Status: WIP — this document is a working draft and has not been reviewed by a solicitor; it may change without notice.

Doddle Beta Participation Agreement

Status: draft for solicitor review. Not legal advice.

Version: 0.2 · drafted 5 September 2026 · last updated 11 October 2026

Status: WIP — this document is a working draft and has not been reviewed by a solicitor; it may change without notice.

Signed: by one adult per household, before Doddle is set up for the household in the app.

Hands over to: the terms of service, by explicit opt-in only.

Between:

(1) [OPERATOR LEGAL NAME], [sole trader trading as "Doddle" / Doddle Ltd, company number XXXXXXX], of [OPERATOR ADDRESS], United Kingdom ("we", "us", "Doddle"); and

(2) [NAME] of [ADDRESS] ("you"), signing for your household ("your household").

Dated [DATE].

1. What this is, in one paragraph

Doddle is an early-stage service that reads your family's group chat and forwarded school email, keeps your family's schedule, writes a shared calendar and asks the group when a day has nobody covering it. You are joining a small beta of [5–10] households. It is free, we ask for fifteen minutes of feedback, and either of us can stop at any time. This document says what each of us is signing up to. It is short on purpose.

2. The beta

2.1 The beta runs from [START DATE] until we tell you it has ended, and we expect that to be around [END DATE / "the end of the spring term 2027"]. We may extend or shorten it.

2.2 It is free. No card, no fee, no charge at the end of it. If you never do anything else, you owe us nothing.

2.3 Doddle is not finished. It will get things wrong, miss things, and occasionally go quiet while something is fixed. That is what a beta is. Section 6 says what we do promise.

2.4 The feedback bargain. In exchange for the beta being free, you agree to give us roughly fifteen minutes of honest feedback — a call, a voice note or a written reply — at a time that suits you, and to tell us in the group chat when Doddle gets something wrong. That is the whole obligation. If you go quiet we will nudge you once, and if you would rather stop, section 9.

2.5 Founding-family rate. Households that complete the feedback in 2.4 keep a founding-family rate for their first year of paid service, if and when they choose to take it. The rate will be [£X] per month against a launch price of £25. This is an offer, not a commitment to buy anything.

3. What we will do

3.1 Run Doddle for your household: read your group chat and the mail forwarded to your family address, keep your schedule, write your household's shared Google Calendar, send the evening plan, the Sunday childcare digest and task lists, and ask the group when a day needs a person.

3.2 Hold your household's data in its own separate database, not shared with any other family.

3.3 Handle your data as set out in the privacy notice, which forms part of this agreement.

3.4 Tell you, in your group chat, when something material changes — a new provider, a change in what we keep, or the end of the beta.

3.5 Fix things. That is the point of a beta.

4. What Doddle will not do

4.1 Doddle proposes; it does not silently act. Nothing lands in your calendar without a yes from one of you. Where Doddle is unsure it asks rather than guesses.

4.2 With one exception, which we would rather name than bury: if a day has nobody covering it, Doddle asks the group, asks again on days two and three, and on day four puts a name against it and says so in the chat. It is a suggestion in your own family's group and one message undoes it.

4.3 Doddle cannot send email to anyone outside your household, spend your money, book anything, contact your school, or delete your own records.

4.4 Doddle does not read any inbox. Mail reaches it only because you forwarded it, or set up forwarding, to your family address.

4.5 Your family's data is never used to train any AI model — not by us, not by our providers.

5. What we can see, and why

Doddle is run by one person. They administer the servers, and so they can read your household's database; and the Doddle bot is in your group, so they see what the bot sees.

They will look at your data when: you have reported a problem and it needs diagnosing; a fault alert fires; a database has to be restored or migrated; or the law requires it. Not otherwise.

There is no technical control preventing access — isolation in Doddle is between families, not between you and us. We would rather you knew that at the start. It is set out again in section 9 of the privacy notice, and you should read that section before signing.

6. No service level, and what we promise instead

6.1 There is no SLA. No uptime commitment, no response-time commitment, no guarantee the evening plan arrives every evening.

6.2 What we do commit to, as a matter of contract:

6.3 Doddle is not a safety system. It does not replace you knowing where your children are. Do not rely on it for anything where being wrong matters — a medical appointment, a flight, a legal deadline, a child being collected. Check anything that matters. Section 8 says what happens when it is wrong.

