The short version: Charlie is a test version of a tool that reads bid documents and drafts what an estimator would find. Everything it produces is a draft for you to check against the source. You own your documents and your bids; you are responsible for what you submit to a customer or send to your books. We provide Charlie as it is, and we may change it as we build it.
01The agreement
These terms are a contract between you and Loper Architectural Products LLC, a Texas company, which operates Run It By Charlie ("Charlie", "we", "us") at runitbycharlie.com. By creating an account or using Charlie you agree to them and to our Privacy Policy, which explains what we collect and how we handle it.
Charlie is a tool for businesses. You must be at least 18 and, if you are using Charlie for a company, you must have the authority to accept these terms on its behalf. "You" then means both you and that company.
02What Charlie is, and what it is not
Charlie reads a commercial roofing bid set — specification, roof plans and details, addenda — and writes up what it finds, citing the section or sheet each item came from. It can measure a roof plan, derive quantities from the measurements, apply prices you paste in from your supplier's quote, build an order list, write a proposal PDF in your company's name, and send an estimate to your QuickBooks Online company if you connect one.
Charlie is a prototype in testing. Every page of it says "Issued for concept review — not for construction," and that is literal. It is not finished, it will be wrong sometimes, and we change it often. We may add, alter or remove features, change limits, or take the service down for maintenance without notice while it is in this stage.
Charlie does not supply prices, labor rates or productivity figures. Every quantity it derives and every price it carries is a starting point you can change, printed with the arithmetic or the source next to it. Charlie is not an engineer, an architect, a code official, a manufacturer's technical representative, an accountant or a lawyer, and nothing it produces is engineering, legal, tax or professional estimating advice.
03Your account
- Give us a real work email and keep it current; it is how we reach you and how you get back in.
- Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for everything done under your account, and you agree to tell us promptly at charlie@runitbycharlie.com if you think it has been used without your permission.
- One account per person. Invite colleagues to a project rather than sharing a sign-in (section 09).
- Before Charlie will run, you must acknowledge on screen that it is a test version. That acknowledgement is part of this agreement.
04Your content
"Your content" is everything you put into Charlie: the documents you upload, the text in them, your measurements, quantities, prices, proposal details, notes, and your decisions on Charlie's findings.
- You own it. We claim no rights in your content or in the bids, proposals and estimates you make from it.
- You give us permission to handle it — to store it, extract text from it, send it to the AI model that reads it, show it to you and to the people you invite, and keep it until you delete it — solely to provide Charlie to you and to keep the service running, as described in the Privacy Policy. That permission ends when the content is deleted, except for copies in routine backups that expire on their own schedule.
- You are responsible for having the right to upload it. Bid documents belong to owners, architects and engineers, and are issued to bidders under their own conditions. Upload only what you are entitled to use for your own bid, and do not upload anything that would violate someone else's rights, a confidentiality obligation, or the law.
- Do not upload payment card numbers, government identifiers, or anyone's personal health, financial or biometric information. Charlie is not built to hold them.
05Charlie's output is a draft
Charlie's findings, quantities, order lists, wind-zone and fastening counts, tapered layouts, edge-metal schedules, proposals and QuickBooks estimates are produced by software — much of it by a large language model reading your documents. They can be incomplete, out of date, or simply wrong. A finding may miss a requirement that is in the documents or assert one that is not. A quantity depends on the calibration and tracing you did in Measure. A manufacturer requirement in Charlie's library may have been superseded by the manufacturer.
You agree that:
- every finding is a draft until a person who knows the job confirms or dismisses it, and you will open the citation before you rely on it;
- you, not Charlie, are the estimator — you will check quantities, prices, fastening patterns, warranty requirements and code requirements against the documents, the manufacturer and the authority having jurisdiction before you bid;
- anything you submit to a customer, an owner, a general contractor, a manufacturer or a surety, and anything you send to your accounting system, is your work and your responsibility.
06Acceptable use
Use Charlie for estimating and bidding commercial roofing work. Do not:
- use it for anything unlawful, or to infringe or misappropriate anyone's rights;
- try to get around the run limit, the acknowledgement, the sign-in, or any other control, or access another person's project or data without being invited to it;
- probe, scan or test the security of Charlie or its providers without our written permission, or upload anything designed to interfere with the service;
- copy, scrape, reverse-engineer, or build a competing product from Charlie, its interface, its prompts, its manufacturer library or its output, or resell access to it;
- use the service in a way that puts unreasonable load on it or on our costs.
We may suspend or limit an account that we reasonably believe is doing any of these, and we will tell you why unless the law prevents it.
07Limits and availability
- Each account has a plan, and the plan sets how many engine runs and how many new projects you get per calendar month, and whether QuickBooks export is included. The limits are shown in My account, and Charlie tells you in plain words when you reach one. Limits reset on the first of each month. If you need more, choose a larger plan or ask us.
- Runs cost us real money. We may pause runs across the service if our own spending guard is reached, and resume when it is raised.
- Uploads are PDF. There are practical limits on file size and on how much text a run will read; the page tells you when a document was read only in part.
- Charlie is a browser application for desktop screens. We do not promise it works on phones or tablets.
- We aim to keep Charlie up, but we make no uptime commitment during the test period, and we may take it down for maintenance or changes at any time.
08The QuickBooks connection
Connecting QuickBooks Online is optional. If you do:
- You authorize Charlie, through Intuit's own sign-in, to create and update a customer, a service item and estimates in the QuickBooks company you choose. You must have the authority to grant that for the company.
