Terms of Service

Welcome to Shepherd. These Terms of Service govern your use of Shepherd — a church health intelligence platform built to help pastors care for their ministry leaders. By creating an account or using Shepherd in any way, you agree to these terms.

1. Who Can Use Shepherd

Shepherd is built for churches, pastors, and their ministry teams. To use Shepherd you must:

• Be 18 years of age or older
• Have the authority to create an account on behalf of your church
• Use Shepherd only for its intended purpose — pastoral care and ministry health

2. Accounts and Responsibilities

Pastors who create a church account are responsible for:

• All users they invite to their church on Shepherd
• Ensuring invited users are aware they are joining a church health platform
• Keeping their login credentials secure
• Any activity that occurs under their church account

Ministry leads and Shepherd Stewards are responsible for:

• Keeping their own login credentials secure
• Using Shepherd honestly and in good faith

3. Acceptable Use

Shepherd is a care tool — not a surveillance system. You agree not to use Shepherd to:

• Monitor or surveil ministry leaders without their knowledge or consent
• Share another person’s check-in responses without their explicit consent
• Attempt to access data belonging to another church
• Use check-in data to make employment or disciplinary decisions
• Harass, shame, or penalize ministry leaders based on their check-in responses
• Reverse engineer, copy, or redistribute any part of the Shepherd platform
• Use the platform for any purpose other than genuine pastoral care

Shepherd is built on trust. Any use of this platform that violates the dignity or privacy of ministry leaders is a violation of these terms.

4. Subscriptions and Billing

Free Trial:

Shepherd offers a 30-day free trial. No credit card is required to start your trial.

Paid Plans:

After your trial ends a paid subscription is required to continue using Shepherd. Current pricing is available at shepherd-church.com/pricing.

Billing:

Billing is handled securely by Polar. Shepherd does not store your payment card details. Subscriptions renew automatically on your billing cycle.

Cancellation:

You may cancel your subscription at any time from your Settings page. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We do not offer refunds for partial billing periods.

5. Your Data

You own your data. Check-in responses, ministry health data, and church information belong to your church — not to Shepherd.

How we handle your data is described in full in our Privacy Policy.

Upon account cancellation you may request permanent deletion of all your church data by contacting hello@shepherd-church.com. All data will be permanently deleted within 30 days of your request.

6. Intellectual Property

Shepherd — including its design, code, branding, and content — is owned by Shepherd. You may not copy, modify, reverse engineer, or redistribute any part of the platform.

Your church retains full ownership of all data your team submits through Shepherd.

7. Important Disclaimers

Shepherd is a pastoral care tool — not a licensed mental health, counseling, or crisis intervention service.

Shepherd does not guarantee the prevention of ministry leader burnout, departure, or moral failure. The platform is designed to create visibility and open conversations — what pastors and churches do with that information is entirely their own responsibility.

Pastors and churches are solely responsible for how they respond to check-in data and any pastoral decisions made as a result.

Shepherd is provided as-is. We work hard to keep it reliable and secure but we do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free service.

8. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law Shepherd is not liable for:

• Decisions made by pastors or churches based on check-in data
• Any indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from your use of the platform
• Any loss of data resulting from account cancellation or termination

Our maximum liability to you is limited to the amount you paid for Shepherd in the 3 months preceding any claim.

9. Termination

You may cancel your account at any time from your Settings page.

Shepherd reserves the right to suspend or terminate accounts that:

• Violate these terms
• Use the platform to harm or surveil ministry leaders
• Engage in fraudulent or abusive behavior

Upon termination your access to the platform ends immediately. Your data will be retained for 30 days and then permanently deleted unless you request earlier deletion.

10. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms of Service as Shepherd evolves. If we make material changes we will notify church administrators by email before those changes take effect. Continued use of Shepherd after notification constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.

11. Governing Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas. Any disputes arising from your use of Shepherd will be resolved in the courts of Texas.

12. Contact

Questions about these terms? Reach us at hello@shepherd-church.com. We are a small team that genuinely cares about the trust you place in us.