Terms of Service

These terms govern your use of Lede, a tool for finding journalists and sending them pitches. By creating an account you agree to them. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you confirm you have the authority to bind it.

Your account

You need an account to use Lede, and you are responsible for what happens under it. Keep your credentials to yourself, tell us promptly if you think someone else has them, and give us accurate information when you sign up. You must be at least 16 and legally able to enter into a contract.

What Lede does, and what it does not

Lede helps you research journalists, drafts pitches for you, and sends the ones you approve from a mailbox you connect. It does not guarantee that any journalist will read, reply to, or write about your pitch. Journalist information is compiled from public sources and may be incomplete or out of date; you are responsible for checking anything that matters before you rely on it.

Sending email

This is the part that carries real consequences, so it is worth being plain about. When you connect a mailbox, Lede sends from your address, under your name, with your reputation attached. Every message goes out only after you have reviewed it and pressed send.

You agree that you will pitch only where there is a genuine professional reason to, that you will honour any request to stop contacting someone, and that you will comply with the laws on commercial and unsolicited email that apply to you and to your recipients — including CAN-SPAM in the United States, PECR and UK GDPR in the United Kingdom, the ePrivacy Directive and GDPR in the European Union, and CASL in Canada. You will not use Lede to send bulk unsolicited advertising, anything misleading about who you are, or anything unlawful, harassing, or defamatory. We may suspend an account that we reasonably believe is being used this way, and we will generally tell you why.

AI-generated content

Pitch drafts, subject lines, and reply classifications are produced by AI models and can be wrong, generic, or subtly inaccurate about facts. Treat every draft as a first draft. You own what you send, and you are responsible for its accuracy — including any claim about your product, your funding, your customers, or anyone else.

Your content

Everything you put into Lede stays yours. You grant us only the licence we need to run the service: to store your content, process it, generate drafts from it, and transmit the messages you ask us to send. We do not use your campaign content or your correspondence to train third-party AI models. We may use aggregated, de-identified statistics — how often pitches in a category get replies, for instance — to improve how Lede ranks suggestions.

Our content

The software, interface, and the compiled journalist database are ours. You may use them to run your own outreach. You may not resell access, scrape or bulk-export the journalist database, redistribute it, or use Lede to build a competing dataset.

Third-party services

Lede connects to services you already use, principally Google and Microsoft mailboxes, and depends on providers listed in our Privacy Policy. Your use of those services remains governed by their own terms, and we are not responsible for their availability or their decisions. If a provider changes or withdraws access, parts of Lede may stop working.

Fees

Lede is in early access. Where a plan carries a fee, the price, billing period, and what is included are shown before you subscribe; fees are billed in advance and are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise. We will give at least thirty days’ notice by email before changing the price of a plan you are on, and you can cancel before it takes effect.

Availability

Lede is early-access software provided as it is, without any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that email will always be delivered. We may change or discontinue features; if we discontinue the service altogether we will give you reasonable notice and an opportunity to export your data.

Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost coverage, lost business, or damage to reputation. Our total liability for any claim relating to Lede is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or one hundred US dollars, whichever is greater. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against claims arising from the messages you send through Lede, from your breach of these terms, or from your violation of anyone else’s rights.

Ending the agreement

You can stop using Lede and delete your account at any time by writing to support@trylede.co. We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, or that we are required to close by law. On closure we delete your data as described in the Privacy Policy. The sections on your content, our content, liability, and indemnity survive.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects your rights we will email account holders and update the date at the top of this page before it takes effect. Continuing to use Lede after that means you accept the new terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the jurisdiction in which Lede’s operating entity is established, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and the courts of that jurisdiction have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute. Where mandatory consumer protection law in your own country of residence gives you the right to bring proceedings there, this clause does not take that right away.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to support@trylede.co.