Terms of service

1. Who these terms are with

Roomeo is provided by Savvi Corp Technologies (ABN 79 627 343 425), a registered Australian business based in Brisbane, Queensland. In these terms, “we”, “us” and “our” mean Savvi Corp Technologies, and “you” means the person using Roomeo. “Roomeo” means the Roomeo mobile app, the website at roomeo.savvicorp.com.au, and the services behind them.

By creating a Roomeo account or using Roomeo, you agree to these terms and to our privacy policy, which forms part of them.

If you do not agree with them, do not create an account. If you already have one, you can delete it at any time from the You screen.

2. Who can use Roomeo

• You must be at least 18 years old.
• You must be able to enter into a binding contract.
• You must give us accurate details when you sign up, and keep them current.
• One account belongs to one person. Do not share your account or your password with anyone, including the people you live with. Everything done from your account is treated as done by you.

Roomeo is built for Australian households. Its currency is Australian dollars, its guidance covers Australian states and territories, and its agreements are written for Australian arrangements. You are welcome to use it elsewhere, but it will not be right for you, and we make no claim that it suits the law of any other country.

Roomeo is currently in a limited release while we finish building it. Features may change, appear or be withdrawn, and there may be faults. Where we know something is missing or provisional, we try to say so in the app rather than let you find out the hard way.

3. What Roomeo is, and what it is not

Roomeo is a record-keeping tool for households. It keeps track of rent, shared expenses, bond and, for owners, how much of the mortgage the rent is covering. It gives both sides of a household the same dated record of what was agreed and what was paid.

Being precise about what Roomeo is not:

• It is not a bank, a payment service, a money remitter or a deposit-taking institution.
• It is not a real estate agent or a property manager. It does not advertise rooms, find housemates, screen anyone, or act for you.
• It does not hold anyone’s bond. A bond in Roomeo is a record of money you hold or lodged yourself. Where your state requires a bond to be lodged with an authority, that remains your job, and the refund flows back through that authority, not through us.
• It does not verify anyone’s identity. A name in Roomeo is the name that person typed.
• It does not give financial, tax, legal or investment advice, and nothing in Roomeo should be taken as any of those.
• It does not decide disputes between you and the people you live with.

4. The records you keep in Roomeo

Everything Roomeo shows about your household is derived from what you and the other people in it entered. We do not check it, and we have no way to know whether a payment someone recorded actually happened.

That means the accuracy of your records is your responsibility and your household’s. If someone marks rent as paid when it was not, Roomeo will faithfully show it as paid. Sort it out between you; the record is a tool for that conversation, not a substitute for it.

Roomeo is not the only record you should keep. Keep your own receipts, statements and copies of agreements, and download a copy of anything that matters to you rather than relying on us to hold it forever.

Because household records belong to more than one person, some things cannot simply be deleted on one person’s request. A payment record is also the other party’s record. Section 12 explains what happens when you leave or delete your account.

5. Households, roles and what others can see

When you create a home you become its owner. When you accept an invitation, you join someone else’s home in the role their invitation specified, or you join a shared house where nobody is the owner.

Who can see what is set by the software, not by you. In short: an owner’s mortgage, equity and valuation figures are never visible to housemates; a housemate’s own charges, payments and history are visible to them and to whoever manages the home; and in a shared house everyone sees the same shared record. Our privacy policy sets this out in detail, and you should read it before inviting anyone.

An owner can remove a member from a home, and a member can leave. Doing either ends the arrangement inside Roomeo and stops future charges, but it does not by itself end anything in the real world, cancel what is already owed, or satisfy any notice you owe each other under your agreement or the law.

6. Room agreements

Roomeo can produce a written boarder or lodger agreement between an owner who lives in the home and someone renting a room in it, and let both people sign it electronically.

