Sounder Terms of Service
These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of Sounder. Please read them carefully. By creating an account or using Sounder, you agree to these Terms.
1. Who these Terms are between
These Terms are an agreement between you and Cyber Networks (New Zealand), the operator of Sounder ("Sounder", "we", "us", "our").
- Legal entity: CYBER NETWORKS LIMITED
- NZ company number: 8309812
- NZBN: 9429050316984
- Registered address: 98 Havill Street, Takaro, Palmerston North, 4410, New Zealand
- Contact: support@sounder.nz
"You" means the person who creates or uses a Sounder account.
2. Acceptance
By signing up for, accessing, or using Sounder, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy and Billing & Trial Terms, which form part of your agreement with us. If you do not agree, do not use Sounder.
3. Eligibility
To use Sounder, you must:
- Be at least 16 years old;
- Have the legal capacity to enter into these Terms; and
- Have the authority to model and manage the bank accounts and financial information you enter.
If you use Sounder on behalf of a household, you confirm you are entitled to enter that household's information and to invite its members.
4. Your licence to use Sounder
We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use Sounder for your own personal and household cashflow forecasting, in accordance with these Terms and your subscription. You must not resell, sublicense, or commercially exploit the service except as we expressly permit.
5. Subscription and fees
Sounder is a paid product. It is offered with a 14-day free trial that requires a payment card at sign-up and automatically converts to a paid monthly subscription unless you cancel.
The full details — the trial, the automatic conversion, the price (NZD 9.99/month), how to cancel, refunds, price changes, and failed payments — are set out in the separate Billing & Trial Terms, which are incorporated into these Terms by reference. Please read them.
6. Acceptable use
You agree to use Sounder lawfully and responsibly. You must not:
- Use Sounder for any illegal purpose or in breach of any law;
- Attempt to access, interfere with, or compromise another household's or user's data, or otherwise attempt to breach the tenant isolation between accounts;
- Probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the service, or scrape or bulk-extract data other than your own (you can export your own data at any time);
- Misuse the AI chat assistant — for example, to generate unlawful, abusive, or harmful content, or to attempt to extract other users' data or our internal information;
- Upload malware, or attempt to disrupt, overload, or damage the service; or
- Impersonate another person or misrepresent your affiliation.
We may suspend or terminate access for breach of this section (see section 12).
7. Your data and intellectual property
- You own your data. The financial and personal information you enter into Sounder remains yours.
- The limited licence you give us. You grant us only the limited licence needed to operate, secure, support, and improve the service for you — for example, to store your data, run the forecasting engine, provide the AI features, and respond to your support requests. This includes sending the necessary information to our sub-processors as described in the Privacy Policy.
- We do not sell your data. We do not sell your personal information.
- We route AI requests only to providers who commit not to train on your data. We constrain every AI request so it can only be handled by providers whose terms commit them not to train their models on what we send and not to retain it beyond generating your response; a provider that does not meet those conditions is not used. Information sent to the AI/LLM provider is therefore used only to generate the responses you ask for. (Once information reaches the AI provider it is handled under that provider's terms, which we do not control; see the Privacy Policy, which explains what we send and how we minimise it.)
- Our intellectual property. Sounder itself — the software, design, branding, and content we provide — remains our intellectual property. These Terms do not transfer any of our intellectual property to you.
8. AI features are not financial advice
Sounder's forecasts, insights, and AI assistant are informational tools only. They are NOT regulated financial advice, and they are not a substitute for advice from a qualified financial adviser, accountant, or other professional. Sounder does not know your full circumstances, and it does not take responsibility for your financial decisions. You remain solely responsible for your own financial decisions. If you need advice, consult a suitably qualified professional.
9. AI output may be inaccurate
The AI chat assistant and cashflow insights are generated by automated language models. Their output may be inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date, and forecasts are estimates based on the information you enter. Do not rely on AI output as a statement of fact or as advice. Always check anything important against your own records and your bank.
The AI features are on by default and can be turned off at any time in Settings, per member. If you turn them off, the chat assistant, cashflow insights, and any automatic issue-logging are disabled for you, and this section applies only while they are on. See the Privacy Policy (section 4) for what is sent to the AI provider and how to turn AI off.
10. Service availability and warranties
We aim to keep Sounder available and working well, but we provide it on an "as is" and "as available" basis, and we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of security incidents.
Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes any guarantee, right, or remedy you have under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 or the Fair Trading Act 1986 (see section 11). Where you are a consumer under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993, we are required to supply our services with reasonable care and skill, and that guarantee applies.
11. Limitation of liability (with consumer rights preserved)
Your consumer rights come first. If you acquire Sounder as a consumer under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993, that Act gives you guarantees (including that services are provided with reasonable care and skill) that cannot be contracted out of, and nothing in these Terms limits or excludes those guarantees or your rights under the Fair Trading Act 1986. Where those Acts apply, they prevail over anything inconsistent in this section.
Subject to that, and to the maximum extent permitted by law:
- We are not liable for indirect, consequential, or special loss, or for loss of profits, savings, or data, arising from your use of Sounder;
- We are not liable for financial decisions you make based on Sounder's forecasts or AI output (see sections 8 and 9); and
- Our total liability to you for any claim connected with the service is limited to the amount you paid us for Sounder in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.
If you use Sounder for business purposes (not as a consumer), you agree that the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 does not apply to that supply, to the extent the Act allows contracting out for business-to-business supplies.
12. Suspension and termination
- By you. You can stop using Sounder at any time and cancel your subscription as described in the Billing & Trial Terms.
- By us. We may suspend or terminate your access if you materially breach these Terms (including the acceptable-use rules), if required by law, or if continuing to provide the service to you would create a serious risk. Where practical and lawful, we will give you notice.
- Your data on termination. Before your account is deleted, you can export your whole dataset from within the app. You can delete your account yourself from within the app (in Settings, with password confirmation); if you own a household shared with others you must transfer ownership first. After termination we will delete or de-identify your data as described in the Privacy Policy, subject to backups cycling out over the backup window.
13. Changes to the service and to these Terms
We may change or improve the service over time. We may also update these Terms. If we make a material change to these Terms, we will give you reasonable prior notice — for example, by notice in the app or by email — before it takes effect. If you continue using Sounder after a change takes effect, you accept the updated Terms. If you do not accept them, you may cancel.
14. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of New Zealand, and the New Zealand courts have jurisdiction.
We would rather resolve any problem directly — please contact us at support@sounder.nz first. If we cannot resolve it, and you are a consumer, you may be able to take the matter to the Disputes Tribunal of New Zealand, or raise conduct concerns with the Commerce Commission. Nothing in these Terms requires you to give up access to those avenues or to enter binding arbitration.
15. General
- If any part of these Terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
- Our not enforcing a term is not a waiver of it.
- You may not transfer your rights under these Terms without our consent; we may transfer ours to a successor of the business, with notice to you.