Treating customers fairly

What you can expect from us on pricing, trials, support and leaving, and what we do when we get something wrong. Most of it is already how the software behaves, and we have said which parts are a promise rather than a mechanism.

Who we mean by you

We sell to businesses rather than to consumers, so most consumer protection law does not apply to what we do either. That makes it more important to write down what we hold ourselves to, not less.

There are three groups of people who feel the consequences of this software, and only one of them chose it.

• The distributor who buys Bottle. Usually an owner or a manager, deciding whether to move a working business onto new software.
• The people who use it all day. Drivers and office staff, who did not pick Bottle and cannot switch away from it. Their working day is better or worse depending on how well we do our job.
• The gas customers of our customers. They get a delivery email or a tracking link with our software behind it. They never heard of us, never agreed to anything with us, and did not choose us.

Fairness has to cover all three, so this page does.

Pricing

What each plan costs is shown on the billing page inside Bottle before you pay anything, and the price you see is the price charged. There are no setup fees, no per-user charges and no charge for support. Plans are priced by the number of vehicles you run rather than by how many people you give a login to, because a business that has to ration who may look at its own customer book is a business looking for another supplier.

Moving to a bigger plan takes effect straight away and you pay the difference for the days left in the month, not another full month. Moving to a smaller plan happens at your next renewal, so the month you have already paid for runs its course on the plan you paid for. The billing page shows the change before it happens and you can change your mind until it does.

Bottle is early and our prices may change. We have not yet sold a subscription at a published price, so we are not going to pretend to a notice period we have never had to honour. What we commit to is this: we will not raise the price of an existing subscription without telling the people paying for it first, in writing, with enough notice to leave if they would rather.

Your free trial

Every new business gets thirty days free on Round, which is the larger of the two plans anyone can buy without talking to us. You trial the fuller version rather than the smallest one, because trialling a cut-down product is a poor way to decide whether any of it helps.

No card is taken to start a trial. We create nothing with our payment provider until you choose a plan, so somebody who signs up, has a look and never comes back leaves no card details anywhere and is never charged. Nothing renews into a paid plan by default, because there is nothing set up to charge.

The countdown sits at the top of every page so nobody has to go looking for it, and we email owners and admins a week before the trial ends and again on the last day.

What happens when a trial ends or a payment fails

Your round carries on. Drops, deliveries, proof of delivery and invoices to your customers are unaffected, and a driver halfway through a day does not notice anything at all. This is deliberate and it is built into how the software decides what to allow: a distributor whose van cannot work because a card expired at six in the morning is a distributor we would deserve to lose.

What waits is office work that can wait: adding a new customer, inviting a new person, connecting another app. Choose a plan and it all comes back with everything where you left it.

Reading is never blocked. A business behind on payment can still see everything it has, and can still get its data out. We do not lock you out of your own customer book to make a point about an invoice.

Leaving

You can cancel yourself, from the billing page, without asking us and without being put through a conversation designed to talk you out of it. Cancelling stops the next renewal rather than the month you have already paid for, so you keep what you paid for until it runs out.

There are three ways to get your data out. Anyone can download everything Bottle holds about them personally, as a file, from their own account settings. You can download everything held about any one of your customers, which is what you need when one of them asks you what you hold: their record, their orders, their invoices, every delivery and what happened at the door, cash taken there, and the messages sent to them. Bottle also has a documented interface that your own software or a developer can use to pull out your customers, orders, invoices and rounds with a read-only key you create yourself.

What does not exist yet is a single button that exports your whole business in one file. It is on our list, and this page will change when it is built.

We do not delete your data when you stop paying. It stays where it is unless you ask us to remove it, so coming back later means picking up where you left off. If you want it deleted when you go, email us and we will do it.

How we describe what Bottle does

We describe what the software does today, not what we intend to build. Where something is planned rather than finished, we say so with the word planned next to it, including on these policy pages and in our published list of the other companies involved in running Bottle.

If you are deciding whether to buy Bottle and something you need is not there yet, ask us and we will tell you straight, including when the answer is that we do not have it and will not have it soon.

Support

Email hello@getbottle.app. It reaches a person, and at our size that person is likely to be the one who wrote the part you are asking about.

We are not going to publish a response time we cannot yet stand behind. Bottle is a very small company and a promise of four working hours would be a promise we might break in a week where somebody is ill. What we will say is that support is included in what you pay, that we answer during UK working hours, and that we would rather tell you we have not got to something yet than leave you wondering.

There are also written guides covering how each part of Bottle works, and they are kept up to date as the software changes rather than written once and left.

When we get something wrong

Software breaks, and ours will. What you can expect from us when it does:

• We tell you, rather than hoping you did not notice. If something went wrong that affected your business, we would rather you heard it from us first.
• We say what actually happened. In plain terms, not a paragraph about an unexpected issue impacting some users.
• We say what we changed so that it does not happen the same way twice.
• We do not quietly charge you for our own mistake. If a fault of ours costs you money in what you pay us, we will put that right.

If your data was involved in a security breach, there are legal rules about telling you and telling the regulator, and we would follow them. That is covered in our privacy policy rather than here.

Complaints

Email hello@getbottle.app and say what has gone wrong and what you would like done about it. It is read by the person running the company, because at this size there is nobody to escalate to and nowhere for a complaint to get lost.

We will acknowledge it, look into it properly, and tell you what we are going to do. If we think you are wrong, we will tell you that and explain why, rather than going quiet.

There is no ombudsman or complaints scheme covering business software, so there is nobody above us to appeal to. We would rather say that than leave you with the impression that some body is standing behind us. If a complaint is about how we have handled personal data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, and our privacy policy explains how.

People who find software hard

Plenty of people in this trade have run a yard on paper, a wall planner and a mobile phone for thirty years and run it well. Being unfamiliar with software is not the same as being unable, and we do not treat it as a failing to be trained out of.

What we commit to: plain English in the software and everywhere we write, including in these policies. Written guides for every part of Bottle. No jargon where an ordinary word would do. And an honest answer when Bottle is not the right fit for how somebody works, rather than a sale that goes wrong six weeks later.

If you have an accessibility need, that is covered properly in our accessibility statement, which sets out what is supported today and what is not.

Your customers, who never chose us

When a gas customer gets a delivery notice or opens a delivery tracking link, our software sent it on your behalf. They have no relationship with us and did not agree to anything with us, so we hold ourselves to this:

• We do not market to them. Their email address is yours, held so that we can send what you asked us to send. We do not use it to sell Bottle to anybody, and we never will.
• Their details are not ours to trade. We do not sell, rent or share them, and we do not build anything from them that is worth something to us.
• The emails stay useful rather than promotional. A delivery notice tells them about their delivery. It does not carry advertising for us, and our name is not the point of it.
• A delivery tracking link shows them their own delivery only. Not your other customers, not your prices, not your round.

Telling us this page is wrong

If something here does not match what you have experienced, that matters more than the page does. Email hello@getbottle.app and tell us, and we will either fix the software or fix the page.