Alovy — Terms of Service

1. About Alovy

Alovy (“we”, “us”, “Alovy”) operates a mobile and web application that connects two kinds of people: people who need care for a baby or a pet (“Lookers” — Parents or Owners) and people who offer sitting services (“Sitters” — Babysitters or Petsitters). A person can be both a Looker and a Sitter on the same account.

Alovy is a marketplace and communication platform. Alovy is not an employer, staffing agency, or care provider. We do not employ Sitters, we do not supervise bookings, and we are not a party to the care arrangement that a Looker and a Sitter agree between themselves. We provide the tools to find each other, message, agree on a booking, and (in a future version) optionally pay — nothing more.

2. Definitions

3. Eligibility & Accounts

3.1. You must have the legal capacity to enter into a binding contract in your country of residence to create a Alovy account.

3.2. Sitters must be 18 years or older, regardless of the general account age above (D66). Alovy treats under-18 sitting as the highest-risk configuration and does not offer a path for it at launch.

3.3. You are responsible for the accuracy of your account information and for keeping your credentials secure. One account per person.

3.4. Care profiles and child data. If you create a Care Profile for a baby or child, you confirm that you are that child’s parent or legal guardian (i.e., you hold parental responsibility), and that you have the right to enter and are consenting to Alovy processing that child’s information as described in our Privacy Policy. You are responsible for the accuracy and lawfulness of what you enter about your child.

4. Roles: Looker and Sitter

You may register as a Looker, a Sitter, or both (D22). Sitting capabilities unlock only after you complete the required verification step for Sitters (§6). Whichever role you’re using, Alovy’s function is limited to connecting you with the other party — we do not vet, supervise, insure, or guarantee any booking, sitter, or looker.

5. Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

• Use Alovy for anything illegal, or that endangers a child, a pet, or any person;
• Harass, threaten, discriminate against, or impersonate anyone;
• Circumvent, falsify, or misrepresent verification status (§6);
• Solicit or arrange payment terms designed to defraud the other party;
• Scrape, reverse-engineer, or misuse the service or other users’ data;
• Post or send content that is unlawful, exploitative, or unrelated to Alovy’s purpose.

You must report safety concerns immediately, using the in-app report/block tools available on profiles and conversations.

6. Verification & Badges

Alovy uses a verification ladder (D19, D20):

1. Email verification — required for everyone, at sign-up.
2. Phone verification — required before you can activate the Sitter role.
3. ID verification (optional) — Sitters may additionally verify their identity through Didit, our third-party identity-check provider (D339). Passing grants a green shield badge and priority placement in search results (D20).

What “verified” means — and doesn’t mean. A green shield means the person passed a third-party identity check. It is not a background check, not a criminal-record check, and not a guarantee of a person’s trustworthiness, competence, or safety as a sitter.

Unverified sitters remain visible on Alovy, ranked below verified sitters. Whenever you view or message an unverified sitter, you’ll see a caution notice reminding you to exercise your own judgment (D57). This notice is part of these Terms by reference — it is not an empty UI hint.

We do not store your identity document itself. We store only the verification outcome and a reference from our verification provider.

7. Bookings

7.1. Lifecycle (D15): a Looker requests a booking from a Sitter’s profile or a conversation; the booking only exists once the Sitter accepts it. Either side can decline or cancel before it starts. A booking is completed after its scheduled end.

7.2. Extensions (D84/D85): either party can propose extending an ongoing booking’s end time; the other confirms. The originally agreed rate carries over automatically.

7.3. No payment processing today. Alovy does not process or enforce any payment (D18). Any rate or budget shown in the app is informational context only; you and the other party settle payment between yourselves, off-platform. Alovy is not a party to, and assumes no responsibility for, that payment arrangement.

7.4. Cancellations. There is currently no formal cancellation-fee policy — this is a genuine product gap, not just a legal one (see docs/legal/README.md), because there is no in-app payment to attach a fee to yet.

7.5. Ratings. After a completed booking, both sides may leave a 5-star rating and an optional comment (D17). Ratings are user opinions, not verified or endorsed by Alovy.

