Terms of Service
The agreement between Gather Hub and the churches that use it.
The agreement
These terms are the agreement between Anatoli Railean, doing business as Gather Hub, based in Spokane, Washington, USA, and the church that holds an account with us. We call them "we" and "the church" below. The agreement starts when someone creates a workspace on behalf of a church, and it continues until either side ends it. Creating a workspace means accepting these terms on the church's behalf, so the person doing it should be someone the church has authorised to agree to them. Where these terms and the privacy policy overlap, both apply; the privacy policy describes what happens to personal information, and nothing here reduces it.
Accounts and access
A workspace belongs to the church, not to the person who created it. That person becomes the owner and can invite other staff, set what each of them may open, and hand ownership on. The church is responsible for who it invites and for what they do with the access they are given, so an account should be closed when someone leaves. Sign-in credentials are personal and must not be shared between people; one login used by several staff makes it impossible to tell who did what, which matters most in exactly the situations where it is worth knowing. Tell us promptly if an account has been used by someone who should not have it.
The church's responsibilities
The church decides what member information to record and why, and is responsible for having a lawful basis to hold it -- including for children, where consent from a parent or guardian is the church's to obtain. The church is also responsible for what its staff write in notes and send in messages. Consent before messaging is not a formality here: each church texts from its own phone number, registered with the mobile carriers in the church's own name, so texting people who did not ask for it can get that number blocked, and we may pause a church's texting to keep the service in good standing with the carriers. The platform records who consented and when, and honours a STOP reply and a do-not-contact mark, but it can only act on what the church tells it. Do not import a list of numbers that never opted in.
Acceptable use
Do not use the platform to send unsolicited bulk messages, to send anything unlawful, or to harass anyone. Do not attempt to reach another church's data, to probe or interfere with the service, or to work around the limits that protect it. Do not resell access to churches that have no account of their own. We may suspend a workspace without notice where continuing would break the law, endanger someone, or threaten the service for everyone else, and we will say why when we do.
Payments and giving
Two different flows of money run through the platform and they should not be confused. The first is the church's subscription to us. A workspace begins on a free trial that needs no card; it continues on a paid plan once the church chooses one, and a trial that ends without one becomes read-only, as described under Ending the agreement. The current prices are published at https://gather-hub.com/#pricing. A plan is billed in advance, monthly or yearly as the church chooses, plus any sales tax that applies. The second is donations from a congregation, which are processed by Stripe into the church's own connected Stripe account, under the church's own agreement with Stripe. That money is the church's and never passes through us; we are not a payment processor, we do not hold donated funds, and we never see card or bank details. Stripe's fees are between the church and Stripe, and we add nothing to them. If a subscription payment fails, we email the church's owners and the workspace keeps working normally while Stripe retries the payment over the following weeks; only if every retry fails does the workspace become read-only, as described under Ending the agreement.
Availability
We aim to keep the platform available continuously and we monitor it so that failures are noticed rather than reported to us, but we do not offer a guaranteed uptime figure and it would be dishonest to print one we do not measure against a commitment. Maintenance and deploys are done without scheduled downtime wherever possible. Some parts depend on providers we do not control -- payments on Stripe, email and SMS delivery on Amazon Web Services -- and an outage there can affect the service regardless of what we do. We will tell account holders about anything significant and prolonged rather than leaving them to guess.
Your data
The church's data belongs to the church. We hold it to run the service and for no purpose of our own; we do not sell it and we do not train machine learning models on it. The church's owners and admins can download a complete copy of everything the church has in Gather Hub -- people, giving records, events, uploaded files and every other record -- as one archive from the workspace's settings, at any time and at no charge, including while the workspace is read-only. Only the codes and links that would let whoever holds the copy sign in or open the church's pages are left out. Giving records, check-ins and event registrations can also be exported to CSV on their own. A church can also delete individual records itself at any time, and deleting a workspace removes its people, gifts, events, uploaded files and staff logins.
Ending the agreement
A church can cancel at any time. When a subscription lapses or is cancelled the workspace becomes read-only rather than disappearing: staff can still sign in and read what is there, and the owners and admins can download everything, but nothing further can be created or changed. That is deliberate, so that a lapsed payment never costs a church its records without warning. It stays that way for 180 days after the subscription ends, during which choosing a plan again restores full use; the church's owners and admins are emailed the day it ends and again 60, 30 and 7 days and one day before, and the workspace is then deleted with everything in it, on the date those emails give and never sooner. A trial that ends without a subscription is kept for 90 days after the trial ends instead, with notices to its owners and admins a month, a week and a day before. We may end the agreement for a serious or repeated breach of the acceptable use section, or on 30 days' notice for any other reason, and in the latter case we will refund the unused part of anything already paid.
Liability
Some things cannot be limited by an agreement and we do not try to: death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, and anything else the law does not permit to be excluded. Beyond those, our total liability to a church is limited to the fees the church paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, and we are not liable for lost profits, lost donations, or loss arising from the church's own failure to obtain consent for the people it records or messages. The platform is provided as it is; we make no promise that it will fit a purpose the church has in mind without checking it first. None of this displaces our obligations under the privacy policy or under data protection law, which stand on their own.
Governing law
This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Washington, USA. A dispute we cannot settle between us is decided by the state or federal courts located in Spokane County, Washington. We would rather resolve a problem by talking about it, so please contact us before starting anything formal.
Changes to these terms
If we change these terms in a way that materially affects a church's rights or what it is paying, we will tell account holders before the change takes effect, and a church that does not want to continue on the new terms can cancel and receive a refund of the unused part of anything already paid. Smaller corrections take effect when published. The date below records when this was last updated.
Contact
Questions about these terms, requests for an export, and anything else about the agreement can be sent to support@gather-hub.com.
Last updated October 8, 2026