Terms of Service

1.1 These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are a binding agreement between you and HelpMeFax LLC, a North Carolina limited liability company (“HelpMeFax”, “we”, “us”). They govern your use of the HelpMeFax website and online fax service (the “Service”).

1.2 By creating an account, sending or receiving a fax, or otherwise using the Service, you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

1.3 The Privacy Policy is part of this agreement and is incorporated by reference. If you have an executed Business Associate Agreement with us, section 11 explains how it interacts with these Terms.

1.4 In these Terms, “you” means the person who agrees to them and, where you are acting for an organization, that organization as well.

2.1 Age and capacity. You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding contract. The Service is not offered to children, and accounts may not be created for or by anyone under 18.

2.2 Authority. If you accept these Terms for a company, practice, firm or other organization, you confirm that you are authorized to bind it. In that case “you” includes that organization, and it is responsible for everything done through the account, including through every login in a business account (3.6).

2.3 Where you may use it from. HelpMeFax is operated from the United States and is aimed at customers in the United States and Canada: that is where we bill, support and hold accounts, and we do not market the Service elsewhere. Faxes may be sent to numbers in the United States and Canada, and to the international destinations listed on our international fax page, most of which are in the United Kingdom and the European Union. Being able to send to a country is not an offer of the Service in that country. One exception: U.S. voters who are outside the United States — members of the uniformed services, their families and U.S. citizens living abroad — may use the Service wherever they are to fax election materials to U.S. election offices, and our vote-by-fax page is addressed to them. Dedicated inbound numbers are available in the United States and Canada only.

2.4 Local law is yours to meet. You are responsible for complying with the law where you are and the law that applies to what you send, including data protection law. Where the UK or EU General Data Protection Regulation, or a comparable law, gives you rights over personal data we hold, the Privacy Policy sets out those rights and how to exercise them, and nothing in this section limits them.

2.5 Personal and business accounts. A personal account is for one person: one login, one set of credentials, one history. An organization whose people need to send and receive faxes can apply for a business account instead, in which each person has their own login; section 3.6 explains how it works. Whichever kind of account you are in, a login belongs to one person and is never shared.

2.6 Sanctions and restricted parties. You may not use the Service if you are subject to United States economic sanctions or are otherwise barred from receiving services under United States law, and you may not use it to transmit anything to a person or place that would breach export control or sanctions law.

3.1 Accurate information. You agree to give accurate registration details and to keep your email address current. Your email address is the address of record: it is how we confirm faxes, send receipts and dunning notices, and give you notice under section 19.

3.2 Verification. We may require you to verify your email address before some features work. Notification emails are not sent to unverified or suspended accounts.

3.3 Credentials. You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for everything that happens under your login. A login is for one person, so you agree not to share yours with anyone else, including a colleague; in a business account each person is given their own (see 3.6).

3.4 Protective measures we apply. After five failed sign-in attempts for the same email address from the same IP address within fifteen minutes, further attempts from that combination are blocked for a period and the attempt is logged. This is deliberately keyed to the pair, so that someone else failing to sign in as you cannot lock you out of your own account. Two-factor authentication is available in your settings, and you may mark a device as trusted for up to 30 days.

3.5 Suspected compromise. Tell us immediately at [email protected] if you believe your account has been accessed without your permission. You can also end other sessions and revoke trusted devices yourself under Settings › Security. We may suspend an account to contain suspected compromise, fraud or abuse, and will contact you at the address of record.

3.6 Business accounts. An organization can apply for a business account from a HelpMeFax account, and the person who applies must be authorized to bind it under 2.2. We review every application by hand and may decline one. Once an application is approved:

• (a) The organization is the customer. It is “you” under these Terms for everything done through any login in the business, and it is responsible for the people it invites and for what they do.
• (b) Roles. The person who applied becomes the owner. The owner and the managers — whom the owner or another manager appoints — can invite and remove people, change roles, add funds, add and cancel the business’s fax numbers and choose who is emailed when a fax arrives on one, delete faxes received on them, change the business’s settings — including requiring two-factor sign-in for everyone in it — see the business audit log, and request and sign the business’s Business Associate Agreement. Only the owner can transfer ownership, and only to someone already in the business. Everyone else is a user, who sends and receives faxes for the business.
• (c) What everyone in the business can see. Everyone in the business can see, retry and cancel the faxes sent by anyone in it, read the faxes received on its numbers (the person who sent a fax, the owner and managers can also delete a sent fax’s document, as 9.5 describes), and read and reply to its support tickets. The business audit log, which the owner and managers can see, records sign-ins, with their IP addresses, and account and security changes for everyone in the business.
• (d) One shared balance. Faxes sent by anyone in the business, pages received on its numbers and its numbers’ monthly charges are all paid from one prepaid business balance, which the owner and managers fund by card. Users never enter a card. The business balance is account credit under 5.5 and belongs to the organization. There is no per-user fee and no limit on the number of people in a business. Plans (5.3) and automatic top-up (5.7) are not yet available for a business balance. International sending becomes available to everyone in the business after the first completed card payment made for it.
• (e) Records belong to the business. The faxes sent and received by anyone in the business, its fax numbers, its payments and its support tickets belong to the organization, and they stay with it when the person who created them leaves.
• (f) When someone leaves. The owner or a manager removes a person from the business, and that person’s access to its records ends at once. A login that was created for the business is then suspended; a person who joined with an existing account of their own keeps that account, without the business’s records. The holder of a login in a business cannot delete it under 14.1.
• (g) Joining. People join a business only by invitation. An existing account can accept an invitation only when it has no balance, no active fax number and no active plan.
• (h) What moves in on approval. When an application is approved, the applicant’s account credit, their active fax numbers and any Business Associate Agreement they hold move to the business. Faxes they sent or received before approval stay private to them.
• (i) One BAA for the business. One executed Business Associate Agreement, requested and signed by the owner or a manager, covers everyone in the business (section 11).
• (j) Suspension and closure. Section 14 applies to a business account as a whole: we may suspend or terminate it under 14.5, and closing one is covered by 14.8.

