Terms of Service

The short version

This is a summary, not the agreement. If anything here differs from the numbered sections below, the numbered sections control.

CivicRecordsOnline is a subscription at the price shown on our pricing page, billed monthly or yearly. There is no setup fee and no per-user or per-request charge inside your plan. You can cancel at any time from the billing page, and your access continues through the end of the period you paid for.

Your records belong to you. You can export them at any time, and for at least 30 days after your subscription ends. If your trial or subscription ends, your workspace is paused, not deleted. We permanently delete your records from active production systems within 30 days of your verified deletion request. Backup copies expire in the ordinary course of backup rotation.

You decide what gets released. Our tools find likely sensitive information and help you redact it, but every release is a decision your staff makes and reviews. We do not make that decision for you, and no tool guarantees a document is safe to release.

We are not offered as a CJIS-compliant or HIPAA-compliant environment, and we do not process citizen payments, redact video, or use generative AI. We say this plainly because it is how we keep every plan under $500 a month.

If we ever stop offering the Service, you ordinarily get at least 90 days' notice, and your export stays available throughout that period, subject to the exceptions in Section 11.

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a binding agreement between PALDAM LLC, a California limited liability company ("PALDAM," "we," "us," or "our"), and the government agency or other eligible public entity that obtains access to CivicRecordsOnline ("Agency"). "Service" means the CivicRecordsOnline websites, hosted application, agency portals, documentation, support, and related services that PALDAM makes available. The individual accepting these Terms represents that the individual has authority to bind the Agency. If that representation is not true, the individual must not accept these Terms or use the Service on the Agency's behalf.

1. Agreement and order of precedence

By checking the acceptance box, creating an Agency workspace, starting a trial, purchasing a subscription, or using the authenticated Service after being presented with these Terms, the Agency agrees to them. A PALDAM-issued order confirmation may identify the selected plan, price, and billing start date, but does not otherwise change these Terms. PALDAM does not accept customer paper or implied amendments.

2. Eligibility and availability

The Service is offered only to government agencies and public bodies in the United States and to the individuals authorized to act for them. By creating an account, the person registering confirms that they are authorized to bind the Agency to these Terms.

The Service is not currently available to agencies in California or Hawaii. PALDAM publishes where the Service is currently available at civicrecordsonline.com/states. Agencies in a state listed there as unavailable may not subscribe or open an Agency workspace, and PALDAM may decline or close any account created in violation of this section. Availability may change. PALDAM may verify an Agency's eligibility at any time, including by requesting documentation, and may delay activation until verification is complete.

The Service is not offered to individuals, private companies, or organizations that are not public bodies. A contractor acting for an eligible Agency may use the Service only through that Agency's account and under the Agency's responsibility.

3. Trial, subscription, billing, and taxes

Eligible agencies may receive one 30-day trial unless PALDAM states otherwise in writing. A trial is provided for evaluation, may have reasonable limits, and may be modified or ended for misuse, security risk, or ineligibility. No payment method is required unless shown at enrollment. If the trial ends before the Agency subscribes, the Agency's workspace is paused, not deleted: staff sign-in is suspended, the Agency's public portal stays online, and Agency Data is preserved unchanged until the Agency subscribes or requests deletion under Section 10.

Paid subscriptions are billed in advance and renew automatically until cancelled. Monthly subscriptions are paid by card through self-service checkout and renew each month. Yearly billing can be paid by card through self-service checkout, or arranged by email and paid by invoice, and renews each year. Published plan limits apply. A plan's annual request amount is a soft limit: reaching it never blocks request intake. PALDAM notifies Agency administrators as usage approaches or passes the included annual request amount; if usage stays at or above that amount for 30 days after notice, the subscription moves to the next published plan at its published price, and PALDAM notifies the Agency of the move. Staff seats and document storage are fixed limits enforced by the Service. PALDAM will never charge a price that is not published or agreed in a signed order. Fees are nonrefundable except where required by law or expressly stated in a signed order. The Agency is responsible for applicable taxes other than taxes on PALDAM's net income and for providing any valid exemption documentation.

PALDAM may change future pricing on at least 30 days' notice. A change takes effect no earlier than the Agency's next renewal after that notice period. Public-records fees owed by requesters are not collected or processed by the Service; the Agency uses its own payment process.

4. Cancellation, suspension, and termination

The Agency may cancel at any time. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the then-current paid period (month or year), and no termination fee applies. PALDAM may suspend access immediately when reasonably necessary to address a security threat, unlawful use, nonpayment, material breach, risk to another customer, or legal requirement. When practicable, PALDAM will give notice and a reasonable opportunity to cure. PALDAM may terminate for an uncured material breach after 10 days' notice, or immediately for fraud, unauthorized access, deliberate harm, or use that exposes another tenant's data. Sections that by their nature should survive will survive, including ownership, disclaimers, liability limits, responsibility allocation, payment obligations, confidentiality, and dispute provisions.