8. Content & Photos

8.1. License. By posting content to Alovy (profile information, Care Profile details, chat messages, ratings), you grant Alovy a license to host, store, and display that content as needed to operate the service. This license ends for content you delete, subject to the retention rules in our Privacy Policy.

8.2. Baby photos are never public. No baby’s photo or identifying image is ever shown to any other user, on any shared surface, under any circumstance (D24). Where another user needs some visual context (e.g. a discovery card, a sitter-visible view, chat), Alovy shows the parent’s own avatar plus an age band (“6–12 months”) instead — never the child’s photo or full name (D52). Pet photos, by contrast, may be shown publicly and to other users.

8.3. Baby photos and routine-tracking entries you store in Alovy are protected by client-side (zero-knowledge) encryption — see the Privacy Policy for exactly what this means and its limits (D69).

8.4. Prohibited content: anything illegal, images of any child other than your own registered Care Profile, impersonation, or anything that violates §5.

9. Location Sharing (post-MVP feature)

When live, location sharing during an active booking will be entirely consent-based: the Looker requests it, the Sitter confirms once per booking, and location streams live only while the Looker has the map screen open — it is never stored as history (D75/D80/D83). This section will be finalized before the feature ships.

10. Communication

All booking-related communication should happen through Alovy’s in-app chat (text-only in this version, D58) so there is a traceable record if something goes wrong. Chat is encrypted in transit and at rest, but is not end-to-end encrypted — see the Privacy Policy for exactly what that means and why (D67/D70/D77). This wording must stay identical between the Terms and the Privacy Policy.

11. Fees

Alovy is currently free to use (D59). If we introduce fees or paid tiers in the future, we will update these Terms and notify you in advance before any fee applies to you.

12. Disclaimers and Limitation of Liability

Alovy does not perform background checks beyond the verification described in §6, does not supervise bookings, and is not responsible for the acts or omissions of any Looker or Sitter. You are solely responsible for evaluating the other party and for the safety of any in-person arrangement you enter into. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Alovy’s liability arising from your use of the service is limited as set out below.

13. Indemnification

If what you do on Alovy causes a claim against us — because you broke these Terms or the law — you are responsible for it. The precise wording of this clause is being drafted and will appear here before public release.

14. Termination

14.1. By you: delete your account anytime from Security settings. For your protection, deletion requires a fresh one-time OTP confirmation, and then all of your account data and stored content is permanently erased (D33) — see the Privacy Policy for exactly what “full erasure” covers.

14.2. By Alovy: we may suspend or terminate an account for violating these Terms, for safety concerns, for fraud, or where required by law.

15. Dispute Resolution & Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the law of the Republic of Bulgaria, without prejudice to any mandatory consumer-protection rights you have under the law of your country of habitual residence within the EU.

16. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. We will notify you of material changes before they take effect.

17. Contact

A contact address for legal and support matters will be published here, together with the operating company’s details, before public release. Until then, reach us through the feedback form in the app: Settings → Help.

18. Miscellaneous

If any provision of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect. These Terms are the entire agreement between you and Alovy on this subject.

v0.2 — added 2026-09-23

Everything above is the v0.1 draft of 2026-08-20. The sections below cover what the product gained since — a paid tier, a money notebook, referrals — and the EU platform rules that apply to a marketplace of this shape (DSA, P2B, the Consumer Rights Directive, the European Accessibility Act). They are numbered on from §18 so nothing above renumbers; a lawyer should feel free to re-order the whole document.

19. Alovy Plus

19.1. What it is. Alovy Plus is an optional paid subscription. The free tier (“Regular”) keeps browsing, posting, messaging, bookings, care profiles and history. Plus adds the availability-matching features (coverage filters, filtering by your own schedule or listing, match alerts), shared care profiles for a co-parent, and encrypted cloud backup of routine data. What each tier includes is shown in the app before you subscribe.