4.1 What it does. You upload one or more documents, enter a destination fax number, pay, and we transmit the document to that number over the public telephone network. You can see the status of each fax in your history and receive email updates. With a dedicated number you can also receive faxes, which arrive as PDFs in your HelpMeFax inbox.

4.2 Accepted files. PDF, JPG, PNG and GIF files up to 25 MB each. Both the file extension and the actual contents of the file must match an accepted type, so a renamed file is refused. Word documents are not supported, and a photo taken on a phone must be saved as a JPG or PNG before you upload it.

4.3 Page limits. A single fax may be up to 500 pages to a United States or Canadian number, and up to 50 pages to an international destination. A document over the limit is refused outright rather than truncated, so that nothing is transmitted or billed in part. International sending is also subject to a rolling limit of 100 pages per account in any 24 hours.

4.4 International sending. Sending to an international destination becomes available after your first completed card payment on the account, which may be a fax or an account top-up.

4.5 No guarantee that a machine answers. A fax is delivered to equipment we do not control. We cannot guarantee that the receiving machine is switched on, has paper or toner, answers the call, or that any person reads what it prints. We cannot guarantee delivery to every fax number.

4.6 Delivery confirmation is not a legal certificate. A delivered status means the receiving equipment accepted the transmission. It is not proof that a particular person received or read the document, and it is not a certificate of service. The Service is not a substitute for certified or registered mail, a courier, a process server, or any other method of formal or legal service of process. If a rule, court or contract requires a particular method of service, use that method.

4.7 Not for emergencies. The Service is not an emergency communication service. It cannot be used to contact emergency services, and it must not be relied on where a delay or failure could cause injury, loss of life, or other serious harm.

4.8 Fair-use limits. We apply rate limits to uploads, sends and number purchases to keep the Service available for everyone, and we maintain a list of destination numbers that cannot be faxed. We may add a number to that list at any time.

4.9 Bulk sending. Sending the same document to several recipients in one batch requires a paid plan, and the number of recipients in a single batch is capped by the plan you are on: Starter 5, Professional 25, and Enterprise 100. The Free plan cannot send in bulk at all — it is limited to one recipient per send. A batch over your cap is refused rather than trimmed. Bulk sending is to United States and Canadian numbers only; international destinations must be sent one at a time.

4.10 Scheduled sending. You can schedule a fax, including a bulk batch, to go out at a future date and time in a timezone you choose. A scheduled fax is priced and paid for when you schedule it, not when it goes out, and it is released by a background process once the time arrives. Until then it sits in your history as scheduled and can be cancelled under 7.8.

4.11 The number your fax appears to come from. Outbound faxes are sent from a shared HelpMeFax sending number drawn from our own pool, and the number shown to the recipient is not yours. It is not your dedicated inbound number even if you have one, it is not a number we can reserve for you, and it can differ from one fax to the next. A recipient who dials back the number on your fax header will not reach you. If you want a reply, put a fax number or other contact details you actually monitor inside the document — which 8.4 requires of you in any event.

5.1 How sending is priced. A fax is priced as one flat amount for the whole fax, based on its total page count. No subscription is required to send. If your document includes a cover page, it counts toward the page total. The cover page template currently offered carries no separate fee; the Service is able to charge a fee for a premium cover template, none is offered today, and if we introduce one its fee will be shown to you before you pay and is included at no charge on the Professional and Enterprise plans. The current rates are:

5.2 International rates. The international ladder ends at 50 pages, so there is no per-page rate beyond it. International faxes are available to the destinations listed on the international fax page; that list is the current one, and it may change.

