needed to process the purchase, calculate applicable taxes, prevent fraud, issue receipts, handle refunds or disputes, and provide payment-related support.

We receive information we need to know that you’ve purchased Porchfest HQ and to manage your account, but we don’t intend to store your full credit-card number or security code ourselves.

Stripe also has its own privacy practices covering information it processes.

We collect product analytics because we want to know where Porchfest HQ is helping — and where it’s making you swear at your computer.

Things like whether organizers use a feature, where a workflow gets abandoned, or whether a new feature actually makes scheduling easier help us build a better product.

We may also look at relevant usage records when a person reviews a refund request or possible refund abuse. That can include completed actions, exports, and errors, linked to the relevant account, event, or purchase. For that review, we use activity details and counts rather than private rosters, addresses, or notes in analytics.

Usage is context, not an automatic reason to refuse a refund. Missing tracking or exercising privacy choices does not by itself make you ineligible. We may share a limited, relevant summary with Stripe to help resolve a refund or payment dispute. Optional feedback stays in support records rather than product-analytics events.

Some data may be processed in the United States.

Porchfest HQ is a U.S. service and serves organizers in both the United States and Canada.

That means information from Canadian events may be stored or processed in the United States or by service providers operating in other jurisdictions.

We explain that more fully in the Privacy Policy because we think Canadian customers should know where their information may go.

We try not to collect things we don’t need.

More data isn’t automatically better.

Our goal is to collect what Porchfest HQ reasonably needs to provide the service, keep it secure, support customers, and improve the product — and not much else.

If you’re an organizer, we’d ask you to take the same approach with your performers and hosts.

If you have a question about your information, ask us.

If you want to know what personal information Porchfest HQ has about you, think something is wrong, want something corrected or deleted, or simply don’t understand one of our privacy practices, contact us at deletemyaccount@porchfesthq.com.

There doesn’t need to be a magic legal phrase in the subject line.

We’ll help.