PitlaneHQ
LEGAL · TERMS

Terms of service.

Last updated: 24 August 2026

Notice of change to these Terms. The 24 August 2026 update corrects how section 6 describes the optional pooling of repair and inspection records into our platform intelligence, so that it matches how the Service already operates, and narrows the deletion wording in section 6 to match section 9 of the Privacy Policy. Under section 13 these changes apply to new customers on publication and take effect for existing customers on 1 October 2026. In the meantime you may cancel before that date, and you can stop your workshop's records being pooled at any time — including today, ahead of the effective date — from Settings → Ask the Boss. The Privacy Policy describes how the Service operates now and is not subject to this notice period.

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of the PitlaneHQ workshop management software and related services (the "Service") provided by Surau Engineering Pty Ltd (ABN 51 696 483 468), trading as “Pitlane HQ” ("PitlaneHQ", "we", "us", or "our"). By accessing or using the Service, you agree to be bound by these Terms.

1. Acceptance of Terms

By creating an account or using the Service, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms and the other documents listed in section 16, which together form your agreement with us — our Privacy Policy, the Data Processing Addendum and the Acceptable Use Policy in particular. If you are using the Service on behalf of a business or organisation, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity.

This clause used to name only these Terms and the Privacy Policy, which sat awkwardly with section 16 listing a wider set. Section 16 is the definitive list and sets the order of precedence.

2. Account Registration and Security

To use the Service, you must:

  • Provide accurate, complete, and current registration information
  • Maintain the security of your account credentials (email and password)
  • Promptly notify us of any unauthorised access to your account
  • Accept responsibility for all activity that occurs under your account

You may invite additional users to your workshop account with various roles and permission levels. You are responsible for the actions of all users you invite.

3. Subscription and Billing

Pricing

The Service operates on a modular subscription model, billed monthly in Australian Dollars (AUD). The base plan and optional add-on modules are priced as listed on our Pricing page. Prices may change with 30 days' notice.

Billing

  • Subscriptions are billed monthly via Stripe. By subscribing, you authorise us to charge your payment method on a recurring basis.
  • When you enable an add-on module mid-cycle, you will be charged a prorated amount for the remainder of the current billing period.
  • When you disable a module, we do not issue a pro-rata credit for the remainder of the billing period you have already paid for. The module remains accessible until the end of that period, then stops renewing. This does not affect any right to a remedy you have under the Australian Consumer Law — see “Your consumer rights” below.
  • Failed payments will be retried automatically by Stripe. If payment is not collected after retries, your subscription may be suspended.

Cancellation

You may cancel your subscription at any time through the Subscription settings page or via the Stripe Customer Portal. Upon cancellation:

  • Your access continues until the end of the current billing period
  • We do not refund the unused remainder of a billing period you have already paid for, because your access continues until it ends. This does not affect your rights under the Australian Consumer Law — see “Your consumer rights” below.
  • Your data is retained for a reasonable period to allow reactivation (see Data Retention in our Privacy Policy)

3A. PitlanePay Payment Processing

PitlanePay is not yet available. It is not enabled for any workshop, and no live payments can be taken through it today. This section sets out the terms that will apply when PitlanePay is made available and enabled for your workshop, and it takes effect for you only from that point.

PitlanePay is an optional feature that will let your workshop accept card and electronic payments from your own customers (for example, invoice payment links, point-of-sale transactions, and booking deposits). PitlanePay is separate from your PitlaneHQ subscription described in section 3 above: section 3 concerns the fees you pay us for the Service, whereas PitlanePay concerns payments your customers make to you.

PitlanePay payment processing will be provided by Global Payments. In Australia, merchant onboarding and the identity, Know Your Customer (KYC), and compliance checks required to enable PitlanePay will be carried out by Ezidebit (a Global Payments company). To use PitlanePay you must complete a merchant application and be approved by the payment provider before you can accept live payments.

Your use of PitlanePay is subject to the payment provider's own merchant terms, in addition to these Terms. Approval, decline, suspension, and the holding, settlement, or release of funds are determined by the payment provider and the applicable card scheme rules, not by PitlaneHQ. We facilitate access to PitlanePay within the Service but are not the card issuer or acquirer, do not hold your settlement funds, and are not responsible for the payment provider's decisions, availability, or performance. Per-transaction fees apply to payments processed through PitlanePay; those fees are set by the payment provider and form part of your merchant agreement with it.

4. Free Trial

We offer a 14-day free trial of the Service. During the trial period:

  • No credit card is required to start a trial
  • You have full access to all features included in the base plan
  • At the end of the trial period, you must subscribe to a paid plan to continue using the Service
  • If you do not subscribe, your account will be placed in a limited state. Your data is preserved and accessible if you subscribe later.

4A. Your consumer rights

Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. Nothing in these Terms — including anything we say about refunds, availability, liability, or indemnities — limits or excludes those guarantees, and nothing here should be read as telling you that you have no right to a remedy.

In plain terms: if we fail to supply the Service with due care and skill, or it is not reasonably fit for the purpose we described, you are entitled to a remedy. For a major failure you may cancel and seek a refund of the amount that fairly reflects what you did not receive, or compensation for reasonably foreseeable loss. For a failure that is not major, we are entitled to a reasonable opportunity to fix the problem first.

If you think something has gone wrong, contact us at hello@pitlanehq.com.au before anything else — almost everything is resolvable that way, and we would rather fix it than argue about it.

