Any online-based company offering a product or service knows it needs a long and generally painful terms of service, privacy policy, etc. to protect itself from the cornucopia of legal disasters that can occur. Unfortunately, legal terms require a legal specialist (aka lawyer) and lawyers tend to be a capitol-draining, by-the-hour endeavor, especially for a small startup company.
This financial quandary often leads to the [flawed, foolish and illegal] practice of copy/pasting terms of service and/or privacy policy content from another business’s website. Since the chances of that other company’s product or service being identical to yours is highly unlikely, this still leaves plenty of holes in the legal text for someone to exploit.
Enter Tempe-based Snapterms, a company run by real-life Internet law attorney Aaron Kelly and entrepreneur Mike Kolb that creates fully-customized terms of service for online businesses. No copying and pasting, no templates; Snapterms takes the time to tailer legal content to each client, and for much less money than an hourly lawyer.
About the Service
Snapterms’ services are white label, so no one will know your “full-time, in-house legal department” didn’t craft your terms & policies. The company has several pricing tiers starting at $149 (that’s what—one Internet lawyer hour?) and increasing based on additional features and turnaround times.
An added bonus with any package is that the relationship doesn’t end with the completion of your terms & policies. Should your company get into any sort of legal tiff, Snapterms will provide two free hours of attorney consultation. There’s also a 100% money back guarantee if you’re not totally satisfied.
But what really sets Snapterms apart from most other lawyers or companies that may claim to offer a similar service, is the option to “make it funny”. The company nails the tone that many young, hip startups strive for, but would most likely fail at in the terms & policies department due to lack of legal expertise/time. It actually makes the legal stuff fun to read. To get an idea, check out Snapterms’ own terms of service page.
Snapterms has only been up and running for a few months, but the company has already secured around 100 clients (by word-of-mouth only) and was also featured in TechCrunch.
More About Snapterms
Founded: 2012
# of employees: 4
Funding: Self-funded, but they’ll happily take your money
Founders: Aaron Kelly, Mike Kolb
Website: Snapterms.com
Twitter: @Snapterms
Phone: Snapterms hates phones. No, really.
Headquarters: 404 S. Mill Ave. Suite C201 • Tempe, AZ • 85281
Snapterms really whips the lama’s ass..