Plotstead is made in New Zealand by James Sumner, trading as Sumner Software Development and as SumnerD, NZBN 9429052362651. In these terms, "we" and "us" means that business, and "you" means whoever is using the app or this site. By making an account or using Plotstead, you agree to what is below. It is worth a read, because a couple of the sections are about things that can hurt somebody, and those are the ones we would most like you to have seen.
How we handle your information is a separate document, the privacy policy, and it forms part of these terms.
Who can use it
You need to be at least 16. If you are under 18, have a parent or guardian agree to these terms before you pay for anything. One account belongs to one person: don't hand your password to somebody else. If you want another person on a property, invite them properly, which is what delegate access is for and what keeps the record of who changed what honest.
Keep your password to yourself and tell us at support@sumnerd.co.nz if you think somebody else has got into your account. What happens under your sign-in is treated as you until you tell us otherwise.
What Plotstead is not
This is the important section. Plotstead is a record keeping app. It stores what you tell it and reminds you of what you asked to be reminded of. It is not a professional service and it is not an authority on anything.
It is not a locate service. Do not dig from it.
A line you drew on the map is a note about roughly where you believe something runs. It is not a located service, it is not to scale, and it cannot tell you what has been buried, moved or added since. Absence of a line on your map is not evidence that nothing is buried there.
Before any excavation, get the services located properly. In New Zealand that starts free at beforeudig.co.nz, and for anything near live electricity or gas you want the asset owner or a qualified locator on site. Striking a buried cable or a gas line kills people. Plotstead is not a substitute for that process and must never be used as one. There is a fuller explanation of why, and of how far each part of the map can be out, on how accurate is the map.
It is not a survey
Property boundaries imported from LINZ parcel data are indicative. They come from the cadastral record, which is a legal description rather than a surveyed line on the ground, and the two are routinely metres apart. Do not use a Plotstead boundary to place a fence, settle a dispute with a neighbour, work out a setback, or decide where your land ends. That is a licensed cadastral surveyor's job, and how accurate is the map sets out what the line actually is and where it comes from.
It is not compliance advice
We build in New Zealand renewal rules because they are useful, and we keep them current as best we can. The rules still change, sometimes at short notice, and the obligation stays yours. A warrant of fitness, a registration, a smoke alarm, a septic pump out or a Healthy Homes requirement is between you and the relevant authority, not between you and us. Check anything that matters against the source, and there are links throughout the help to the authority for each.
It is not tax or financial advice
Plotstead records what you spent, what you earned and what you told it about how each thing is used. It does not decide what is deductible, and it does not tell Inland Revenue anything. Whether a cost can be claimed is a question for your accountant and the answer is your responsibility. The reports exist so that the person doing your return has the facts in front of them, not so that the return writes itself.
Reminders are a convenience, not a guarantee
A notification has to survive your phone's battery saving, your notification settings, an operating system update, a flat battery and a phone left in a drawer. We deliberately do not ask Android for permission to wake your phone to the minute, because a renewal due sometime on the 14th does not need it and the permission is reserved for alarm apps. So a reminder can arrive late, or not at all, for reasons at your end that we cannot see.
Do not make Plotstead the only thing standing between you and an expiry that costs money or breaks the law. It is a very good second pair of eyes and that is what it is for.
Who put it there
Plotstead records positions. It does not find them. Every pin, line and area on your map is one you or somebody you invited placed, from where you were standing or from what you could make out on the photo, and its accuracy is the accuracy of that act. If something is in the wrong place, it is in the wrong place because that is where it was drawn, and putting it right is yours to do. We have no way of knowing where your pipe actually runs.
Two things on that map are ours rather than yours, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The property boundary is imported from LINZ parcel data when you type in an address, and the aerial photo underneath it comes from LINZ as well. Vehicle details, if you use a plate lookup, come from CarJam. We show you what those sources give us. We do not survey, verify or correct any of it, and each one is indicative rather than exact, for the reasons set out on how accurate is the map.
So by using the mapping features you accept that the map is a working record and not a survey, that positions in it can be out by metres, and that this is normal and described in advance rather than a fault. Decisions with real consequences, where to dig, where to build, where a boundary runs, need the proper source checked and the proper professional engaged. We set all of this out plainly on how accurate is the map, and show it to you in the app before you start mapping.
Your records are yours
You keep ownership of everything you put in: your properties, assets, photos, documents, notes and financial entries. You give us permission to store it, back it up, move it between your devices and our servers, and show it to the people you have invited or shared it with. That permission exists so the app can work, it goes no further than that, and it ends when you delete the material or close your account.
We do not sell your records, we do not hand them to advertisers, and we do not use them to train machine learning models. Export is built into every plan including the free one, so you can take a copy out whenever you want.
Plotstead itself, the app, this site, the name and the artwork, stays ours.
Using it responsibly
Don't use Plotstead to break the law, and don't use it to store information about other people that you have no right to hold. Your contacts list is a good example: the tradespeople and neighbours in it are real people with rights under the Privacy Act 2020, and while you hold their details you are the one responsible for them.
Don't try to get at other people's data, work around the sharing rules, or pull the service apart. Automated or scripted access is not on. We apply sensible limits, including a ceiling on how many assets one property can hold, to keep the service standing up for everybody. If you hit a limit and you are a real person with a real property, write to us and we will sort it out.
