Terms of Use
These terms cover the Spare Up app specifically. Your account, your payment settings, and the money itself are governed by the CauseLine Labs Terms of Service, which apply to Spare Up as well and which include an arbitration agreement and a class action waiver. Where the two documents disagree about money, the platform terms win.
The two things to understand before you use Spare Up.
1. Spare Up is not a payment processor and never charges a card. It records that you decided to give. The charge, if and when it happens, is made by the CauseLine platform under its terms and your own payment settings.
2. A round up is a commitment to give, not a completed gift. It sits queued for the nonprofit you chose until that queue reaches $25 and a three-day window has elapsed. That can take weeks or months.
01 The agreement
Spare Up ("Spare Up") is provided by CauseLine Labs, Inc., 5232 Abbott Ave. South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55410 ("CauseLine," "we," "us"). By downloading or using Spare Up you agree to these terms, to the CauseLine Labs Terms of Service, and to the Spare Up Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use Spare Up.
You must be at least 18, or the age of majority where you live, and legally able to enter a contract. Spare Up requires a CauseLine account, which is free.
02 Spare Up is not the payment processor
Spare Up never asks for a card, never stores one, and never initiates a charge. There is no payment path in the app at all.
When you round up, Spare Up records a donation and hands it to the CauseLine platform. Everything after that — batching, the threshold, the three-day window, the charge itself, the receipt, and delivery to the nonprofit — is done by the platform under the CauseLine Labs Terms of Service, using the payment settings on your CauseLine account. Card processing is performed by Stripe, our payment processor.
Whether a charge happens automatically depends on your own settings, not on Spare Up. By default a new account is manual: when a queue is ready you receive an email and pay it yourself. If you turn on automatic charging in your CauseLine account, the platform charges your saved payment method when a queue settles. Spare Up cannot turn that on or off. Saying that Spare Up never charges a card is a statement about which system does the charging — it is not a promise that no charge will happen.
Payment methods are managed on the web, in your CauseLine account. Apple's rules do not permit managing them inside the app, and we do not try.
03 A round up is a commitment to give, not a completed gift
When you round a bill up, the difference becomes a queued round up: you have decided to give it, and it has not moved. It joins a queue for the specific nonprofit you chose.
Money leaves only after all of this is true:
- the queue for that nonprofit has passed $25 in total;
- at least three days have elapsed since the most recent round up in that queue; and
- the charge succeeds — automatically if you have opted in, or when you pay the emailed request if you have not.
Round ups are queued per nonprofit. If you give to three organizations, each queue climbs to $25 on its own; they are never combined. Round ups made in other CauseLine apps for the same nonprofit do join the same queue — one nonprofit, one donation.
The $25 floor exists because card processing on a $2 charge takes roughly a fifth of it. Queuing means the nonprofit receives a real donation instead of a rounding error. It is a deliberate feature of the platform, and Spare Up does not work around it.
Until a charge completes, a queued round up is a statement of intent that you may change or withdraw. It is not a binding pledge, it is not a debt, and we do not treat it as money you owe us.
04 Changing or cancelling a queued round up
You can reduce or cancel any round up that has not yet been charged. The three-day window exists so that you have time to.
- In the app, open the queue for that nonprofit and remove the round up you want gone.
- Or reply to the payment notice you were emailed, or write to support@causelinelabs.io from the address on your account, telling us which round ups to cancel. We will act on any request that reaches us before the charge is made.
- Deleting your account cancels everything still queued.
Once a charge has completed, the gift has gone to the nonprofit and we cannot reverse it. If a charge was made in error, contact us and we will investigate; any refund is at our discretion and may depend on the nonprofit, since the money is theirs once delivered.
05 Nothing is instant, and nothing is guaranteed to arrive on a date
A queue may sit for weeks or months. Ten round ups at $2.50 is what a $25 queue takes, and if you round up twice a month, the first charge is most of a year away. That is normal operation, not a fault.
We do not promise a delivery date for any gift. Charges can also be delayed or fail — an expired card, a bank decline, a nonprofit whose account is not ready to receive (§6). When that happens the round ups stay queued and you are told.
The app shows two different numbers on purpose: what is queued and what has been delivered. Only the second one has actually reached anybody.
06 Choosing a nonprofit
You can only send round ups to organizations that are set up on the CauseLine platform to receive them. If the organization you want is not, you can nominate it and we may invite them; until they are connected, you cannot queue money for them.
CauseLine does not endorse, vet the programs of, or take responsibility for any organization on the platform, and listing is not a recommendation. We check that a recipient is a real organization able to receive funds; we do not audit how it spends them. What a nonprofit does with your gift is between you and them. Deciding who deserves your money is your job, and the whole point of the app is that it is yours.