19.2. Price, term and renewal. The price and the billing period are shown at purchase. A subscription renews automatically for the same period until it is cancelled.

19.3. How to cancel. A subscription bought through the Apple App Store or Google Play is managed and cancelled in that store’s account settings, not by us. Cancelling stops the next renewal; the paid period you are in runs to its end.

19.4. Your right of withdrawal. As a consumer you normally have 14 days to withdraw from a distance contract (Consumer Rights Directive 2011/83/EU, as transposed in Bulgaria). Where a subscription begins immediately at your request, that right can be affected.

19.5. Free months. Plus can also be granted free — a trial for a new account, a referral reward (§21), or a grant from our team. A granted period does not renew and is not refundable in money.

19.6. Changes. If we change what a tier includes, or what it costs, we will tell you before the change applies to you, and you may cancel.

20. Money between you and a Sitter

20.1. Alovy moves no money. There is no payment processing in Alovy. The price per hour, the hours worked and the payments made are records the two of you enter and confirm, kept so that you both see the same numbers.

20.2. What the records mean. Hours count only once both sides have confirmed them. A payment is logged by the Looker and then confirmed or disputed by the Sitter. Four figures are always kept apart and never merged: owed, awaiting confirmation, paid, disputed.

20.3. We are not a party. Alovy does not guarantee, hold, escrow or recover any amount, and is not a party to the payment. A disagreement about money is between the two of you.

21. Invite a friend

21.1. Every account has an invite code. If somebody joins with your code and then settles in — their account reaches a minimum age and a minimum number of days on which they opened the app, or they pay for a Plus period of their own — you receive one free month of Plus.

21.2. The person you invite receives nothing for redeeming a code. A code can be redeemed once per account, never your own, and only from a confirmed e-mail address.

21.3. The reward is capped per account, and we may withhold or reverse it where the rules above are circumvented — for example where the invited accounts are not real, separate people.

22. How listings are ranked

22.1. When you search, results are ordered by the ranking you pick. The default puts ID-verified Sitters first, then higher-rated ones. You can switch to newest, price, distance or — with Plus — how much of your schedule a Sitter can cover.

22.2. Nobody pays for position. A paid subscription changes which filters and orderings are available to you; it never moves anybody’s listing up in somebody else’s results, and we accept no payment for ranking.

23. Illegal content, reports and appeals

23.1. Reporting. Any user can report another user’s content or behaviour from inside the app (report and block). Reports reach our team, which reviews them.

23.2. What we may do. We may remove content, restrict a feature, suspend an account or terminate it (§14.2) where content or behaviour is illegal or breaks these Terms.

23.3. We will say why. If we restrict or remove something of yours, we will tell you what was affected and on what ground, and you may contest that decision by replying to that notice.

24. Accessibility

We aim to make Alovy usable with your phone’s own accessibility features: screen readers, larger text and reduced motion are supported throughout the app.

25. Availability, changes and language

25.1. We may change, suspend or discontinue parts of the service. Where a change materially reduces what you get, we will say so in advance.

25.2. These Terms are published in English and Bulgarian. Where the two differ, the Bulgarian version governs for users resident in Bulgaria.

26. Who you are contracting with

26.1. Alovy is not the other party. When you book a Sitter, the care arrangement is between you and that person (§1). Alovy provides the place you find each other and the tools you use.

26.2. Sitters are private individuals. Alovy has no business accounts: a Sitter is a person offering their own time, not a company. There is no trader status to hold and none is displayed. If you offer sitting as a registered business, say so in your listing text.

26.3. What that changes for you. EU and Bulgarian consumer protection — the right of withdrawal, the statutory guarantees, the unfair-terms rules — applies to a contract you make with a trader. It does not apply to a contract between two private individuals. Where the Sitter is a private individual, you are protected by ordinary civil law instead, and you should read the arrangement with that in mind.

26.4. Your own obligations are yours. Whether a Sitter must register, declare income or hold any permit for paid childcare or pet care is between them and the Bulgarian authorities. Alovy does not check it, and §5 requires you not to use the service unlawfully.