Screening-grade input to a licensed professional's submission. Not legal advice, not a permit, not a jurisdictional determination. Read Section 4 carefully. It defines what Avow is and is not.
These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of Avow's website, packs, screening memos, and APIs (collectively, the "Service"). By purchasing a pack, requesting a screening memo, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.
Operating entity. The Service is operated by Avow LLC, a Massachusetts limited liability company. References to "Avow," "we," "us," or "our" in these Terms mean Avow LLC. If the operating name changes, these Terms will be updated to reflect it, with prospective effect only.
2. Definitions
"Customer": the entity or person purchasing the pack or memo, identified by the email at checkout.
"Pack": a bundle of federal environmental data layers, clipped to a Customer's AOI and delivered as GeoPackage, Shapefile, GeoJSON, KML, and Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF with embedded symbology (QML, LYRX, SLD), plus a per-layer citation manifest (CITATIONS.md / CITATIONS.json) and a machine-readable METADATA.json.
"Screening Memo": a preliminary regulatory analysis document (PDF) delivered with a pack as an add-on. Standard and Pro Screening Memos are generated deterministically from the AOI's federal layer data and the active regulatory corpus, with no LLM involvement. Expert Screening Memos add an AI synthesis layer (Anthropic Sonnet 4.5) on top of the same deterministic base; the AI contribution is disclosed in the memo header.
"AOI": the Area of Interest geometry that the Customer draws in the in-browser map at checkout.
"Licensed Professional": a Professional Engineer, Professional Geologist, Registered Professional Archaeologist, attorney admitted to practice in the relevant jurisdiction, certified planner (AICP), or other person licensed to render professional opinions on the subject matter.
3. Licensed-professional workflow
You acknowledge and agree that the Service is sold for use by, or under the direct supervision of, a Licensed Professional. Avow does not render professional engineering, geological, archaeological, planning, or legal opinions. The Customer (or its retained Licensed Professional) shall independently verify all Avow outputs before relying on them or transmitting them to any agency or third party.
4. What Avow is and is not
4.1 What Avow is
A delivery service for U.S. federal environmental data layers (public-domain data, repackaged with citations)
A preliminary regulatory screening service intended as technical input to a Licensed Professional's work product. Standard and Pro tiers are deterministic and reproducible (no LLM is invoked); the Expert tier adds an AI synthesis layer on top of the deterministic base, disclosed in the memo header.
A version-controlled regulatory corpus (the citation whitelist) against which screening memos are validated before delivery
4.2 What Avow is not
Avow is not a permit, jurisdictional determination, Categorical Exclusion, Environmental Assessment, Environmental Impact Statement, Section 7 consultation, Section 106 finding, EFH Assessment, NPDES Notice of Intent, CEQA Initial Study, Negative Declaration, Mitigated Negative Declaration, or any other agency-issued or agency-required document.
Avow is not "agency-ready," "permit-ready," "submission-ready," or "USACE-accepted." Any marketing or summary language to the contrary in any third-party description of the Service does not modify these Terms.
Avow is not legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is created.
Avow is not a substitute for a Phase I cultural survey, biological survey, jurisdictional wetland delineation, hazardous-materials assessment, or any other field-based investigation.
5. Customer responsibilities
Customer represents and warrants that:
Customer is, or is acting under the direction of, a Licensed Professional as defined in Section 2.
Customer will independently verify all Avow outputs before relying on them, citing them in any agency submission, or representing them to any third party.
Customer holds all rights necessary to submit the AOI geometry to Avow.
Customer will not transmit Avow outputs to any agency or third party without first satisfying the verification requirement above.
Customer will not use the Service to make findings that, in the applicable jurisdiction, must be made by a licensed engineer, geologist, archaeologist, planner, or attorney.
5A. Prohibited uses
Customer shall not, and shall not permit any third party to:
Represent any Avow output as an agency-issued document, a jurisdictional determination, a permit, a Categorical Exclusion, an Environmental Assessment, an Environmental Impact Statement, a Section 7 consultation, a Section 106 finding, or any other agency-required instrument, or as having been reviewed or approved by any federal, state, or tribal agency.
Use any Avow output, including the regulatory corpus, the citation whitelist, any pack data, or any screening memo, as training data, evaluation data, or fine-tuning data for any artificial-intelligence model, large language model, or machine-learning system.
