Terms of Service

0. Who We Are

Starvo is operated by Shiva Kumar Esakki Pandiyan as a sole proprietorship based in Hyderabad, Telangana, India.

• Operating name: Starvo
• Legal form: sole proprietorship (the Starvo service is operated personally by the proprietor named above)
• Proprietor: Shiva Kumar Esakki Pandiyan
• Principal place of business: Hyderabad, Telangana, India. The exact postal address is available to regulators and enterprise buyers on lawful request to support@starvo.app.
• PAN: GATPP3889P
• Country of governing law: India
• Customer care / general support: support@starvo.app
• Privacy / data-subject requests: privacy@starvo.app
• Grievance Officer (Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021, Rule 3(1)(a), and Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023): Shiva Kumar Esakki Pandiyan — grievance@starvo.app. The Grievance Officer responds to complaints under the IT Rules within 15 days, and to data-principal requests under the DPDPA within the period prescribed by the Act (currently 30 days).

If or when Starvo is reorganised into a registered company (Private Limited / LLP / OPC), this section will be updated to reflect the new entity name, CIN/LLPIN, and registered office, and existing users will be notified by email per Section 17.

1. Acceptance & Eligibility

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) form a binding agreement between you and the entity identified in Section 0 (“Starvo”, “we”, “us”). By creating an account, ticking the “I agree” box during onboarding, or otherwise using the Starvo service (the “Service”), you confirm that you have read, understood, and agree to these Terms, our Privacy Policy, and (where it applies to you) our Data Processing Agreement. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

To use the Service you must (a) be at least 18 years old (or the age of majority in your jurisdiction, whichever is older); (b) have the legal capacity to enter into a contract; (c) be using the Service for a real business you own, operate, or are authorised to manage; and (d) not be located in, or a national or resident of, a country or region subject to comprehensive sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, or India.

If you accept these Terms on behalf of a company or other legal entity, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity, and “you” in these Terms refers to that entity.

2. The Service

Starvo is a review management platform for local businesses. It helps you collect customer feedback through QR codes, route happy customers toward your public Google Business Profile, capture private feedback from unhappy customers in a dashboard, and generate AI-assisted reply drafts.

We may add, change, or remove features of the Service at any time. For material changes that materially reduce a feature available on a paid plan, we will give you reasonable advance notice by email. Beta features, AI features, and any features explicitly marked as such are provided on an experimental basis and may change or be withdrawn without notice.

3. Google Review Policy Compliance

Starvo is designed to comply with Google's review policies. The Google review link is shown to every customer at every star rating; we do not filter which customers can access the public Google review path based on their rating (this practice is known as “review gating” and is prohibited by Google).

You agree to use the Service in a way that is consistent with Google's policies and any other platform whose reviews you collect or display. You are responsible for compliance with those policies on your own Google Business Profile (or equivalent listings). Starvo cannot remove a review from Google on your behalf.

4. Your Account & Responsibilities

You are responsible for everything that happens under your account. Specifically, you agree to:

• Provide accurate business information during onboarding and keep it up to date.
• Use Starvo only for a real, lawful business you own, operate, or are authorised to manage.
• Not solicit, fabricate, incentivise, exchange, or buy fake reviews; not coerce customers; not pay for positive reviews.
• Not violate Google's review policies, your local consumer-protection laws, or any other applicable law.
• Keep your account credentials secure. Notify us immediately at support@starvo.app if you believe your account has been compromised.
• Not attempt to circumvent rate limits, plan limits, security controls, or any technical measure protecting the Service.
• Manage any team members (Managers, Staff) you invite. Their actions count as yours for the purposes of these Terms.

5. Acceptable Use

You will not, and will not attempt to:

• Upload, store, or transmit any content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, hateful, fraudulent, infringing of intellectual property, or harmful to minors.
• Use the Service to send spam, malware, phishing content, or any unsolicited bulk message.
• Scrape, crawl, or use automated tools to access the Service beyond the public REST API on the Pro Max plan and within its rate limits.
• Reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code of the Service, except to the extent that such restriction is prohibited by applicable law.
• Resell, sublicense, or provide the Service to third parties as a separately branded offering without our written permission.
• Use the Service in a way that could damage, disable, overburden, or impair Starvo's infrastructure or any third-party service it depends on.
• Submit any personal data of an individual without that individual's knowledge or a lawful basis.

