Terms of service

Certale is a trading name and product of PPT-Design Ltd (on the register as PPT-DESIGN LTD), a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16115606, with its registered office at 2nd Floor College House, 17 King Edwards Road, Ruislip, London HA4 7AE, United Kingdom. You can reach us at help@certale.com, and about privacy at privacy@certale.com.

Certale lets you design certificates from our library, issue them one at a time or in bulk from a spreadsheet, deliver them, and give each one a story page with a QR code that anyone can open to check it. Scanning and verifying a certificate is free for everyone and needs no account.

• You must be 18 or over to open an account, or be acting with the authority of the organisation you represent. People of any age can receive certificates, and they don’t need an account to do so.
• Give accurate details and keep them up to date. Keep your password and sign-in methods safe, and don’t share an account: each person should have their own.
• Accounts work inside an organisation. Owners and admins manage the team, settings and billing; editors create designs and batches. You are responsible for what your team members do in your organisation, and for removing people who should no longer have access.
• Tell us straight away at help@certale.com if you think someone else has used your account.

Certale has three plans: Free, Pro at US$9 a month or US$90 a year, and Business at US$19 a month or US$190 a year. What each plan includes is shown on our pricing page.

• Single certificates are unlimited on every plan. Bulk issuing from a spreadsheet is limited each calendar month: 25 names on Free, 300 on Pro and 1,000 on Business. When you reach the limit you can wait for the next month or move to a higher plan; certificates you have already issued are never affected.
• Scanning, verification and sharing are never limited or charged for, on any plan.
• Prices are in US dollars. Payments are handled by our payment processor, Stripe: your card details go straight to Stripe and we never see them.
• Prices don’t include VAT or other sales taxes. Where tax applies, Stripe calculates it from your billing address and shows it before you pay.

Renewal

Paid plans renew automatically at the end of each monthly or yearly period, and the payment method on file is charged for the next period, until you cancel. Your invoices are available in Settings, under Billing.

Changing plan

You can move to a higher or lower plan, or switch between monthly and yearly billing, at any time in Settings, under Billing. Stripe shows you the change, including any prorated charge or credit, before you confirm it. If you move to a lower plan, the higher plan’s extras stop, but your designs and the certificates you have issued stay.

Failed payments

If a payment fails, Stripe tries again for a while and your plan keeps working in the meantime. If the payment still can’t be taken, your organisation moves to the Free plan. Nothing you have issued is deleted.

Cancelling

You can cancel a paid plan at any time in Settings, under Billing. Cancelling stops the next renewal: your plan keeps working until the end of the period you have paid for, and then your organisation moves to the Free plan. We don’t refund the rest of a period that has already started, except as set out below or where the law requires.

Your right to cancel (UK consumers)

If you are a consumer in the UK, you would normally have 14 days to cancel a contract for digital services. A paid plan starts as soon as you subscribe, at your request: by subscribing, you ask us to start straight away and accept that you lose the right to cancel once the subscription has started. If you change your mind soon after subscribing, email help@certale.com and we may give you a refund at our discretion. This doesn’t affect your other legal rights.

You are responsible for the certificates you issue through Certale and for everything on them. In particular, you must:

• only issue certificates for things that really happened, such as a course completed or an award given, by you or by an organisation you are authorised to act for;
• make sure names, titles, dates and other details are correct;
• have a lawful basis for using recipients’ personal data, give recipients the privacy information the law requires, and only email people you are entitled to contact (our Data Processing Agreement is available on request at help@certale.com);
• mark certificates for anyone under 18 as issued to an under-18, and have any permission from parents or guardians that you need;
• not put sensitive information, such as health details or government ID numbers, on certificates or in spreadsheets;
• answer recipients’ questions about their certificates, and correct or revoke a certificate that is wrong.

On the Business plan, certificate emails are sent on your behalf, with your organisation’s name, to the recipients you choose.

A Certale story page, and the “Verified” result on it, confirms that the certificate was issued through Certale by the account named on it, that it hasn’t been changed since, and that it hasn’t been revoked or expired.

It does not vouch for the issuer’s claims. We don’t check that an issuer is who it says it is, that a course or award took place, or that a qualification is recognised. The issuer alone is responsible for what a certificate says. The verified-issuer badge on the Business plan means only that the organisation proved it controls the web domain shown.

If you rely on a certificate for an important decision, such as hiring someone, check with the issuer.

• Recipients choose who can see their story page: Private, Shareable or Public. Only the recipient can make a page Public, which puts it on the Wall of Tales and on their public profile. Certificates issued to under-18s are never Public.
• The line a recipient adds to their story page must be their own words and follow the acceptable use rules below. Recipients are responsible for what they write.
• We may hide any story from the Wall of Tales, or remove a line, at our discretion.
• To report a certificate or story page that looks fake, wrong or harmful, email help@certale.com with its link or certificate ID.