- What lands in your books is your responsibility. Charlie sends the estimate you built; review it in QuickBooks as you would any estimate before you use it. Charlie does not read your other accounting data (see the Privacy Policy, section 08).
- You can disconnect at any time from the QuickBooks card, or revoke Charlie's access inside QuickBooks. Either one stops Charlie from touching the company. We may disconnect a company if Intuit requires it or if the connection stops working.
- Your use of QuickBooks is governed by Intuit's terms, and Intuit's service, not ours, determines what QuickBooks does with the estimate once it is there. QuickBooks and Intuit are trademarks of Intuit Inc.; Charlie is not affiliated with or endorsed by Intuit.
09Sharing a project
You can invite other people to a project. Anyone you invite sees that project in full — documents, findings, measurements, estimate, proposal — and can act on it. You are responsible for who you invite, and for what they do there. Inviting someone to a project does not give them access to your other projects. The project's owner is the only person who can delete it.
10Confidentiality
We treat your content as confidential. We do not show it to other customers, publish it, or use it to build products for anyone else, and we disclose it only as the Privacy Policy describes: to the providers that run Charlie, to the people you invite, to our own administrators in order to run and improve the service, and where the law requires.
In return, please keep to yourself anything about Charlie that is not public — the way it works, its prompts, its library, its unreleased features, and anything we share with you as a tester — and any bugs or security issues you find; report those to us rather than to the public, and we will fix them.
11Who owns what
Charlie — the software, the interface, the prompts, the manufacturer library as compiled, the name and the marks — belongs to us and our licensors, and stays ours. Manufacturer documents in the library belong to their manufacturers and are used as reference. You get a limited, revocable, non-transferable right to use Charlie under these terms, and nothing more.
If you send us feedback, suggestions or bug reports, you agree we can use them to improve Charlie without owing you anything; we will not identify you publicly without asking.
12Fees
Charlie has a free plan and paid plans. The plans, what each allows, and their prices are shown in My account and on the page before you choose one. Nothing is billed unless you choose a paid plan and complete checkout.
- How billing works. Paid plans are billed monthly in advance through Stripe, our payment provider, on the card you give Stripe at checkout. Your plan renews each month until you cancel. Prices are in U.S. dollars and do not include any sales tax that may apply.
- Cancelling. Cancel at any time through Manage billing in My account. Your plan stays in force until the end of the period you have paid for; then your account returns to the free plan. We do not refund the unused part of a month, except where the law requires it or where we choose to.
- Changing plans. You can move to a different plan through Manage billing; Stripe prorates the difference on its normal terms.
- Failed payments. If a renewal payment fails, Stripe will retry and email you. Your plan stays in force for a short time while it does; if the payment is not made, the subscription ends and your account returns to the free plan. Your projects are not deleted.
- Price changes. We may change plan prices or what a plan includes. We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email or in the product before a price increase applies to you; if you do not want it, cancel before it takes effect.
- Free plan. The free plan has lower limits and may change or end; we will give notice in the product if it does.
Stripe's checkout and billing pages are run by Stripe under its own terms. Charlie never receives your card number.
13Ending it
- You can stop using Charlie at any time, cancel a paid plan through Manage billing, delete your projects from their pages, and ask us to delete your account by email. The Privacy Policy explains what is deleted and when. Closing an account does not refund the current month.
- We can suspend or close an account for breaking these terms, for a security or legal reason, or because we are ending or changing the test program. Except for a serious breach or a legal requirement, we will give you notice and time to export your work.
- Sections 04 (your content), 10 (confidentiality), 11 (ownership), 14 (no warranty), 15 (liability), 16 (your responsibility) and 17 (law) continue to apply after the account is closed.
14No warranty
Charlie is provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties of any kind — express, implied or statutory — including any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, completeness, non-infringement, or uninterrupted or error-free operation. In particular, we do not warrant that Charlie's findings are complete or correct, that its quantities match the roof, that a manufacturer requirement in its library is current, that a proposal or estimate is right, or that a bid built with it will be accepted, profitable or free of omissions.
15Limits on our liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, neither we nor our owners, employees, contractors or providers will be liable to you for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost bids, lost revenue, lost data, or the cost of substitute services, arising out of or related to Charlie or these terms — however caused and under any theory of liability — even if we were told they were possible. Our total liability for all claims arising out of or related to Charlie or these terms will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid us for Charlie in the 12 months before the claim or one hundred U.S. dollars ($100).
Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions or limits; in those places these apply to the extent permitted.
16Your responsibility for your bids
You will defend, indemnify and hold us harmless from any claim, loss, liability, cost or expense (including reasonable attorneys' fees) brought by a third party and arising out of your content, your bids, proposals and estimates, your use of Charlie in violation of these terms or the law, or your use of the QuickBooks connection. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and let you control the defense, provided you do not settle in a way that admits fault on our part without our consent.
17Governing law and disputes
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas and the United States, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute that we cannot resolve by talking will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Texas, and both of us agree to their jurisdiction. Either of us may seek an injunction in any court to protect intellectual property or confidential information. If you are a government entity, tell us and we will discuss terms appropriate to your procurement rules.
18Changes to these terms
We will update these terms as Charlie grows. When we change something material we will tell you by email or in the product and give you at least 14 days before it takes effect; using Charlie after that date means you accept the change. If you do not, stop using Charlie and ask us to close your account. The date at the top is the version in force.
19Contact
Run It By Charlie · Loper Architectural Products LLC · Texas, USA
charlie@runitbycharlie.com
If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest still applies. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about Charlie, and they replace anything earlier. Not enforcing a term is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these terms without our consent; we may assign them to a successor that takes over Charlie.