Terms of Service

Gale-Force LLC · gale-force.com · alerts.city
Effective 1 October 2026. Last changed 14 September 2026.

These are the terms for the paid things Gale-Force LLC sells to businesses: the paid plans on alerts.city, the websites we build and host, and the extras on our order sheets. They are written in plain English on purpose. Where they say "we", "us" or "Gale-Force" they mean Gale-Force LLC, a Washington limited liability company in Duvall, Washington, which also runs alerts.city. Where they say "you" they mean the business that buys, and the person acting for it.

Using the free listing needs no agreement beyond the content rules in section 7. Paying for anything, or clicking "Pay now", "I agree" or "Start plan", means you accept these terms.

1. What we sell

The order sheet you bought from, the plans page at gale-force.com, and the plan page inside alerts.city describe each item. Together with these terms they are the whole agreement. If a sales page and these terms disagree, the more specific description of the item on the page you bought from wins for that item; these terms win for everything else.

alerts.city plans (each includes the ones before it):

• Your listing (free, always): your name, address, phone, hours, website and other details on alerts.city; claim it and edit it yourself; a monthly email of how many people saw it.
• Found by what you sell: the things you sell or do, searchable in the words people type; your own search words; specials on your page and on the Local page; the full stats dashboard; eligibility for the alert slot.
• There when it matters: one labelled slot under alerts we judge relevant (snow, ice, wind, outages, holidays), shared fairly with other businesses on the same alert. Never on flood, river or bridge alerts.
• Top of your category: one labelled slot above your category's list, billed monthly.

Websites: a one-page template, a one-page custom site, a multi-page custom site, or a recovery of a site you already had, each with a yearly fee for hosting, security, backups and the nightly sync with your listing; or a <name>.induvall.com address that simply points at the site you already have.

Extras: online ordering set up with Square, a domain of your own, everything transferred to you, and changes made for you (one at a time, or a yearly plan).

2. What we promise, and what we do not

The free listing is never taken away or made worse. If you stop paying, only what the payment added is removed. Your listing, your edits and your right to edit stay.

Paying never moves anyone up or down the organic list. Every paid placement is one clearly labelled slot. Nothing on alerts.city depends on buying a website from us, and nothing about a website depends on a paid plan.

Guarantees written on the order sheet are real. Two apply today:

• Found by what you sell: if fewer than 50 people saw your listing in your first paid year (measured by our own impression count, which you can see in your dashboard), your second year is free.
• There when it matters: if your slot was never shown under any alert during the paid year (again by our count), we credit $75 to your account.

Credits apply to your next purchase or renewal with us; they are not paid out in cash.

Changes made for you are applied within two business days of the email that asks for them, to your listing, your website if we host it, and your Square menu if we set it up. A "change" is one email with a batch of edits to what is already there (about ten line edits: prices, hours, a special, a few items, a photo); corrections to that change are included. A new page, a new look or a mostly new menu is a small project we quote first. The yearly plan covers up to twelve changes a year, at most two in a month, and two menu image sets a year; unused changes do not roll over.

What we do not promise. alerts.city is a community information service; it is not a marketing guarantee. We do not promise any number of customers, calls, orders or sales, and we do not promise that any resident will see a given page. We publish our own traffic each month so you can judge it yourself. We do not promise that alerts.city or a website will be reachable every minute: we run them with reasonable care, keep backups, and fix outages as soon as we can, but there is no uptime guarantee and no credit for downtime except the ones written above. For the record: we have run alerts.city for more than twelve years, through every flood season, and outages have been rare and short.

3. Prices, tax, billing and renewal

• Prices are on the order sheet or plan page at the time you buy. Founder prices are for the first twenty Duvall businesses and are locked for as long as that plan renews without a gap.
• Washington sales tax is added at checkout where it applies (it applies to advertising, web design and hosting).
• Payment is by card through Stripe. We never see or store your card number.
• Yearly items renew automatically each year, and Top of your category renews monthly, until you cancel. We email you before a yearly renewal. Cancel any time from the billing portal link in your account or by email; cancelling stops the next charge and the plan runs to the end of the period already paid.
• If a renewal payment fails we try again and email you. After 14 days without payment the paid features pause (section 2 says what stays). Paying again restores them; nothing is deleted.
• Price changes never apply mid-period. We give at least 30 days' notice before a renewal at a new price.

4. Refunds

• alerts.city plans: full refund if you ask within 14 days of a first purchase. After that, no refund for the current period, but you can cancel the next one.
• Website builds: you approve the site before the build fee is final. Until you have seen a first version you can cancel for a full refund. After you approve it (or after the round of corrections), the build fee is earned. Yearly hosting is refundable in the first 14 days after the first charge.
• Extras done once (Square setup, domain, transfer, a single change): refundable until we start the work.
• Anything we get wrong, we fix first. If we cannot fix it, we refund it.