Things you need to understand before you rely on one:

• The document Roomeo produces is an informal boarder or lodger agreement. It is not a residential tenancy agreement, and it is not the standard form your state prescribes for a tenancy.
• Whether an arrangement is a boarding arrangement or a tenancy is decided by the substance of the arrangement and by your state’s law, not by the title on the document. In most states, renting a room in a home the owner lives in falls outside the residential tenancies legislation, which is exactly why a written agreement matters so much: it is often the only protection either side has.
• The thresholds differ sharply between states and can be crossed without you noticing. Depending on where you are, letting a second, third or fourth room, or having a certain number of occupants, can bring the full tenancy or rooming-house rules into play, with obligations Roomeo does not manage for you. Roomeo shows guidance for the state you set on the home, but it does not track your occupant numbers and it will not warn you when you cross a threshold.
• Bond rules differ too. Some states require any bond to be lodged with an authority within a set time and cap it at a number of weeks’ rent. Roomeo records a bond; it never holds one and never lodges one.
• The law changes. The guidance in Roomeo reflects our research at the time it was written, and you should check the current rules for your state before relying on it.

A Roomeo agreement is between the people who sign it. We are not a party to it, we do not enforce it, and we take no responsibility for whether its terms suit you or are enforceable in your circumstances.

On signing: each person signs from their own account by typing their full name and confirming they agree to sign and receive the agreement electronically. We record the typed name, the exact time, that consent, and a cryptographic fingerprint of the document, so it can later be shown that what is stored is what was signed. Both parties can view and download it at any time, and we recommend you both keep your own copy.

Once an agreement is signed, the rent it sets can only be changed by an amendment that you both sign. Roomeo may flag that an amendment looks inconsistent with notice periods or a fixed term. Those flags are guidance, not a ruling, and Roomeo will let you proceed past them.

7. Mortgage figures and projections

If you own the home, you can enter your loan details and Roomeo will show how much of your repayment your housemates’ rent is covering, and when the loan might be paid off with and without that rent.

Real loans do not behave that way. Rates move, offset and redraw accounts change the arithmetic, fees are charged, and rooms sit empty. Do not make a financial decision on the strength of a Roomeo projection. Speak to your lender, a licensed financial adviser or your accountant.

The same applies at tax time. Roomeo’s exports are designed to be useful to your accountant, and that is all they are. Renting a room can affect your income tax, your deductions and the capital gains tax exemption on your main residence. We do not give tax advice and Roomeo does not calculate your tax.

8. Subscriptions and payments

Most of Roomeo is free, and stays free. Some features for home owners are paid.

Only the owner of a home can be charged. A renter, boarder or shared-house member is never asked to pay anything, for anything. A subscription attaches to one home, so if two people co-own a home, either one subscribing covers it for both, and a second home you own needs its own subscription.

All purchases are made through Apple’s App Store using in-app purchase. Apple is the merchant. We never see your card details. The price you are charged is the price Apple shows you at the moment of purchase, in your store’s currency, and that price prevails over the figures above if they ever differ.

One deliberate exception in your favour: if you buy an agreement credit and later obtain a refund for it, any agreement it already paid for stays valid and readable. We will not invalidate a signed agreement because a payment was reversed.

9. Your rights under the Australian Consumer Law

Among other things, you are entitled to a replacement or refund for a major failure, and to compensation for any other reasonably foreseeable loss or damage. You are also entitled to have the service remedied if it is not of acceptable quality and the failure does not amount to a major failure.

10. How you may use Roomeo

Use Roomeo for its purpose, and do not:

• Enter information you know to be false, or record payments or charges that did not happen.
• Use Roomeo to harass, threaten, defame or intimidate anyone, including in the free-text fields such as bill titles, notes, house rules and agreement clauses.
• Enter someone else’s personal information without a proper reason to, or upload a receipt or image you have no right to.
• Try to reach data belonging to a household you are not part of, or to get around who-can-see-what, rate limits or paid features.
• Attack, overload, probe or reverse engineer the service, or use it through automated means we have not authorised.
• Use Roomeo to break the law, including the residential tenancy, rooming house, discrimination and privacy laws that apply where you live.
• Resell or commercialise Roomeo, or hold it out as your own product.

You keep ownership of what you put into Roomeo. You give us the permission we need to store it, display it to the people in your household who are meant to see it, back it up, and produce the documents and exports you ask for. That permission exists so we can run the service for you, and for nothing else. We do not use your content to advertise, and we do not license it to anyone.

Roomeo itself, including its name, design, software and the wording of the agreement templates, belongs to us. Using Roomeo does not give you rights in it beyond using it as intended.

11. Availability and changes

We will make reasonable efforts to keep Roomeo running, but we do not promise it will be available without interruption. It may be down for maintenance, for reasons outside our control, or because something broke.