Certale exists so that people can trust what a certificate says. You must not use Certale to:

• create fake, misleading or fraudulent certificates, or certificates meant to deceive anyone about a person’s skills, qualifications or achievements;
• issue a certificate for a qualification, degree, grade, licence or award that was not actually awarded, or sell certificates to people who haven’t earned them;
• impersonate an institution or a person, such as a university, school, exam board, professional body, employer or government body, or use their name, logo, crest or seal without permission;
• claim that a certificate is accredited or officially recognised when it isn’t;
• upload content that is unlawful, defamatory, hateful, harassing or sexually explicit, or that infringes someone else’s rights, including logos and artwork you don’t have the right to use;
• send spam, or send certificate emails to people you have no right to contact;
• break or probe our security, scrape the service, get around plan limits (for example by opening several Free accounts), overload the service or interfere with other people’s use of it;
• copy, resell or sublicense Certale or access to it, or use it to build a competing product.

If we believe a certificate or account breaks these rules, we may revoke or hide certificates, suspend the account or organisation, and, where appropriate, tell the institution being impersonated or the authorities.

You keep ownership of what you put into Certale: your logos, wording, signatures, recipient lists and certificate details (“your content”). You confirm you have the rights to use it.

You give PPT-Design Ltd a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, process, render, display and deliver your content, only as needed to provide Certale: for example, to make certificate images and PDFs, show story pages to the people who open them, send certificate emails and, when a recipient chooses Public, show their story on the Wall of Tales. The licence ends when your content is deleted, apart from copies we must keep by law and backups that expire on their own.

Recipients give us the same licence for the line they write on their story page.

If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them without owing you anything.

The certificate designs and templates in Certale’s library are owned by PPT-Design Ltd or used under licence. Certale itself, its software and its brand are ours too.

While you use Certale, you may use the designs to create certificates that you issue through Certale, and use those certificates (including exported PDF, image and PowerPoint files, printed copies and shared links) for their intended purpose. Certificates you have issued stay yours to use after your plan ends.

You may not sell, share or redistribute the designs as templates or design files (including exported PowerPoint files), include them in another template library or design product, or use their artwork apart from your certificates.

Premium designs are included in the Pro and Business plans. Certificates made on the Free plan carry a small “Made with Certale” credit on the certificate and its story page, which you must not remove or hide.

On the Business plan you can revoke a certificate you issued, give it an expiry date, or restore it. A revoked certificate’s story page says “Not valid · Revoked”, with the date and any reason you give, and applause, sharing and downloads stop. Revoked certificates stay on record so they can’t be passed off as valid.

We may also revoke a certificate that breaks these terms, or when the law requires us to.

• You can stop using Certale at any time, and delete your account yourself in Settings → Profile. Deleting it cancels the paid plan of any organisation that closes with it straight away, without an automatic refund; certificates such an organisation issued stay verifiable (our Privacy policy explains what happens next).
• We may suspend or close an account or organisation, or stop it issuing certificates, if it seriously or repeatedly breaks these terms, if the law requires it, or to protect recipients, other users or Certale. Where we can, we will tell you why first and give you a chance to put things right.
• While an organisation is suspended it can’t issue certificates, but the certificates it has already issued keep verifying, unless we revoke them because they break these terms.
• If we close an account because it broke these terms, we don’t refund fees already paid. If we ever stop providing Certale altogether, we will give you at least 30 days’ notice and refund any fees you paid in advance for the time after it stops.
• Closing an account or moving to a lower plan doesn’t take down certificates that have already been issued: their story pages keep verifying. If you want them removed, tell us.

We work hard to keep Certale available and secure, but we can’t promise it will always be available or free of errors. We may need to pause it for maintenance, and we may change, add or remove features. Keep your own copies of anything important, such as exported certificates and recipient lists.

We are not responsible for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including failures of the providers we rely on, such as Amazon Web Services and Stripe.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that the law does not allow us to limit or exclude.

If you use Certale for a business or organisation

• We are not liable for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill or data, or for any indirect or consequential loss.
• We are not liable for what an issuer puts on a certificate, or for decisions anyone makes based on a certificate.
• Our total liability to you for everything arising out of or in connection with these terms, in any 12-month period, is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us for Certale in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim and US$100.
• Apart from what these terms say, Certale is provided “as is”, and we exclude all other warranties and conditions as far as the law allows.
• You will cover our reasonable losses and costs from claims by others that are caused by your content, the certificates you issue or your breaking these terms.

If you are a consumer

We are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable, or for business losses: as a consumer, you use Certale for your own private purposes. You have legal rights, for example to services provided with reasonable care and skill, and nothing in these terms affects them.

We may update these terms, for example when Certale or the law changes. We will change the “Last updated” date and, for significant changes, tell account holders by email or in the app at least 30 days before they take effect. If you don’t agree, you can cancel before then; if you keep using Certale afterwards, the new terms apply. A change to the price of a paid plan applies from your first renewal after the notice.

• These terms, together with our Privacy policy and, for issuers who ask for it, our Data Processing Agreement, are the whole agreement between you and us about Certale.
• We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another organisation, for example if Certale is sold; we will tell you, and it won’t reduce your rights. You may not transfer yours without our written agreement.
• If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
• If we don’t enforce a right straight away, we can still enforce it later.
• Nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction over any dispute about them. If you are a consumer living in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also bring proceedings in your local courts.

If you have a complaint, please email help@certale.com first. We will try to resolve it quickly.

PPT-Design Ltd, 2nd Floor College House, 17 King Edwards Road, Ruislip, London HA4 7AE, United Kingdom. Company number 16115606. Email help@certale.com.