Privacy and terms

Not yet reviewed by a lawyer. Everything below is an accurate description of what this software does, written from the code. It is not a substitute for a policy a solicitor has checked, and it should be reviewed before this site takes money from the public.

What we collect

Your email address: Held so an account can exist, so we can send a password reset, and so we can tell you once if you asked to be told when we read a particular brand’s filing. Stored lower-cased. Never sold, never shared, and not used for marketing — there is still no mailing list, and nothing we send is a broadcast.
Brands you asked to be told about: Some brands have no disclosure document here yet. You can ask to be told when we read one, which records the brand and the date you asked, against your account. It sends exactly one email, to you, about that one brand — and then the request is finished. You can remove it at any time from the brand’s page, and deleting your account removes it with everything else.
Your password: Stored only as an Argon2id hash. We cannot read it, and neither can anyone who obtains the database. If you sign in with Google, no password is stored at all.
A session cookie: One cookie, frx_session, holding a random token — HttpOnly, so page scripts cannot read it. It is how the site knows you are signed in. There are no analytics, advertising or third-party tracking cookies on this site.
Documents you upload: A disclosure document you upload is private to your account. It is not added to the public catalogue, not shown to other users, and deleting it removes the file.
Server logs: Like every web server, ours records each request: the time, the page, the response, your browser’s user-agent string, the page you arrived from, and the IP address the request came from. These are kept for thirty days and then deleted. They are used to see whether the site is working and roughly where its readers are; they are never joined to your account, never used to build a profile, and never sent anywhere else.
Which reports you have opened: Necessarily — an unlock is permanent, so we have to remember it. This list is only ever returned to the account that owns it.

What we do not collect

No card details ever reach this server. Payment is handled by Stripe on a page Stripe hosts; we receive a session identifier and an event identifier, and your email address so Stripe can send the receipt.

No analytics service, no advertising network, no session recording, no fingerprinting. Nothing on this site reports your behaviour to a third party.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from your filings page at any time. That removes your uploaded documents. Purchase records are kept, because they are financial records we are obliged to retain.

What you are buying

One payment opens every brand we have read, for one year from the date of purchase. Access then lapses. It is not a subscription: no card is stored, nothing renews automatically, and there is nothing to cancel.

Refunds. If you bought by mistake, write to us within three days and we refund it in full without asking why. Opening the brand you bought is using it, and ends the refund. On a multi-brand or all-access purchase the bound is two brands rather than one. Past it you have read a meaningful part of what you bought, and a refund would be a way of reading the catalogue for nothing. Judging the work itself costs nothing and needs no purchase: the free sample is a complete report.

What this is not

This is not legal, financial or investment advice, and we are not your attorney or your adviser. Figures are read out of documents franchisors file with state regulators and out of the SBA’s published loan performance data. They are reproduced as filed and are not audited by us — a franchisor that files an optimistic figure produces an optimistic figure here.

We are not a franchise broker. No franchisor pays us, and none can pay to appear, to rank higher, or to have a figure removed. How the reading works.

How accurate this is, and what to do about an error

A machine does the reading. Each filing is parsed by a language model instructed to copy figures and never to compute them, and every figure on this site links to the page of the document it was taken from. That link is the check we can offer: not our word for it, but the source.

The reading carries no error rate measured at any useful scale. A small set of filings has been checked line by line by a person and the extractor scored against them, and the FAQ publishes both that score and the number of filings behind it. It is a pilot, not a measurement: the sample is a fraction of one per cent of the corpus, it was not drawn at random, and no confidence interval can honestly be put around it. Treat every figure here as a pointer into the filing, not a substitute for reading it, and see what has been checked.

Telling us about an error. Every figure on a brand page carries a report link that opens a message already naming the brand and the field, so nothing has to be described from memory. We answer within two working days, and where a figure is wrong we correct it and say so on the page it appeared on. Where a filing genuinely states a figure more than one way we mark it contested rather than pick a side.

