Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are a legally binding contract between you and Costnip, Atlanta, Georgia, United States (“Costnip”, “we”, “us”). They cover your use of costnip.com, its pages, emails, embeddable cards and any related service we provide (together, “Costnip” or the “Service”).

By using Costnip, creating an account, or clicking a button that says you agree, you accept these Terms, our Community Guidelines and, if you act for a business, our Business Policy. Those documents are part of these Terms. Our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy explain how we handle information; they describe our practices rather than forming part of the contract. If you don’t agree, please don’t use Costnip.

Important for people in the United States: section 21 (Resolving disputes, including arbitration for US users) contains an agreement to resolve disputes by binding individual arbitration, a class-action waiver and a jury-trial waiver. You can opt out within 30 days, as explained there.

These Terms take effect on the date shown at the top. You can print or save a copy using the link above, and earlier versions are available on request.

A few words have a specific meaning in these Terms.

• “Report” means a price someone submits as paid, seen or quoted, together with its item, store, date and any notes.
• “Posted price” means a price a claimed business publishes on its own page. “Published price” means a price taken from a public file, such as a hospital’s price transparency file.
• “Evidence” means receipts, photos, screenshots, PDFs and links attached to a report to support it.
• “Post” means a question or correction submitted on a price page, and any reply to it.
• “Your content” means everything you submit: reports, evidence, posts, responses, collections, business details and messages to us.
• “The Costnip system” means the automated features described in the section on automated features.
• “Reviewer” means a person who checks content for Costnip, whether staff, contractor or trusted volunteer.

You must be at least 16 years old. If you’re not yet old enough to form a binding contract where you live, you may use Costnip only with a parent or guardian who agrees to these Terms on your behalf. You can’t use Costnip if we’ve suspended or banned you before, or if the law forbids it.

If you use Costnip for a company or other organization, you confirm you’re authorized to accept these Terms for it, and “you” includes that organization.

You may not use Costnip if you’re on a US government sanctions list or located in a country subject to a comprehensive US embargo. You’re responsible for complying with export and sanctions laws that apply to you.

Costnip shows prices people report paying or seeing, prices businesses post, and prices published in public files (such as hospital price transparency files), so you can see when the same thing is priced differently.

• It’s information, not advice. Nothing on Costnip is financial, medical, legal, insurance or purchasing advice. Check prices with the business before you buy or book.
• Prices change and reports can be wrong. Reports come from people and public files. We review and check them, but we can’t promise any price is accurate, complete, current or available to you.
• A price difference isn’t an accusation. Costnip shows that prices differed. It doesn’t say why, and it doesn’t claim any business acted unlawfully or unfairly.
• Hospital and other published prices aren’t your bill. They are what the business published, as of the file date we show. What you pay depends on your care, insurance, discounts and other factors.
• Posted and published prices aren’t offers from us. Only the business can confirm whether a price applies to you.
• We aren’t a party to your purchases. We don’t sell the products or services shown and aren’t responsible for what businesses charge or do.

You can browse without an account. To share prices, save items, follow updates or post questions, you sign in with an email code, Apple or Google. Where we offer it, you can share anonymously under a temporary account with no email.

• Give accurate information and keep your sign-in methods secure. You’re responsible for what happens under your account.
• One person, one account. Don’t share accounts, create accounts to get around limits or bans, or pretend to be someone else.
• If you sign in with Apple or Google, their terms also apply to that sign-in. We receive only the identifier and, where you allow it, the email address they provide.
• If you share anonymously and later sign in, we can attach what you shared to your account for a short time afterwards, so you don’t lose it.
• Tell us straight away at hello@costnip.com if you think someone else has used your account.
• You can delete your account at any time from your account page. What happens to your data is explained in our Privacy Policy. Deleting your account also removes your posts, as explained in section 7 (Questions, corrections and comments).

You keep ownership

You own your content. To run Costnip you give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable licence to host, store, copy, review, reformat, translate, display, publish, distribute and make derivative works from your content (for example averages, comparisons, charts, link previews and embeddable cards), for operating, improving, securing and promoting Costnip. Sublicensing is limited to the service providers who help us run Costnip and to people who view or embed Costnip content in the ways these Terms allow.

Public content appears with your handle, or with no name if you shared anonymously. Combined figures such as typical prices never name you. To the extent the law allows, you agree we may show your content without further attribution in combined figures.

• Private material stays private. Evidence you attach is used to check your report. It is seen by you and by reviewers, and is never published. We only show a link’s website name.
• When you delete content or your account, we stop showing it and remove it as described in the Privacy Policy. The licence ends then, except for anonymous totals and statistics that no longer identify you, copies in backups until they expire, copies others made while it was public, and anything we must keep by law.