5. Authorized use and account security

The Agency may permit its employees, officials, contractors, and authorized representatives to use the Service for the Agency's public-records work. The Agency will keep credentials confidential, use reasonable access controls, promptly remove access when no longer needed, and notify security@civicrecordsonline.com of suspected compromise. The Agency is responsible for activity through its accounts unless caused solely by PALDAM's breach of this agreement.

The Agency and its users must not: access another tenant's data; probe or test the Service except as expressly permitted by PALDAM's then-current Vulnerability Disclosure Policy; defeat usage or security controls; introduce malicious code; conduct denial-of-service or load testing; scrape or bulk extract except through provided export tools; reverse engineer except to the limited extent a prohibition is unenforceable by law; use the Service unlawfully; or use it to process data or workloads the Service expressly excludes.

6. Agency Data and instructions

"Agency Data" means data, documents, images, communications, configurations, and other content submitted to or generated for the Agency through the Service. As between the parties, the Agency retains its rights in Agency Data. The Agency grants PALDAM a nonexclusive right to host, copy, transmit, transform, display, back up, secure, and otherwise process Agency Data only as reasonably necessary to provide, maintain, protect, troubleshoot, and improve the Service; comply with documented Agency instructions; and meet legal obligations. PALDAM does not sell Agency Records or use them to train machine-learning or generative-AI models.

The Agency represents that it has authority to submit Agency Data and instruct PALDAM to process it. The Agency is the public-records custodian and controller of its Agency Data; PALDAM acts as a service provider or processor when handling that data on the Agency's behalf. The Agency determines what it collects, uploads, redacts, withholds, publishes, releases, retains, deletes, and exports.

7. Public-records and legal responsibility

The Service provides workflow and reference tools. It does not provide legal advice, make public-records determinations, establish attorney-client privilege, or replace review by the Agency's records officer or counsel. Deadline windows, business-day calculations, holiday calendars, exemption catalogs, fee references, retention suggestions, and other legal-reference content may be incomplete, jurisdiction-specific, superseded, or affected by facts the Service cannot know. The Agency must independently verify applicable law, deadlines, notices, fees, exemptions, appeal rights, preservation duties, and release decisions.

The Agency is solely responsible for responding to requesters, meeting legal deadlines, deciding whether records are responsive or exempt, applying legally sufficient redactions, providing required explanations or indexes, preserving records and litigation holds, and ensuring that every release is authorized. PALDAM is not the Agency's records officer, legal custodian, or agent for service of process.

8. Redaction, OCR, and human review

Redaction features assist authorized staff with documents and images. They include manual tools, deterministic pattern searches, bulk literal or regular-expression search, health-code and context patterns, OCR for scanned material, exemption tagging, and creation of a flattened release copy. They do not redact video or audio. They are not generative AI and do not determine whether information is legally exempt.

No automated, pattern-based, OCR, or manual software process can identify every sensitive item or guarantee that a file is safe to disclose. OCR and pattern matching can miss text, misread scans, or identify false positives. File formats may contain layers, attachments, metadata, annotations, or other content requiring separate review. Before any disclosure, an authorized Agency user must inspect the complete final release copy, verify each redaction and exemption basis, confirm that no protected content remains accessible, and approve the release. The Agency bears all responsibility for the decision and content released.

9. Excluded and unsupported uses

The Service is not designed, certified, or offered as: (a) a CJIS-compliant environment; (b) a HIPAA-compliant environment or a service for which PALDAM will act as a business associate; (c) a payment processor for requester fees; (d) a video, body-camera, dash-camera, surveillance, or audio redaction system; (e) an emergency-response or life-safety system; (f) an evidentiary preservation repository, archival records-management system, or the Agency's sole system of record; or (g) a system for classified information, export-controlled technical data, or data requiring a higher security classification than PALDAM has expressly accepted. The Agency must not submit data subject to those requirements in reliance on the Service.

10. Agency Data: ownership, export, and deletion

The Agency owns Agency Data. PALDAM acquires no rights in Agency Data other than the limited license needed to provide, secure, support, and improve the Service as described in these Terms and the Privacy Policy. PALDAM does not use Agency Records to train machine-learning models and does not sell Agency Data.

Export. At any time during the subscription, and for at least 30 days after it ends, the Agency may export its data through the Service. The standard export includes request records, requester contact details the Agency collected, request timelines and status history, fee records, request audit history, and the document metadata and then-retained document files available to the export process, in the formats described on the export screen and in the export archive itself. Source files previously removed under the Agency's retention settings cannot be included; they remain identified in the exported document metadata by their removal date and content fingerprint, and their audit history remains. Support tickets and PALDAM's internal operational records are not included. PALDAM may update export formats and will keep the export capable of producing a complete copy of the categories listed here. Post-termination export is subject to verification of an authorized Agency administrator and may be delivered through a secure method selected by PALDAM.