We may, at our discretion, remove content that violates this section and suspend or terminate accounts that do so repeatedly or seriously.

6. AI-Generated Content

Starvo uses third-party AI models (currently Llama via Groq) to generate review-reply drafts and sentiment / topic analysis. AI output is provided on an “as-is” basis and:

• Is a suggestion only. You are responsible for reading and editing every draft before sending or publishing it. The AI may produce inaccurate, misleading, or culturally inappropriate text.
• Should not be treated as legal, medical, financial, or other professional advice.
• Is never auto-published. You always remain the editor and sender of record.

You retain ownership of any reply you choose to send or publish. By using Starvo's AI features, you grant us the limited right to send your review text and business metadata to the underlying AI provider strictly to produce the draft. We do not use your data to train third-party models.

7. Ownership & License

Starvo owns the Service. All software, designs, trademarks, and brand assets in the Service are owned by Starvo (operated by the proprietor named in Section 0). We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the Service for your business during your subscription, subject to these Terms.

You own your data. The reviews collected by your QR codes, your customer email list, your reply templates, your business details — all of it remains yours. We process it on your behalf to provide the Service. You can export your customer list as CSV from your dashboard at any time, and you can request a full data export by email.

You grant us a limited licence to host and process your data for the purpose of operating the Service. This includes storing it, displaying it back to you, sending owner alerts on your behalf, and (where you choose) generating AI replies. We will not sell your data or use it for advertising. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

Feedback you give us about Starvo (feature requests, bug reports, suggestions) may be used by us without obligation or compensation, including incorporating it into the Service.

Aggregate / anonymous usage data. We may generate aggregated and anonymised data from how the Service is used — for example, total scans across all customers, response-time distributions, AI-quota usage patterns, or feature-adoption rates — and we may use that data for any legitimate business purpose, including improving the Service, publishing benchmarks, and writing blog posts. We will never publish or use such data in a form that identifies you, your business, or any individual customer, and we will not use it in a way that breaches our Privacy Policy or the Data Processing Agreement.

8. Reviews from Your Customers

When a customer of yours submits a review through your QR code, the review text and any optional details they provide become part of your account's private feedback. We process it solely to display it to you, generate optional AI replies, and (if you choose to send one) deliver a customer-facing reply or apology email.

You are the business this feedback is about and are responsible for handling it lawfully — including responding to data-subject requests from your own customers (under GDPR, CCPA, DPDPA, or other applicable law). Starvo will reasonably assist when notified at support@starvo.app.

Removal of unlawful content. Reviews submitted through the Service are user-generated content. Starvo hosts that content on your behalf; we do not pre-screen it. If you, an individual mentioned in a review, or any other affected person believes that a specific piece of content is unlawful (for example: defamatory, infringes intellectual property, breaches privacy, or violates a court order), please send a written notice to support@starvo.app with: the exact URL or review identifier; a clear description of the claim and the law you say is breached; your full name and contact details; and a statement made in good faith that the claim is accurate. We will review and, where the claim is substantiated and acting is lawful, remove or restrict access to the content. This procedure is provided to comply with India's Information Technology Act, 2000 (Section 79) and the corresponding intermediary rules, the EU Digital Services Act notice-and-action requirements, and equivalent provisions in other jurisdictions. Notices that are abusive, repetitive, or made in bad faith may be ignored.

