Terms and Conditions

Last updated: 23 September 2026

1. About these Terms

These Terms and Conditions ("Terms") apply when you use UnLostPaws at unlostpaws.com (the "Service"). The Service is run by Dot Squad Ltd ("we", "us", "our"), a company registered in England and Wales under company number 15906946.

By using the Service, creating an account, posting content or buying Premium, you agree to these Terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the Service.

The UnLostPaws source code is open source and licensed separately (see section 10). These Terms cover the website and the services we host.

2. What UnLostPaws is

UnLostPaws helps lost pets get home. You can publish lost and found alerts, search alerts and receive automated match suggestions.

The core features are free. Premium is an optional paid subscription sold by Dot Squad Ltd. We are a private limited company, not a charity, community interest company or non-profit organisation.

The Service is available worldwide. Our systems are mainly hosted in the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United States, and our cloud providers may also use other regions.

3. Your account

You must be at least 13 to use the Service. If the law where you live requires parental consent at your age, a parent or guardian must agree to these Terms for you.

Keep your login details safe. You are responsible for what happens under your account. Give accurate information, don't pretend to be someone else, and don't create accounts to abuse the Service.

4. Using the Service fairly

Free features include posting and browsing lost and found alerts, search and automated matching. They are subject to fair-use limits, such as daily posting limits.

You must not:

• post false, misleading, fraudulent or unlawful content;
• harass, threaten or exploit anyone, or misuse contact details you get through the Service;
• upload malware, scrape the Service in a way that affects its performance, or try to get around our security measures or usage limits;
• use the Service to sell, trade or advertise animals in breach of the law or these Terms;
• interfere with matching, moderation or other people's alerts;
• collect other users' personal data for spam, marketing or anything unrelated to reuniting pets.

If we reasonably believe you have broken these rules, we may remove content or restrict your account. Section 7 explains how to ask us to review that decision.

5. Premium

Premium is an optional paid subscription sold by Dot Squad Ltd. Payments are processed by Stripe. The current price and what's included are shown on the Premium page and at checkout before you pay.

Unless checkout says otherwise, Premium is billed yearly and renews automatically until you cancel. We aim to email you a reminder before each renewal. You can cancel at any time from the Premium page by choosing Manage billing, which opens the Stripe billing portal. Cancelling stops future renewals. It does not refund payments already made unless one of the refund rules below applies.

14-day cancellation right: if you are a consumer, you can cancel Premium within 14 days of buying it under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. Because Premium starts as soon as you pay, the law allows us to keep an amount for the time you have used it. In practice, the 30-day refund below is more generous and normally gives you a full refund.

30-day refund: if you're not happy, ask for a refund within 30 days of any Premium payment through the contact form or by emailing hi@dotsquad.net. We will check the purchase and, unless the next paragraph applies, refund that payment in full. This goodwill policy is in addition to your legal rights, not instead of them.

We may suspend or end Premium, and the related account, for fraud, abuse, chargebacks, failed, reversed or incorrect payments, or a serious breach of these Terms. In those cases the 30-day goodwill refund does not apply, but your legal rights are not affected.

Premium features are described on the Premium page and may change over time. At the moment they include phone verification with a verified badge, the Digital Collar (an emergency QR page for your pet) and higher daily limits. If we make a change that significantly reduces what you have paid for, we will tell you, and you may cancel and receive a refund for the unused part of your subscription.

Nothing in these Terms affects your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 or any other consumer law that applies to you, including your rights if digital content or a service is faulty or not as described.

6. Donations

Donations made through Buy Me a Coffee or similar sites are personal gifts to our developer. They are not payments to Dot Squad Ltd, don't buy Premium and don't create any contract with the company. Any refund of a donation is governed by the donation platform's own terms. Premium is billed separately by Dot Squad Ltd through Stripe.

7. Safety, moderation and complaints

UnLostPaws lets users share content with each other, so the UK Online Safety Act 2023 applies to the Service.

We work to remove illegal and harmful content, including adult (18+) sexual content and violent content. Most moderation is automated, using AI, spam and nudity filters, with some human review. No system catches everything, so harmful content may sometimes appear before we remove it. Because the Service is open to users aged 13 and over, we do not allow content that is harmful to children.

