Terms and conditions

Definitions

• Terms: the terms and conditions that are described in this document.
• Application or Service: the BriefBuilder application provided by us via app.briefbuilder.com
• Course: a BriefBuilder course provided by us to your employees or collaborators.
• Consultancy: expert advice we provide you related to BriefBuilder modelling.
• We/our/us: BriefBuilder B.V., company registration no. 73276766, registered under the laws of the Netherlands, with its registered office at Kipstraat 7c, 3011 RR Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
• You/your: the legal entity that has entered into an agreement with BriefBuilder and exercises these terms.
• Content: all the data that is entered by a user in the application.
• User: any natural person who is granted access to the application by you or is taking a course paid for by you.
• Subscriber: a legal entity that has concluded an agreement with BriefBuilder B.V. to make use of the application, to which these terms apply.
• Customer: a legal entity that has concluded an agreement with BriefBuilder B.V.
• Product website: the BriefBuilder product website (com).
• Knowledge base: our online support website (briefbuilder.com).
• Learning platform: our online platform that provides lessons for course participants.
• Websites: the product website and the knowledge base.
• Subscription: the right to make use of the BriefBuilder application during the term of the agreement.
• Subscription plan: a type of subscription that can be chosen by the subscriber.
• LITE subscription: subscription that gives access to a BriefBuilder environment with a limited set of BriefBuilder functionalities.
• PRO subscription: subscription that gives access to a BriefBuilder environment with all of BriefBuilder’s functionalities.
• Company bundle subscription: subscription that includes a bundle of 10 active project models with the same functionalities as the PRO subscription.
• Enterprise bundle subscription: subscription that includes a bundle of more than 10 active project models with the same functionalities as the PRO subscription.
• Trial subscription: subscription that is free-of-charge and can be used for trial purposes only.
• Environment: your dedicated space in BriefBuilder where you can create and manage project models.
• Active project model: a model that can actively be used.
• Archived project model: a read-only model of a model that is no longer active.
• Sandbox project model: a test model with limited functionality.
• Demo project model: a free-of-charge example model with limited functionality, provided by us for instruction purposes.
• Template: project model with standardized content that is provided by us.
• Third-party applications: software applications or services that are provided by third parties and interoperate with BriefBuilder.

The definitions above apply regardless of whether they are capitalized or not.

General

• BriefBuilder B.V. reserves the right to make changes to the terms at any time. We will notify you of any changes with two months’ notice. This is done via email.
• The updated terms will be posted at briefbuilder.com/terms
• The updated terms will become effective on the next business day after they are posted.
• If you don’t agree to the changes in the terms, you must cancel your subscription no later than thirty days prior to the conclusion of your current payment term.

Functionalities

• BriefBuilder is an online application for requirements management. The application’s functionalities are described in the online knowledge base.
• The BriefBuilder LITE subscription offers fewer functionalities than the PRO subscription. The differences are explained in the plan comparison matrix on the product website.
• We reserve the right to make changes to these functionalities at any time. We will take reasonable efforts to keep the application backwards compatible.
• All new functionalities introduced to the application will be subject to these terms.

Environments and projects

• As a subscriber, you will get your own dedicated environment for your project models.
• In your environment, you can create, manage, edit, delete and archive project models.
• For every active project model, you can create one free-of-charge archived project model and one free-of-charge sandbox project model.
• Additional archived and sandbox project models are charged at a reduced price.
• Demo project models that have been provided by us for instruction purposes are free-of-charge.
• The total number of active, sandbox and archived project models in your environment and your subscription plan determines your total subscription fee.

Content

• By entering data in the application, you ensure that you are either the owner of the data or that you have permission from the appropriate rights holder to use the data.
• We do not take any responsibility and liability with regards to the validity of data provided by you or users you have granted access to your environment.
• We will never sell or disclose your content with any third party without your explicit permission.

Templates

• In the application, we provide several standardized requirement templates. You can use these as examples or as a basis for your own models.
• You cannot derive any rights from the templates we provide. We are not liable for their accuracy or completeness.
• We reserve the right to monitor how and how often our templates are being used with the sole purpose of improving them.