We may change, add or remove features. If we remove something you rely on, or shut down Roomeo altogether, we will give you reasonable notice and a reasonable opportunity to export your records first, unless we are prevented from doing so.

Roomeo depends on services we do not control, including Apple’s App Store and our cloud providers. Their changes can affect what we can offer.

12. Ending your use of Roomeo

You can stop at any time. Deleting your account from the You screen ends any current tenancy in Roomeo that day, removes your identity from the service, and signs you out everywhere. It requires your password, and it cannot be undone.

Deleting your account does not wipe your household’s financial ledger, because that ledger is also the record of the people you lived with. Your name is removed from it. Agreements you have already signed keep the name you signed them with, because a signed document cannot be rewritten afterwards. Our privacy policy explains this in full, and the app explains it again before you confirm.

If you are the primary owner of an active home, transfer ownership or remove the home before deleting your account. We will not destroy a household’s records to close one person’s account.

Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription. Cancel that in your Apple account settings.

We may suspend or close an account that is being used to break these terms, to harm someone, or in a way that puts the service or other people’s data at risk. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why and give you a chance to put it right first. If we close your account, we will still let you get a copy of your own records unless the law prevents us.

Anything you already owe your household when you leave stays owed. Roomeo stops tracking it; it does not forgive it.

13. Liability

This section is subject to section 9. Nothing here limits a right you have under the Australian Consumer Law.

Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows:

• Roomeo is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be error free, or that the information in it is accurate, since that information comes from you and the people you live with.
• We are not responsible for the arrangements you make with the people you live with, for whether an agreement made in Roomeo suits or protects you, for whether anyone actually pays what the records say they owe, or for any dispute between members of a household.
• We are not liable for loss you suffer because you relied on a projection, an estimate, a state guidance note or an agreement template rather than getting advice about your own situation.
• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, lost opportunity or lost data, arising out of your use of Roomeo.
• Where our liability can be limited but not excluded, it is limited, at our option, to resupplying the service or paying the cost of having it resupplied.
• In any event, our total liability to you for everything arising out of these terms is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for Roomeo in the 12 months before the claim, and A$100.

You are responsible for what you do with Roomeo. If a claim is made against us because you broke these terms or the law, or because of information you entered, you agree to cover the reasonable loss we suffer as a result. That does not apply to the extent the claim was caused by something we did wrong.

14. If you got Roomeo from the App Store

These terms are between you and us, not between you and Apple. Apple is not responsible for Roomeo or its content.

• We, not Apple, are responsible for supporting Roomeo. Apple has no obligation to provide you with any support for it.
• If Roomeo fails to conform to any warranty we have given, you may tell Apple, and Apple may refund the purchase price. Apple has no other warranty obligation to you in relation to Roomeo.
• We, not Apple, are responsible for dealing with any claim you or a third party makes about Roomeo, including product liability claims, claims that it fails to meet a legal requirement, and claims under consumer protection law.
• We, not Apple, are responsible for investigating and resolving any claim that Roomeo infringes someone’s intellectual property.
• You confirm that you are not located in a country subject to a United States government embargo or designated as a terrorist-supporting country, and that you are not on any United States government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
• Apple and its subsidiaries are third party beneficiaries of these terms, and Apple has the right to enforce them against you as such.

15. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as Roomeo changes. The version number and effective date at the top of this page tell you which revision you are reading.

If a change materially affects your rights, we will give you reasonable notice in the app or by email before it takes effect. If you keep using Roomeo after that, you accept the new terms. If you do not accept them, delete your account, and if you have paid for a period you will no longer use, contact us.

16. General

• These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about Roomeo.
• If any part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies.
• If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• You cannot transfer your rights under these terms to someone else. We may transfer ours if our business is sold or restructured, provided your rights are not reduced.
• The English (Australia) version of these terms is the authoritative one. Translations in the app are provided for convenience, and where wording differs, the English version applies.

These terms are governed by the laws of Queensland, Australia. You and we submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Queensland and the courts that hear appeals from them. Nothing in this section prevents you from bringing a matter in another forum where the law gives you that right, such as your state’s tribunal or a consumer protection regulator.

17. Contact us

If anything here is unclear, ask us. We would rather answer a question than have you agree to something you did not follow.