Terms and Conditions

These Terms and Conditions ("Terms") describe the relationship between you and Archetype Technologies, Inc. (placeholder) ("Archetype", "we", "us") when you use the Archetype platform (the "Platform"). They cover the website, the project workspace, and everything the Platform produces on your behalf.

When the real document replaces this one, it will carry a version and an effective date in the strip above, and we will tell account holders before it takes effect.

Archetype helps you take a Pre-approved Template and assemble it into a Permit-Ready Set for a specific parcel. You choose a property, review what we retrieved about it, set a Program within the bounds the template and the parcel allow, look at the result in plan and in a 360° view, and hand off a Plan Package.

What we are not

• We are not an architecture or engineering firm, and we do not offer professional design services.
• We are not a permit expediter and we do not file, prosecute or guarantee any application.
• We are not a contractor, a lender, an insurer, or a real-estate broker, and nothing on the Platform is an offer to perform construction work.
• We do not provide legal, tax, insurance or land-use advice.

The Platform's service area at present is Los Angeles County, California, and some parcels within it are out of scope. Availability for a given address is decided by the Platform, not by request.

You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter a binding contract to hold an account. If you use the Platform for a company or a client, you confirm you are authorised to accept these Terms for them, and "you" means both of you.

Account security

You are responsible for your credentials and for everything done through your account. Passwords must meet the policy the sign-up form enforces — at least eight characters, with an uppercase letter, a number and a special character. Tell us promptly if you believe someone else has access.

Verification and sessions

An account is created in a pending-verification state. Verification does not block you from starting work, but we may require it before a Plan Package is sent. A session ends after 24 hours of inactivity and you will be asked to sign in again.

This is the most important section in these Terms. Every set produced through the Platform is reviewed, sealed and submitted by an Architect of Record — a California-licensed professional who is not Archetype.

Archetype does not stamp drawings, does not carry professional liability for a design, and is not the licensed professional on your project.

A human licensed professional is in the loop by design and not as a formality. They may change, reject, redraw or refuse to seal anything the Platform produced. Their judgement governs, and where it differs from the Platform's output, theirs is the version of record.

What this means for you

1. Do not submit Platform output to any authority without that review.
2. Do not begin construction, demolition or site work from Platform output alone.
3. Direct questions about code compliance, structural adequacy or constructability to the licensed professional on your project.

The Platform combines deterministic computation with language models. The division of labour is deliberate: correctness is computed, not generated. A model translates what you ask for into changes the Platform can evaluate; it never decides whether something complies with a code, fits within a template's approval, or may be built.

No output of a language model is authoritative here — not for compliance, not for safety, not for cost.

Generated Output may nonetheless be wrong, incomplete, internally inconsistent, or unbuildable. Automated systems fail in ways that look plausible, and a drawing that renders cleanly is not a drawing that has been checked. Review everything before you act on it.

Chat-driven editing

Where the workspace lets you edit a plan by describing a change, the available changes are bounded by the selected template's approved parameters. A request the bounds do not allow will be declined or adjusted rather than silently applied. Those bounds belong to the approving authority; we do not waive them and cannot grant exceptions to them.

We may change the models, prompts and rules behind the Platform at any time. Output is not guaranteed to be reproducible between sessions, and a set you intend to rely on should be exported rather than re-generated.

A Pre-approved Template is valuable precisely because an authority has already reviewed it. That review is conditional on the design staying within the parameters it was approved under, so the Platform will not let you leave them.

Consequences worth stating plainly

• A control that stops before where you wanted it stops because a rule outside Archetype says so — zoning, the template's approval, or a parcel constraint.
• Taking a design outside a template's bounds is a bespoke design. That is legitimate work, but it is not what the Platform does, and it forfeits the review advantage the template carried.
• An authority may amend or withdraw a template's approval. If that happens to one your project depends on, we will tell you, and the work may need to change.

Nothing here transfers any approval to you. The approval belongs to the issuing authority and attaches to a design, not to your account.

The Platform retrieves lot geometry, zoning parameters, Site Flags and a Development Path from public records and third-party providers. All of it is presented for information.

Public data is frequently stale, occasionally wrong, and inconsistently maintained between agencies. Fire hazard severity zones, hillside designations, flood maps and historic overlays are revised on their own schedules. An agency status the Platform shows is our reading of available information at a point in time and may lag the agency's own.

Confirming or flagging retrieved data in the Platform records your input. It does not make the data correct, and it does not shift responsibility for it to us.

You may upload surveys, soils declarations, inspiration images and other material ("Your Content"). You keep ownership of it.

The licence you grant us

You grant Archetype a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, copy, process, display and adapt Your Content for the purpose of operating the Platform and producing your project's outputs — and for no other purpose. The licence lasts as long as we hold the content and ends when it is deleted, except for copies retained in backups until they expire.

What you promise about it

• You have the rights needed to upload it and to grant the licence above.
• It does not infringe anyone's intellectual property, privacy or other rights.
• A survey or soils report you upload is the one that applies to the parcel in question. Substituting a report from another site produces a set that describes a building for the wrong ground.