Redistribute, sublicense, or commercially exploit the regulatory corpus, the citation whitelist, the symbology stack, or the Avow software outside the licensed-professional workflow described in Section 3.
Attempt to reverse-engineer, decompile, or extract the deterministic engine, the citation whitelist, or any proprietary Avow software.
Use the Service for any purpose prohibited by U.S. export-control law, including the Export Administration Regulations (15 C.F.R. Parts 730–774) and any embargo or sanctions program administered by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Use the Service for any project area in which the Customer does not have a lawful right to conduct environmental review.
Use the Service to harass, defame, or unlawfully discriminate against any person, or to interfere with any agency consultation or review process.
Violation of this Section is grounds for immediate termination under Section 13 without refund and may give rise to claims under Sections 10 and 11.
6. Data quality and federal API dependency
The Service ingests data from federal APIs and public-domain datasets (BLM, CDC, Census, EPA, FEMA, HUD, MRLC, NMFS, NOAA, NPS, USACE, USDA, USFWS, USGS, and others). Avow does not control these sources and does not warrant their currency, completeness, or accuracy.
For high-volume sources, Avow maintains a versioned local cache so a transient federal-endpoint outage does not block pack delivery; cache vintage is recorded in each pack's METADATA.json. For sources without a cache (typically smaller or naturally per-AOI in scope), Avow's pipeline retries with exponential backoff and consults a per-source fallback registry. If a layer still cannot be retrieved, the layer is flagged in the pack's METADATA.json with one of the documented per-layer status values (see Methodology Section 5).
7. Refund policy
Within seven (7) days of delivery, Avow will refund the full purchase price if:
A paid-for layer is missing for reasons other than a confirmed absence of data in the AOI (for example, USFWS reports no critical habitat in the AOI; that is a valid finding, not a missing layer); or
The pack was not delivered within sixty (60) minutes of payment confirmation.
For partial failures (one or more layers flagged as unavailable due to federal-endpoint downtime where Avow's cache, retry, and fallback all failed), Avow will, at Customer's election: (a) re-run the affected layer at no cost when the endpoint is restored; or (b) issue a pro-rata refund equal to that layer's share of the pack purchase price, calculated by Avow in good faith.
Avow does not refund findings that the Customer disagrees with. Accurate "no data" findings, low-risk screening outcomes, and any other deliverable that performs as described are not refundable.
7A. Subscription terms (Firm Plans)
Avow offers monthly subscription plans for firms that need recurring screening capacity: Firm Lite ($299 per month, 5 project credits per billing period; each credit covers one data pack plus an optional Standard Screening Memo add-on), Firm Standard ($999 per month, 20 project credits per billing period; each credit covers one data pack plus an optional Standard Screening Memo add-on), and Firm Pro ($1,999 per month, 20 project credits per billing period; each credit covers one data pack plus an optional Pro Screening Memo add-on). Subscriptions auto-renew each month at the price displayed at sign-up until canceled.
Account identity and team members. A Firm Plan subscription is keyed to the email address used at sign-up; that address is automatically designated the subscription owner. Avow does not maintain a password-based account system; identity is verified by single-use codes sent to the relevant email at the time of each privileged action. The owner may add up to nine (9) additional team-member email addresses to the subscription (for a total of ten authorized addresses), each of which may consume project credits at checkout subject to the same per-credit verification step. Orders from non-authorized email addresses are billed at the published per-project retail price. Enterprise customers requiring more than ten authorized addresses may request a seat-cap increase by emailing [email protected].
Owner responsibility for team members. By adding a team-member email address to a subscription, the owner represents that they have the authority to do so on behalf of their organization and that the added person is reasonably expected to consent to inclusion. Avow is not responsible for verifying internal authority or consent within the owner's organization. The owner remains the billing-responsible party for all project credits consumed by team members under the subscription.
Self-removal right. Any team member may request immediate removal from a Firm Plan subscription roster by emailing [email protected] from the affected email address. Self-removal requests are honored without owner approval and take effect within one business day. Self-removal does not refund any project credits previously consumed by the removed member.
Administrative audit log. Avow maintains a security audit log of administrative actions taken on Firm Plan subscriptions — sign-in code requests, successful sign-ins, team-member additions, team-member removals, and sign-outs (see Privacy Policy §2.4 for the data fields recorded). The log is append-only and retained while the subscription is active. Subscription owners may request a copy of the log, or its deletion, by writing to [email protected] from the owner email.