Storage

• All your data is stored in BriefBuilder for as long as your subscription remains active.
• If you cancel your subscription, or if your subscription is terminated by BriefBuilder in accordance with the provisions of these terms, you will be responsible for downloading your data as exports and/or reports within thirty days.
• 1 month after the termination of your subscription, we will delete your data. After another month, all data will also have been removed from all of our backups.

Intellectual property

• The BriefBuilder application is the exclusive intellectual property of BriefBuilder B.V.
• Our intellectual property may not be used in connection with any product, application, or platform without our prior written consent.
• You agree not to use the application for the purpose of developing a competitive product. If we find that you are violating this term, we reserve the right to cancel your subscription and suspend your access to the application immediately.

Courses

• When participating in a BriefBuilder course through our learning platform, the course participants will be granted access to that course for two months.
• For the course’s assignments we will provide a dedicated course environment If there are no course participants and/or if course is not completed in the afore mentioned two months, this course environment may be deleted by us.

Personal information

• We strongly recommend that you read our Privacy Policy to understand how we handle personal data.
• By entering into an agreement with BriefBuilder B.V. or by starting to use our application, you agree to our Data Processing Agreement (DPA) which defines how we process your employees’ and other users’ data on your behalf.

Security

• To prevent unauthorized access and safeguard your personal information and content, we have implemented commercially reasonable physical, technical and administrative control mechanisms. We use firewalls, encryption, hashing techniques, backups, disaster-recovery protocols and authentication and authorization procedures to maintain security (confidentiality, integrity, availability) when you are using the application.
• We are ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified by DigiTrust.

Liability

• We are not liable for any kind of financial loss on your side due to operational, power or network interruptions or (partial) loss of data.
• We are not liable for any kind of financial loss on your side due to performance failures in BriefBuilder that are caused by conditions beyond our reasonable control (‘force majeure’), as long as we use commercially reasonable efforts to avoid or remove the causes of non-performance.
• Our total liability is limited to the amount paid by you during the 12 months period prior to the time when the damage(s) occurred. We are not liable for any third-party application used in conjunction with the application.
• We are not liable for damages unless you notify us in writing thereof no later than 90 days after you noticed or should have noticed, the actual damage or loss.

Availability

• Our aim is to make the application available for you at least 99,9% of each month. However, limitations to the availability of the application can happen due to factors that are beyond our influence. Insofar such limitations happen, this shall have no impact on the conformity of the terms.
• You are obliged to notify any function outages, disruption, or impairments of the application without delay and to provide information which is as precise as possible in this respect. Please do so at support@briefbuilder.com.

System Requirements

• The application is accessible for users who meet the minimum system requirements which are:
  • A modern laptop or desktop computer not older than 5 years, with at least 4GB of RAM.
  • A compliant browser: Chrome 80+, Firefox 60+, Safari 12.1+ (for Mac) or Microsoft Edge 88+

Warranty

• We warrant that BriefBuilder operates in accordance with the functionalities as they are described in the knowledge base.
• This warranty does not apply if (a) problems are caused by accident or events BriefBuilder B.V. reasonably cannot influence, (b) and/or if the user’s IT systems or browser do not meet the minimum system requirements, (c) and/or BriefBuilder is temporarily not available due to a case of downtime or other interruption of the hosting provider.
• If there is a violation of our warranty, you have the right to cancel your subscription.

Subscription period

• The minimum subscription period for LITE and PRO subscriptions is three months.
• The minimum subscription period for a Company bundle and Enterprise bundle subscription is one year.
• The subscription period for LITE and PRO subscriptions is automatically extended every three months.
• The subscription period for a Company bundle and Enterprise bundle subscription is automatically extended for a year.
• A subscription can be downgraded to cheaper subscription plan every three months. This must be requested by email, at least fourteen days in advance.

Termination

• Cancellation of your subscription must be done by email (support@briefbuilder.com) and should be communicated at least thirty days before the end of the subscription period.
• We reserve the right to terminate your subscription if we sense or detect misuse, attempted misuse, violations of these terms, non-compliance with our acceptable use policy (see below), or good practice in general.

