Terms of service

Who we are, and who you are

Borinken Labs is Borinken Labs LLC, a limited liability company registered in Puerto Rico. You can write to us at hola@borinkenlabs.com or on WhatsApp from the link on this site.

“You” are the business that hires us: a company, or a person doing business under their own name. What we sell is for running a business, not for personal use.

These terms apply from the moment you order something from us, pay us, or start using Recepción or a site we built. When we also sign a plan or a quote, that document says what we build and what it costs; these terms cover everything else. If the two disagree, the signed document wins.

What we sell

Websites. We visit your business, agree a plan and a fixed price in writing, build the site, put it live, and hand it over in your name: domain, code and accounts.

The care plan. Hosting, backups, security updates and small changes — a phone number, the hours, a photo, a few lines of text — billed monthly. Bigger work is quoted.

Recepción. An assistant that answers your business’s phone when you cannot. It tells the caller it is an assistant and that the call is recorded, asks whether they agree, takes the message, sends it to you, and can text the caller back about what they asked. It is a monthly plan; the plans and their prices are on our price page and on your order.

Promociones. Text messages you write yourself, to your own list of customers, sent from Recepción, with a set number of texts a month. It is bought on its own, and it cannot be switched on until the carriers have registered your business — the section below says what that takes.

Anything else we quote you in writing.

Recepción: what it does, and what it does not promise

It is an assistant, and it says so on every call. It is not a person and it is not an emergency service.

It answers when your line is forwarded to it and the phone network delivers the call. Calls drop, a transcript can get a word wrong, a caller can hang up. We work on all of that every week, and we do not promise that every call is answered or that every word is right.

Urgent calls. When a caller says it is urgent, Recepción tries to reach you the way you set it up — a call, a message, then the next person on your list. That is best effort. You remain responsible for how your business handles emergencies, and you keep your own way for people to reach you.

Recording. Puerto Rico law requires the express agreement of everyone on a call before it is recorded. Recepción asks for it at the start of every call, in the caller’s language, and records nothing until the caller says yes. That question cannot be turned off, and you agree not to ask us to. The exact words are on our consent page.

It is your line and they are your callers. You are the business the caller is talking to; we record and transcribe on your behalf. You give the assistant your real business name and truthful things to tell callers.

Not for clinics. Recepción is not for medical or dental practices, or for any business that handles protected health information, unless we have signed a separate agreement with you first.

Messages to you. Recepción reaches you by call and by message, sometimes with a synthetic voice. By giving us your numbers, you agree to receive them.

Your list, your messages, and one shared brand

Two kinds of message leave the service. A text to somebody who just called you is a reply to something they asked for. A promotion is not: it is you writing to people who were not expecting to hear from you that day. Most of what follows is about the second kind.

Your customers are yours. The list Recepción builds for you — the names, the numbers, what was said — belongs to your business, and so does every promotion you write. We hold them for you. We use them for nothing but running your service, and we do not sell them or write to your customers on our own account.

One registration carries all of it. Every text the service sends leaves under a single carrier registration in Borinken Labs’ name. That is what lets you start the day you sign up instead of waiting two weeks for a registry to answer.

And that is the catch, so read it twice. Because the registration is shared, a complaint against one business counts against every business on it. If one of them sends to a list it bought, the carriers act on the registration — and from that minute nobody’s texts go out, including yours, including the replies to your own callers.

So these are your promises, and they are not negotiable. Everyone on your list gave you permission to write to them. You keep the proof of that permission and you give it to us within two business days when a carrier asks for it. You do not buy, rent, scrape or swap a list. You send between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. Puerto Rico time. Every promotion says who it is from and how to stop it. And what the message says is yours: true, legal, and yours to stand behind.

We can stop your messages. If we believe your messages break these rules or put the shared registration at risk, we suspend them at once, without notice, and they stay suspended until it is settled. We tell you the same day and we tell you why. Your calls keep being answered — though if a carrier suspends us rather than you, that part is out of our hands.

A fine arrives on our bill, not yours. The carriers charge for messages that break their rules, and the published schedule runs to $10,000 for a repeat. If a message of yours brings a fine, a penalty or a claim, you cover it, and you cover what it costs us to deal with it.