Quota-redemption authentication. When a subscriber places a project order that would be covered by the active subscription, Avow issues a single-use, time-limited (15 minute) numeric verification code to the subscription email. The code must be entered in the order window before the project is enqueued. This step exists to ensure that only the email's authorized holder can consume the subscription's quota. Codes are subject to a per-code attempt limit and a per-email hourly issuance limit; see the Privacy Policy §2.2 for retention details.
Cancellation. Customer may cancel at any time by emailing [email protected] from the account email. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period; no pro-rated refund is issued for the partial month in which cancellation occurs.
Quota and out-of-tier upgrades. The monthly project-credit quota does not roll over between billing periods. Projects beyond the quota in any billing period are not auto-billed as overage; they route to the published per-project retail price (data pack plus optional memo add-on), and the quota resets at the start of the next billing period. A subscriber who selects a memo add-on at a tier higher than their subscription includes (for example, a Firm Standard subscriber selecting a Pro memo add-on) consumes one project credit for the data pack and is charged the published memo add-on price at retail for the upgraded tier on that project only.
Price changes. Avow will give at least thirty (30) days' email notice before any price increase takes effect. The increase applies to the next renewal after the notice period; Customer may cancel without penalty before the increase takes effect.
Refund and SLA carve-outs. Subscription fees are not eligible for the per-pack refund mechanics in Section 7; the per-memo SLA (delivery within sixty (60) minutes; layer-availability commitments) still applies to each memo generated under the subscription.
8. Intellectual property
Federal data layers are works of the United States Government in the public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105). Customer may redistribute these layers freely, subject to the agency-attribution conventions documented in the METADATA.json file shipped with every pack.
The screening memo is licensed to Customer for use in Customer's professional work product, including reproduction or excerpting in NEPA documents, EAs, EISs, Initial Studies, Biological Assessments, and similar instruments. Customer must include the Avow attribution in any verbatim reproduction.
The regulatory corpus, citation whitelist, and Avow software remain the exclusive property of Avow. Customer is granted no license to redistribute, sublicense, reverse-engineer, or commercially exploit them.
9. Warranty disclaimer
EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY STATED IN THESE TERMS, THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE." AVOW DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE UNDERLYING FEDERAL DATA AND ANY REGULATORY INTERPRETATION DERIVED FROM IT. The underlying federal data is supplied by third-party government APIs that Avow does not control; the regulatory interpretation generated from that data is screening-grade input for a Licensed Professional's independent verification, not a regulatory determination.
What this disclaimer does not waive. Nothing in this Section reduces the affirmative commitments Avow makes elsewhere in these Terms, specifically: (i) the deterministic-by-construction generation of Standard and Pro Screening Memos (Section 12), (ii) post-generation validation of every CFR, U.S.C., Executive Order, and case citation against the active citation whitelist with rescinded-citation flagging (Section 12), (iii) the corpus-version hash stamped in every memo footer (Section 12), (iv) the refund mechanics in Section 7, and (v) the security-incident notification commitment in the Privacy Policy.
Beta features. From time to time Avow may designate specific features as "beta," "preview," "experimental," or similar. Beta features are provided strictly AS-IS and AS-AVAILABLE with no warranty of any kind, may be modified or discontinued without notice, and are excluded from the refund-policy commitments in Section 7. The aggregate-liability cap in Section 10 applies in full to beta features.
10. Limitation of liability
Maximum aggregate liability: Avow's total cumulative liability to Customer arising out of or related to the Service, regardless of theory (contract, tort, statute, or otherwise), shall not exceed the amount Customer actually paid Avow for the specific pack or memo giving rise to the claim. In no event shall Avow be liable for indirect, consequential, special, incidental, exemplary, or punitive damages, including lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost business opportunity, agency fines, permit delays, project delays, mitigation costs, or third-party claims, even if Avow has been advised of the possibility of such damages.
11. Indemnification
Customer shall defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Avow and its officers, employees, contractors, and successors from any claim, loss, damage, fine, or expense (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of: (a) Customer's use of Avow outputs without independent Licensed-Professional verification; (b) Customer's submission of Avow outputs to any agency or third party in violation of Section 5; (c) Customer's breach of these Terms; or (d) Customer's negligent or wilful conduct relating to the Service.