Acceptable use policy

• Your use of BriefBuilder is subject to an acceptable use policy that is intended to prevent fraud and abuse and protect customers.
• The following is a non-exhaustive list of practices we do not consider as acceptable use:
  • (Re)selling BriefBuilder user accounts
  • Sharing accounts publicly
  • Using sandbox or archived project models for active projects.
  • Using BriefBuilder for other purposes than those described in the knowledge base
  • Starting more than one trial
  • Storing or creating illegal data in BriefBuilder
  • Using BriefBuilder for illegal practices
  • Generating excessive request to the application, for example by using automated web scraping tools to extract data from an environment (please use our official API instead)
• Other practices may be relevant in determining acceptable use and we reserve the right to take any unlawful, prohibited, abnormal or unusual activity into account when determining this.
• If your use of BriefBuilder violates this acceptable use policy, we may suspend relevant user accounts in your environment or your complete subscription immediately.

Trial subscription

• A trial subscription is a free-of-charge BriefBuilder subscription that can be used for trial purposes only.
• The trial period is 30 days.
• When your trial period ends, your subscription is automatically cancelled.
• Our terms are fully applicable during the trial period.

Prices

• All subscription plans and associated prices are stated on the product website or in the agreement you signed with BriefBuilder.
• All subscriptions are billed in Euros and are exclusive of taxes (VAT or otherwise).
• Our website may list indicative, approximate, prices in other foreign currencies. No rights can be derived from the indicated foreign currency prices as billing always occurs in the listed price in Euros.
• BriefBuilder B.V. reserves the right to make changes to the prices once a year. There is no automatic price indexation. We will notify you of any changes with two months’ notice. This is done via email.
• The updated prices will be posted at the product website and become effective on the next business day after they are posted.
• If you don’t agree to the price changes, you can cancel your subscription no later than thirty days prior to the conclusion of your current payment term.
• All prices are based on the acceptance of these terms. If you wish to deviate from these terms and/or apply purchasing conditions, we will apply a markup of at least 40% on our list prices.

Payment

• Payment will be done by submission of an invoice.
• Payment must be made in advance of the use period, i.e. monthly or yearly.
• Payments must be made within thirty days following the invoice date. If you fail to pay within that period, we reserve the right to charge commercial interest to the unpaid amount and/or to suspend your access to your environment until all outstanding payments have been made.
• Payments must be made in Euro’s. Additional costs for international money transfers are to be paid by the subscriber.

Support

• We offer an online knowledge base and tutorial videos that explain the essentials of BriefBuilder.
• In addition, we have a help desk that can be reached for technical questions and general questions about the workings of BriefBuilder during business hours (CET / CEST) in Dutch and English.
• Support activities regarding the implementation of BriefBuilder (e.g. training, instructions, onboarding) and the configuration of project models are not part of your subscription and can be acquired separately.

Consultancy

• At request, we can deliver consultancy activities that help you in the use of BriefBuilder, e.g. supporting you in the development of requirement templates and/or specific project models.
• The explicit focus of our consultancy activities is on a model’s structure – and not on the model’s contents. This also means that we cannot be held responsibility for the quality of the model’s content.
• Before starting any consultancy activities, we will specify the activities and provide you with an estimate of the needed time and the expected costs.
• If the risk arises of a significant exceedance of the estimated time and/or costs, we will contact you in good time.
• If part of the consultancy activities is carried out on location, at least one part-day (4 hours) will be charged. Travel expenses will be charged on a cost-basis.
• Depending on availability, type of project, and location, we may recommend that the requested consultancy activities are carried out by one of our trusted consultancy partners.

Communication

• We reserve the right to you use your company name and logo in our list of references on the Product website and in other promotional materials.

Transferability

• These terms and the rights which you obtain through them are applicable to you specifically and may not be transferred, assigned, or delegated to other personal or legal entities. Any attempt to assign or transfer these terms or any rights hereunder shall be deemed invalid.

Governing Law

• These terms and your use of the application and our websites are governed by Dutch law.

Disputes

• Any legal dispute, controversy or claim that is related to the use of BriefBuilder is to be submitted to the relevant judicial authorities in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.