5.3 Optional monthly plans. Plans are optional and do not change the rates above except by applying a discount. A plan buys you a percentage discount on fax pricing and, on the larger plans, dedicated inbound numbers at no separate monthly charge:

• Free — $0 per month. No discount, no included number.
• Starter — $10.00 per month. 10% off fax pricing.
• Professional — $25.00 per month. 20% off fax pricing, and one dedicated inbound number included.
• Enterprise — $99.00 per month. 30% off fax pricing, and five dedicated inbound numbers included.

A paid plan also unlocks bulk sending, with the per-batch recipient cap set out in 4.9. Pages received on an included number are still charged per page as set out in section 6. Annual billing is offered on the paid plans at a lower effective rate; current plan pricing, monthly and annual, is on the pricing page. A plan discount applies only while the period you have paid for is still running — see 5.4.

5.4 Plan term, renewal and cancellation. A plan is paid for one period at a time: a monthly plan buys one month from the day the payment completes, and an annual plan buys one year. A plan renews only if you switch on automatic renewal under Settings › Billing. It is off unless you turn it on, and while it is off nothing is charged again and the plan simply ends. If you switch it on, you authorize us to charge your saved card the plan price for each new period without further prompting. We email you a reminder five days before a period ends and attempt the charge the day before it ends. If the charge is declined, we email you and try again at most once a day for up to three days after the period ends; if it still has not gone through, the plan ends and we tell you. A renewal extends your plan from the end of the period you had already paid for, so an early renewal never costs you days. You can switch automatic renewal off at any time under Settings › Billing: you keep every benefit through the period you have already paid for, and nothing more is charged.

If automatic renewal is off, at the end of the period the plan simply lapses. Your per-fax discount stops and the premium-cover waiver in 5.1 stops, so sending returns to the ordinary rates in 5.1 with no interruption to the Service; you keep your account, your history, your account credit and any dedicated number you hold. To continue on a plan, buy it again from the pricing page. While automatic renewal is off, the reminder email we send before a plan period ends is a courtesy: a prompt to buy again if you want to, not notice of a charge.

Cancelling. Cancelling on the subscription page switches automatic renewal off, so nothing more is charged, and sends you a confirmation. Your plan benefits continue to the end of the period you have already paid for. There is no proration and no refund of the unused part of a period.

Switching to the Free plan before your period ends. Choosing the Free plan is immediate: the change takes effect at once and the whole remainder of the period you paid for is lost, with no refund and no warning screen before you confirm. That is a different outcome from cancelling, which keeps the benefits you have paid for until the period runs out. Unless you specifically want to give up the rest of the period, cancel instead of switching.

Changing plans. Moving to a different paid plan is a fresh purchase at that plan’s full price and starts a new period from the day it completes. There is no proration in either direction and no credit for what is left of the plan you were on.

5.5 Account credit. You can add funds to your account balance and spend them on faxes, inbound pages and dedicated numbers. Some top-up amounts include bonus credit: $10.00 adds $10.00, $25.00 adds $27.50, $50.00 adds $57.50, and $100.00 adds $120.00. Account credit does not expire. It is not transferable, except that it moves to the business balance when a business account is approved (3.6), and it is not money on deposit; it is a prepayment for the Service.

5.6 Payment methods. We accept cards only — Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover — through a PCI-compliant payment processor on its own hosted checkout page. Card details are entered on the processor and are never stored on HelpMeFax systems. Where you save a card, we keep only the brand, the last four digits and the expiry date so you can recognize it.

5.7 Saved cards and automatic top-up. You may optionally save a card and authorize automatic top-ups of your account credit. It is off unless you switch it on, and the Service is fully usable without it. Saving a card never switches it on by itself: automatic top-up is always a separate choice. If switching it on would lead to an immediate charge, because your balance is already below the threshold you choose, we show you the amount and ask you to confirm before it is switched on. If you enable it, you authorize us to charge your saved card without further prompting in two circumstances: (a) when your balance falls below the threshold you set, and (b) when a scheduled charge such as a monthly number renewal would otherwise fail for insufficient balance. In case (b) the amount charged may exceed the top-up amount you selected, up to the amount needed to cover the scheduled charge. No more than three automatic charges are made in any rolling 24 hours, counted as attempts whatever their outcome, and that cap applies in every case without exception. Automatic charges are also spaced at least 30 minutes apart, with one exception: a charge made to cover a dedicated fax number renewal that would otherwise fail is not held back by the 30-minute spacing, so that a number is not lost to a timing rule. Automatic charges are only ever made by a scheduled background process, and are receipted by email. Automatic top-ups buy account credit on the same terms as manual ones, including any bonus credit.

5.8 If an automatic charge does not go through. If a charge is declined, or your bank requires authentication we cannot complete, we stop and email you; we do not retry. Automatic top-up stays suspended until you update your card, save a card while adding funds, or switch it back on under Settings › Billing. A manual top-up on its own does not resume it. Separately, if a charge is left in an unknown state by the payment network, we hold it, stop further automatic charges, and have a person resolve it before your balance is adjusted; you will see the charge shown as being reviewed rather than as a decline.