12. Screening memo generation: additional terms
Standard and Pro tiers (deterministic). Standard and Pro Screening Memos are generated deterministically from the AOI's federal layer data and Avow's versioned regulatory corpus. Given the same AOI, the same federal layer data, and the same corpus version, the engine produces byte-identical output every time. No large language model is invoked, and no AOI metadata is transmitted to any third-party AI provider for Standard or Pro generation. Every CFR, U.S.C., Executive Order, and case citation in a Standard or Pro memo is emitted from the active citation whitelist by construction; the deterministic engine cannot emit a citation outside the whitelist.
Expert tier (deterministic base + AI synthesis layer). Expert Screening Memos consist of the same deterministic base generated for Standard and Pro, with an AI synthesis layer applied on top using Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.5 model. The AI synthesis layer adds project-context narrative, executive-summary tailoring, and comparative framing. The AI contribution is disclosed in the memo header. Allow-listed AOI metadata is transmitted to Anthropic strictly for the purpose of generating the AI synthesis layer (see Privacy Policy §4 for sub-processor details). Avow validates every CFR, U.S.C., Executive Order, and case citation emitted by the AI synthesis layer against the citation whitelist post-generation; any citation not on the whitelist is replaced with [CITATION UNVERIFIED — REVIEW REQUIRED], and any citation to a rescinded authority (e.g., 40 C.F.R. §§ 1500–1508 after January 2026) is flagged for mandatory review.
The whitelist is versioned (currently v2026.05.2), and the SHA-256 hash of its contents at the time of memo generation is stamped into the memo footer. The public Currency Ledger at /trust/currency records every version's effective date and review log.
Customer acknowledges that any screening memo, deterministic or AI-augmented, may contain errors despite these guardrails. The Licensed-Professional verification requirement in Section 5 applies to every word of every memo.
AI-specific limitations (Expert tier). Customer further acknowledges that the AI synthesis layer in Expert Screening Memos may, despite the post-generation validation guardrails described above: (a) generate factual inaccuracies, omissions, or fabricated content; (b) misattribute citations to the wrong statute, regulation, or case; (c) produce inconsistent narrative output between runs even where the deterministic base is byte-identical; (d) fail entirely, in which case the Expert deliverable defaults to the deterministic base alone with the absence of the AI layer disclosed in the memo header. Customer agrees that Avow's post-generation citation validation, model selection, and tier-fallback mechanisms are commercially reasonable safeguards and do not constitute a warranty of AI-generated content accuracy. The licensed-professional verification requirement in Section 5 applies in full to AI-augmented content.
13. Termination
Either party may terminate the relationship at any time. Avow may refuse service or cancel pending orders for any lawful reason, with full refund of the affected order, except where termination is triggered by Customer's violation of Section 5A (prohibited uses), in which case Avow may terminate immediately and no refund is due. Sections 4, 5, 5A, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, and 15 survive termination.
14. Governing law and venue
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service shall be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and both parties consent to the personal jurisdiction and venue of those courts. Nothing in this Section waives any non-waivable consumer-protection right a Customer may have under the law of the Customer's home jurisdiction.
Class-action waiver. To the extent permitted by applicable law, both parties agree that any dispute will be resolved on an individual basis and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class or representative proceeding.
15. Miscellaneous
Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy constitute the entire agreement between Customer and Avow regarding the Service.
No waiver. Avow's failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of that provision.
Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in effect.
Assignment. Customer may not assign these Terms without Avow's written consent. Avow may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of substantially all of its assets.
Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay or failure in performance to the extent caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including: federal API outages or rate-limit changes; cloud-provider outages affecting any sub-processor disclosed in the Privacy Policy; cyber attacks not caused by the party's negligence; acts of God; pandemic; war or terrorism; government action including new statutes, regulations, or executive orders that materially affect the legality of the Service; and labor disputes not arising from the party's own employment practices. The affected party shall notify the other within five (5) business days of the event and use commercially reasonable efforts to resume performance. If the event continues for more than thirty (30) days, either party may terminate the affected order with refund of any unfilled portion.
Changes. Material changes to these Terms will be announced by email to active customers and posted here at least 30 days before they take effect. The version number at the top of this page is updated each time.