Terms of Service

These terms and who they bind

These terms, the privacy policy, and any written order or agreement signed by Crux Labs make up the whole agreement for PondSheet. Where a signed written agreement conflicts with these terms, the signed agreement controls for that conflict and these terms govern everything else.

If you use PondSheet for a firm, that firm is the customer, and you represent that you have authority to bind it. PondSheet is business software. You must be old enough to form a binding contract and you may use it only for lawful professional purposes.

We may publish a new version of these terms. When we do, the application requires you to accept the new version before you continue, and we keep a record of each acceptance.

What PondSheet is

PondSheet is site stormwater calculation software for civil engineers. It computes runoff and routes it through detention storage using the NRCS TR-55 and TR-20 methods and the rational and modified rational methods, compares the results against the NYSDEC design criteria you select, and formats a report for a plan reviewer. It can also export a SWMM 5 input file so the routing can be reproduced in another tool.

Everything PondSheet produces is calculation applied to inputs you supplied or confirmed. Change an input and the result changes. The software does not know the site, the soils as they exist in the ground, the drainage patterns in the field, or how the practice will be built and maintained. It knows the numbers in the project.

The free calculators on the public site need no account. When you use them, the disclaimer of warranties and the limitation of liability in these terms apply to them in the same way.

What PondSheet is not

PondSheet is not engineering advice, a professional opinion, a certification, a permit, or a submittal. It is not a substitute for a licensed professional engineer or for the municipality, agency or plan reviewer that reviews your project. No output of this software approves a design or accepts a stormwater management practice.

PondSheet is not drawing or grading software. It does not draw a site, grade a pond, design a storm sewer network, size a culvert or channel, or model two-dimensional flooding.

A check that passes in PondSheet is a statement that, on the inputs you supplied, the result these methods produce meets the criterion you selected. It is not a finding by anyone that the design is acceptable.

• PondSheet does not choose the rainfall source, the storm distribution, the cover types, the hydrologic soil groups, the flow paths, or the design criteria for your project.
• PondSheet does not survey a site, test soils, or confirm a parcel boundary.
• PondSheet does not decide which edition of the NYSDEC design manual, which local law, or which town, village or city requirement applies to your project.
• PondSheet does not review, sign, seal, stamp, or submit anything, and it does not prepare or file a stormwater pollution prevention plan, a notice of intent, or any permit application.

Engineer of record

The engineer of record is the licensed professional engineer who signs and seals the report. The engineer of record is responsible for the design, for every input, for the choice of rainfall source, methods and criteria, for checking every result, for the applicability of the calculation to the site as it will be built, and for the sealing and submission of the deliverable. PondSheet performs the calculations. You supply the judgment.

PondSheet checks results against the criteria the engineer selects. It does not approve or certify a design, and it does not guarantee that any reviewer, municipality or agency will accept a report.

You must independently verify every input and every result before you seal, submit, issue, or rely on a calculation. Verification means checking the numbers against the edition of the design manual and any local requirement the reviewing authority enforces, and against the conditions you observe on the site.

A statement of this allocation of responsibility is printed on every report PondSheet generates, and a one-line form of it runs in the footer of every page, so that a plan reviewer reads it alongside the numbers.

By creating an account you attest that you are the engineer of record for the work you enter, or that you work under that engineer’s direction, and that you accept this allocation of responsibility.

• You choose the rainfall source and depths, the storm distribution, the drainage areas, the cover types, the soil groups, the time of concentration paths, the stage-storage data, the outlet devices, and the design criteria.
• You are responsible for confirming that the data PondSheet retrieves or ships is the data the reviewing authority requires.
• You are responsible for field verification of every condition the calculation assumes.
• You are responsible for deciding whether a result is fit for the project, and for the professional review, sealing and submission of anything you send to a reviewer.

Public data and frozen snapshots

PondSheet retrieves data from public and third-party sources so you do not have to transcribe it. Design rainfall depths come from NOAA Atlas 14, or from a table you enter yourself and label with its source. Hydrologic soil groups come from the USDA soil survey. The county, town, village or city for a location comes from the US Census Bureau. Parcel boundaries come from public parcel layers and, where those have no match, from a commercial parcel data provider. Map imagery and address search come from Google Maps.

When PondSheet retrieves rainfall, soil or parcel data for a project, it freezes a copy with the project, together with the source, the dataset or version, and the date it was retrieved. A project’s data does not change when the source changes. It changes only when you choose to update it, and the change is logged.