9. Plans, Payments & Billing

• Free plan: $0 / month, 1 location, capped scans and replies. No card required.
• Paid plans: $9 / $29 / $99 per month (USD), billed monthly in advance.
• Merchant of Record. All payments are processed by Dodo Payments, who is the Merchant of Record for every transaction. Dodo is responsible for accepting the payment, computing and collecting any applicable VAT / GST / sales tax based on your billing location, issuing the tax-compliant receipt, and handling chargebacks and refunds. Starvo does not see, store, or process your card details at any point.
• Subscriptions auto-renew at the end of each billing cycle until cancelled.
• You may cancel any time from your dashboard. On cancellation, your paid features remain active until the end of the billing period you have already paid for, and your account then reverts to the Free plan. Your data is preserved.
• Downgrades take effect at the end of the current billing period.
• Upgrades take effect immediately on successful payment.
• No refunds. All sales are final. We do not refund partial months, unused time, accidental purchases, or post-cancellation periods. The Free plan exists so you can fully evaluate Starvo before paying.
• Tax. The prices shown on our pricing page are exclusive of applicable taxes. As Merchant of Record, Dodo Payments calculates and collects any applicable VAT, GST, or sales tax at checkout based on your billing address. Your Dodo receipt shows the full tax-inclusive amount actually charged.
• Price changes. We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before any price change affecting your existing subscription takes effect.
• Failed payments. If a renewal payment fails, Dodo retries the charge according to its dunning schedule, and we notify you by email. If the subscription cannot be collected within 14 days of the first failed charge, your account is downgraded to the Free plan and any excess locations are locked (read-only) until you successfully upgrade again. Your data is preserved.
• Chargebacks & payment disputes. A chargeback initiated against any charge for your subscription is a serious matter. If you raise a chargeback, we may immediately suspend your account (read-only access only) pending resolution. Accounts that result in confirmed fraud chargebacks may be terminated permanently. If you believe a charge is incorrect, please email support@starvo.app first — we can almost always resolve a billing issue directly without a chargeback.
• Service availability. Starvo targets a 99.5% monthly uptime for the customer-facing review-collection endpoint (the URL behind your QR codes). This is a target on commercially reasonable efforts, not a guarantee, and does not amount to a contractual service-level agreement. Planned maintenance, scheduled provider downtime, and time spent outside our reasonable control are excluded.

Right of withdrawal / cooling-off — EU and UK consumers. Under the EU Consumer Rights Directive (and equivalent UK regulations), a consumer who buys a distance contract for digital services normally has 14 days to withdraw without giving a reason. Article 16(m) of that Directive allows that right to be lost where the service is supplied immediately and the consumer expressly acknowledges this. By ticking the “I agree to the Terms” box at onboarding, you expressly request immediate supply of the Service AND acknowledge that you lose your 14-day right of withdrawal once supply has begun. This applies only after we begin supplying the Service to you, and only to the extent legally permitted in your country of residence. Any non-waivable consumer right under your local law continues to apply notwithstanding this clause. To raise any concern about a charge, email support@starvo.app.

10. Third-Party Services

Starvo depends on several third-party providers to run. Your use of the Service involves these providers, each governed by their own terms and privacy policies:

• Supabase — database and authentication.
• Vercel — application hosting and edge network.
• Dodo Payments — Merchant of Record, payment processing, invoicing, tax.
• Groq — AI model inference for reply drafts and analysis.
• Resend — transactional email delivery.
• Google — Google Business Profile integration (OAuth-based, optional).
• Meta WhatsApp Cloud API — optional WhatsApp notifications.

We rely on these providers but do not control them. Starvo is not liable for outages, defects, or actions of third-party services. Where any of them is unavailable, the affected Starvo feature will degrade gracefully.

11. No Guarantee of Outcomes

We are honest about what we can and cannot control:

• We cannot make customers leave reviews.
• We cannot guarantee any particular rating, ranking, or revenue outcome.
• Google, Yelp, or any other platform may add, change, remove, or hide reviews at any time, for reasons outside our control.
• Your results depend on your actual product, service quality, and customer experience.
• AI-generated content is a starting point and not a finished work product.

12. Suspension & Termination

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service, with or without notice, if you:

• Violate these Terms or our Privacy Policy.
• Engage in fake, incentivised, coerced, or otherwise manipulated reviews.
• Use the Service for illegal, fraudulent, or abusive activity.
• Fail to pay subscription fees after the 14-day retry window described in Section 9.
• Damage or attempt to damage the Service or other users.

Suspension freezes your account (read-only) while we investigate. Termination ends your access and downgrades your account to the Free plan or, in serious cases, deletes the account after a 48-hour soft-delete window.

You may stop using the Service or delete your account at any time from Dashboard → Settings → Delete account. Account deletion is a 48-hour soft delete with a recovery window, after which all your business data is permanently removed.

13. Disclaimers

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or completely secure.

