Terms and Conditions

1. Agreement to these terms

These Terms and Conditions govern access to and use of Cemstree, a church management and ministry operations platform operated by Mad Tech Solutions LLC, a Michigan limited liability company. In these terms, “Cemstree,” “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to Mad Tech Solutions LLC.

By creating an account, signing in, accessing a workspace, inviting staff, entering member data, sending communications, accepting payments, purchasing a subscription, or otherwise using Cemstree, you agree to these terms on behalf of yourself and, if applicable, the church, ministry, nonprofit, organization, or legal entity you represent.

If you do not agree, do not use Cemstree. If you are using Cemstree for a church or organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization to these terms.

2. Service status and updates

Cemstree may update these terms as the product, provider stack, security practices, pricing, customer agreements, or applicable requirements change. The updated terms will be posted in the product or made available through the service, and continued use after an update means you accept the updated terms.

If a signed written agreement, order form, data processing agreement, or similar customer agreement applies to your organization, that agreement controls where it expressly conflicts with these online terms.

3. Cemstree role and customer role

Cemstree provides software tools for ministry administration. Churches and organizations remain responsible for their own ministry decisions, staff actions, records, communications, pastoral care, payments, tax treatment, employment decisions, child-safety procedures, and legal compliance.

Cemstree is not a church, pastor, counselor, accountant, attorney, payment processor, telecommunications carrier, emergency service, medical provider, or fiduciary. Cemstree does not provide legal, tax, financial, pastoral, medical, counseling, safeguarding, or emergency advice.

4. Accounts, access, and authorization

A person who purchases a subscription or accepts these terms on behalf of an organization must be at least eighteen years old and authorized to bind that organization. A customer organization may authorize a person age 13 through 17 to hold a supervised user account for ministry participation, including volunteering, only when the organization has obtained permission from the person's parent or legal guardian and applies appropriate safeguards and permissions. People under age 13 may not hold a Cemstree login account.

You must provide accurate account information, keep credentials secure, and promptly remove access for people who should no longer use a workspace. You are responsible for activity performed through your account or by users you invite.

Each workspace is organization-scoped. You may access only workspaces and records you are authorized to use. Attempts to bypass authentication, authorization, tenant boundaries, audit logs, rate limits, or security controls are prohibited.

5. Ministry data and acceptable use

You are responsible for the accuracy, legality, sensitivity, permissions, and retention of data entered into Cemstree, including information about members, guests, children, households, attendance, care, serving, giving, communications, and staff activity.

You may not use Cemstree to store or transmit unlawful, abusive, harassing, discriminatory, exploitative, defamatory, infringing, malicious, deceptive, or unsafe content. You may not use Cemstree for spam, phishing, malware, surveillance, credential harvesting, unauthorized scraping, or any activity that harms Cemstree, another customer, or a third party.

6. Children, check-in, and safety

Cemstree includes tools that can support children's check-in, guardian records, labels, room assignments, and checkout workflows. These tools do not replace your church's legal obligations, staff screening, child-protection policies, training, incident response, emergency procedures, custody review, or local law compliance.

Churches are responsible for obtaining any required parent or guardian consent before entering children's information and for ensuring only properly authorized staff or volunteers access child-related records.

7. Communications, SMS, email, and consent

You are responsible for obtaining, recording, and honoring all legally required consent before sending SMS, MMS, email, push notifications, calls, campaigns, reminders, or automated messages through Cemstree or a connected provider.

You must honor opt-outs, unsubscribe requests, STOP/HELP expectations, suppression lists, quiet-hour rules, carrier rules, provider terms, and applicable laws. You are responsible for message content, recipient selection, sending frequency, and any fees, penalties, complaints, or claims arising from messages you send or authorize.

8. Payments, giving, and financial records

Cemstree may integrate with payment providers such as Stripe. Payment processing is provided by the applicable payment provider, not Cemstree. Churches remain responsible for donor communications, refunds, chargebacks, tax receipts, restricted funds, accounting, reconciliation, statements, legal entity information, charitable registration, and tax compliance.

Cemstree may provide software records and workflow tools, but it does not guarantee payment availability, settlement timing, tax deductibility, donor intent, accounting treatment, or dispute outcomes.

9. Platform support access

Cemstree platform administrators may access a customer workspace when reasonably needed to troubleshoot, support, secure, migrate, audit, investigate abuse, comply with law, or maintain the service. Support access should be limited to legitimate business purposes, require an access reason and basis, and be logged.

By using Cemstree, you authorize this limited support access. Cemstree personnel should not use support access for personal reasons, unrelated ministry review, unnecessary browsing, or purposes outside the access reason recorded for that session.

10. Third-party services

Cemstree may connect with third-party providers for hosting, databases, authentication, payments, email, SMS, push notifications, monitoring, security, and support. Current providers and their processing roles are identified in Cemstree’s Subprocessor List. Third-party services are governed by their own terms, privacy policies, availability, fees, limitations, and compliance requirements.