5.9 Controls you keep. You may change your threshold or top-up amount, switch automatic top-up off, or remove your saved card at any time under Settings › Billing. Removing the card also switches automatic top-up off and instructs the processor to delete the stored card.

5.10 Taxes. Prices are shown in United States dollars and are exclusive of any sales, use, communications, goods and services or similar taxes. You are responsible for any such taxes that apply to your use of the Service, other than taxes on our income.

5.11 Price changes. We may change fax rates, plan prices and the monthly price of a dedicated number on 30 days’ notice by email to your address of record and on the pricing page. A fax already submitted is charged at the rate shown when you submitted it, and a plan period you have already bought runs to its end at the price you paid.

A plan renews only if you have switched on automatic renewal (5.4). If you have, a renewal falling on or after the effective date of a plan price change is charged at the new price; if you do not want to pay it, switch automatic renewal off under Settings › Billing before that date. Otherwise a plan price change applies only to the next plan you choose to buy. A dedicated fax number is also a recurring charge — its monthly cost is taken from your account credit each month for as long as you hold the number (section 6) — so a number renewal falling on or after the effective date is charged at the new price. If you do not want to pay it, release the number before that date under 6.5.

5.12 Unpaid and abandoned checkouts. A checkout you start but do not complete is closed automatically after a period, and nothing is charged.

6.1 What a number costs. A dedicated inbound fax number is $11.99 per month per number, plus $0.05 for each page received, both taken from your account credit. Numbers included with the Professional and Enterprise plans carry no separate monthly charge; received pages are still charged per page. When you first buy a number you must hold $2.00 in credit on top of the first month. That amount is not a fee — it stays on your balance and pays for the first pages you receive.

6.2 Where numbers are available. Local and toll-free numbers in the United States and Canada. Availability of any particular number, area code or toll-free prefix depends on stock at the carrier and is never guaranteed.

6.3 Bringing a number, and taking it away. You can bring (port) a fax number you already have, local or toll-free, in the United States or Canada, from another provider. Moving it is free. When you sign the letter of authorization, the first month for each number is taken from your account credit, or uses a number your plan includes, and it is refunded if that number cannot be moved. You must be authorized to move the number and must give the account details exactly as your current provider holds them. Your current provider decides whether to release the number, and a transfer can be delayed or refused when the details do not match its records. Once a number moves it receives faxes only, not voice calls. Keep your current service until we tell you the move is complete, and settle anything you owe your current provider with them. You can cancel a transfer free of charge until we send it to your current provider; after that we will ask the carrier to stop it, which is not always possible close to the transfer date. You can also move a HelpMeFax number to another provider: contact support and we will help with the transfer.

6.4 You do not own the number. The number is assigned to you for as long as you pay for it. You acquire no ownership or other property right in it. Once a number is released or cancelled it cannot be re-claimed, and we cannot hold or reserve it for you.

6.5 Releasing a number. You can release a number yourself at any time. It is released at the carrier immediately and billing stops the same day. There is no refund or proration of the month already charged, and any faxes sent to the number afterwards will not reach you.

6.6 Non-payment. Monthly renewals are charged daily as they fall due. If your balance will not cover a renewal, we email you each day that it is overdue. If it remains unpaid for seven days, the number is cancelled and released at the carrier, permanently. It cannot be recovered, and the same number cannot be re-claimed. A number you brought to us from another provider (6.3) is the exception: it is not released automatically. We keep it, keep reminding you, and contact you before anything changes.

6.7 Receiving limits. An incoming fax of more than 100 pages is rejected. An incoming fax is also rejected if your balance is below $0.50 or will not cover the pages being received. A rejected fax is not delivered to you and its pages are never retrieved or stored — we do not download the document from the carrier. We do record that the rejection happened, keeping the sending number, the page count and the time on your account so that you can see what you missed, and we email you. We do not notify the sender, who will usually see the transmission as completed.

6.8 Numbers and account closure. Deleting your account does not release a dedicated number on its own. If you are closing your account, release your numbers first under Inbox › Fax numbers, or tell us so we can. See section 14.

7.1 Retries. A busy, unanswered or unreachable line is retried automatically: up to 30 attempts over about 24 hours, starting at five-minute intervals and tapering to two-hourly so that an after-hours fax gets a chance when the recipient opens the next morning. An international fax is attempted at most 3 times, on the opening steps of the same schedule. Some failures are treated as final and are not retried at all: an invalid destination, a call answered by a voice line, and a call the receiving equipment rejected. You do not pay extra for retries.

7.2 Status and receipts. Every fax has a status in your history, and we email you when a fax is sent, delivered or fails, subject to the notification preferences you set. Each transmission attempt is logged.