Read the current disclosure document before you sign anything. A filing describes the year it was filed, franchisors change their fees, and the document a franchisor hands you supersedes everything on this site.

Reporting an error. If a figure here misstates what a filing says — whether you are a prospective buyer or the franchisor it concerns — tell us. We will check it against the source document and correct or withdraw it, and we would rather hear about it than not. support@franchiserecord.com

What we do and do not warrant

This site is provided as it is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranty — express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement — that the figures here are accurate, complete, current, or fit for any decision you make with them.

The reason is not evasion. Figures are reproduced as franchisors filed them and are not audited by us; a filing describes the year it was filed; the SBA withholds the outcome on a large share of loans; and the reading is done by a machine. Every figure links to the page it came from so you can check it, and that link is the assurance we can honestly offer in place of a warranty.

None of this reduces what we undertake to do about an error. Tell us a figure misstates its source and we check it against the document and correct or withdraw it, as set out above. Nor does it exclude anything that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Limits of what we are liable for

Deciding to buy a franchise is your decision and your risk. This site is a reading of public records, offered as a starting point for your own diligence, and nothing on it is a recommendation to buy or to avoid any franchise.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss — including lost profits, lost savings, or loss arising from a franchise you did or did not buy — and our total liability to you for any claim connected with this site is limited to what you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and none of it displaces the rights the FTC Franchise Rule and state franchise laws give you against a franchisor.

Brand names

Franchise brand names and marks belong to their owners. They are used here to identify the filings and loan records they refer to, which is the only way to report on a public filing. No franchisor endorses, sponsors or is affiliated with this site.

How you may use this site

Read it, quote it, and use what you find to make your own decision or to advise someone making theirs. Search engines are welcome to crawl and index it; that is how most readers arrive.

What is not permitted is collecting the site wholesale. Do not use automated means to copy the catalogue or a substantial part of it, and do not republish, redistribute or resell what we have written — the readings of each filing, the flags, the comparisons and the models — whether as a dataset, a product, or training material.

That restriction covers our work, not the public record underneath it. The SBA’s loan file is a federal dataset and the disclosure documents are state filings; both are public, both are available to anyone from the source, and we claim nothing over them. What we ask you not to take is the reading of them, which is the part we did.

Using the site means accepting this. If you want the data in bulk for a purpose this does not allow, write to us and ask — the answer may well be yes, and it costs you nothing to find out.

Copyright, and how to report an infringement

The figures on this site are read from documents franchisors file with state regulators and from the SBA’s published loan data. Facts are not copyrightable, and each figure links to the registry’s own copy of the document rather than to a copy held here. We do not republish any franchisor’s disclosure document.

Account holders may upload a filing of their own to be read. Those uploads are private to the person who made them: they are never shown to another reader, never joined to the public catalogue, and are deleted with the account.

If you own a copyright and believe material here infringes it, write to our designated agent with: your signature, physical or electronic; identification of the work; the URL of the material you want removed; your address, telephone number and email; a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised by the owner, its agent, or the law; and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act for them.

We remove or disable material expeditiously on a compliant notice and tell whoever uploaded it. They may send a counter-notice, and if they do we may restore the material after ten business days unless you tell us you have filed an action to restrain them.

Repeat infringers. We terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of anyone who repeatedly uploads infringing material. A terminated account keeps no access and is not refunded for the remainder of its year.

Designated agent: Franchise Record LLC, support@franchiserecord.com. A postal address for notices is available on request.

Governing law

This site is operated by Franchise Record LLC, a limited liability company formed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States.

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of this site, are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. You and we agree that the state and federal courts sitting in Middlesex County, Massachusetts have exclusive jurisdiction over any such dispute, and each of us consents to venue there.

Nothing in this section removes a right you have under the law of the place you live that cannot be removed by agreement, and nothing in it displaces the rights the FTC Franchise Rule and state franchise laws give you against a franchisor.

Contact

Questions about any of this, or a request to see or delete what we hold: support@franchiserecord.com.