Your promises about your content

• It’s true to the best of your knowledge, and it’s your own experience: a price you paid, saw or were quoted, or a question or correction you genuinely hold.
• You have the right to share it, and it doesn’t break anyone’s rights, a law or a contract (for example a confidentiality agreement).
• You’ve covered other people’s personal information, such as names, card numbers and order numbers, before uploading.
• It follows our Community Guidelines.

Prices themselves are facts, and nobody owns a fact. Other people may report the same price, and we may combine reports. Facts you report may remain in combined figures after your report is withdrawn, without anything that identifies you.

You’re responsible for your content. We don’t endorse it, and we aren’t liable for it. See also section 19 (Your responsibility for claims).

Price pages have a comments section where signed-in people can ask a question about an exact listing or suggest a correction. These rules apply to posts:

• Posts are reviewed before they appear. Until a reviewer publishes a post, only you can see it. We may decline a post without publishing it, and we’ll tell you where we can.
• A published correction isn’t a verified correction. Publishing a suggestion means it passed our content rules, not that we’ve confirmed it. Prices and comparisons change only through our review and dispute processes.
• Costnip may reply. A reply from us is labelled as a Costnip response. Businesses reply through their claimed page.
• Limits. Posts are plain text, and there are daily limits on posts and on reports of posts. We may change the limits to keep the feature usable.
• Withdrawal and deletion. You can withdraw your posts at any time. Deleting your account deletes them. When a listing is removed or replaced, its comments close.
• Reporting. You can report a published post that breaks the rules. Reporting doesn’t hide a post by itself; a reviewer decides.

The Community Guidelines explain what posts may and may not contain.

We review reports and posts, often before they’re published. We may decline, edit for format (never to change a price someone reported), label, hide or remove content, and limit, suspend or close accounts, when we reasonably believe it breaks these Terms or the Guidelines, is unreliable, is the subject of a valid legal complaint, or creates legal or safety risk. We aren’t required to monitor content, and publishing something doesn’t mean we endorse it.

Anyone can flag a report or post. Businesses can dispute reports as explained in the Business Policy. Where we can, we tell you when we act on your content and why, and you can ask us to look again by replying to that message or writing to hello@costnip.com. We aim to answer appeals within 14 days. Decisions about illegal content for people in the EU follow the process described on our removal page.

We may use automated tools to detect spam, duplicates, altered images and other abuse, but a person makes the final decision on removals and account closures.

Some features are automated, such as reading a receipt or screenshot you choose to have read, routing a question to the right page, suggesting matches to reviewers, or drafting explanations and digests from public price facts. We call these “the Costnip system”. Some use outside service providers, named in our Privacy Policy.

• Results are suggestions and can be wrong. You must check them before you share. Nothing is published until you confirm it.
• The Costnip system never creates prices. Every price on Costnip comes from a person, a business or a published file.
• Explanations and digests put existing public facts into words. The numbers come from Costnip, not from the model.
• Don’t try to make the Costnip system produce harmful output, extract how it works, or use it for anything other than its purpose on Costnip.

Besides the Community Guidelines, you agree not to:

• Post false, fabricated, paid-for or incentivized reports or posts, or reports about a business you work for, own or compete with, unless you clearly say so where the Guidelines allow it.
• Copy, scrape, crawl, harvest or bulk-download Costnip’s content or data by automated means, or use it to build or train a database, product, model or dataset, without our written permission. Ordinary search-engine indexing that follows our robots.txt is allowed.
• Resell, sublicense or commercially republish Costnip’s data, except brief quotes with a link back for news, research, commentary or personal use, and embedded cards as allowed below.
• Get around rate limits, reviews, bans or security measures, probe for weaknesses, or interfere with the service (including by overloading it).
• Upload malware, or content you know infringes someone’s rights.
• Use Costnip to harass, threaten or track anyone, to identify anonymous contributors, or to collect information about other users.
• Impersonate Costnip, a reviewer, a business or anyone else, or misrepresent your connection to them.
• Use Costnip in a way that breaks the law, including consumer protection, competition, privacy, intellectual property and export laws.

Good-faith security research

We welcome responsible reports of security problems. Research that is done in good faith, avoids privacy violations, data destruction and service disruption, doesn’t access more data than needed to show a problem, and is reported promptly and privately to legal@costnip.com is authorized under these Terms. We won’t bring or support legal action against you for research that follows these rules, and we’ll work with you on a fix before any disclosure.