7.3 If a fax fails. When every automatic attempt has failed, we email you. That email invites you to ask for a refund review. A review is not automatic approval, and refunds are assessed by a person.

7.4 What a refund is worth. A refund is net of the costs already spent on the fax that we cannot recover, and those costs depend on how you paid:

• Paid by card. Two costs are deducted: the card-processing fee, which is 2.9% of the amount charged plus $0.30 and which the processor keeps even when we refund, and roughly $0.02 for each transmission attempt made. A $2.99 fax that failed after 30 attempts refunds $2.00.
• Paid from account credit. No card was charged for the fax, so no card-processing fee is deducted. Only the per-attempt cost of roughly $0.02 an attempt comes off, and the balance is returned to your account credit. The same $2.99 fax that failed after 30 attempts refunds $2.39.

A refund of a card payment is returned to the card that paid it; a refund of a fax paid from credit is returned to your account credit. Where the deductible costs exceed the amount paid, the refund is zero. The figures for the card-processing fee and the per-attempt cost are the ones the Service uses to work out a refund, and we will update this section if they change.

7.5 What is not refundable. A fax that the receiving machine rejected, a fax sent to a voice line rather than a fax machine, and a fax sent to an invalid or non-existent destination are not refundable — in each case the call was completed and paid for. Faxes that were delivered are not refundable.

7.6 Refunds of account credit. You may ask us to refund unused account credit and we will consider it, but credit is not automatically refundable. Where a refund or a lost chargeback is processed against a credit purchase, the equivalent amount is removed from your balance — including any bonus credit that came with it, and even if that takes your balance below zero. You remain responsible for a negative balance.

7.7 Chargebacks. If you dispute a charge with your card issuer, tell us first — most disputes are a question we can answer in a day. When a dispute is opened we mark the payment as disputed and keep your credit in place while it runs, because disputes can be resolved in your favor. If the dispute is decided against us, the clawback in 7.6 applies. We may suspend an account with an unresolved dispute.

7.8 Cancelling a fax before it goes. A fax that is still queued, still waiting for its scheduled time, or waiting between retries can be cancelled by you from its page in your fax history. Cancelling refunds the full amount you paid for that fax to your account credit automatically, with nothing deducted — no review, and none of the deductions in 7.4, which apply only to a fax that has run out of attempts. A fax you never paid for, because you left the checkout, can also be cancelled and there is nothing to refund. Once a fax is sending or has been sent it can no longer be cancelled.

7.9 Retrying a failed fax yourself. When a fax has finished as failed you can retry it from your history. A manual retry is a new send at the same price, not a free second go: the price of the fax is taken from your account credit again, and the retry is refused if your balance will not cover it. It is separate from the automatic retries in 7.1, which are included in the original price, and from any refund you may be owed on the original attempt.

8.1 You are the sender. For every fax you send through HelpMeFax, you are the sender in law and we are the conduit. The obligations in this section are yours, and they apply whether you send one fax or a bulk batch.

8.2 No unsolicited advertisement faxes. United States federal law — the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, 47 U.S.C. § 227, and the Junk Fax Prevention Act, implemented at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200 — prohibits sending an unsolicited advertisement to a fax machine. You may send an advertisement by fax only where the recipient has given you prior express invitation or permission, or where you have an established business relationship with the recipient and obtained the number directly from them or from a source they made it publicly available in. Where an advertisement is permitted, it must carry the opt-out notice the rules require, and you must honor an opt-out request. Statutory damages are $500 per fax, and up to $1,500 per fax for a wilful or knowing violation, recoverable by the recipient. Sending unsolicited advertisement faxes through HelpMeFax is a breach of these Terms and will result in termination.

8.3 Canada. Faxes to Canadian numbers are subject to the CRTC Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules, including the National Do Not Call List rules as they apply to fax, and to Canadian privacy law. Equivalent obligations of consent, identification and do-not-call compliance apply, and they are yours.

8.4 Sender identification. United States rules require a fax to identify, on the first page or on each transmitted page, the date and time it was sent, the identity of the business or person sending it, and a telephone number for that sender. You are responsible for including that information in the document you upload.

8.5 Check the number. A fax goes where you send it. You are responsible for confirming that a destination number is correct and belongs to the intended recipient before you send, and for the consequences if it does not. This matters most for confidential, financial, legal and health information, which is delivered to a machine anyone standing next to it can read.

8.6 Protected health information. Do not send protected health information through HelpMeFax unless a Business Associate Agreement between you and HelpMeFax has been executed. A BAA is free and can be signed online at helpmefax.com/baa. See section 11.

8.7 Content you may not send. You may not use the Service to transmit anything that is unlawful, fraudulent, deceptive, defamatory, harassing, threatening, obscene, or that infringes someone’s copyright, trademark or other rights; anything containing malware; or anything you do not have the right to send.