Stopping messages. Anyone can reply STOP to a text and the messages stop; the phone network acts on that word before it ever reaches us. Someone can also tell you in person or on the phone that they do not want messages — record it in Recepción, and the service will not write to that number again, not a promotion and not a reply, until they tell you otherwise.

Promociones needs a registration in your own name. Promotions to your own list are registered to the business that sends them, not to us. To buy it you give us your exact legal business name as registered with your EIN, your EIN, a working website in that name, a public privacy policy and terms, and one authorised person with their name, title, email, phone and a mailing address. We file it for you. It takes ten to fifteen days and the carriers can refuse it. If your business has no EIN we cannot sell you Promociones today. None of this touches the replies to your own callers, which work from the first day.

Websites and the care plan

The plan we sign says what we build, what it costs and roughly when it goes live. Dates are estimates; when one moves, we tell you before it does.

The site is yours. The domain, the code and the accounts are in your name from the start. If you leave, you take all of it.

The care plan keeps the site up and current. Whether it can be cancelled, and when: You can cancel it at any time, and it ends at the end of the month you have already paid for. The site is yours: we hand you the files and the domain, and stop hosting and updating it.

Prices, payment and taxes

Prices are in US dollars and do not include IVU, Puerto Rico’s sales and use tax. IVU is added at the rate that applies to what you buy, and it appears on your invoice.

Websites: half when we sign the plan, and the balance when the site goes live.

Recepción, Promociones and the care plan are charged monthly, in advance, to the card you saved with us, on the same day each month. If your plan includes a free first month, nothing is charged until it ends.

Payments go through Stripe. We never see or store your card number; Stripe shows us the brand and the last four digits so we can tell you which card is on file.

If a charge fails we tell you and try again. If it still fails after ten days, we pause the service until it is paid. Your data stays where it is for the period the privacy policy gives.

Founding prices. If you were given a founding price, it holds for twelve months from your first paid month as long as your plan runs without a break. It is given in exchange for letting us name your business as a customer; if you would rather we did not, tell us and the list price applies.

Cancelling, and getting money back

You can cancel Recepción or the care plan at any time, with no notice period and no fee. What happens to the month you already paid for, and when we refund, is in the refund and cancellation policy. It is short and it is part of these terms.

Your data, and your callers’ data

What we collect, why, who else sees it and for how long is in the privacy policy, which is also part of these terms.

Two things belong here. Your callers’ recordings, transcripts and messages belong to your business; we hold them for you, and we delete them on the schedule in the privacy policy, or sooner when you ask.

Your callers have rights of their own. Anyone can ask to hear their recording, get a copy, or have it deleted. If they ask you, tell us and we do it; if they ask us, we do it and tell you.

What each of us is responsible for, and the limit

We each take responsibility for what we do. Neither of us is responsible to the other for indirect losses — a job you did not get, a customer who did not call back, time lost — even if we knew it could happen.

For everything else, the most either of us has to pay the other over a problem with the service is the amount you paid us in the three months before the problem.

This limit does not apply to money you owe us for the service, to harm done on purpose or through gross negligence, or to anything the law says cannot be limited.

This clause is written the same way for both of us on purpose, and we ask you to read it, because it is the one that matters if something goes wrong.

When Recepción is down

We aim to keep Recepción answering around the clock and we watch it. When it is down for more than eight hours in a month because of us, you get that month back, as a credit or a refund, at your choice — ask within thirty days. That is the remedy for downtime. Outages of the phone network, of your own line or of your internet are not ours to refund, but tell us anyway: we may be able to help.

Ending the agreement

You can end it at any time, from your account or by writing to us.

We can end it with thirty days’ notice, or immediately if you use the service to break the law, to harass people, or if you do not pay after we have told you.

When it ends, you get your data as the privacy policy describes, and we delete the rest.

Changing these terms

We will change these terms from time to time. We email you at least thirty days before a change takes effect and show the date at the top of this page.

If you do not agree with a change, you can cancel before it takes effect, and we refund anything you paid for time after that date.

Prices change the same way: with the same notice, never in the middle of a month you paid for, and never during a founding-price year.

The law, and where a dispute goes

These terms are governed by the laws of Puerto Rico. A dispute goes to the courts of San Juan, Puerto Rico, or to DACO if you have the right to go there. Talk to us first: most problems are a misunderstanding we can fix in a day.

This page exists in Spanish and in English. If the two ever say different things, the Spanish version controls.