Terms of Service

1. Who you are contracting with

Kessel is a product of two separate companies, and which one you contract with depends on where your business is established. Both are named RentalTide Inc., and they are nonetheless two distinct legal persons rather than one company with two offices: one is incorporated in Delaware, the other federally in Canada. Where it matters which one is meant, they are identified by registration number and not by name.

"Kessel", "we", "us" and "our" mean whichever of those companies you contract with. "You" means the business using Kessel and, where you are accepting on behalf of a company, that company. If you are accepting on behalf of a company you confirm you have authority to bind it.

Which company you contract with decides the governing law and the place of arbitration in section 20. It is not a formality.

2. The service

Kessel is a point-of-sale system: a register, a floor plan, a kitchen display, a catalog, inventory, a double-entry ledger, reporting, house accounts and invoicing, delivered as hosted software with native and web clients.

We may change, add to or remove features. Where a change removes a capability you rely on, we will give you at least 30 days’ notice by email and you may cancel without penalty, which you can do at any time anyway.

3. Accounts, staff and security

• You are responsible for everything done under your account, including by your staff.
• Staff accounts are unlimited and included. Give each person their own; a shared login makes your own audit trail worthless.
• Keep credentials confidential and tell us at security@usekessel.com as soon as you suspect a compromise.
• You must be at least 18 and legally able to enter into contracts.

4. Payments are processed by Stripe

Kessel is not a payments processor, a bank or a money transmitter. Card payments are processed by Stripe under a Stripe connected account held by you. Your use of that account is governed by Stripe’s Connected Account Agreement and Services Agreement, which you enter into with Stripe directly and in addition to these terms.

• Funds settle from Stripe to your bank account on Stripe’s payout schedule. We do not hold your money and we cannot accelerate a Stripe payout.
• Stripe may hold, reserve or delay funds, or close an account, under its own agreement and for its own risk reasons. We will tell you what we know when that happens, but the decision is Stripe’s.
• You are the merchant of record for every sale you take. Goods, services, refunds, disputes and consumer-law obligations to your customers are yours.
• You must not use Kessel for any business Stripe restricts. Stripe publishes that list and it is a condition of your connected account, not ours.

5. Fees

Interchange is set by the card networks. It varies by card type, by country and by how the card is presented, and it passes through to you at cost: we neither mark it up nor round it. The 0.90% + 30c is ours, and it is the only part we control. Any worked example on our website is illustrative and is not a quote.

You are on interchange-plus unless you have asked us in writing for the flat rate, and you may move between the two on request. On the flat rate we pay interchange for you, so your price does not move with your card mix; in exchange it is a single rate that does not fall when interchange falls. We will tell you which of the two is cheaper on your own volume before you choose, and again if that answer changes.

On the flat rate, the additional 2.00% applies where the card was ISSUED outside your country, as reported by the card networks on the transaction. It reflects cross-border interchange and currency conversion that we are charged and is shown on every affected transaction, so you can check it. We do not charge a different rate for rewards, business or commercial cards, and we do not add a fee to your customer at checkout: these prices are what you pay us, not a surcharge on the cardholder.

We may change the software fee, our 0.90% + 30c, or the flat rates above on 30 days’ notice by email. If you do not accept a change, cancel before it takes effect; continuing to use Kessel after that date is acceptance. Changes in interchange are not fee changes by us and take effect when the networks make them.

Fees are exclusive of sales tax, GST, HST, QST, VAT and similar taxes, which we add where we are required to collect them.

What we refund, when, and what happens to the processing fee on a sale you refund to your own customer are set out in the Refund and Cancellation Policy at usekessel.com/refunds/.

6. Hardware, leases and finance

Readers are Stripe Terminal hardware. You can buy one outright, or lease or finance one and pay nothing on the day.

• A lease or finance plan has a fixed term and a total. It is stated in full before you order and it does not change afterwards.
• Amounts due under a plan are collected out of your card volume, capped at 10% of any single payment, so a slow week defers the collection rather than producing a bill.
• Title to leased hardware stays with us until the term completes. Title to purchased or financed hardware passes to you on full payment.
• Risk of loss passes on delivery. Insure it the way you would insure a till.
• If you stop using Kessel with an open plan, the remaining balance becomes payable, because the hardware was funded out of volume that is no longer coming. We will always agree a schedule rather than simply invoice it.
• Manufacturer warranty terms are Stripe’s. We will help you claim under them.

7. Free trial

The first 30 days are free and no card is charged during them. We email you before the trial ends. Card processing fees apply from your first real sale, because those are the networks’ costs and Stripe’s, not a trial of ours.

8. Your data

Your catalog, orders, customers, staff records, inventory and ledger are yours. We claim no ownership of them. You grant us only the licence we need to run the service for you: to host, process, transmit, back up and display that data, and to disclose it to the sub-processors listed in our Privacy Policy.

We do not sell your data, we do not use it to train models, and we do not permit our providers to train on it. AI requests run through commercial APIs whose terms prohibit training on submitted content.

We produce aggregated, de-identified statistics that cannot identify you or your customers, and we use those to operate and improve Kessel.

Export your data as CSV at any time, including for 90 days after your account closes. We do not charge for an export and we do not hold data hostage against an unpaid invoice.

9. Acceptable use

You will not, and will not permit anyone else to:

• Use Kessel for anything unlawful, or to sell anything you are not licensed to sell.
• Process a payment that is not a genuine sale of your own goods or services, including processing on behalf of another business. That is factoring, every card network prohibits it, and it will close your Stripe account.
• Attempt to gain access to another merchant’s data, probe or load-test our systems without written permission, or circumvent a limit or a permission.
• Resell, sublicense or white-label Kessel without a written agreement.
• Upload malware, or content that infringes somebody’s rights.

We may suspend an account immediately where continuing would break the law, put other merchants at risk, or breach a card network rule. We will tell you why, in writing, and restore access as soon as the cause is resolved.

What this means in practice — what may and may not be sold through Kessel, which categories need our approval first, and the rules about texting your customers — is listed in the Acceptable Use Policy at usekessel.com/acceptable-use/. It is a list rather than a second contract: it explains this section and does not add to it.

10. Tax

Kessel calculates and records the taxes you configure and reports on them. Configuring the right rates, registering where you are required to, filing and remitting are yours. We are not your tax adviser and a report from Kessel is not a filing.

11. Refunds, chargebacks and negative balances

• You decide your own refund policy and you owe it to your customers, not to us.
• A chargeback is decided by the cardholder’s bank and the card network. Kessel assembles the evidence automatically, including the receipt, the entry method, and the PIN or signature result, and drafts a response for you to review and send. Nobody can guarantee an outcome.
• Chargebacks, refunds and network fines are debited from your Stripe balance. If that balance is insufficient, you owe the shortfall and Stripe may recover it from your bank account under its own agreement.
• Amounts you owe us that we cannot collect from volume are payable within 14 days of an invoice.

Your refund policy toward your customers and our refund policy toward you are two different things, and a cardholder reading a statement cannot tell them apart. The Refund and Cancellation Policy at usekessel.com/refunds/ opens by separating them.

12. Availability and support

We aim for Kessel to be available all the time and we build for the times it is not: the register keeps selling offline, and cash, house accounts and gift cards work with no connection at all. We do not offer a contractual uptime guarantee on the $49 plan, and we would rather say that plainly than publish a number with no remedy attached to it.

Support is included at no charge, by email at hello@usekessel.com. There is no paid support tier.

13. AI features

Every AI feature in Kessel proposes and a person applies. Catalog Studio drafts items, prices and modifiers; add-on suggestions are measured from your own baskets and show the evidence; dispute responses are drafted from your own records. None of them writes anything until you click Apply, and a proposal with a blocking problem cannot be applied at all.

Output can be wrong. You are responsible for what you apply, exactly as you would be if you had typed it. AI output is not legal, tax or accounting advice.

We do not sell your data, we do not use it to train models, and we do not permit our providers to train on it. AI requests run through commercial APIs whose terms prohibit training on submitted content.

14. Our intellectual property

Kessel, its software, design, documentation and marks are ours and stay ours. You get a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service while your account is in good standing. Feedback you send us we may use freely, with no obligation to you and no claim over anything of yours.

15. Confidentiality

Each of us will protect the other’s non-public information with at least reasonable care and use it only to perform this agreement. This does not cover information that is public, already known, independently developed, or required to be disclosed by law, and in that last case we will tell you first unless we are prohibited from doing so.

16. Term, cancellation and termination

• The software is monthly. Cancel at any time in the console; it takes effect at the end of the paid month and there is no termination fee.
• We do not refund part-months, and we do not bill you again after you cancel.
• We may terminate for a material breach you have not fixed within 30 days of written notice, or immediately in the acceptable-use cases in section 9.
• After termination you can export your data for 90 days. We then delete it, except where we must keep records to meet a legal, tax or anti-fraud obligation.
• An open hardware lease or finance plan survives cancellation, as set out in section 6.

17. Disclaimer

Except as expressly stated in these terms, and to the fullest extent the law allows, Kessel is provided "as is" and we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free. Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions, in which case they apply to you only as far as the law permits, and nothing here limits any non-excludable consumer right you have.

18. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, neither of us is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, goodwill or data, even if advised they were possible.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to this agreement is limited to the greater of the software fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or $100. This cap does not apply to your obligation to pay amounts due, to either party’s indemnity obligations, or to liability that cannot be limited by law, including fraud and death or personal injury caused by negligence.

Card processing risk sits with Stripe and with you, not with us. We are not liable for a chargeback, a Stripe reserve, a payout delay or an account closure decided by Stripe.

19. Indemnity

You will defend and indemnify us against third-party claims arising from your goods or services, your dealings with your customers and staff, your content, your breach of these terms, or your breach of law. We will defend and indemnify you against third-party claims that Kessel itself infringes their intellectual property. In each case the indemnified party must give prompt notice and reasonable cooperation, and the indemnifying party controls the defence and cannot settle in a way that admits fault for the other without consent.

20. Governing law and disputes

The law and the forum follow the company you contracted with under section 1.

• Before starting arbitration, tell us the problem in writing and give us 30 days to fix it. Most things end here.
• Arbitration is on an individual basis. Neither of us will bring a class, collective or representative action.
• Either of us may bring a claim in small claims court instead, if it qualifies.
• Either of us may seek injunctive relief in a court of competent jurisdiction to protect intellectual property or confidential information.
• The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

21. Changes to these terms

We will post a new version here with a new version number and effective date, and email you at least 30 days before a material change takes effect. Continuing to use Kessel after that date is acceptance. If you do not accept, cancel before it takes effect.

22. Everything else

• Notices to you go to the email on your account. Notices to us go to legal@usekessel.com.
• You may not assign this agreement without our consent. We may assign it to an affiliate or in a merger or sale of the business.
• Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our control, including a network or processor outage.
• If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
• Not enforcing something once is not a waiver of it.
• We are independent contractors. Nothing here creates a partnership, agency or employment relationship.
• These terms, plus any order you place and the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between us about Kessel.

23. Contact

Legal notices: legal@usekessel.com. Anything else: hello@usekessel.com. Registered addresses are in section 1.