You must confirm that the source PondSheet used is the one the reviewing authority requires, and that the values are right for the site. Some municipalities require a rainfall source other than NOAA Atlas 14. You can override a retrieved soil group, and you are responsible for any value you override or enter.

We do not control these sources and we give no warranty about them. Third-party data may be incomplete, out of date, approximate, or wrong. Parcel lines are approximate and are not a survey. Map imagery and parcel lines are shown for context and are not used in any calculation.

The map and address search are provided by Google. Your use of them is subject to the Google Maps/Google Earth Additional Terms of Service (maps.google.com/help/terms_maps) and the Google Privacy Policy (policies.google.com/privacy).

Methods, criteria, reference data and versions

PondSheet ships reference data transcribed from published sources, such as curve number tables, roughness coefficients, storm distributions, the NYSDEC criteria presets, and manufacturer data for chamber systems. Each record carries the source it was taken from and a verification status.

This reference data may contain transcription errors, may be drawn from an edition other than the one your project is held to, and may be superseded. It is offered as a convenience, not as a reproduction of any standard that anyone has vouched for. Where a record is marked unverified, it has not yet been checked against its published source by us.

While any record in the reference tables we ship is unverified, every generated report prints a PRELIMINARY banner on its cover, whether or not the calculation drew on one of those records. A preliminary report is not a final calculation and must not be submitted as one.

Every run records the engine version, the data version and the rule set edition it used, and the report prints them. When we ship a new engine, new reference data or a new rule set, an existing project keeps the versions it was run with until you choose to run it again. We do not re-run a project for you without telling you.

You are responsible for verifying the reference data and criteria a calculation used against the edition of the design manual the reviewing authority enforces, any local requirement, and the manufacturer’s published data for the specific products installed.

Accounts, firms and users

A firm owns its projects. Users belong to a firm as an owner or an engineer, and an owner controls who has access. If you invite someone, you are responsible for that person’s access, for what they enter, and for removing their access when it is no longer appropriate.

A subscription covers the whole firm. There is no charge per user, and adding or removing a user does not change the price.

You are responsible for keeping credentials secure and for all activity under your account. Tell us promptly at [email protected] if you believe an account has been compromised.

Share links

Your firm can share a project with a plan reviewer through a read-only link. The reviewer needs no account and pays nothing.

Anyone who has the link can view the project it points to, including the site location, the inputs, the results and the generated reports, and can download those reports. The link does not let anyone change the project. Share a link only with people you intend to see the project, and treat it like a password.

Your firm can revoke a link at any time, and a revoked link stops working. Your firm is responsible for what it shares and with whom. A reviewer who opens a share link is not a party to these terms, and what the reviewer does with what you shared is between your firm and the reviewer.

Acceptable use

Use PondSheet for its purpose and do not interfere with it or with other customers.

• Do not attempt to access another firm’s data or to circumvent tenancy, authentication, entitlement, or rate limit controls.
• Do not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, scrape, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code, the engine, or the calculation methodology, except where that restriction is prohibited by law.
• Do not resell, sublicense, or provide PondSheet as a service to a third party without our written agreement.
• Do not misrepresent a PondSheet output, alter a generated report, remove the engineer of record statement or the preliminary banner from it, or present a preliminary report as a final calculation.
• Do not tell a client, reviewer or agency that Crux Labs or any agency has signed off on, vouched for or accepted a report because PondSheet produced it.
• Do not use PondSheet to store or transmit unlawful, infringing, or malicious content, or regulated data that requires special handling unless we have agreed to that in writing.
• Do not overload the service, use automated bulk access outside interfaces we publish, or bypass rate limits.

Your data and content

You keep ownership of the projects, models, data you enter, notes, and reports you put into PondSheet. We claim no ownership of your content.

You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide license to host, process, copy, back up, display, and transmit that content as needed to operate the service, support your account, keep the project history and report archive these terms describe, and comply with law. That license ends when the content is deleted, except for backups during their rotation.

You are responsible for having the rights and permissions needed to upload and use your content, including any survey, drawing, report, or manufacturer data you transcribe into a project.

We do not sell your data and we do not use your project data to train models.

Project history and the report archive

PondSheet keeps every saved revision of a project’s model, and an unchangeable copy of every generated report together with the run that produced it and the versions of the engine, data and rule set it used.

This exists so that a calculation submitted to a reviewer can be reproduced exactly, years later, and so that your firm keeps a record of what it submitted. A generated report cannot be edited. While your firm keeps its account, old revisions and reports are kept for the firm’s records.

