Terms of Service and Privacy Notice
The short version. This summary is not the agreement — the sections below are — but nothing in them contradicts this.
- We read the bid documents you send us and tell you what risk we found in them. A person decides what goes in your report and signs off on it.
- What we give you is decision support, not advice. It is not legal advice, not a cost estimate, and not an engineering opinion. Your bid is yours.
- We do not promise to find everything. Documents are ambiguous and reasonable reviewers disagree.
- We sell contact information. The name, company, email, phone and role you give us may be sold or shared with third parties. You can say no — there is a box on the form, and you can opt out later at any time.
- We never sell, share, or publish your bid documents, or anything in them. Those are yours, they are walled off from the contact data, and no amount of money changes that.
- All sales are final once your report is delivered. We refund only where we failed to deliver — not because a report found less than you hoped.
- Dollar exposure figures are ranges, not predictions. Do not carry one as a line item in a bid.
- We may audit the same bid set for more than one bidder. If we are already working for the awarding authority on your project, we tell you before we take your money.
- We do not carry professional liability insurance. If your prequalification requires an insured vendor, do not use us.
- If something goes wrong, what you can recover is capped — see Limitation of liability.
- Massachusetts law, Massachusetts courts.
Part One — Terms of Service
These terms, and how you accept them
Pythagoras Construction Analytics, LLC (“Pythagoras,” “we,” “us”) is a Massachusetts limited liability company. These Terms govern your request for and use of our pre-bid risk audit reports and the portal through which they are ordered and delivered (the “Service”).
You accept these Terms by checking the box marked “I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Notice” and submitting the form. That check is your signature. If you do not agree, do not check the box and do not send us documents.
If you are accepting on behalf of a company or public body, you represent that you are authorised to bind it, and “you” means both you and that organisation.
The Service is offered only to businesses, public agencies and other organisations for their commercial or governmental purposes. It is not offered for personal, family or household use.
Each report you order is a separate agreement on the version of these Terms posted when you place that order. The version and effective date are at the top of this page, and we record which version you accepted and when.
What we actually do
On the documents you send us for a single bid set — plans, specifications, and the addenda you provide — a Pythagoras estimator, working with our in-house software (“Nemesis”), performs an eight-point audit: Biddability, Schedule, Extended General Conditions, Change-Order Prediction, Claims, Constructability, Financial, and Owner Document Readiness.
A person reviews and signs off on every report. Nothing is delivered that a human has not read.
What the report contains depends on the level you order. Current levels and prices are on our pricing page and are incorporated here by reference.
We hold findings to a stated internal standard — real (cited to a page), material (moves money), and non-obvious. That is how we work. It is not a promise about results.
We review only what you send us, in the condition you send it, as of the time we receive it. We do not obtain documents, addenda, plan-holder notices or clarifications on your behalf, and we do not monitor a project for later changes.
What we are not
The Service is decision support — information you use in making your own decisions. It is none of the following, and you agree not to treat it as any of them:
- Not legal advice. We are not a law firm and no attorney-client relationship is created. Our bid-clarification checks, and any comment we make on bid forms, filed sub-bids, protest exposure or contract terms, are informational only.
- Not a cost estimate, takeoff or bid. We do not price work, quantify work, or tell you what number to carry.
- Not engineering, architecture, or any licensed design or surveying service. Nothing we deliver is a design, a code-compliance review, or a structural, life-safety or means-and-methods certification. Nothing is sealed or stamped.
- Not an audit, accounting, insurance, surety or bonding service, and not a substitute for any of them.
- Not complete. We do not represent that we have found every risk, error, omission, conflict, ambiguity or cost exposure in a bid set, or that any finding is correct.
- Not a decision. We do not tell you whether to bid, whether to walk, what to bid, whom to carry, or whether to submit an RFI. Those decisions and their consequences are yours.
If you are an owner, municipality, OPM or architect using the Service on documents you issue, the same limits apply: our report is not an approval, certification or sign-off of your procurement, and it does not discharge any duty you owe to bidders or to the public.