If a campaign you have chosen ends or is paused, we may redirect subsequent round ups to a permanent fund for the same nonprofit so that your money still reaches the organization you picked. We will tell you when that happens. Your money never moves to a different organization without you choosing it.
07 Tax
You are the donor of record. When a store rounds you up at a register, the store hands the money over. Here, the gift is from you, to the nonprofit you chose, and the platform issues your receipt in your name.
We do not give tax advice and we make no statement about what is or is not deductible. Whether a gift is deductible for you depends on the organization and on your own situation. Use the receipt the platform issues and ask your own tax advisor.
08 Your account
You are responsible for your account credentials and for everything done through your account. Keep your device secure — anyone holding an unlocked phone with Spare Up on it can queue a round up. Tell us promptly at support@causelinelabs.io if you think your account has been used without your permission.
Give us accurate information and keep your email address current: the email notices about your money are how the three-day window and the payment request reach you.
09 Acceptable use
Do not:
- use Spare Up to launder money, to move funds you are not entitled to, or for any unlawful purpose;
- use someone else's payment method or account;
- queue round ups you have no intention of paying, or use the queue to misrepresent support for an organization;
- probe, scrape, reverse engineer, or interfere with the app or the platform, or try to access other people's data;
- use Spare Up to solicit for an organization in a way that misleads people about where their money goes.
10 Scanning and amounts
Receipt scanning is a convenience. Spare Up reads the total on your device, shows you what it read, and asks you to confirm it — you are responsible for the amount you confirm. The same is true of an amount you say to Siri or type in. If a wrong number gets through, the three-day window is there so you can remove it (§4).
Spare Up rounds a bill up to the nearest $1, $5, or $10 as you have chosen, and the difference is the gift. Spare Up does not read your bank account, your card, or your purchase history — it only knows the number you gave it. See the Privacy Policy for what happens to the photo.
11 The app itself
We license Spare Up to you personally, for your own non-commercial use, on Apple devices you own or control. We keep all rights in the app, the CauseLine name and marks, and everything in it. You may not copy, modify, distribute, or sell any part of it.
Spare Up is distributed through the App Store and Apple's own terms apply to that. Apple is not a party to this agreement, has no obligation to support Spare Up, and is not responsible for it or for any claim you may have about it. If Spare Up fails to conform to any warranty Apple is required to offer, you may tell Apple and Apple may refund the purchase price — which is zero, because Spare Up is free.
12 Disclaimers and liability
Spare Up is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the app will be uninterrupted or error-free, that receipt scanning will read a total correctly, or that any particular gift will be delivered on any particular date.
To the fullest extent the law allows, CauseLine Labs is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits or goodwill, arising out of your use of Spare Up. Our total liability for any claim relating to Spare Up is limited to the greater of $100 or the total amount of fees you have paid us for Spare Up in the twelve months before the claim — noting that Spare Up is free, and that money you gave to a nonprofit is not a fee you paid us. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits, in which case they apply to the extent permitted.
Nothing here limits liability for fraud, for wilful misconduct, or for anything that cannot be limited by law.
13 Suspension and termination
You can stop using Spare Up at any time, delete the app, and delete your account. Deleting your account cancels round ups that have not been charged; it does not undo gifts already delivered.
We may suspend or terminate your access if you breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we reasonably suspect fraud or abuse. We may also discontinue Spare Up, or any part of it, with reasonable notice. If we do, queued round ups are cancelled unless you ask us to settle them, and no gift already delivered is affected.
14 Disputes and governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Minnesota, without regard to its conflict of law rules.
Disputes are handled under the dispute resolution section of the CauseLine Labs Terms of Service, which requires binding individual arbitration and waives jury trial and class actions. Please read it. As it provides, contact us first at support@causelinelabs.io and we will try to resolve the matter informally; you may also bring an individual claim in small claims court. Claims not subject to arbitration belong to the state and federal courts in Hennepin County, Minnesota, and you and we consent to their jurisdiction.
15 Changes to these terms
We will update these terms as Spare Up changes. The "last updated" date at the top always reflects the current version, and we will give notice in the app or by email before a material change takes effect. Continuing to use Spare Up after that means you accept the new terms. If you do not, stop using Spare Up and cancel anything queued (§4).
If any provision of these terms is unenforceable, the rest stays in effect. Our failure to enforce a right is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these terms; we may, as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
16 Contact
CauseLine Labs, Inc.
Attn: Legal
5232 Abbott Ave. South
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55410
United States