We do not verify uploads. Declaring that a survey exists is not the same as having a correct one, and the Platform trusts what you tell it.

Where a project needs a survey, a soils report or another consultant service you do not already have, the Platform can arrange it. We pass the consultant's price through without a markup, and we tell you what it is before you commit.

The consultant is engaged for you and is responsible for their own work. We are not a party to that engagement, we do not supervise it, and we do not warrant its findings. Where a consultant's report changes what is feasible on a parcel, the report governs.

If we ever take a fee on procurement, this section will say so and the amount will be shown before you order. A change of that kind is a change to these Terms, notified in advance.

Archetype's fee is calculated as a percentage of the estimated construction cost of your project, quoted before work begins.

Consultant charges arranged through the Platform are additional and are passed through at cost. Taxes are yours. Unless the real document says otherwise, fees are non-refundable once the work they pay for has been performed.

The Platform produces a ROM Estimate to help you judge scale early. It is derived from unit rates and the program you chose.

It is not a bid, a quotation, a guaranteed maximum price, or an offer. No contractor is bound by it. Construction pricing moves with labour, materials, site conditions, schedule and who is bidding, and none of those are things an estimate produced before a site visit can know.

Treat the figure as an order of magnitude for a decision about whether to proceed, and get real bids before committing money.

A project moves through setup, property review, program, plan, review and handoff. Work is saved as you go so you can leave and return.

Sending the package locks the project

When you send a Plan Package, the project is locked against further editing. This is an integrity measure, not a restriction: a set transmitted for professional review has to remain the set that was reviewed, or nobody downstream can tell which version they are looking at.

If something needs to change after a send, the route is a new revision rather than an edit to the sent one. You keep access to read and export a locked project.

Archetype owns the Platform — its software, models, interfaces, and the libraries and rule sets behind it. These Terms grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use it for your own projects while your account is in good standing, and nothing more.

Your outputs

Subject to fees being paid, you may use the drawings and documents your project produces for that project — including submitting them, through your Architect of Record, and building from them.

What you may not do

• Resell, sublicense or redistribute Platform output as a product, template or library of your own.
• Use output to train a competing model or to reconstruct our rule sets.
• Remove attribution or professional seals from a document that carries them.

Third-party template designs stay with their owners, and a pre-approved design's own licence terms sit alongside these.

You agree not to:

• Misrepresent a parcel, a survey, a soils report or your authority over a property.
• Present Generated Output as sealed, approved or permitted when it is not.
• Probe, scrape, overload or reverse-engineer the Platform, or work around a limit it enforces.
• Share an account, or use one on behalf of someone barred from the Platform.
• Upload malware, or content you have no right to upload.

Passing off unreviewed output as a permitted set is the misuse with real consequences for third parties, and we treat it as grounds for immediate suspension.

The Platform depends on services we do not control: public records, parcel and hazard data providers, mapping, model providers, payment processing, email delivery and identity providers such as Google sign-in.

Each is used under its own terms, may change or stop without notice, and may be unavailable. Where one fails, the Platform will tell you what it could not retrieve rather than substituting a guess — but a feature may be degraded or unavailable while that lasts.

We choose providers so they can be replaced, and a change of provider is not a change to these Terms.

To the fullest extent the law allows, the Platform is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory — including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from a course of dealing.

Specifically, we do not warrant that

• any permit will be granted, or granted within any period;
• any output complies with any building code, zoning ordinance, or authority requirement;
• retrieved property data is accurate, current or complete;
• an estimate approximates what construction will cost;
• the Platform will be uninterrupted, secure, or free of error.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, in which case the exclusions above apply only as far as that jurisdiction permits.

Limitation

To the fullest extent the law allows, Archetype is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost opportunity, construction delay, cost overrun, or the cost of redesign or rework — whether or not we were told such damages were possible.

Our total liability arising out of or relating to the Platform is capped at the greater of the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred United States dollars.

Indemnity

You agree to indemnify Archetype against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your use of the Platform, from Your Content, from your misrepresentation of a property or a document, or from construction carried out from a set that was not reviewed and sealed by a licensed professional.

Nothing in this section limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

You may stop using the Platform at any time and ask us to close your account. We may suspend or close an account for a breach of these Terms, for non-payment, for conduct that puts a third party at risk, or where the law requires it.

We will give notice before closing an account for anything other than an urgent safety, security or legal reason, and we will give you a reasonable opportunity to export your projects. Sections that need to survive termination — intellectual property, disclaimers, liability, indemnity and governing law — do.

Where a project has been handed off to a licensed professional, termination of your account does not withdraw the set they already hold.

Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules. The courts of Los Angeles County, California have exclusive jurisdiction, and both of us consent to it.

Changes

We may change these Terms. A material change will be notified to account holders before it takes effect, and the version and effective date at the top of this page will move. Continuing to use the Platform after a change takes effect means you accept it; if you do not, stop using the Platform and close your account.

Contact

Questions about this document go to legal@example.invalid — a placeholder address for a placeholder document. Privacy questions are answered in the Privacy Policy.