Cemstree is not responsible for third-party outages, provider rule changes, delivery failures, account suspensions, payment disputes, webhook failures, carrier filtering, or actions taken by a provider.

11. Security and incident cooperation

Cemstree uses reasonable technical and organizational measures intended to protect the service. No system is perfectly secure. You must promptly report suspected unauthorized access, lost credentials, improper workspace access, data exposure, or security incidents to security@cemstree.com.

You agree to cooperate with reasonable investigation, mitigation, notice, and remediation steps related to security or privacy incidents involving your workspace.

12. Availability and changes

Cemstree may change, suspend, limit, replace, or discontinue features as the product develops. Cemstree may perform maintenance, apply updates, change providers, impose usage limits, or restrict access when needed for security, compliance, reliability, nonpayment, abuse prevention, or product operations.

Cemstree will use commercially reasonable efforts to provide advance notice of planned maintenance when practical. Emergency maintenance, security response, and provider incidents may occur without advance notice. Support response targets are goals rather than guaranteed resolution times unless a signed written agreement expressly states otherwise.

Cemstree is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis unless a signed written agreement says otherwise.

13. Fees and paid services

Paid monthly and annual subscriptions automatically renew for successive periods matching the purchased billing interval until canceled. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the then-current paid term. Canceling does not create a refund or credit for time remaining in that term.

A customer may request one refund of its first Cemstree subscription payment by writing to support@cemstree.com within 14 calendar days after the initial charge. This exception does not cover renewals, setup, migration, training, Custom Code, provider usage, transaction fees, messaging fees, consumed services, chargebacks, or policy abuse. All other payments are non-refundable and non-creditable except where required by law or expressly stated in the checkout flow or a signed written agreement.

The applicable checkout flow, invoice, or written agreement describes plan prices and other charges. Cemstree may change prices by giving at least thirty days’ advance notice, with the change applying no earlier than the next renewal after the notice period. You are responsible for applicable taxes and provider fees unless a written agreement says otherwise.

If a subscription payment remains unpaid for 15 days, Cemstree may add a $10 late fee. One additional $10 late fee may be added for each additional 30-day period that the same payment delinquency remains unresolved. Late fees stop accruing when the delinquency is resolved and are non-refundable except where required by law.

Cemstree may suspend or limit paid features for nonpayment, payment failure, chargeback, fraud risk, or provider account issues.

14. Intellectual property

Cemstree and its software, design, branding, workflows, documentation, and technology are owned by Cemstree or its licensors. These terms do not transfer ownership of Cemstree technology to you.

You retain ownership of your organization's data and content. You grant Cemstree the rights needed to host, process, secure, transmit, back up, display, and support that data as necessary to provide the service.

15. Confidentiality

Each party may receive confidential information from the other. Confidential information should be used only for legitimate service, support, operational, legal, or security purposes and protected with reasonable care.

Confidentiality obligations do not apply to information that is public, independently developed, lawfully received from another source, or required to be disclosed by law, subpoena, court order, regulator, or similar legal process.

16. Disclaimers

To the maximum extent allowed by law, Cemstree disclaims warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, uninterrupted operation, error-free operation, data-loss prevention, message deliverability, payment success, legal compliance, ministry outcomes, or suitability for any specific church policy or jurisdiction.

17. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent allowed by law, Cemstree will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages; lost profits; lost revenue; lost donations; lost data; business interruption; ministry interruption; reputational harm; provider failures; carrier filtering; payment disputes; or unauthorized access not caused by Cemstree's gross negligence or willful misconduct.

To the maximum extent allowed by law, Cemstree's total liability for claims related to the service will not exceed the amount paid to Cemstree for the affected service during the three months before the event giving rise to the claim, or one hundred dollars if no amount was paid.

18. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold Cemstree harmless from claims, damages, liabilities, penalties, fines, costs, and expenses arising from your organization's data, users, ministry actions, communications, payment activity, consent failures, legal violations, misuse of the service, breach of these terms, or disputes with members, donors, staff, volunteers, guardians, attendees, recipients, providers, or third parties.

19. Termination

You may stop using Cemstree at any time. Cemstree may suspend or terminate access for security risk, illegal activity, abuse, nonpayment, provider requirements, court order, legal compliance, or material breach of these terms.

After termination, Cemstree may retain or delete data according to the Privacy Policy, applicable law, backups, audit requirements, provider requirements, and any written agreement.

20. Governing terms and conflicts

If a signed order form, data processing agreement, business associate agreement, or other written agreement is executed by Cemstree and a customer, that signed agreement controls where it conflicts with these online terms. Otherwise, these terms govern use of Cemstree.

Unless a signed written agreement says otherwise, these terms and disputes arising from them or the service are governed by the laws of the State of Michigan, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. The parties consent to exclusive personal jurisdiction and venue in the state courts located in Branch County, Michigan, or, when federal jurisdiction exists, the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan.