Terms of Service

• PalAte is a restaurant discovery and social platform. It is completely free of charge — there are no purchases, subscriptions, or paid features — and is currently distributed in beta through Apple TestFlight.
• We may add, change, suspend, or discontinue any feature, or the Service as a whole, at any time, with or without notice, and without liability to you.
• We may impose limits on use or storage at our sole discretion.

• You are solely responsible for all activity that occurs under your account and for keeping your credentials secure.
• One account per person. No shared, automated, or bot accounts.
• We may suspend or terminate your account at any time, for any reason or no reason, including violation of these Terms.

• Post content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, hateful, deceptive, or infringing.
• Impersonate any person or misrepresent your affiliation.
• Scrape, harvest, copy, or redistribute any data from the Service, including restaurant data, menus, photos, or availability, by any automated or manual means.
• Reverse engineer, probe, disrupt, overload, or circumvent security or rate limits of the Service.
• Sell, resell, or offer for compensation any reservation obtained through or surfaced by the Service, or use the Service in violation of any applicable law, including laws governing restaurant reservations.
• Use the Service to develop a competing product or train machine learning models on our data.

• You retain ownership of content you post (reviews, ratings, photos, posts, lists, messages) ("User Content").
• You grant PalAte a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable license to host, store, reproduce, modify (for formatting), display, and distribute your User Content in connection with operating, promoting, and improving the Service. This license survives account deletion only for content you shared publicly that others have re-shared, and for backup copies retained for a commercially reasonable period.
• You represent that you own or have all rights necessary to post your User Content and that it does not violate any law or third party right. You are solely responsible for your User Content.
• We may remove or moderate any User Content at any time without notice, but we have no obligation to monitor or retain it.

Restaurant information (names, addresses, hours, photos, menus, prices, reservation availability) is aggregated from third parties and may be inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date. We make no representation that any restaurant listing, menu, price, hour of operation, or reservation slot is accurate or will be honored.

PalAte does not itself take reservations. Availability shown in the app is a point-in-time snapshot, and booking always completes on the platform that holds the table — Resy, OpenTable, SevenRooms, Toast Tables, Tock, Yelp, Google, or the restaurant directly — under that platform's own terms and account requirements. A time shown in PalAte can be gone by the time you reach the provider.

Reservation swaps (PalateX). PalAte may let members offer to swap or give away reservations they hold. PalAte only facilitates the conversation between members: it is never a party to a trade, holds nothing, and guarantees nothing. Offering, soliciting, or accepting money or any other compensation for a reservation is prohibited (see Section 5) and may violate applicable law, including New York's restaurant reservation anti-piracy law. Trades are between members at their own risk and remain subject to the issuing platform's rules, including any name-on-reservation requirements.

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available," with all faults and without warranty of any kind. To the maximum extent permitted by law, PalAte disclaims all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, and any warranties arising from course of dealing or usage of trade. PalAte does not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that any data will be accurate or preserved.

To the maximum extent permitted by law: (a) PalAte and its officers, employees, and agents will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or any loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, or opportunity, arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms, under any theory of liability, even if advised of the possibility of such damages; and (b) PalAte's total aggregate liability for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms is capped at the greater of fifty U.S. dollars ($50) or the amounts you paid PalAte in the twelve (12) months before the claim arose.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you; in that case liability is limited to the smallest extent permitted by law. The limitations in this section are fundamental elements of the bargain between you and PalAte, and the Service would not be provided without them.

Please read this section carefully. It affects your legal rights, including your right to file a lawsuit in court and to have a jury hear your claims.

1. Informal resolution first. Before filing any claim, you agree to email austinomala2002@gmail.com with a written description of the dispute and give us sixty (60) days to resolve it informally. Most concerns can be resolved this way.
2. Agreement to arbitrate. Any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service that cannot be resolved informally shall be resolved exclusively by final and binding arbitration on an individual basis, administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.
3. No jury trial; no court action. By agreeing to arbitration, you and PalAte each waive the right to sue in court and the right to a trial by jury, except as provided in Section 14.5.
4. Class action waiver. All disputes must be brought in the parties' individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over any form of representative proceeding. If this class action waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim (and only that claim) shall proceed in court, and the remainder shall be arbitrated.
5. Exceptions. Either party may (a) bring an individual claim in small claims court, or (b) seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property or prevent unauthorized access to the Service.
6. Arbitration procedure and costs. Arbitration will be conducted in English, by a single arbitrator, in New York County, New York, or remotely by videoconference at your election. For claims under $10,000, we will pay AAA filing, administration, and arbitrator fees beyond the amount of a comparable court filing fee, unless the arbitrator finds the claim frivolous.
7. 30-day opt-out. You may opt out of this arbitration agreement and class action waiver by emailing austinomala2002@gmail.com with the subject "Arbitration Opt-Out," your name, and the email on your account, within thirty (30) days of first accepting these Terms. Opting out does not affect any other provision of these Terms.
8. One-year limitation. To the extent permitted by law, any claim arising out of the Service must be filed within one (1) year after the claim arose, or it is permanently barred.

• Severability: if any provision is found unenforceable, the remainder stays in full effect, and the provision will be enforced to the maximum extent permissible.
• Entire agreement: these Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and PalAte regarding the Service.
• No waiver: our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment: you may not assign these Terms; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
• Apple: if you use the iOS app, Apple is not a party to these Terms, has no obligation to provide support or maintenance, and is a third-party beneficiary entitled to enforce these Terms against you.