If you claim or manage a business page, the Business Policy also applies. In short: you can respond publicly, reply to questions, post and correct your own prices, and dispute reports with evidence. You can never edit, hide or remove what customers report, and you may not offer anything in return for reports, posts or their removal. Costnip doesn’t accept payment to change, rank or remove content.

You may share links to Costnip pages anywhere. Link previews show combined figures only.

You may embed a Costnip comparison card on your own website or blog using the embed code we provide, on these conditions: don’t alter the card or its attribution, don’t frame or combine it in a way that suggests we endorse you or your content, don’t use it on sites that break the law or these Terms, and keep the link back to Costnip. Cards are served without cookies or tracking. We may change, limit or stop the embed feature at any time, and we may ask you to remove a card.

Anything else, including bulk use of our data, needs our written permission. Write to business@costnip.com.

Costnip’s software, design, text, the way we organize and present data, and our name and logo belong to us or our licensors and are protected by copyright, trademark, database and other laws. We give you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use Costnip as these Terms allow. Apart from that, we keep all rights. Don’t use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse you without our written permission.

Some data comes from others under their own licences, for example hospital price files published under US federal price transparency rules, US Census data and map data © OpenStreetMap contributors. We show the source where we use it, and those licences apply to that data.

If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them without owing you anything, and you confirm they don’t include anyone’s confidential information.

Costnip links to other websites and apps, such as businesses, delivery apps, maps and sign-in providers, and some pages load content from them when you ask. We don’t control them and aren’t responsible for their content, prices, availability or practices. Their own terms and privacy policies apply.

You agree that we may communicate with you electronically, by email to the address on your account and by messages on the site, and that these count as “in writing”. Notices are treated as received when sent to that address, so keep it current.

• Service messages, such as sign-in codes, review decisions, security alerts and changes to these Terms, are part of running your account. You’ll receive them while you have an account.
• Optional messages, such as price alerts, hospital price updates and the weekly digest, are sent only if you turn them on. Every one has an unsubscribe link, and you can change them in your account.

We don’t send marketing on behalf of businesses, and we don’t share your email with them.

We may change, add or remove features, and may suspend or stop Costnip in whole or part. If a change significantly affects you, we’ll try to give reasonable notice.

Preview period. While Costnip is marked as a preview, features may change more often, and we may need to reset or remove test content. We’ll tell you before removing anything you shared, where we can, and give you a way to keep a copy.

You can stop using Costnip and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or close your account if you break these Terms or the Guidelines, if required by law, if the account has been inactive for a long time (we’ll email you first), or to protect people or Costnip. Where it’s appropriate and lawful, we’ll tell you why and how to ask us to reconsider.

Costnip is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties, express or implied, including warranties of accuracy, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement, and we don’t promise that Costnip will be uninterrupted, secure or error-free, or that any price, report, comparison, explanation or automated result is accurate, complete or current.

You are responsible for your decisions, including purchases, care and claims you make based on what you see here. Some places don’t allow these exclusions, so some of them may not apply to you.

To the fullest extent the law allows, Costnip and its officers, directors, employees, contractors, reviewers and suppliers won’t be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, savings, data or goodwill, arising from or related to Costnip, your content, anyone else’s content or these Terms, even if told they were possible. Our total liability for all claims about Costnip is limited to the greater of US $100 or what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.

These limits apply whatever the legal theory, but they don’t limit liability for fraud, gross negligence or wilful misconduct, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or anything else the law doesn’t allow us to limit. If you live in the EU or UK, we’re responsible for foreseeable loss caused by our breach of these Terms or our failure to use reasonable care, and nothing here affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

If someone brings a claim against Costnip because of your content, your use of Costnip, or because you broke these Terms or the law, you’ll cover our reasonable costs, including legal fees, and any resulting liability, to the extent the law allows. We’ll tell you about the claim promptly and may take control of the defence; you’ll cooperate and won’t settle a claim that affects us without our consent. This section doesn’t apply to consumers in places where it isn’t permitted.

We respond to copyright notices under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and to other legal removal requests. See Copyright and Content Removal for how to send a notice or counter-notice. We close the accounts of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances.

Talk to us first. Most problems can be solved quickly. Before starting any formal claim, you must email legal@costnip.com with your name, contact details, what happened and what you want (we’ll do the same if we have a claim against you). We’ll both try in good faith to resolve it within 60 days. Any time limit for bringing a claim pauses during that period.