8.8 Destinations you may not send to. You may not fax emergency service numbers, premium-rate numbers, or any number you have been asked to stop faxing. We maintain a blocked-number list; a fax to a blocked number is refused, and we may add a number to that list at any time without notice.

8.9 No interference or probing. You may not attempt to access another account, another customer’s documents, or any part of the Service you are not authorized to use; circumvent page caps, rate limits, quotas or payment; reverse engineer, decompile or scrape the Service; access it by automated means other than the interfaces we provide; or conduct security testing, load testing or vulnerability scanning without our prior written permission. If you believe you have found a security issue, tell us at [email protected].

8.10 No resale. You may not resell the Service, operate it as a fax bureau for third parties, or make it available to people outside your organization as if it were your own service, without a written agreement with us.

8.11 Enforcement. We may refuse or cancel a fax, block a destination number, and suspend or terminate an account for a breach of this section. Where a breach is serious or repeated, we will act without notice. Nothing in this section obliges us to monitor what you send, and we do not read your documents as a matter of course.

9.1 You keep ownership. Documents you upload, and faxes you receive, remain yours. We claim no ownership of them.

9.2 The license. You grant HelpMeFax a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, encrypt, convert, render, transmit, display back to you, and delete your documents — solely to operate the Service for you, to keep records required for billing and dispute handling, and to comply with law. The license exists only for those purposes, and it ends when the document is deleted.

9.3 What we will not do with them. We do not sell your documents or the information in them, do not use them for advertising, and do not use them to train models.

9.4 Your warranty. You confirm that you own or are licensed to use everything you upload, and that sending it to the destination you chose is lawful and permitted.

9.5 How long documents are kept. Sent documents are stored for 365 days and received faxes for 365 days, after which the document files are deleted automatically from our servers. These periods are the same on every plan. The transmission record itself — date, destination, page count, status — is kept after the document is deleted, for billing, dispute and audit purposes, and for as long as your account exists. You can delete a received fax from your inbox at any time, and the document of a sent fax from that fax’s page in your history once the fax has finished (delivered, failed or cancelled). Deleting a document removes the file for good; the transmission record stays, and a failed fax whose document has been deleted can no longer be retried. If you need a different retention period, contact us before relying on the Service for that.

9.6 Documents about other people. Contacts, recipient details and referral invitations you enter are information about people who have not dealt with us. You confirm you are entitled to give them to us for these purposes. How we handle them is set out in the Privacy Policy.

9.7 Reviews and other things you publish. If you submit a review, you grant us a perpetual, royalty-free license to publish it, together with the name, role and organization you give, on our website and in our materials. Do not include confidential information or anything about a patient or client in a review.

10.1 The Service, the HelpMeFax website, its software, design, text, graphics and the HelpMeFax name and logo belong to HelpMeFax LLC or its licensors, and are protected by intellectual property law.

10.2 We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the Service for its intended purpose while these Terms are in force. Nothing else is granted, by implication or otherwise.

10.3 You may not copy, modify, distribute, sell, lease or create derivative works from any part of the Service, or remove any proprietary notice from it.

10.4 If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without obligation or payment to you. Feedback is given voluntarily and is not confidential.

10.5 Copyright complaints. If you believe material transmitted or published through the Service infringes your copyright, write to [email protected] or to the postal address in section 21, identifying the work, the material complained of, and your contact details, and confirming that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized. We will investigate and may remove material or terminate a repeat infringer’s account.

11.1 Privacy. What we collect, why, who it goes to and how long we keep it is set out in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

11.2 Where data is held. HelpMeFax is operated from the United States and the Service runs on servers located in the United States.

11.3 Security. Documents are encrypted with AES-256 at rest, connections use TLS 1.2 or later in transit, and every transmission is logged. The final leg of any fax is the public telephone network, which is not encrypted; that is inherent to faxing, not particular to HelpMeFax.

11.4 Business Associate Agreements. If you are a covered entity or a business associate under HIPAA and you will send protected health information, you must have an executed Business Associate Agreement with us first. It is free and self-service: request it at helpmefax.com/baa, read and sign it online, and a person at HelpMeFax countersigns it. It is executed when countersigned, not when you sign.

11.5 Order of precedence. Where an executed BAA is in force, it governs our handling of protected health information, and if it conflicts with these Terms on that subject the BAA controls. In all other respects these Terms continue to apply.

11.6 Retention of an executed BAA. An executed BAA and its signing evidence are retained for six years from the date of signature, as 45 C.F.R. § 164.316(b)(2) requires. Deleting your account does not delete that record.

11.7 Breach notification. Where an executed BAA is in force and we discover a breach of unsecured protected health information we hold for you, we will notify you without unreasonable delay and in no case later than 60 days after discovery, as 45 C.F.R. § 164.410 requires. The notice will identify each individual whose information we reasonably believe was involved, so far as we can, and will give you the other information that section requires, as soon as we have it, so that you can meet your own notification obligations. Notice is given to your address of record under 19.4. The executed BAA sets out the detail and controls if it differs from this paragraph.