5. Acceptable Use

You agree not to use the Service to:

  • Violate any applicable law, regulation, or third-party rights
  • Store, transmit, or distribute malicious code, viruses, or harmful content
  • Attempt to gain unauthorised access to the Service, other accounts, or related systems
  • Use the Service for any purpose other than managing your workshop business operations
  • Send unsolicited bulk messages (spam) via the SMS or email features
  • Scrape, crawl, or use automated means to access the Service beyond documented APIs
  • Resell, sublicense, or redistribute the Service without our written permission

The full rules, including your obligations when sending SMS or email through the Service under the Spam Act 2003 (Cth) and ACMA rules, are set out in our Acceptable Use Policy, which forms part of these Terms. Where this section and that policy both address the same conduct, the stricter obligation applies.

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate accounts that violate these terms.

6. Data Ownership

Your data belongs to you. All workshop operational data you enter into the Service (customers, vehicles, jobs, invoices, quotes, stock, employee records, messages, and uploaded files) remains your property.

  • You may export your data at any time using the Service's CSV export features
  • We will not access, use, or share your workshop data except as necessary to provide the Service and as described in our Privacy Policy
  • We never use your data for advertising, and we never sell it or share it with data brokers
  • We never use your data to train AI models served to other customers. If your workshop enables Ask the Boss by accepting its terms, repair and inspection records from your completed jobs — with the customer details we hold removed, and prices we can detect stripped from the text — are pooled into our platform intelligence and combined into cross-network statistics, unless you tick the contribution opt-out offered on the same consent screen. This pooling is described in section 4 of our Privacy Policy, and you can opt out at any time from Settings → Ask the Boss. If you have not enabled Ask the Boss, or you have opted out, your completed-job records are not pooled at all.
  • Upon account termination, we will retain your data for a reasonable period and then delete it from the live Service, keeping only what section 9 of our Privacy Policy describes — records the law requires us to keep, backups until they cycle out, and one deletion snapshot, held so a deletion made in error can be reversed and destroyed 90 days after the deletion
  • Cross-network statistics we derive from pooled repair records remain PitlaneHQ's property. They store no customer or workshop identifier, and a group is only published once at least five contributing jobs sit behind it, but they are derived from your contributions and they are not deleted on termination. The pooled repair records your workshop contributed are deleted with the rest of your data; pooled inspection records keep no reference back to your workshop, so they cannot be located or deleted for one and they remain in the pool.

7. Intellectual Property

The Service, including its design, code, features, documentation, and branding, is owned by PitlaneHQ and protected by intellectual property laws. Your subscription grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the Service for your workshop business during the subscription term.

You retain all intellectual property rights in the data and content you create using the Service.

8. Service Availability

We strive to maintain high availability of the Service but do not guarantee uninterrupted access. The Service may be temporarily unavailable due to:

  • Scheduled maintenance (with reasonable advance notice)
  • Unplanned outages caused by infrastructure issues, security incidents, or force majeure events
  • Third-party service disruptions (Stripe, Twilio, etc.)

We do not offer a formal Service Level Agreement (SLA) at this time. We will make commercially reasonable efforts to resolve outages promptly and communicate status updates.

9. Third-Party Integrations

The Service integrates with third-party services including Stripe, Twilio, Xero, QuickBooks, Global Payments (Ezidebit) for PitlanePay (see section 3A), and others. Your use of these integrations is subject to the respective third party's terms of service and privacy policy. We are not responsible for the availability, accuracy, or performance of third-party services.

10. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by Australian law, PitlaneHQ's total liability to you for any claims arising from or related to the Service is limited to the fees you have paid to us in the 12 months preceding the claim.

We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including but not limited to loss of profits, data, business, or goodwill, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.

AI features (“Ask the Boss” and AI assistance). Where AI features are enabled, they provide AI-generated suggestions and drafts only. All diagnostic, repair, and safety-critical decisions remain the sole responsibility of qualified technicians, who must review any AI-generated output before relying on it. To the maximum extent permitted by law, PitlaneHQ accepts no liability for decisions made, or actions taken, on the basis of AI-generated suggestions. How we handle data for these features — including the optional pooling of repair and inspection records, with customer details removed, into our platform intelligence and how to opt out — is described in our Privacy Policy.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited under Australian consumer law, including the consumer guarantees under the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth).

11. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless PitlaneHQ and its directors, employees, and agents from any claims, losses, damages, liabilities, and expenses (including legal fees) arising from:

  • Your use of the Service
  • Your violation of these Terms
  • Your violation of any third-party rights, including privacy rights
  • Content or data you input into the Service

12. Termination

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service if you materially breach these Terms, fail to pay subscription fees, or engage in conduct that threatens the security or integrity of the Service. We will provide reasonable notice where practicable.

Upon termination, your right to use the Service ceases immediately. Provisions relating to data ownership, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law survive termination.

13. Changes to These Terms

We may modify these Terms from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by email or by posting a notice in the Service at least 30 days before they take effect. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

If you do not agree with the updated Terms, you may cancel your subscription before the changes take effect.

14. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Queensland, Australia. The parties submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of that State and the Commonwealth of Australia.

15. Severability

If any provision of these Terms is found to be invalid or unenforceable, that provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it valid and enforceable, and the remaining provisions will continue in full force and effect.

16. Entire Agreement and order of precedence

Your agreement with us is made up of all of the following documents, each of which forms part of it:

If those documents conflict, they apply in this order, from highest to lowest: a signed order form or written agreement; the Data Processing Addendum (on anything concerning personal information); these Terms; the Acceptable Use Policy; then the remaining notices. Together they are the entire agreement between you and PitlaneHQ about the Service, and they supersede any prior agreement or understanding.

17. Contact Information

If you have questions about these Terms, contact us:

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