Exposure ranges
An exposure range is our judgment of a possible dollar impact if an issue materialises. It is a range, not a prediction, not a guarantee, and not a contingency amount.
Do not carry it as a line item. Do not use it to build, adjust or withdraw a bid. If you need a number to put in a bid, that number is yours to determine.
Payment and refunds
All sales are final once your report has been delivered. We do not refund because a report found less than you hoped, because you decided not to bid, or because you changed your mind. The work has been done and the report cannot be returned.
We refund in one situation only: where we failed to deliver what you paid for. Specifically —
- the report does not arrive, or arrives after it is useful to you (see Turnaround);
- a finding is not where we said it was and the error was ours (see If we cite something wrongly);
- we withdraw a report because a rights holder or awarding authority objected to a document (see The documents you send us); or
- we end your access without cause (see Termination).
In each of those cases we refund what you paid for that bid set, and that refund is your sole and exclusive remedy. The free first pass carries no charge and therefore no refund.
Turnaround
Turnaround is typically measured in days and depends on the size and condition of the bid set and our workload. Any date or window we mention is an estimate.
We do not guarantee that a report will arrive before your bid date, an RFI cutoff, or any other deadline. Do not plan a bid or an RFI around receiving a report by a particular time. If a report arrives late, or does not arrive, your sole remedy is not to be charged, or to be refunded if you already paid.
We may decline any bid set, for any reason, before we begin work.
If we cite something wrongly
If a finding is not where we said it was, tell us and we will correct it. If the error was ours, we will refund what you paid for that bid set. That correction and refund is your sole and exclusive remedy for a miscited finding.
Your responsibilities
You agree that:
- You will give us the complete, current bid set, including all addenda you hold, and tell us the bid date.
- You will do your own review of the bid documents and will not substitute our report for your own judgment or for professional advice.
- You will check a finding against the cited pages before you act on it in a way that matters.
- You are solely responsible for your bid, your price, your RFIs and their wording and timing, your contract and your performance — whether or not they reflect anything in our report.
- You will not present our report as your own professional opinion, certification or design work.
- You will use the Service lawfully, will not attempt to reach other customers' data, and will not scrape, reverse engineer, resell or build a competing product from it.
The documents you send us
Your documents remain yours. You grant us a limited licence to store, copy, process and analyse them for the purpose of producing your report, and to retain them afterwards as described in the Privacy Notice below.
You warrant that you have the right to give us each document you upload, that doing so breaches no confidentiality obligation, protective order or licence you are under, and that you are not sending us anything you are prohibited from sharing.
Do not upload personal information you do not need us to have — payroll, social security numbers, medical records, or anything similar. Bid documents should not contain them, and we do not want them.
If a rights holder or an awarding authority objects to our holding a document, we may stop work, remove it, and withhold or withdraw a report without that being a breach by us. If we do, we refund what you paid for that bid set.
We may use what we learn across audits to improve our methods and our software. We do not republish your documents, and we do not use them to produce another customer's report.
More than one bidder, and the awarding authority
We may audit the same bid set for more than one customer, including competing bidders. Our findings are produced per bid set: once a finding is in the finding set for a bid set, it goes to every customer who bought a level that includes it. We do not give one bidder a finding we withhold from another at the same level.
If we are already engaged by the awarding authority, owner or OPM on the same project, we will tell you before you pay, so you can decide whether to proceed.
Who may rely on a report
A report is prepared for you, for the bid set you sent, at the time we sent it. You may share it inside your own organisation.
Nobody else may rely on it. There are no third-party beneficiaries of these Terms or of any report — not an awarding authority, owner, OPM, architect, joint venture partner, subcontractor, surety, lender or insurer. If you give a report to someone else and they rely on it, that is between you and them.
Our members, employees and contractors are protected by the disclaimers and limits in these Terms to the same extent Pythagoras is, and may enforce them.
Confidentiality, subpoenas and public records
We keep your documents and your report confidential and do not disclose them except to the service providers described in the Privacy Notice, or where we are legally compelled.
We can protect the copy you gave us. We cannot make a public document private — if a bid set is a public record in the hands of an agency, our confidentiality does not change that.
