Agreed at the point of purchase and applying for the paid term. Venture Harbour Ltd is registered in England and Wales.

1. What membership includes

   For the paid term, on the pages set out at the point of purchase, membership includes:

   • A labelled advertising placement on every page you have bought, live for the whole of the paid term.
   • Our time. We test your platform and consider it for inclusion in relevant content.
   • The guarantee in clause 8, on any write-up we publish about you.

   On the Category Partner plan and above, membership also includes a filmed video review of your platform. On Category Leader it additionally includes right of first refusal on the same placement when your term comes up for renewal. The plan you are on is stated at the point of purchase.

2. No guarantee of any outcome

   Venture Harbour Ltd makes no guarantee, representation or warranty as to any outcome arising from membership of the Test Lab. This includes but is not limited to traffic, clicks, impressions, leads, enquiries, sales, search rankings, citation by any AI assistant or search summary, brand mentions, or visibility of any kind.

   What is sold is our time and attention for the paid term, on the terms set out below. Nothing beyond that is promised. A change in how any third-party search engine or AI assistant surfaces, cites or summarises our content is outside our control and does not constitute a failure to deliver.

3. Right to refuse or terminate

   We may decline any application, and may terminate any membership at our sole discretion at any time. Where we terminate other than for a breach of clause 14, we will refund the unexpired portion of the term on a pro-rata basis.

4. Labelling and link attributes

   All advertising placements are labelled as advertising, and all outbound links to a member carry the rel="sponsored" attribute. Every placement carries a visible label and a written disclosure stating that it is paid for and is not an editorial recommendation.

   This labelling is a condition of membership. It cannot be removed, reduced, reworded or made less prominent at a member's request, and a request to do so may be treated as grounds for termination under clause 3.

5. What the fee buys, and what it does not

   The fee buys our time. It funds us testing your platform and considering it for inclusion in relevant content. It does not buy a verdict, a score, a ranking, a position in a comparison table, or a favourable finding.

   Editorial judgement remains entirely ours. Rankings and scores are determined by testing alone. A member may be ranked below a non-member, criticised, or omitted from a particular recommendation, and frequently will be. That is not a breach of these terms and is not grounds for a refund.

   We continue to test and include products whose makers are not members of the programme. Membership is never a condition of appearing in our content, and non-members can and do outrank members.

6. Disclosure in editorial content

   Where a member appears in our editorial content as a result of the programme, that content carries a clear written disclosure of the commercial relationship, in words such as:

   “For full disclosure, {Member} is a member of our Test Lab — they pay us a fee to test their platform. It does not affect our verdict, score or ranking.”

   That disclosure is visible without interaction and is not negotiable. It is a legal requirement under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 as well as our own policy, and it applies for as long as the content remains published — which may be indefinitely, including after membership ends.

7. If your product doesn't pass our testing

   If, in our judgement, your product doesn't pass our testing, we refund the membership fee in full and publish nothing about it as part of the programme. That judgement is ours alone. It does not change or remove anything we had already published independently of the programme.

   If it passes, we publish what we find, critical points included. Membership does not entitle a member to approve, amend, delay or withdraw our findings, and a critical finding in a published write-up is not grounds for a refund, a rewrite or removal of the content.

   This clause is subject to clause 8, which gives you 30 days from publication to raise factual corrections and to refund out entirely if you consider the write-up thin or unfair. Clause 8 does not make our conclusions negotiable. It makes our accuracy and our effort answerable.

   If you would rather we did not test and write about your platform at all, do not join the programme.

8. The 30-day write-up guarantee

   This clause qualifies clauses 7 and 13. It qualifies nothing else, and in particular it does not qualify clause 5.

   If you are not satisfied with the depth or fairness of a write-up we publish about you, tell us in writing within 30 days of its publication. We will first offer to rework it — more testing, more detail, a fuller account of what we found. What a rework does not do is change the verdict, and we will say so plainly rather than pretend otherwise.

   If a rework does not satisfy you, or you would rather not have one, we will refund your fee for the current term in full and take the write-up down. That choice is yours, not ours. The refund is the whole fee for the term, not a pro-rata part of it. Your placements come down with the write-up and the membership ends.

   Separately, you may propose corrections to any write-up about you within 30 days of its publication. Where a proposed change is factual or objective — a feature we recorded as absent that is present, a price, a limit, an integration, a certification, a figure — we guarantee to make it. Where it is subjective — our assessment, our emphasis, our verdict, our ranking — the decision is ours. We will tell you which of the two we have treated a change as, and why.