Each generated report can be downloaded as a PDF, together with its SWMM 5 input file and the PondSheet model file, so your firm can keep its own copy outside PondSheet.

Your firm can ask us to delete all of its data. When it does, we delete its projects, revisions, frozen data, runs and reports, as the privacy policy describes. Deleted data cannot be recovered, so download what you need to keep first.

Trial, subscription and read-only access

A new firm gets a 14-day free trial with every feature enabled and no payment card.

When the trial ends without a subscription, the firm becomes read only. A read-only firm can still view its projects, share them, and download reports already generated. It cannot edit a model or generate a new report. Nothing is deleted when a trial ends. Subscribing restores editing.

Subscribing before day 14 ends the trial at that moment and starts the subscription and its billing immediately. The unused trial days are not carried over or credited, so if you want the whole trial, wait until it runs out.

A firm whose payment fails keeps editing for seven days after the first failed payment. After that it becomes read only until payment succeeds.

Billing, renewal, taxes, refunds and cancellation

A subscription costs $99 per firm per month, for unlimited users and projects, plus any applicable tax. Payment is processed by Stripe. You are responsible for the accuracy of your payment method.

The subscription renews automatically every month and is charged to your payment method at the start of each month, until an owner cancels. The price, the monthly interval and the fact of renewal are shown before you subscribe and in your billing settings afterwards.

If we change the price, we will email the owners of your firm at least thirty days before the new price applies to your subscription. You can cancel before then and pay nothing at the new price.

Sales tax is calculated and collected through Stripe Tax where it applies. Prices are exclusive of tax unless stated otherwise.

Fees already charged are non-refundable except where required by law or promised by us in writing.

An owner may cancel at any time, either with the cancel control in billing settings or through the Stripe billing portal. Canceling takes no email, no telephone call and no notice period. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the month you have already paid for. Editing continues until then. Cancellation is not prorated and does not by itself generate a refund. The firm then becomes read only and keeps its projects and its report archive.

Availability, changes and support

We work to keep PondSheet available and correct, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free service. Maintenance, connectivity, third-party failures, and events outside our control can interrupt it. A public data source that is unavailable can stop PondSheet from retrieving new data until it returns.

We may add, change, or discontinue features. Where a change affects calculation behavior, the versions recorded on each run keep an existing report reproducible.

Support is provided at [email protected]. Support is help with the software. Support is no substitute for engineering consulting or plan review, and it gives no opinion on whether a design is correct or acceptable. Nothing said in support makes us the engineer of record.

Confidentiality

Where either party receives non-public business information from the other through the service or through support, that party will protect it with reasonable care and use it only for purposes related to PondSheet, except where disclosure is required by law or authorized by the owner of the information.

We treat your project data as confidential. A project is visible only to the members of your firm and to anyone holding a share link your firm created. Our staff access project data only to operate the service, to investigate a fault, or to respond to a support request you have made, or where law requires it.

To retrieve public data and draw the map, PondSheet sends a project’s location, and for soils the site outline, to the data sources named in these terms. It sends no project name, client name or calculation to them.

Security

We use technical and organizational safeguards appropriate to the nature of the service, described in the privacy policy. No system is perfectly secure.

You are responsible for controlling who has access to your firm and to its share links, for using strong authentication, and for limiting what sensitive information you put into PondSheet.

Accessibility

We hold every color pair in the PondSheet palette to the WCAG 2.1 contrast ratios, and a test checks them on every change. We do not claim that PondSheet as a whole conforms to any accessibility standard, and we will not say otherwise until it has been audited.

If any part of PondSheet stops you doing your work, write to [email protected] and say what you were trying to do. We treat that as a defect report.

Our intellectual property and feedback

PondSheet, its engine, its reference data compilation, its report layout, its documentation, and its trademarks remain ours. These terms grant you a limited, revocable, non-transferable right to use the service, and nothing more.

If you send us feedback, a bug report, or a suggestion, we may use it without obligation or compensation. Sending us the inputs that produced a number you believe is wrong is the most useful message we can receive, and we treat those inputs as confidential.

If you believe content held in PondSheet infringes your copyright or another intellectual property right, write to [email protected] identifying the work, the content you are complaining about and where it sits, your contact details, and a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized. We investigate, we remove or disable access to content where the claim is made out, and we may terminate the account of a repeat infringer.

Suspension and termination

You may stop using PondSheet at any time. We may suspend or terminate access for non-payment, for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, for a security or legal risk, or for conduct that threatens the service or another customer. Where circumstances allow, we give notice and an opportunity to cure first.