5. Websites: ownership, hosting and leaving

• Your domain is yours. Any domain we register for you is registered in your name from day one. We never hold a client's domain.
• Your content is yours and stays yours.
• The site files are yours to keep. You get a non-exclusive, perpetual licence to the generated site code and the layouts and themes it uses, so you can host it anywhere. Our generator itself stays ours.
• Hosting at <name>.induvall.com is included in the yearly fee. induvall.com belongs to Gale-Force; the address is yours to use while you host with us. Your own domain can point at the site at any time.
• Sync. A hosted site is rebuilt overnight from your alerts.city listing. Edits you make to the listing appear on the site; hand edits to the site are made through Changes made for you.
• Leaving. If you leave, you take the files, the domain and, if you bought the transfer, the hosting and repository in your own accounts. We keep a copy of your site for 90 days after the last paid day, then delete it.
• Square. The Square account is yours, in your name; card payments go to your bank; Square's own fees and terms apply; we never handle your money. Our fee is for setup only.

6. Your account and your listing

• You confirm you are the owner of the business, or authorised by the owner, when you claim a listing. We may ask for proof (a code texted to the listed phone, an email at the business's domain, or a call). A claim made falsely is removed as soon as we learn of it.
• Keep your sign-in private. You are responsible for what is done from your account.
• Everything you put on your listing or site must be true, current and yours to use: your hours, prices, menu, photos and words. If you upload a photo, a menu or a logo, you confirm you have the right to publish it.
• You give us a licence to show, store, resize, index and reproduce that content on alerts.city, on a website we build for you, in search results and in our own examples of your listing. The licence ends when you remove the content or close the account, except for copies already in backups and in residents' caches.

7. Content rules

alerts.city is trusted because it is useful and never abusive. These rules keep it that way. They apply to every listing, free or paid, and to search words, specials, photos and the alert and category slots.

• Honest. Nothing misleading about what you sell, your prices, your hours, or who you are. No claims you cannot back up.
• Yours. No content you do not have rights to, and no impersonation of another business.
• About your business. Search words must describe things you actually sell or do. Words that are too general to help anyone ("the", "food", "brown"), competitors' names, unrelated popular terms and misspellings placed to catch searches are rejected. We may edit or decline a search word and will say why.
• Family-safe. No nudity, no sexual content, no gore, no slurs or hate, no harassment, nothing illegal, and nothing aimed at children that would not belong in a school newsletter. Alcohol and cannabis may be listed where legal, factually, without promotion aimed at minors.
• Not a channel for others. No advertising a business other than the one on the listing, no affiliate links, no political or religious campaigning, no solicitations.
• Not a door out. Your listing may link to your own website, menu, ordering, booking and social pages. It may not be used to send residents to another directory, listing service or advertising site, or to carry wording whose purpose is to draw people away from alerts.city rather than to your business. Every paid slot, special and search word must point at what you sell, not at somewhere else to look.
• Checked. Search words and photos go through automated checks (including an AI model) and can be reviewed by a person before they go live. Approval is not an endorsement, and we can remove anything later.

If something breaks these rules we remove it and tell you. Repeated or serious breaches end the paid plan without refund; deliberate deception or abuse ends the account. The free listing's basic facts (name, address, phone, hours, links) stay, corrected if need be, because residents rely on them.

8. Fair placement rules

• The organic list is ordered by distance and name, never by payment.
• There when it matters shows one business at a time in a labelled slot under an alert. When more than one paying business fits the alert, we rotate fairly between them. We choose which alerts qualify; flood, river and bridge alerts never carry a slot.
• Top of your category shows one labelled slot above the category list. If more than one business in a category buys it, the slot rotates between them per view. We will tell you if that happens.
• We never show a slot in a way that interrupts a resident, and we can pull every paid slot during an emergency without notice and without a refund for that time.

9. Our right to say no

We can decline or end service to a business that is not local to the area alerts.city serves, is a chain or an ad network, or does not fit the rules above. If we end a plan for our own reasons (not yours), we refund the unused part.

10. Liability

We run a small local service with care but without guarantees. To the extent Washington law allows:

• Our services are provided "as is". We do not warrant that they are error-free or uninterrupted, or that they will bring you customers.
• Our total liability to you for anything arising from these terms or the services is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.
• We are not liable for indirect, consequential or special losses, including lost profits, even if we were told they were possible.
• You are responsible for the content you publish and will cover us for claims that it infringes someone's rights or breaks the law.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

11. Privacy

Our Privacy Policy at gale-force.com/privacy/ says what we collect from businesses and residents and what we do with it. Stats we show you are counts; they never identify a resident.

12. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. For paid plans, a change takes effect at your next renewal; we email you at least 30 days before, and you can cancel instead. The date at the top says when they last changed, and old versions are kept in our public repository.

13. Disputes

These terms are governed by Washington law. Talk to us first at hello@gale-force.com; most things are fixed in a conversation. If not, either of us may bring a claim in the courts of King County, Washington, including small claims court.

14. The rest

• Neither of us is liable for delay caused by things outside our control (floods included).
• If part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stands.
• You may not transfer this agreement without telling us; we may transfer it to a successor that keeps these promises.
• Notices to us: hello@gale-force.com. Notices to you: the email on your account.

Gale-Force LLC · Duvall, Washington · hello@gale-force.com