   What this clause does not do is make a favourable finding something you can demand. Being ranked below a competitor, scoring lower than you hoped, or being criticised on something we tested and you disagree about is not a failure of depth or fairness, and clause 5 continues to govern it. This guarantee is on the quality of our work. It is not on its conclusion, and it never will be.

   After 30 days from publication, clauses 7 and 13 apply unqualified.

9. Use of your name and logo

   You grant Venture Harbour Ltd a non-exclusive, royalty-free, revocable licence, for the term, to use your company name, logo and brand marks for the sole purpose of identifying you as a member of the Test Lab. That covers use on ventureharbour.com, in our media kit, and in material describing the programme. It covers nothing else. We will not sub-licence your marks, will not use them to imply that you endorse Venture Harbour, and will not use them in any other context without asking you first.

   We follow your brand guidelines where you supply them. Resizing and proportionate scaling are the only changes we make: we will not recolour, crop, distort, animate or combine your marks with other marks.

   You can withdraw the licence at any time by writing to us, with no effect on the rest of your membership, and we will remove your marks within 14 days. We remove them in any event within 14 days of the end of the term. Your marks remain yours. Nothing here transfers any right in them to us, and we will not register or claim any.

   One exception, because the law requires it: where clause 6 obliges us to disclose that you are a member, we will continue to name you in words. That disclosure uses your name, never your logo or brand marks.

10. Price fixed for term

    The price is fixed for the paid term. Renewal is at the rate current at the time of renewal, and we will give at least 30 days' written notice of any increase before it takes effect.

11. Auto-renewal, and cancelling

    You can cancel at any time. There is no minimum commitment beyond the term you have already paid for, no notice period, and no cancellation fee. Cancel from the billing portal linked in your Stripe receipt, or email testlab@ventureharbour.com and we will do it for you and confirm in writing.

    Membership renews automatically at the end of each term unless cancelled. This is disclosed at the point of sale, and we email a reminder at least 30 days before each renewal date, showing the date and the amount. Cancelling stops that renewal and nothing further is charged.

    Cancellation takes effect at the end of the term you have already paid for. Your placement stays live until then under clause 13, and there is no pro-rata refund for the unexpired part of a term you cancel — see clause 12.

12. No refund on voluntary cancellation

    Where a member cancels during a paid term, no pro-rata refund is given. Placements remain live for the remainder of the term already paid for.

13. Content removal

    On expiry, cancellation or termination, advertising placements remain live until the end of the paid period and are then removed within 14 days.

    Editorial content is not removed, save where clause 8 requires it. Otherwise, testing we have carried out and published stands as a record of what we found, and it keeps its disclosure under clause 6. We do not control third-party caches, archives or previously ingested AI training data and cannot guarantee removal from them — which applies equally to anything taken down under clause 8.

14. Acceptable use

    We do not accept members from the following categories:

    • Gambling, betting and gaming
    • Adult content and services
    • Payday lending and high-cost short-term credit
    • Unregulated financial products and investment schemes
    • Crypto tokens and token sales
    • Multi-level marketing and network marketing
    • Any activity requiring FCA authorisation that the member does not hold

    We may also decline any other applicant at our discretion. Where a member is found to fall into an excluded category after purchase, we may terminate immediately under clause 3 without refund.

15. Limitation of liability

    Nothing in these terms limits or excludes either party's liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

    Subject to that, each party's total liability to the other arising under or in connection with these terms — whether in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty, misrepresentation or otherwise — is limited in aggregate to the fees paid by the member for the term in which the liability arose. That cap includes any liability under clause 16.

    Neither party is liable to the other for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill, anticipated savings or opportunity, or for any indirect or consequential loss, however arising.

    This clause does not affect a member's obligation to pay fees properly due.

16. Mutual indemnity

    You indemnify us against third-party claims that our use of your company name, logo, brand marks, description or other material you supply, used in accordance with clause 9, infringes that third party's intellectual property rights.

    We indemnify you against third-party claims that material we create and publish as part of your placement, or any programme mark we ask you to display, infringes that third party's intellectual property rights.

    Both indemnities are capped by clause 15 and run on the same conditions. The party claiming gives prompt written notice, does not admit liability or settle without the other's written consent, and gives reasonable assistance. The party indemnifying takes conduct of the defence at its own cost.

    These indemnities cover intellectual property only. They do not extend to our editorial findings, which are governed by clauses 5 to 8.

17. Governing law

    These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

Questions to testlab@ventureharbour.com. Our wider position is in the editorial policy.