You can download your reports before you leave. After termination we may retain data for a limited period for backup, legal, billing, and security purposes, and then delete it in line with the privacy policy.

The sections on your data, project history and the report archive, confidentiality, intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law survive termination.

Disclaimer of warranties

PondSheet is provided as is and as available, without warranty of any kind to the fullest extent permitted by law. We disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, accuracy, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that PondSheet will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of defects, that its reference data or the third-party data it retrieves is complete, current or correct, that its results are correct for your project, or that a calculation it produces will be accepted by any reviewer, municipality, agency, owner, insurer, or court.

No advice or information obtained from us or through the service creates any warranty not stated in these terms.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Crux Labs and its owners, employees, contractors, and suppliers are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business, lost data, project delay, rework, redesign, reconstruction, remediation, cost of substitute services, or claims made against you by a third party, even if we were advised those damages were possible.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, and without limiting the preceding paragraph, we are not liable for flooding, erosion, sedimentation, property damage, damage to downstream or neighboring property, environmental harm, fines or penalties, permit denial or delay, business interruption, personal injury, death, or any other outcome arising from the design, construction, operation, maintenance, failure, or non-performance of a stormwater management practice, whether or not PondSheet was used in connection with it. Responsibility for that practice rests with the engineer of record, the contractor who builds it, the owner who maintains it, and the parties who review and accept it.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to PondSheet is limited to the greater of one hundred United States dollars or the fees you paid us for the service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.

These limits apply to every theory of liability, including contract, warranty, negligence, strict liability, and statute. They are an essential part of the bargain: the price of PondSheet reflects them, and we would not offer the service without them.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited by law, including liability for our own fraud, for our own gross negligence or willful misconduct, or for death or personal injury caused by our negligence where that exclusion is prohibited.

Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Crux Labs and its owners, employees, and contractors from claims, losses, liabilities, damages, penalties, costs, and expenses, including reasonable legal fees, arising from or relating to your use of PondSheet, your content and inputs, the calculations you produce, the deliverables you seal or submit, the practices designed or built in reliance on them, what you share through a share link, your breach of these terms, your violation of law, or a dispute between you and a client, owner, contractor, employee, insurer, neighboring property owner, municipality, or agency. This indemnity does not reach a claim to the extent it arises from our own gross negligence or willful misconduct.

We will notify you of a claim, give you control of the defense with counsel we reasonably accept, and cooperate at your expense. We may take part in the defense at our own cost with counsel of our choosing. You may not settle a claim in a way that admits fault on our part, imposes an obligation on us, or leaves us without an unconditional release, unless we agree in writing.

Lawful use, export controls and sanctions

You are responsible for confirming that your use of PondSheet is permitted where you and your projects are located, including any professional licensure rule about who may prepare, sign or seal a stormwater calculation.

You may not use PondSheet in violation of export control laws, economic sanctions, anti-corruption laws, or privacy laws that apply to you, and you represent that you are not located in, or acting for a party in, a jurisdiction subject to comprehensive sanctions.

Governing law, venue and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, without regard to its conflict of law rules, and excluding the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

Before filing a formal claim, both parties agree to attempt in good faith to resolve the dispute for thirty days after written notice, by emailing [email protected] with a description of the issue and the resolution sought.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, any dispute that is not resolved that way must be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in New York County, New York, and each party consents to the personal jurisdiction of those courts. To the fullest extent permitted by law, each party waives any right to a jury trial and any right to bring or participate in a class, collective, consolidated, or representative action.

Any claim relating to PondSheet must be brought within one year after the claim arose, to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version identifier and effective date at the top of this document change when we do, and the application requires you to accept the new version before you continue using it. Continued use after acceptance is your agreement to the updated terms.

If you do not accept an updated version, stop using the service and cancel. You can still download your existing reports.

Miscellaneous

If a provision of these terms is held unenforceable, it is limited or severed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

You may not assign these terms without our written consent. We may assign them to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets. The parties are independent contractors; these terms create no partnership, agency, or employment relationship, and no third-party beneficiary rights.

Neither party is liable for a failure to perform caused by an event outside its reasonable control, except that no such event excuses an obligation to pay fees already incurred. We may communicate with you electronically, and you agree that electronic notices and records satisfy any requirement that a communication be in writing. We give notice to the email address on your account, so keeping that address current is your responsibility; you give us notice at [email protected].

Contact

Crux Labs LLC, for PondSheet. Questions about these terms, notice of a dispute, or a request in writing: [email protected].