Startups! How did you create your T&S and Privacy statement?
Hello, I have a large chance of getting my first client in a few months. I am wondering when I need to add the privacy and the Terms and Service documents to my website.
Also, how can I get them generated? Do I need a lawyer? Is there an online tool that helps?
Great question because legal pages are often treated as an afterthought even though they play an important role in trust, compliance, and risk management. Many startups start with templates and legal guidance, then refine policies as products, customers, and regulations evolve.
Foundersbar helps startups build stronger foundations by thinking about compliance and operational readiness alongside product growth.
Privacy Statement: https://www.iubenda.com/en
Terms of Service: https://termly.io
These both have worked pretty well for me, though linking people to the privacy statement is kind of annoying, since it happens off my site.
Hey Tommy, thanks for mentioning iubenda (came here via the Indiehackers newsletter) - you can actually embed your policy into any pages anytime and thus the linking part is kind of solved for you (also I think it's a feature that's more useful for mobile apps and app store pages).
btw. there are a lot of upgrades coming:
generating terms is such a pain. definitely looking forward to that 😊
so am I 🎉 :)
So, termly, seemed like the best one! Thank you!
Hey Phillip,
I would suggest using Docracy.com, it's good for small startups that are wanting to see examples and not have to spend so much time on creating your own. I would look around for the best document that you can find based on what your product/service is and what it needs.
The website is going to be shut down sometime this year, although there are still some great terms of service, privacy policies, and other legal documents that can be used.
Hopefully this helps!
Really interested to see who could step into the docracy void once it's gone.
Definitely has potential. If replaced and expanded, I could see it continuing to be open source but turned into a marketplace as well for people that want more defined legal documents rather than just what is provided.
I believe they are closing it down because a lack of funds/no advertisers. Meaning if someone could find a way to make money from it. It might have opportunity!
@philipimperato I'm biased since I used to work at GitHub, but I know the care that the legal team put into the terms... and it's completely open source !
It's located at https://github.com/github/site-policy licensed under the most permissive Creative Commons CC0-1.0 license so there's no obligations at all. My startup has adapted some of their language and it's been a huge time saver.
It's a great idea to use open source licenses for legal documents. Do you know some more?
Hmm, the only other one I know for sure is the Wordpress TOS. It's provided under a creative commons share alike license so it requires attribution: https://en.wordpress.com/tos/
The GitLab terms/privacy are based on the Wordpress terms (https://about.gitlab.com/privacy/)
Oh, cool. Thanks for sharing this.
@philipimperato Give Shopify's generators a try:
Terms and Conditions - https://www.shopify.com/tools/policy-generator/terms-and-conditions
Privacy Policy - https://www.shopify.com/tools/policy-generator
They might be more suited to an e-commerce context, but still, with small changes you can adapt them.,
I just used them. Pretty neat way!
I'm glad they were useful 👍🙂
Hey Philip,
I personally use https://termsfeed.com for my projects.
I haven't viewed the generated document yet but it definitely feels like it's going to produce something good.
I went through the generation process and it's gonna cost about $60 for a fairly standard Privacy Policy.
This looks nice!
Thanks everyone for all the suggestions. I'm impressed that github maintains their policies in a public repository. It's great that we can easily track changes and see the discussion that drives it. (See the closed issues here: https://github.com/github/site-policy/issues.) This is an excellent resource for indiehackers – legal costs shouldn't be a hurdle for early stage experiments.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Thank you! Very helpful.
My product is a Saas for the insurance agency field. I'll try to find similar competitors' docs and move on from there.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
oh boy, okay. Well, instead of posting a entirely new question. do you mind walking me through this process? Do you know of a broker that sells liability insurance and what they would cover me for? something you have used?
This comment was deleted 7 years ago