12.1 Delivering a fax depends on the public telephone network and on a telecommunications carrier partner, and on the recipient’s own line and equipment. None of that is under our control. Outages, congestion, line quality, number reassignment and carrier-level blocking can all prevent a fax from arriving, and can do so without any fault on our part.

12.2 We also rely on a PCI-compliant payment processor to take payments and on an email delivery provider to send notifications. Those providers process only what is necessary for their part of the Service, as described in the Privacy Policy.

12.3 We may change providers. Where a change materially affects the Service, we will give notice under section 19.

12.4 Links from our website to other sites are for convenience. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content or their handling of your information.

13.1 No service level agreement. We work to keep HelpMeFax available and we take outages seriously, but we do not offer a service level agreement, an uptime guarantee, a guaranteed delivery time, or service credits for downtime. If you need a contractual uptime commitment, HelpMeFax is not the right service for you today — tell us before you rely on it.

13.2 Maintenance. The Service may be unavailable during planned or emergency maintenance. We try to schedule planned work outside United States business hours.

13.3 Changes to the Service. We may add, change or remove features. We will not make a change that removes a feature you are paying for during a period you have already paid for, without offering notice under section 19.

13.4 Discontinuation. If we discontinue the Service or a material part of it, we will give reasonable advance notice by email to your address of record so that you can download your documents and release any dedicated number. It is our intention in that event to refund the unused part of any plan period and any unused account credit, and we say so here as a statement of intent rather than a guarantee. It does not create an entitlement to a refund beyond 7.6 and 14.4, under which credit is refundable on review and not automatically, and it does not apply where your account was terminated for a breach of section 8 (see 14.6).

14.1 Closing your account yourself. You can delete your account at any time under Settings › Account. You will be asked for your password and to type DELETE to confirm. Before you do, release any dedicated fax numbers (see 6.8) and download anything you want to keep — there is no bulk export. A login in a business account is the exception: its holder cannot delete it. The owner or a manager removes it instead (3.6), and an owner must first transfer ownership to someone else in the business or ask us to close the business (14.8).

14.2 The 30-day recovery window. Deleting your account signs you out and marks it deleted. For 30 days it can be restored: register again with the same email address and we will email you a restore link, valid for 24 hours. You can also ask support to restore it.

14.3 What happens after 30 days. After the recovery window your account is deleted permanently, along with your fax history, received faxes, dedicated number records, payment records, account credit and every stored document file. This cannot be undone and we cannot recover any of it afterwards. We keep one minimal record of the deletion — the account identifier, email address, name, creation date and deletion date — in our administrative audit log, so that we can show an account was closed and when. Executed BAAs are kept for six years as required by law (see 11.6). Records that belong to a business account (3.6) are not deleted with any one person’s login; they stay with the business.

14.4 Account credit on closure. Account credit is not automatically refunded when you close your account, and closing an account does not convert credit to cash. If you have unused credit, ask us to review a refund before you close.

14.5 Suspension and termination by us. We may suspend or terminate your account, immediately and without prior notice where the circumstances require it, if you breach these Terms — in particular section 8 — if we reasonably suspect fraud or unauthorized access, if there is an unresolved payment dispute, or if we are required to by law. We will tell you at your address of record when we do, unless we are prevented from doing so.

14.6 Effect of termination. On termination your right to use the Service ends. Faxes in flight may not complete. Where we terminate for a breach of section 8, we may decline to refund unused account credit or the unused part of a plan period. There is no self-service appeal process; if you think a suspension is wrong, write to [email protected] and a person will look at it.

14.7 Closing an account does not clear what is owed. Any negative balance, and any amount owing under section 7, survives termination.

14.8 Closing a business account. The owner can ask us to close a business account by writing to [email protected]. When we close it, its dedicated fax numbers are released at the carrier and cannot be recovered (6.4), its open invitations are cancelled, and everyone is removed from it as described in 3.6. Its faxes, tickets and payment records are kept as the business’s records: document files are still deleted when the periods in 9.5 end, and an executed BAA is kept under 11.6. Unused business credit is not refunded automatically; it is refundable on review under 14.4, to the organization.

15.1 The Service is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis, without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory.

15.2 To the fullest extent permitted by law, HelpMeFax disclaims all implied warranties, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement.

15.3 We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, that any particular fax will be delivered, that a delivered fax will be legible at the receiving machine, or that defects will be corrected.

15.4 No advice or information, oral or written, obtained from us or through the Service creates any warranty not expressly stated in these Terms.