If we are subpoenaed or otherwise compelled in a proceeding relating to your project, we will tell you if we lawfully can. You agree to reimburse our reasonable costs of responding, including time at our then-current rates, unless the proceeding is one in which you allege we did something wrong.
No NDA, purchase order term, vendor portal term or data addendum binds us unless a member of Pythagoras has signed it.
Insurance
Pythagoras does not currently carry professional liability (errors and omissions) insurance, and does not add customers as additional insureds.
If your prequalification, your owner, or your own risk policy requires an insured vendor, do not use the Service.
Disclaimer of warranties
THE SERVICE AND EVERY REPORT ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE.” To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, completeness, title and non-infringement.
We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that findings are accurate or complete, that any exposure range will prove correct, or that using the Service will improve any bid outcome.
Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service is limited to the greater of (a) what you paid us for the bid set the claim arises from, or (b) one thousand dollars ($1,000).
We are not liable for lost profits, lost bids, lost opportunity, cost overruns, change orders, delay, liquidated damages, claims by or against third parties, or any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages — even if we were told they were possible.
These limits are a basis of the bargain: the fee for a complete audit of an entire bid set is a small fraction of the value at stake in the bid, and we could not offer the Service at that price while accepting bid-sized risk.
Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for fraud, for wilful misconduct, or under Massachusetts General Laws chapter 93A.
Indemnity
You will defend and indemnify us against claims brought by a third party arising from (a) your breach of these Terms, (b) your warranty that you had the right to send us a document, or (c) your disclosure of a report to someone else.
If you are a Massachusetts public body, this section applies only to the extent your governing law permits, and does not require you to indemnify beyond that.
Time limit on claims
Any claim relating to the Service must be brought within one year after it arises, to the extent that limit is enforceable. We keep records for longer than that, so that a claim brought in time can be answered on the facts.
Termination
You may stop using the Service at any time. We may suspend or end your access if you breach these Terms, if we are required to, or if we stop offering the Service. If we end your access without cause, we refund anything you paid for work not delivered.
Changes, and how we notify you
We may revise these Terms. The version and effective date at the top change when we do, and the revised version governs orders placed after it is posted. It does not retroactively change an order you already placed.
Notices are given by posting them here and in the portal. Do not assume you have been notified by email — check the portal.
Governing law and where disputes are heard
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.
The state and federal courts sitting in Massachusetts have exclusive jurisdiction, and you and we each consent to that jurisdiction and waive any objection to it.
You and we each waive the right to a jury trial in any dispute arising out of or relating to the Service, to the extent that waiver is enforceable.
The rest
These Terms and the Privacy Notice below are the entire agreement about the Service and replace anything said before. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stands. Failing to enforce something is not a waiver of it. You may not assign this agreement without our consent; we may assign it to a successor to our business.
Every provision that by its nature should survive — the disclaimers, the limits on liability and reliance, indemnity, confidentiality, the time limit on claims, and governing law — survives termination.
Part Two — Privacy Notice
The two buckets, and the wall between them
Bucket 1 — contact information. Your name, company, work email, phone, role or trade, whether you are a contractor or an owner, how you heard about us, and which report you asked for. This is the information we may sell or share.
Bucket 2 — your bid documents and your reports. The plans, specifications and addenda you upload, everything inside them, and the reports we produce from them. We never sell, share, license, publish or trade this, and we never will. If we ever wanted to, we would have to change this notice first, and that change would apply only going forward — never retroactively to documents you already sent.
The wall runs both ways: we do not extract names, emails or phone numbers out of your uploaded documents for any list, ever. A designer's contact block on a title sheet, an agency contact in a spec — none of it goes anywhere.
Optional disclosure of business contact information
We may sell or share the business contact information you enter on the request form with the categories of recipient described below. You can refuse. There is a box on the form — “Opt out of contact sharing” — and ticking it before you submit means your record never enters a sale file at all.
The information covered by that permission is limited to your name, company, company website, work email, work telephone number, role or trade, customer type, referral source and which report you asked for.
We may provide it to the categories of recipient identified at the point of collection — construction-industry publishers, event organisers, business-data providers, and companies marketing products or services to construction firms or public agencies.