Nothing in this section limits or excludes any warranty or right that cannot be limited or excluded under the law applicable to you as a consumer.

14. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, STARVO (INCLUDING THE PROPRIETOR NAMED IN SECTION 0) WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES; ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, GOODWILL, OR DATA; OR ANY DAMAGE ARISING FROM THIRD-PARTY SERVICES OR ACTIONS, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

Our aggregate liability to you for any claim arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms will not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you actually paid Starvo in the twelve (12) months immediately preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) USD $100.

These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be limited under the law that applies to you (for example, liability for gross negligence, wilful misconduct, fraud, or death or personal injury caused by negligence).

15. Indemnification

By you. You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Starvo (including the proprietor named in Section 0) from and against any third-party claim, demand, loss, liability, damage, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to: (a) your violation of these Terms; (b) your violation of any law or third-party right (including Google's policies); (c) your content, including reviews collected on your behalf and any reply you send or publish using the Service; (d) your team members' use of the Service; and (e) any dispute between you and a customer of yours, a team member you invited, or a third-party service you connected (such as your Google Business Profile).

By Starvo. Starvo will indemnify, defend, and hold you harmless from and against any third-party claim that the Service, when used by you in accordance with these Terms, directly infringes that third party's patent, copyright, trademark, or trade secret. This is your sole and exclusive remedy for any intellectual-property infringement claim concerning the Service.

Exclusions to Starvo's indemnity. The Starvo indemnity above does not apply to a claim that arises from: (a) any modification of the Service by anyone other than Starvo; (b) your use of the Service in combination with anything not provided by Starvo, where the claim would not have arisen but for that combination; (c) your continued use of the Service after we notified you of an infringement claim and asked you to stop or to use an updated version; (d) your content (reviews, replies, business name, logo, anything you upload); or (e) your use of the Service in violation of these Terms or applicable law.

If the Service becomes the subject of an infringement claim, Starvo may, at its option and expense, (i) obtain a right for you to continue using the Service, (ii) modify the Service so it is non-infringing while preserving substantially equivalent functionality, or (iii) terminate your subscription and refund pre-paid, unused fees for the affected period. The aggregate liability of Starvo under this Section 15 is subject to the limit in Section 14 (Limitation of Liability).

Procedure. Each party will promptly notify the other in writing of any claim subject to indemnification, give the indemnifying party reasonable control of the defence and settlement, and reasonably cooperate. Neither party may settle a claim in a way that admits fault on the other's part, requires payment by the other, or restricts the other's rights, without that other party's prior written consent.

16. Force Majeure

Neither party is liable for failure or delay in performance caused by events outside its reasonable control, including but not limited to acts of God, war, terrorism, civil unrest, government action, sanctions, outages of upstream providers (cloud hosting, payment processors, AI providers), internet failure, or natural disaster.

17. Modifications to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. The current version is shown above with a date and version code. For any material change, we will give reasonable advance notice (typically by email and a banner in the dashboard) and ask you to re-accept the updated Terms on your next location-create action. Continued use of the Service after a material change constitutes acceptance.

If you do not agree to a material change, your remedy is to stop using the Service and cancel your subscription. We will preserve your data for the standard recovery window and then delete it on request.

18. Governing Law & Dispute Resolution

These Terms are governed by the laws of India, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. Any mandatory consumer-protection law of your own country of residence that cannot be waived by contract continues to apply.

Informal dispute notice (required). Before starting any formal proceeding, you agree to send a written notice describing the dispute to support@starvo.app (with a copy to the Grievance Officer at grievance@starvo.app if the dispute concerns a complaint under the Indian IT Rules 2021 or the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023), and allow at least 30 days for us to attempt to resolve it informally.

If the dispute cannot be resolved informally, you agree that it will be submitted to the exclusive jurisdiction of the competent courts in Hyderabad, Telangana, India, unless the consumer law of your own country of residence grants you a non-waivable right to sue in a different forum.

Individual claims only — no class actions. To the maximum extent permitted by the law that applies to you, you and Starvo agree that any claim will be brought only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective, consolidated, representative, or private-attorney-general proceeding. If a court finds that this clause is unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim (and only that claim) is severed from this Section 18 and may proceed in the appropriate forum; the rest of these Terms (including the rest of this Section 18) continue to apply.