To report an alert, sign in and use Report this alert on the alert page. You can also report any content, or make a complaint, through the contact form or by emailing hi@dotsquad.net. We aim to review reports promptly, but we can't promise a set response time.

If we remove your content or restrict your account and you think we got it wrong, contact us and ask for a review. We will look at the decision again and tell you the outcome.

8. Public alerts and what others can see

Alerts are public so the community can help. They can include photos, a description, the location you pin and the contact options you choose.

The location you pin is shown publicly on the map, exactly where you place it. Unless it matters for the search, pin a nearby street, park or landmark rather than your home.

Your phone number and email are not displayed on the alert page. A visitor has to pass an automated bot check before they can see them, and you can switch either one off at any time. This makes automated harvesting harder, but it can't stop a real person from sharing details they have seen.

Public alerts can be indexed by search engines, cached or copied by other websites. After you delete content from the Service, copies may remain in search results, our backups or other sites for a while. Digital Collar pages are set to stay out of search results, although we can't fully control how search engines behave.

You decide what to publish. As far as the law allows, we are not responsible for how unrelated third parties use information you chose to make public. This does not limit our responsibility for how we handle your personal data, or any liability that the law does not allow us to exclude.

9. Your content

You keep ownership of everything you upload. By posting content, you give Dot Squad Ltd a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, display, share and adapt it (for example resizing images or creating image data for matching and moderation). We use this licence to run, secure and improve the Service and to help reunite pets, including by sharing public alerts on our own social media or messaging channels. We won't use your content to advertise UnLostPaws without asking you first.

The licence ends when you delete the content, except for copies kept in backups for a limited period and content that others have already shared.

You confirm that you have the right to upload your content and that it doesn't break the law or anyone else's rights.

10. Open source and our brand

The UnLostPaws source code is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPL-3.0). That licence covers the code only. It doesn't give you any rights to the UnLostPaws name, logo or branding, which belong to Dot Squad Ltd.

11. Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains how we collect and use personal data. For privacy requests, use the contact form or email hi@dotsquad.net.

12. Availability

We work hard to keep the Service running, but we don't offer a service-level agreement. As far as the law allows, free features are provided "as is" and "as available". We can't guarantee uninterrupted access, perfect matching, or that every lost pet will be found.

UnLostPaws is not a veterinary, emergency or police service. If an animal is injured or in danger, contact a vet, an animal welfare organisation or the emergency services.

13. Our liability

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that the law does not allow us to limit, including your rights as a consumer.

If we break these Terms, we are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breach. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable. The Service is for personal use, so we are not responsible for business losses.

Free features: subject to the first paragraph of this section, and as far as the law allows, we give no warranties for free features and are not liable for loss of data or opportunity, or for a pet not being found, arising from their use.

Premium: subject to the first paragraph of this section, our total liability to you in connection with Premium is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us for Premium in the 12 months before the claim or (b) £100.

14. Your responsibility to us

If you break these Terms or upload unlawful content, and someone brings a claim against us as a result, you are responsible for our reasonable and foreseeable losses and costs, except to the extent they were caused by our own breach or negligence.

15. Suspension and changes

We may suspend or close accounts (including Premium), remove content or limit features where this is reasonably necessary for security, legal compliance, preventing abuse or fraud, chargebacks, failed, reversed or incorrect payments, or a serious breach of these Terms. Where appropriate, we will tell you why and how to ask for a review.

If we decide to close the Service entirely, we will give reasonable notice and refund any unused part of your Premium subscription.

We may update the Service and these Terms. For significant changes to these Terms, we will give you reasonable notice, for example by a notice on the site or by email, and update the date at the top. If you keep using the Service after the changes take effect, the new Terms apply, unless the law requires your express agreement. If you don't agree, you can stop using the Service and cancel Premium.

16. Law and disputes

If you have a problem, please contact us first so we can try to sort it out.

These Terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and you can bring legal proceedings in the courts of England and Wales. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also bring proceedings in your local courts. If you live outside the UK, you keep any protection given by the mandatory consumer law of your country, including any right to bring proceedings there.

17. Contact

For questions about these Terms, Premium, refunds, safety reports or legal notices, use our contact form or email hi@dotsquad.net.