15.5 Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain implied warranties, so parts of 15.1 to 15.3 may not apply to you. Nothing in these Terms excludes a liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

16.1 To the maximum extent permitted by law, HelpMeFax is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, lost goodwill, or loss of or damage to data, arising out of or related to the Service — including a fax that was delayed, undelivered, delivered late, delivered to the wrong number, or delivered illegibly — even if we were advised that such damages were possible.

16.2 Our total aggregate liability for all claims arising out of or related to the Service and these Terms is limited to the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us for the Service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, and (b) $100.

16.3 The limits in 16.1 and 16.2 apply to every theory of liability — contract, warranty, tort, negligence, strict liability or otherwise — and survive any failure of an essential purpose of a limited remedy.

16.4 These limits do not apply to a liability that cannot lawfully be limited. Some states do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

16.5 You and we agree that the pricing of the Service reflects this allocation of risk, and that the Service would not be offered at these prices without it.

17.1 You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless HelpMeFax LLC and its members, officers, employees and contractors from any claim, demand, proceeding, loss, liability, damage, fine, penalty, cost or expense, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of or related to:

• what you transmitted or received through the Service, including any claim that it was unlawful, infringing, confidential, or sent to the wrong recipient;
• any claim under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the Junk Fax Prevention Act, the CRTC Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules, or any other law governing fax advertising or unsolicited communications;
• any claim relating to protected health information you sent without an executed Business Associate Agreement in place, or in breach of one;
• your breach of these Terms or of any law; and
• use of your account by anyone you allowed, or failed to prevent, from using it.

17.2 We will tell you promptly of any claim we are indemnified against, and you may control its defense with counsel we reasonably approve. You may not settle a claim in a way that imposes an obligation or admission on us without our written consent. We may participate in the defense at our own expense.

18.1 Talk to us first. Most problems are a support question. Before starting any formal proceeding, write to [email protected] or to the address in section 21 describing the problem and what you want, and give us 30 days to resolve it. We will do the same before bringing a claim against you.

18.2 Governing law. These Terms, and any dispute arising out of them or the Service, are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, United States, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

18.3 Venue. Any proceeding must be brought in the state or federal courts located in North Carolina, and you and we consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts. This does not prevent either of us from bringing a qualifying claim in a small claims court.

18.4 Injunctive relief. Either party may seek injunctive relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to protect its intellectual property or confidential information, or to stop unauthorized use of the Service.

18.5 Consumer rights. If you are a consumer in a jurisdiction whose law gives you rights that cannot be waived by contract, nothing in this section takes those rights away.

19.1 We may change these Terms. When we do, we update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page and publish the revised version here.

19.2 Where a change is material — for example a change to fees, to the limits in section 16, or to section 18 — we will give notice by email to your address of record before it takes effect. Price changes follow the 30 days’ notice in 5.11.

19.3 Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the revised Terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the Service and close your account under section 14.

19.4 How notice is given. We give notice by email to the address on your account and by publishing it on this website; email is treated as received on the day it is sent. You give us notice by email to [email protected] or by post to the address in section 21. Keeping your email address current is your responsibility.

19.5 Emails you can and cannot switch off. Some emails are part of the Service and cannot be switched off: email verification, password and security notices, two-factor codes, payment and refund notices, dunning notices, automatic top-up outcomes, fax number renewal and cancellation notices, and support and BAA correspondence. Emails about individual faxes, low balance, login alerts and our occasional request for a review can be managed under Settings › Notifications, which requires you to sign in.

20.1 Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and any executed Business Associate Agreement are the entire agreement between you and HelpMeFax about the Service, and replace anything said or written before. Where an executed BAA conflicts with these Terms on the handling of protected health information, the BAA controls; otherwise these Terms control.

20.2 Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these Terms or your account without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of substantially all of our assets, on notice to you.

20.3 Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, it is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest of these Terms stays in force.

20.4 No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision on one occasion, that is not a waiver of it. A waiver is effective only if we give it in writing.

20.5 Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a failure or delay caused by something outside its reasonable control, including telephone or internet network failure, carrier outage, power failure, natural disaster, fire, flood, epidemic, labor dispute, act of government, war or terrorism. This does not excuse an obligation to pay.

20.6 Survival. Sections 7, 8, 9.1 to 9.4, 10, 11.6, 14.6, 14.7, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 20 survive termination of these Terms.

20.7 Relationship. Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, joint venture, employment or agency relationship between you and HelpMeFax.

20.8 No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms are between you and HelpMeFax. Nobody else can enforce them.

20.9 Headings and language. Headings are for convenience only. These Terms are written in English, and the English version controls.

20.10 Referral credit. Where we offer referral credit, it is account credit under 5.5 and is subject to these Terms. A referral invitation expires if it is not accepted in time, and we may withhold or reverse credit from referrals we believe are not genuine.

20.11 Accessible formats. If you need these Terms or the Privacy Policy in another format, write to [email protected] and we will provide one.

Questions about these Terms, notices under them, and anything else about the Service:

You can also use the contact form. More about the company is on the about page.