Don't resell Plotstead, rent it out, or present it as your own product.
Sharing, and what it means
A share link is view only, expires, and can be revoked from your settings at any time. It still needs thinking about. Anyone holding the link can open it without signing in, so treat it like a key: send it to the person who needs it, give it the narrowest scope that does the job, and revoke it when the job is done.
Be aware of what a whole property share actually contains. A map of your buildings, your gear and what it is worth is a useful brief for a contractor and would be just as useful to somebody with worse intentions. Anyone you share with can also screenshot, copy or forward what they see, and no software can prevent that. What you choose to share, and who you share it with, is your call and your responsibility.
The same goes for inviting somebody onto a property. An editor can change and delete your records. Invite people you would trust with the filing cabinet.
Plans and payment
Plotstead has a free plan and a paid one, Plotstead Plus. What each includes, and the limits on properties, people, storage, share links and reports, are published on the home page and shown again before you pay.
Plus is billed yearly or monthly through Stripe, in New Zealand dollars, and renews automatically until you cancel. The price you are shown at checkout is the price you pay. You can cancel any time from your account settings, and cancelling stops the next payment rather than refunding the period you are already in, so you keep Plus until the date you have paid up to.
If we ever change the price, we will tell you before it applies to you, and it will only ever take effect at a renewal, never mid term. Promotional codes do what they say at the time you use them and are not retrospective.
Refunds beyond that are at our discretion, and separate from anything you are entitled to under the Consumer Guarantees Act. If Plus did not do what we said it would, write to us and say so.
If a subscription ends
Nothing is deleted and nothing is locked away. If Plus lapses or you downgrade, you keep full access to one property, and any extra properties and shared access become read only. Export keeps working on every plan, including after a lapse, because a promise that your data is not held hostage means nothing if it expires with the subscription.
Availability, and the state it is in
Plotstead is early. It is being actively developed, features change, and things occasionally break. We will look after your records carefully, but we do not promise the service will be uninterrupted or fault free, and we may change, suspend or retire features. If we ever have to shut something down that holds your data, we will give you notice and time to export first.
Keep your own copies of anything you could not stand to lose. Backing up a property is in Settings, it takes about a minute, and it is on every plan.
Backups, ours and yours
We take our own backups, and they are global and incremental: the database is snapshotted continuously and can be rolled back, which is how the service survives a bad day at our end. They are not a per-customer service. We cannot restore one property, or one asset, or last Tuesday's version of your records, and rolling anything back would roll back everybody.
Photos and documents are protected differently and less. When you delete one we hold it for thirty days before it is destroyed, so an accidental deletion can be undone by asking us inside that window. Beyond that there is no earlier version of a file to go back to.
So the copy you take yourself is the only copy of your property that exists outside our systems, and it is the only one that can put a single property back. We recommend taking one before anything major: before deleting things in bulk, before handing a property to somebody else, and before you stop using Plotstead. It downloads to your own computer and we never see it.
Information that comes from somewhere else
Some of what you see in Plotstead is supplied by other organisations. Aerial imagery and property boundaries come from Land Information New Zealand under a Creative Commons licence, satellite imagery from Microsoft Azure Maps, and vehicle details from CarJam, which sources them from the NZTA record. We pass on what they give us. We do not verify it, we cannot correct it, and if it is wrong the correction has to happen at the source.
Ending it
You can close your account whenever you like, from within the app. The privacy policy sets out exactly what happens to each of your properties when you do, and the app shows you which case applies to each one before you confirm.
We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, is being used to harm somebody, or is putting the service at risk. Except where the situation is serious enough that we have to act immediately, we will tell you what the problem is, give you a fair chance to put it right, and let you export your records before anything goes.
Responsibility, and the limits on ours
Nothing in these terms takes away rights you have under the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993, the Fair Trading Act 1986, or any other law that cannot be contracted out of. If you are a consumer, those rights stand no matter what any of the rest of this says.
If you are using Plotstead for the purposes of a business, you and we agree that the Consumer Guarantees Act does not apply, and that this is fair and reasonable given what the app costs and what it does.
Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows it, our total liability to you for anything connected with Plotstead is limited to the greater of what you paid us in the twelve months before the problem arose, or one hundred New Zealand dollars. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, lost income or lost time.
In particular, and because these are the ones worth being unambiguous about, we are not responsible for what you dig into, for a renewal you missed, for a position taken on a tax return, for where you put a fence, or for what somebody does with information after you shared it with them. Those decisions are yours, and the sections above explain why the app is not in a position to make them for you.
If you use Plotstead in a way these terms don't allow, and that causes a claim against us, we may ask you to cover it.
Changes to these terms
We will update this page when things change, and the date at the top changes with it. If a change materially affects you, we will tell you in the app or by email rather than quietly editing the page. Carrying on using Plotstead after a change means you accept it. If you don't, close your account, and export your records on the way out.
Which law applies
These terms are governed by New Zealand law, and the New Zealand courts deal with any dispute. If any part of this document turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of it still stands.
Before it gets that far, write to us. Almost everything is fixable by email.
Getting in touch
hello@sumnerd.co.nz, or the contact page. For anything to do with your account or a problem in the app, support@sumnerd.co.nz.
Plotstead is made in New Zealand by James Sumner, trading as Sumner Software Development and as SumnerD. NZBN 9429052362651.