Our agreements with recipients restrict what they may use the information for, require reasonable security, and require them to process suppression and withdrawal instructions for the information they received from us.
We do not sell or share anything extracted from plans, specifications, addenda, reports, title blocks, plan-holder lists or any other material you upload. We do not sell information about anyone under 16.
Refusing or withdrawing later
Refuse it by ticking the optional box on the request form, labelled “Opt out of contact sharing.” Ticking it before you submit means your record never enters a sale file at all. If you leave it unticked, your contact details may be sold or shared as described above.
Withdraw it at any time by emailing [email protected] with the subject “Withdraw contact data permission.” We only need the email address or phone number to match against — no account, no ID, no reason required. We will confirm and stop within 15 business days.
We do not yet detect automated browser opt-out signals such as Global Privacy Control. Until we do, use the box on the form or the email address above — both reach a person and are recorded against your record.
Declining costs you nothing. The Service, the price, the report contents and the turnaround are identical either way, and we will never ask why.
People who gave us details before this notice
Anyone who gave us their details before the effective date at the top of this page did so under a notice that said we would not share them. Those records are permanently excluded from any sale — not by policy alone, but by a flag set in our database on every record created before that date. We are not going back on what we told them.
Personal information inside your documents
Bid documents often contain other people's contact details — designers, agency staff, plan-holders. That information is Bucket 2. We do not sell it, do not extract it, and do not add it to any list.
What else we do with contact information
We use it to set up and run your account, to answer you, to deliver reports, to take payment, to keep records we are required to keep, and to enforce these Terms.
Who else touches your information
We use service providers to run the business — cloud hosting and storage, sign-in, payment processing when it is in place, and professional advisers such as an accountant or lawyer. They act on our instructions for those purposes only. A service provider is not a buyer, and giving your information to one is not a sale. We will tell you the current list on request.
How long we keep things
- Bid documents: four years from delivery. That is deliberately longer than the one-year claim window in the Terms, so that if a dispute arises we can answer it on the actual documents rather than on memory.
- Reports and the record of how we produced them: seven years.
- Contact information: while your account is active, and afterwards only as long as we need it for records and legal obligations. An opt-out record is kept permanently, because forgetting it would mean selling you again.
You may ask us to delete your documents sooner and we will, unless we are required to keep them for a dispute.
Security — what is actually true today
Your documents are held in access-controlled private cloud storage, which we do not serve to the public web. Access to the portal requires a one-time code sent to your work email, so there is no password for us to store or for you to reuse. Information moving between your browser and the Service is encrypted in transit. We log operator access to bid sets, project records, manifests and file downloads.
No method of storage or transmission is completely secure. We do not represent that the Service meets any particular certification, procurement standard or customer-specific security requirement unless a signed order form expressly says so. If your organisation requires particular security controls, ask us before you upload anything.
We will give notice of a security incident when and as required by applicable law.
We are a two-person company and we will not pretend to more than that. We do not claim a formal certification, and we are not going to list controls we have not implemented. If that matters to your organisation, ask us before you send anything and we will tell you plainly what we do and do not have.
Your rights
Whatever state you are in, we will give you these: ask what we hold about you, ask for a copy, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, and opt out of sale or sharing. We do not require an account or an ID to exercise them — just enough to match your record. Email [email protected] and we will respond within 45 days.
We will not treat you differently for exercising any of them.
Cookies
We use only the cookies required to keep you signed in and to keep the portal secure. We do not run advertising pixels or third-party analytics on our site. If that ever changes, this section changes first.
Changes to this notice
If we change this notice, the change applies going forward only. We will not retroactively apply a new use to information we already hold, and we will not quietly start selling your bid documents.
Copyright and takedown
Customers upload documents prepared by architects and engineers. If you own copyright in a document you believe has been uploaded without authority, write to [email protected] with the subject “Copyright notice,” identifying the work, where it is, your contact details, and a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is unauthorised. We will act promptly, and we may remove material and withdraw a report as described above.
Contact
Pythagoras Construction Analytics, LLC
[email protected]