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

Doddle — Terms of Service

Status: draft for solicitor review. Not legal advice.

Version: 0.1 · drafted 5 September 2026 · last updated 11 October 2026 · effective [DATE]

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

Applies to: the paid Doddle service, after the beta.

Comes from: the beta agreement, by your explicit opt-in — never automatically.

These terms are written so a household coming off the beta changes nothing except starting to pay. The service, the data, the privacy notice and your consent all carry over as they were.

1. Who we are and who you are

Doddle is run by [OPERATOR LEGAL NAME], [sole trader trading as "Doddle" / Doddle Ltd, company number XXXXXXX], of [OPERATOR ADDRESS], United Kingdom. Contact: [hello@doddlefamily.com]. [VAT number, if registered]

These terms are between us and you — the adult who signs up and pays. One subscription covers one household: the adults in your Doddle group chat and the children you tell Doddle about.

Doddle is sold to consumers, for personal and family use. You must be 18 or over.

By subscribing you agree to these terms, the privacy notice and the acceptable use section below.

2. What Doddle does

You sign up in the Doddle app, from a welcome email and setup link, and set your household up in a chat with Doddle there. Doddle then:

reads the messages you send it in the app (and on any other channel you connect, such as Telegram or WhatsApp) and the school, nursery and club email you forward to your household's yourfamily@doddlefamily.com address;
keeps your household's schedule — school runs, clubs, appointments, tasks, term dates, closures, INSET days, holidays and who is covering which day;
writes events to a shared Google Calendar it creates for your household and shares with you;
sends an evening plan for tomorrow, a Sunday week-ahead on childcare, and task lists;
asks the household when a day has nobody covering it, and follows it up;
answers questions in the chat about your own schedule.

Your household's data is held in its own separate database, not a shared one.

3. What Doddle does not do

3.1 It proposes; it does not silently act. Nothing reaches your calendar without a yes from one of you. Where Doddle is unsure it asks.

3.2 One exception, named rather than buried. When 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 inside your own family's group, reversible by one message, and it is there so an uncovered Thursday does not stay uncovered in silence.

3.3 Doddle cannot email anyone outside your household, spend your money, book or pay for anything, contact your school on your behalf, or delete your own records.

3.4 Doddle does not read any inbox. Mail reaches it because you forwarded it.

3.5 Doddle is not a safety-critical system. It does not replace you knowing where your children are. Check anything where being wrong matters — a medical appointment, a flight, a legal deadline, a child being collected.

3.6 Your family's data is never used to train any AI model.

4. Price, payment and the cooling-off period

4.1 £25 per month per household, including VAT where applicable, taken monthly in advance by card through [PAYMENT PROVIDER]. Founding families keep the rate they were offered for the period they were offered it.

4.2 The subscription renews monthly until you cancel. Cancel at any time (section 5).

4.3 Your 14-day right to cancel. Because you are buying at a distance, the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 give you 14 days from the day you subscribe to change your mind, for any reason, and get your money back.

4.4 Doddle starts working the moment you subscribe, and you will normally want it to. At sign-up we ask you to confirm two things:

I want Doddle to start now, during the 14-day cancellation period. I understand that if I cancel after Doddle has started, I will be charged for the part of the month I have used.

That is regulation 36. If you tick it and then cancel within the 14 days, we refund your first month less a proportionate amount for the days you used it. If you do not tick it, Doddle waits until day 15 to start, and a cancellation inside 14 days is refunded in full.

4.5 How to cancel in the 14 days. Say so in your group chat, or email [hello@doddlefamily.com], or use the model cancellation form in Schedule 2 to the 2013 Regulations. Any clear statement is enough. We refund within 14 days of being told, to the card you paid with.

4.6 Failed payments. If a payment fails we will tell you in the chat and try again. If it has not gone through after 14 days we pause the service; after 30 days we treat the subscription as cancelled under section 5, and section 6 applies to your data.

4.7 Price changes. We will give you at least 30 days' notice in your group chat and by email before any price change, and it takes effect at your next renewal after that. If you do not want it, cancel before then and you will not be charged the new price.

5. Cancelling, after the first 14 days

5.1 Cancel at any time, with no notice period and no reason: say so in your group chat, email us, or remove Doddle from the group.

5.2 Cancellation takes effect at the end of the month you have already paid for. Doddle keeps working until then. We do not pro-rate a part month after the cooling-off period, and we do not charge an exit fee.

5.3 We may end your subscription by giving you 30 days' notice — for example if we are discontinuing Doddle. We will refund any period you have paid for and not received.

5.4 We may suspend or end it immediately if you break section 7 in a way that puts the service or another household at risk, or if we are required to. We will tell you why.

