Terms of service

These terms govern the use of TenderDesk, a service for architecture practices to find public tenders and design competitions and to prepare submissions with partners. By creating an account or using the service you accept them. If you use TenderDesk for a firm, you accept them on the firm's behalf and confirm you may do so.

1. What TenderDesk does

• Collects tender notices from public sources (such as TED, BOAMP, TenderNed, BASE, simap.ch and Find a Tender), classifies and scores them, and shows them in a free feed.
• Hosts firm profiles and portfolios in a public directory.
• Provides bid workspaces where a lead firm, partner firms and invited guests share files, tasks and requests for one tender.

Tender information is copied from the official publications and may be incomplete, out of date or wrongly classified. Scores and fit indicators are estimates. The official notice and its documents are the only authority: always check them, and the deadlines in them, before you bid. We are not responsible for a missed deadline or a rejected submission.

2. Accounts and firms

• You sign in with your email address. Keep access to that mailbox secure; anyone who can read it can sign in as you.
• Each practice has one firm profile. The first person to claim it provides the firm's VAT or registry number; we may check it and the email domain before verifying the firm. We may refuse or remove a claim that looks inaccurate or duplicated.
• Colleagues join the firm with an email address at the firm's domain and the approval of an owner or administrator. Owners and administrators manage members, the profile and the subscription.

3. Free use, trial and subscription

• The tender feed, saved searches, the firm profile and taking part in bids you are invited to are free.
• When a firm is verified, it gets one free trial of 5 days with every feature. Leading bid workspaces after the trial requires a paid subscription for the firm.
• Subscriptions are billed in advance through Stripe for the period and at the price shown at checkout, plus any applicable VAT. They renew automatically until cancelled. Owners and administrators can cancel at any time from the billing page; the subscription then runs to the end of the paid period. Payments already made are not refunded except where the law requires it.
• If a subscription ends or payment fails, the firm keeps its profile and its existing workspaces remain readable to the firm, but it cannot start new ones until it subscribes again.
• We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice by email; the new price applies from the next renewal after that notice.

4. Your content

You and your firm keep all rights in what you upload: profiles, project images, CVs, files and messages. You give us the permission needed to store and process that content to run the service, and to show it to the people you choose: the public (for the public parts of your profile) or the members of a bid workspace. You confirm you have the right to upload it, including the consent of colleagues whose CVs or details you add, and that it does not infringe anyone's rights or the law.

In a bid workspace, the lead firm decides who takes part. Partners and guests can see the workspace's files while it is open; when the lead firm closes it, their access ends and the lead firm keeps the record. Agreements between firms about a joint bid, fees or intellectual property are between those firms; TenderDesk is not a party to them.

5. Acceptable use

• Do not misrepresent your identity or your firm, or claim a firm you do not belong to.
• Do not upload malware, unlawful material, or other people's confidential information without the right to do so.
• Do not scrape the service, resell its data in bulk, or try to get around access controls or limits.
• Do not use the workspaces for anything that breaks public procurement rules, such as collusion between competing bidders.

We may suspend or close an account or a firm that breaks these rules, after telling you where we reasonably can.

6. Availability and changes

We work to keep TenderDesk available and your data safe, but we do not promise the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we keep backups for recovery, not as an archive for you. Keep your own copy of anything you submit; the ZIP export exists for that. We may improve or change features; if we withdraw a paid feature, we will tell subscribers in advance.

7. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, such as for fraud, wilful misconduct or gross negligence. Otherwise, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including lost contracts, profits or opportunities, and our total liability for any claim in a year is limited to the amount the firm paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or 100 euros if it paid nothing.

8. Ending

You can stop using TenderDesk and ask us to delete your account at any time. When a firm closes its account, we delete its profile and workspace content within 60 days, except what we must keep by law (such as invoices).

9. Law and changes to these terms

These terms are governed by the laws of Portugal, and the courts of Lisbon have jurisdiction, without removing any right a consumer has to sue in their own country. We may update these terms; for material changes we will tell account holders by email at least 30 days before they apply.