Deletion. When a trial or subscription ends, the Agency's workspace is paused, not deleted, and Agency Data is preserved unchanged; subscribing again restores access. PALDAM permanently deletes Agency Data from active production systems within 30 days of a verified deletion request from an authorized Agency administrator, and may delete a workspace that has remained closed after notice to the Agency's contacts on file. Backup copies are retained only for disaster recovery and expire in the ordinary course of PALDAM's backup rotation, after which they are not recoverable. PALDAM may retain the limited records needed to comply with law, resolve disputes, enforce these Terms, investigate security or fraud, and maintain billing and audit history. The Agency is responsible for exporting anything it needs before deletion runs; PALDAM has no obligation to recover data afterward.

Retention law. The Agency remains responsible for its own obligations under applicable records-retention law, for authoritative originals, and for litigation holds. The Service is a tool for managing requests, not a substitute for the Agency's retention schedule or system of record. Any retention settings in the Service are selected by the Agency, and the Agency is responsible for their legality and consequences.

11. Service continuity

PALDAM intends to operate the Service for the long term. If PALDAM decides to discontinue the Service, or to stop offering it in the Agency's state, PALDAM will give the Agency at least 90 days' written notice before the discontinuation date, will keep the export function available throughout that period, and will refund any prepaid fees for the period after discontinuation. During the notice period PALDAM will continue to provide the Service and support in the ordinary way. If PALDAM assigns these Terms to a successor under Section 20, the successor assumes these commitments, and the assignment itself is not a discontinuation.

The 90-day commitment does not apply where continued operation is prohibited by law; would create a material security, privacy, or safety risk; is prevented by a provider failure, force majeure event, or circumstance beyond PALDAM's reasonable control; or the Agency's access is suspended or terminated for nonpayment, unlawful use, fraud, security abuse, or material breach. In those circumstances, PALDAM will provide as much notice and export access as reasonably practicable. Refund of prepaid fees for the unavailable period is the Agency's exclusive monetary remedy for discontinuation, except where applicable law requires otherwise.

12. Security and incidents

PALDAM will maintain reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards appropriate to the Service. Security is a shared responsibility, and no service can guarantee prevention of every attack, error, or unauthorized disclosure. The Agency must configure access appropriately, protect endpoints and credentials, review audit activity, and avoid uploading unsupported data.

If PALDAM confirms a security incident involving unauthorized access to Agency Data in PALDAM's custody, PALDAM will notify the Agency's designated contact without undue delay as required by applicable law and provide information reasonably available to support the Agency's own legal assessment. Notice is not an admission of fault or liability. PALDAM may delay or limit details when reasonably necessary for security, law-enforcement, legal, or third-party confidentiality reasons.

13. Service changes, maintenance, and third-party dependencies

PALDAM may modify the Service to improve security, reliability, usability, or legal compliance; address abuse; or reflect changes in third-party services. PALDAM will not materially reduce the core paid functionality during a current monthly term without reasonable notice, except where a change is necessary for security, law, or a third-party dependency. Maintenance, internet failures, attacks, force majeure events, and provider outages may interrupt access. Any availability figure stated outside a separately signed service-level agreement is a target, not a warranty, and creates no service-credit obligation.

14. Support

PALDAM provides the support included with the Agency's plan through the channels shown in the Service. Response targets are goals, not guaranteed resolution times. The Agency must not place unnecessary sensitive records in support tickets. Support-ticket data is operational correspondence and is not included in the standard Agency Data export.

15. Intellectual property and feedback

PALDAM and its licensors own the Service, software, designs, documentation, trademarks, and all related intellectual-property rights, excluding Agency Data. No rights are granted except the limited right to use the Service during an active trial or subscription. If the Agency provides suggestions or feedback, PALDAM may use them without restriction or compensation, provided PALDAM does not identify the Agency publicly without permission.

16. Confidentiality

Each party will use reasonable care to protect nonpublic information disclosed by the other that reasonably should be understood as confidential and will use it only for this agreement. These duties do not apply to information that is public through no breach, already lawfully known, independently developed, or lawfully obtained without restriction. The Agency acknowledges that it may be subject to public-records and open-meeting laws. If the Agency receives a request for PALDAM information, it will, where legally permitted, give PALDAM prompt notice and a reasonable opportunity to identify claimed protections; the Agency retains its legal decision-making authority.

17. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SERVICE AND ALL REFERENCE CONTENT ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE." PALDAM DISCLAIMS ALL EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, AND OTHER WARRANTIES, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, UNINTERRUPTED OPERATION, ERROR-FREE OPERATION, LEGAL COMPLIANCE, AND RESULTS. PALDAM DOES NOT WARRANT THAT ANY REDACTION, OCR, SEARCH, DEADLINE, RETENTION, ACCESSIBILITY, SECURITY, OR AUDIT FEATURE WILL IDENTIFY EVERY ISSUE, SATISFY EVERY LEGAL REQUIREMENT, OR PREVENT AN IMPROPER DISCLOSURE. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain disclaimers, so they apply only to the extent permitted.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, PALDAM AND ITS MEMBERS, MANAGERS, EMPLOYEES, CONTRACTORS, LICENSORS, AND SERVICE PROVIDERS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, PUNITIVE, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES; LOST REVENUE, PROFITS, SAVINGS, GOODWILL, OR BUSINESS; LOSS, CORRUPTION, OR DISCLOSURE OF DATA; PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE SERVICES; MISSED DEADLINES; OR CLAIMS ARISING FROM THE AGENCY'S RELEASE, WITHHOLDING, RETENTION, OR DELETION DECISIONS, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY.

PALDAM'S AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS, INCLUDING ITS DEFENSE AND PAYMENT OBLIGATIONS UNDER SECTION 18, WILL NOT EXCEED THE FEES ACTUALLY PAID BY THE AGENCY TO PALDAM FOR THE SERVICE DURING THE 12 MONTHS IMMEDIATELY BEFORE THE FIRST EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM. For a free trial, the aggregate cap is US $100. These exclusions and caps apply regardless of theory and are an essential basis of the bargain, but do not limit liability that applicable law does not permit the parties to limit.

18. Responsibility for Agency Data and release decisions

To the extent permitted by the laws that apply to the Agency, and subject to any appropriation or constitutional limits on the Agency's authority, the Agency will defend and reimburse PALDAM for third-party claims, damages, judgments, penalties, costs, and reasonable legal fees arising from (a) Agency Data, including any personal information contained in it, and (b) the Agency's decisions to release, redact, withhold, retain, or delete records. PALDAM will notify the Agency promptly of any such claim, will not settle it in a way that admits fault by the Agency without the Agency's consent, and will cooperate reasonably at the Agency's expense.

PALDAM will defend the Agency against third-party claims that the Service, as provided by PALDAM and used in accordance with these Terms, infringes a United States patent, copyright, or trademark, and will pay damages finally awarded or agreed in a settlement approved by PALDAM. PALDAM may, at its option, modify the Service to avoid the claim, obtain a license, or terminate the affected subscription and refund prepaid fees for the remaining term. This obligation does not cover Agency Data, modifications not made by PALDAM, continued use after PALDAM provides a non-infringing replacement or directs the Agency to stop, or use of the Service in combination with items PALDAM did not supply. This paragraph states PALDAM's sole obligation and the Agency's exclusive remedy for an intellectual-property claim, and all defense costs, damages, settlements, and refunds are subject to and count toward the aggregate cap in Section 17.

19. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, except where a law binding on the Agency requires that the Agency's own state law apply, in which case that law governs to the extent required.

Before either party files a claim, it will send the other written notice describing the dispute, and the parties will make a good-faith effort to resolve it through direct discussion between people with authority to settle it, for at least 30 days. This does not prevent either party from seeking urgent relief to protect Agency Data, confidential information, or intellectual property.

Any claim that is not resolved may be brought in any state or federal court of competent jurisdiction. Nothing in these Terms requires the Agency to litigate outside the state where it is located.

20. General

Neither party is liable for delay caused by events beyond its reasonable control, except payment obligations. The Agency may not assign these Terms without PALDAM's consent, except to a lawful successor government entity that assumes them; PALDAM may assign them in connection with a merger, financing, reorganization, or sale of all or substantially all relevant assets. PALDAM is an independent contractor. There are no third-party beneficiaries. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. If a provision is unenforceable, it will be modified to the minimum extent necessary and the remainder will continue. Headings are for convenience. Electronic notices and signatures are permitted. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and any PALDAM-issued order confirmation are the complete agreement about the Service. If the Agency issues a purchase order, vendor form, or similar document, it is for the Agency's administrative convenience only. Any terms in it that add to or conflict with these Terms have no effect, even if PALDAM acknowledges or processes the document.

21. Changes and notices

PALDAM may update these Terms. For a material change affecting an active paid subscription, PALDAM will provide at least 30 days' notice by email or in-product notice unless an earlier change is reasonably required by law or security. The revised Terms apply at the next renewal after the notice period. Continued use after that renewal constitutes acceptance. Notices to PALDAM must be sent to legal@civicrecordsonline.com and by mail to:

PALDAM LLC
2108 N Street #1668
Sacramento, CA 95816

Notices to the Agency may be sent to its administrator or billing contact.

Versions

These Terms are version 2026-09-01. The text of each published version stays available at a stable address so any recorded acceptance can be matched to the exact text accepted: version 2026-09-01 (current).