Jury-trial waiver. To the maximum extent permitted by the law that applies to you, you and Starvo each waive any right to a trial by jury for any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service. This clause has no effect in jurisdictions where it is not permitted.

Time limit to bring a claim. Any claim arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service must be brought within one (1) year of the date the claim first accrued, except where a longer minimum period is mandated by the law that applies to you. After that period the claim is permanently barred.

19. Export, Sanctions & Reverse Engineering

You confirm that you are not located in, and are not a national or resident of, any country subject to comprehensive sanctions imposed by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, or India (including, at the time of writing, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and certain regions of Ukraine), and that you are not on any sanctions or denied-party list maintained by any of those governments. You will not use the Service in violation of any applicable export or sanctions law.

20. Miscellaneous

• Severability. If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, that provision will be limited to the minimum extent necessary, and the rest of the Terms will remain in full force.
• No waiver. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
• Assignment & change of control. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign these Terms (for example, in connection with a sale of Starvo or its assets, a merger, or a reorganisation) on at least 30 days' advance written notice to you. If you object to an assignment — for example, because the assignee is a direct competitor of yours or operates a service you do not wish your data to be associated with — you may, within 30 days of our notice, cancel your subscription and request deletion of your data, and we will not charge any further renewal. This right of objection is in addition to your normal cancellation rights.
• Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, the Data Processing Agreement (where it applies to you), and any plan-specific terms shown at checkout, are the entire agreement between you and Starvo regarding the Service, and supersede any prior agreement.
• Notices to you will be sent to the email address on your account.
• Notices to Starvo must be sent to support@starvo.app.
• Language. These Terms are written in English. Translations are provided for convenience only; the English version controls in case of conflict.

21. Confidential Information

In the course of using the Service, each party may receive information of the other party that is identified as confidential at the time of disclosure or that should reasonably be considered confidential given its nature and the circumstances of disclosure (“Confidential Information”).

Examples. Confidential Information of Starvo includes non-public technical details of how the Service works, security incidents, pricing arrangements not posted publicly, and unreleased product plans. Confidential Information of yours includes your customer data, your team-member list, your business's pricing and operational data, and any non-public business information you choose to share with us in a support exchange.

Obligations. Each party agrees to: (a) use the other party's Confidential Information only to perform its obligations or exercise its rights under these Terms; (b) protect it from unauthorised disclosure using at least the same care it uses to protect its own confidential information, and never less than a reasonable standard of care; and (c) limit access to its employees, agents, and sub-processors who need it and who are bound by confidentiality obligations at least as protective as this Section.

Exclusions. Confidential Information does not include information that: (a) was lawfully known to the receiving party without an obligation of confidentiality before receipt; (b) becomes public other than through breach of these Terms; (c) is independently developed by the receiving party without reference to the other party's Confidential Information; or (d) is rightfully received from a third party without an obligation of confidentiality.

Required disclosure. Either party may disclose the other's Confidential Information to the extent compelled by law, court order, or a competent regulator, provided that, where lawful, the party required to disclose gives prompt notice so the other can seek a protective order or other appropriate remedy.

Remedies. The parties acknowledge that unauthorised disclosure of Confidential Information may cause irreparable harm for which monetary damages alone are an inadequate remedy. Each party is entitled to seek injunctive relief in addition to any other available remedies.

22. Survival

The following Sections survive any termination or expiration of these Terms and continue in effect: Section 7 (Ownership & License), Section 9 (Plans, Payments & Billing — to the extent fees have accrued), Section 13 (Disclaimers), Section 14 (Limitation of Liability), Section 15 (Indemnification), Section 17 (Modifications), Section 18 (Governing Law & Dispute Resolution, including the class-action waiver, jury-trial waiver, and time-limit clauses), Section 19 (Export, Sanctions & Reverse Engineering), Section 20 (Miscellaneous), Section 21 (Confidential Information — for three years after termination), and this Section 22.

23. Contact

Questions, dispute notices, or other communications about these Terms: email support@starvo.app from the email address on your account. Grievance Officer (for IT Rules 2021 / DPDPA matters): grievance@starvo.app.