7. Your side

You agree to:

7.1 Use Doddle for your own household's family admin, not for a business, not for anyone else's household.

7.2 Look after who is in the household. Doddle answers to every adult in your household, in the app or any channel you connect, and shows them the household's plan. Inviting someone adds them to everything Doddle knows. If your household changes — a separation, a new partner, a nanny, a teenager who now has a phone — that is yours to manage, and we cannot see it happen. Tell us and we will help; we cannot decide it for you.

7.3 Not forward material you have no business forwarding — someone else's private correspondence, anything confidential to your employer.

7.4 Give feedback per 2.4.

7.5 Not attempt to break, probe, overload or reverse-engineer the service, and not use it to do anything unlawful.

7.6 Accept that you are responsible for what you tell Doddle. It has no way to know a date is wrong if you gave it the wrong date.

8. If something goes wrong

8.1 The beta is free, and provided as is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties and conditions, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, or loss of opportunity.

8.2 What we cannot exclude, and are not trying to. UK consumer law limits this and we would rather say so plainly than write a clause a court would strike out:

8.3 Subject to 8.2, our total liability to you under this agreement is limited to £[100]. That figure reflects a service you pay nothing for. [SOLICITOR: confirm this cap is defensible as fair in a free consumer beta — a cap set too low can itself be an unfair term.]

8.4 Doddle depends on third parties — Telegram, Google, an AI language-model service, our host. We are not liable for their outages, though we will tell you when one is why your plan did not arrive.

9. Stopping

9.1 You can stop at any time, for any reason, with no notice and no explanation. Say so in the group or email [hello@doddlefamily.com]. Removing the bot from your group also ends it.

9.2 We can stop at any time — because the beta has ended, because we are shutting something down, or because a household is doing something in section 7.5. We will give 14 days' notice in the group unless 7.5 makes that unreasonable.

9.3 When it ends, Doddle stops reading your chat and your family address, and stops writing your calendar.

9.4 Deleting. Ask and we delete your household's database and the Doddle-created calendar within 30 days, working out of backups within a further 89 days. If you do not ask, we delete it anyway within 6 months of the beta ending, unless you have moved onto paid terms. We are not going to sit on your family's data because nobody sent an email. Ask before then and we will export it for you.

9.5 Sections 5, 8 and 11 survive.

10. What happens after the beta — no automatic conversion

10.1 The beta does not turn into a paid subscription on its own. There is no card on file and nothing to cancel.

10.2 Before the beta ends we will tell you, in the group and by email, what paid Doddle costs (£25 a month per household, or your founding-family rate) and link the terms of service.

10.3 You become a paying customer only by saying yes and entering payment details. Silence means no. If you say nothing, the beta ends and 9.3–9.4 apply.

10.4 If you do opt in, the terms of service replace this agreement from that date, your data carries over unchanged, and the privacy notice continues to apply. Your consent under onboarding-consent.md carries over too, and remains withdrawable.

11. The rest

11.1 Notices. In your group chat, or to the email address each of us gave the other.

11.2 Changes. We may change this agreement by telling you in the group. If you do not like a change, stop under 9.1; we will not hold you to it.

11.3 Assignment. You cannot transfer this agreement. Doddle is run today by an individual, and we may later set up a company to run it: we may transfer this agreement, and the data it covers, to that company or to a buyer of the business, on notice to you in your group chat before it takes effect. Your rights under this agreement and the privacy notice do not change, the new controller is bound by both, and if you would rather not continue you can leave and have your data deleted before the transfer happens.

11.4 Third parties. Nobody outside this agreement can enforce it, except that the other adults in your household may rely on sections 3, 4, 5 and 9.4.

11.5 Entire agreement. This document, the privacy notice and the onboarding consent are the whole of it.

11.6 Governing law. England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you can bring proceedings in your own courts.

Signatures

Household
Name[NAME]
Signature[SIGNATURE]
Date[DATE]
Other adults in the household[NAMES] — who acknowledge this agreement in the group chat
Doddle
Name[OPERATOR LEGAL NAME]
Signature[SIGNATURE]
Date[DATE]

Acknowledgement in the group. After signing, Doddle posts in the household group: "[Name] has signed the beta agreement for this household — here it is: [link]. Everyone in this chat is covered by it, and any of you can ask me to stop or to delete everything." Each other adult replies to acknowledge. Doddle records who acknowledged and when.

Sources

Verified 5 September 2026.