6. Your data when you leave

6.1 When your subscription ends, Doddle stops reading your chat and your family address and stops writing your calendar.

6.2 Ask, and we delete your household's database and the Doddle-created Google Calendar within 30 days, ageing out of backups within a further 89 days.

6.3 If you do not ask, we keep it for 6 months in case you come back, then delete it. We will email you before we do. Accounting records are the exception — we keep those for 6 years, as tax law requires.

6.4 Export. Ask before deletion and we will give you your household's data in a machine-readable file. This is also your Article 20 portability right.

6.5 Events already in your own calendars, and the messages in any chat group you connect, are yours and stay where they are.

7. Acceptable use

You agree to:

use Doddle for your own household's family admin — not a business, not a childminding service, not another household;
keep to one household per subscription;
look after who is in your household. Doddle answers to every adult in it and shows them everything it knows. Inviting someone gives them the household's plan. Household changes — a separation, a new partner, a nanny, a teenager with a phone — are yours to manage; we cannot see them happen. Ask and we will help, but the household is yours;
not forward material you have no right to forward;
not use Doddle unlawfully, or to harass anyone;
not attempt to break, probe, overload, scrape or reverse-engineer the service, resell it, or use it to build a competing product;
accept that what you tell Doddle is your responsibility — it cannot know a date is wrong if you gave it the wrong date.

We may suspend or end your subscription for a serious or repeated breach, under 5.4.

8. Third-party services

Doddle depends on services we do not control: Telegram for the chat, if you connect it, Google for the calendar, an AI language-model service for reading your messages, and our host Railway. They are listed with their roles and locations in the privacy notice and in dpa-and-subprocessors.md.

If you connect Telegram, your use of it is between you and Telegram, under their terms. If one of these providers has an outage, Doddle may be unavailable; we will tell you in the chat when that is what has happened, and it is not a breach of these terms, but it does count towards a refund under 9.4 if it is prolonged.

9. If something goes wrong

9.1 We will provide Doddle with reasonable care and skill, as section 49 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires.

9.2 What we cannot exclude. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for:

death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
our obligations under sections 49–52 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 — section 57 says a term cannot exclude those, and we are not attempting to;
anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded, including your rights under UK GDPR.

Any term that goes further than the law allows is cut back to what is allowed, and the rest stands.

9.3 Subject to 9.2, and because Doddle is a low-cost consumer service, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of opportunity, or loss arising because you relied on Doddle for something you should have checked (see 3.5); and our total liability in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of £[250] and the fees you paid us in that period. [SOLICITOR: confirm this cap is fair under Part 2 CRA 2015.]

9.4 If Doddle is not working, tell us. Your first remedy is that we fix it. If we cannot fix it in a reasonable time you can cancel with a refund for the period you paid for and did not get, and you keep your rights under Part 1 Chapter 4 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (services) — repeat performance, or a price reduction where repeat performance is impossible.

10. Changes to these terms

10.1 We may change these terms. We will tell you in your group chat and by email at least 30 days before a material change, and it takes effect at your next renewal.

10.2 If you do not want a change, cancel before it takes effect and you will not be bound by it.

10.3 Changes required by law may take effect sooner, and we will say so and why.

11. Complaints

Tell us: [hello@doddlefamily.com]. We will acknowledge within 2 working days and answer within 30 days.

For data protection complaints specifically, our procedure is in the privacy notice, and you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint at any time, without coming to us first. [OPERATOR: a documented complaints procedure and a route to submit one becomes a statutory duty on 19 June 2026 under section 103 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 — see ico-and-business-setup.md.]

[OPERATOR DECISION: name an ADR scheme here if you join one. Not mandatory for this sector, but if you decline ADR after a deadlocked complaint you must say so in writing.]

12. The rest

12.1 Notices. Your group chat, or the email address on your account.

12.2 Assignment. You cannot transfer your subscription. We may transfer these terms if Doddle becomes a company or is sold — we will tell you first, and you may cancel and have your data deleted before it takes effect.

12.3 Third parties. Nobody outside these terms can enforce them, except that the other adults in your household may rely on sections 2, 3, 6 and 7.

12.4 Entire agreement. These terms and the privacy notice.

12.5 Severability. If a clause is unenforceable, the rest stands.

12.6 Governing law. England and Wales, and its courts have jurisdiction. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland you may also bring proceedings in your own courts.

Coming: the DMCC subscription rules

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 introduces a new regime for subscription contracts — mandatory pre-contract information, reminder notices before renewals, an easy exit route, and a non-waivable renewal cooling-off right with proportionate refunds. It is not in force yet; commencement is currently expected in spring 2027 (the timetable has slipped more than once).

These terms are drafted to sit close to it already — monthly rolling, cancel any time, 30 days' notice of a price change, no exit fee. When the regime commences the additions will be reminder notices and the renewal cooling-off right. See ico-and-business-setup.md.

Sources

Verified 5 September 2026.