If you live in the United States

• Binding individual arbitration. Any dispute that isn’t resolved informally will be decided by binding arbitration run by the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, not in court, except as listed below. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. The arbitrator decides all issues, including whether a dispute must be arbitrated, except that a court decides the class-action waiver below. If the AAA can’t administer the arbitration, either of us may ask a court to appoint a substitute administrator.
• Exceptions. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small-claims court, and either of us may go to court to stop infringement or misuse of intellectual property or unauthorized access to the service.
• How it works. Hearings can be by video or phone, or in the county where you live. The arbitrator can award the same individual relief a court could, and must follow these Terms and applicable law. The arbitrator’s decision is final and can be entered in any court.
• Fees. For claims under $10,000 that aren’t frivolous, we’ll pay your filing, administration and arbitrator fees. Otherwise the AAA rules on fees apply, and each side pays its own lawyers unless the arbitrator or the law says otherwise.
• No class actions. You and Costnip may bring claims only individually, not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective or representative action, and the arbitrator can’t combine claims of more than one person or award relief for anyone but the individual claimant. If this waiver is found unenforceable for a claim, that claim (and only that claim) goes to court, and the rest of this section still applies.
• Many similar claims. If 25 or more similar demands are filed by or with the help of the same lawyers or organization, they’ll be handled in batches under the AAA’s mass-arbitration procedures, and the time limits for each batch pause until it starts.
• Jury trial waiver. If a dispute goes to court for any reason, you and Costnip each give up the right to a jury trial, to the extent the law allows.
• Opting out. You can opt out of this arbitration agreement by emailing legal@costnip.com within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, with your name, the email on your account and a clear statement that you opt out. Opting out doesn’t affect anything else in these Terms. If we change this section later, you can reject the change the same way within 30 days of its effective date, and the earlier version will apply to you.
• Confidentiality. The arbitration is private, but either of us may disclose it where the law requires or to enforce an award.

Time limit

To the extent the law allows, any claim about Costnip must be started within one year after it arose, or it is permanently barred. This doesn’t shorten any period that the law says can’t be shortened.

Everyone

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Georgia and US federal law, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Disputes that go to court will be heard only in the state or federal courts in Fulton County, Georgia, and we both agree to those courts’ jurisdiction. If you live in the EU, UK or another country whose law gives you the right to bring claims in your local courts or under your local consumer law, nothing here takes that right away, and the mandatory consumer laws of your country apply alongside these Terms. EU consumers can also use their local consumer dispute bodies. Changes to this section are handled as described in section 22 (Changes to these Terms).

We may update these Terms as Costnip, the law or our practices change. When we do, we’ll change the dates at the top and describe the change in the version history below. For significant changes, we’ll tell you at least 14 days before they take effect, by email or on the site, unless a change is needed sooner for legal or security reasons. If you keep using Costnip after a change takes effect, the new Terms apply. If you don’t agree, stop using Costnip and delete your account before then. Changes to section 21 (Resolving disputes, including arbitration for US users) won’t apply to disputes you had already told us about, and you can reject them as described there.

• Whole agreement. These Terms, with the policies they mention, are the whole agreement between you and Costnip about Costnip, and replace earlier agreements on the subject.
• Severability. If part of these Terms can’t be enforced, the rest still applies, and the unenforceable part is replaced by an enforceable one that comes closest to its purpose.
• No waiver. If we don’t enforce something straight away, we can still enforce it later.
• Transfer. You can’t transfer these Terms without our consent. We may transfer them as part of a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets, or to an affiliate, and we’ll tell you if the party you’re contracting with changes.
• Survival. Sections that by their nature should continue after your account ends survive, including licences for content already in combined figures, disclaimers, limits of liability, your responsibility for claims, and the dispute section.
• No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms are for you and Costnip only. Nobody else can enforce them, except that the people and companies named in the liability section can rely on it.
• Events beyond our control. Neither of us is responsible for delays or failures caused by events beyond reasonable control, such as outages, natural disasters or government action.
• Notices. We may send notices by email or on the site. You can send notices to legal@costnip.com. Legal process should be served as the law requires.
• Interpretation. Headings, the short summary and the version history are for convenience only. “Including” means “including without limitation”. These Terms are written in English; if we provide a translation, the English version applies if they differ.
• California residents. Under California Civil Code section 1789.3, you may contact the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs in writing at 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or by telephone at (800) 952-5210. Costnip is currently free to use.

Costnip, Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Email legal@costnip.com for legal questions, privacy@costnip.com for privacy, business@costnip.com if you represent a business, and hello@costnip.com for anything else.