Terms of Service

Last updated 2026-08-13

Draft — not legally effective. This document is under review by the owner and by retained counsel. It describes how Harvestkin works today, but it is not yet in force.

1. Acceptance of These Terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between you and [LEGAL ENTITY NAME — OWNER CONFIRMS] ("Harvestkin", "we", "us"), covering your use of harvestkin.com, app.harvestkin.com, and everything we offer through them (the "Service").

By creating an account or using the Service you accept these Terms and the Privacy Policy, which is part of them. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

2. What Harvestkin Is — and What It Is Not

What it is

Harvestkin is a marketplace. Members publish listings for goods they grow, raise, or make; other members nearby find those listings and get in touch; the two of them then arrange a trade directly with each other, in person.

That is the whole of it. We provide the place where the listing appears and the encrypted channel in which the two of you talk.

What it is not

Harvestkin is not a party to any trade. We are not a buyer, a seller, a broker, an agent, a dealer, a consignee, an escrow holder, or an intermediary in any trade between members. Every trade is a private arrangement between the two members making it.
Harvestkin does not handle goods. We never take possession, custody, or control of anything a member lists. We do not inspect, test, grade, certify, transport, or store any item.
Harvestkin does not handle money between members. There is no payment system, no checkout, and no way to send value to another member through the Service.
Harvestkin operates no credits, points, balances, wallets, ledgers, escrow, or platform currency. None exists, and none will be introduced.
Harvestkin never takes a cut of a trade. We charge no commission, no percentage, no per-trade fee, and no listing fee tied to what anything is worth. This is not a current pricing choice we might revisit — the Service has no mechanism for it, and it holds no record of what any trade was worth.
Harvestkin does not record prices. The Service has no price field and no field that records what a trade was worth. We do not ask, and we could not store the answer if you told us.
Harvestkin does not verify members. We do not run identity checks, background checks, or credential verification on members. A rating or a certification badge reflects what other members and our moderators have seen — it is not a warranty from us.

We charge for the service, never for the trade. If we ever offer a paid tier, you would be paying us for optional platform features, on a subscription basis, entirely separately from any trade you make with another member.

3. Eligibility and Accounts

You must be at least 16 years old to hold an account. If the law where you live sets a higher minimum age for entering this kind of agreement, that higher age applies to you.
One person, one account. Your account is yours; do not share it, sell it, or transfer it.
Sign-in is passwordless. We email a single-use code to the address on your account. Keep control of that email account — anyone who can read your email can sign in as you.
Keep your details accurate. In particular, keep your location pin roughly right, so the people who find your listings are actually near you.
You are responsible for what happens under your account, other than use that results from our own failure.

Your encryption keys are your responsibility

Messages are end-to-end encrypted with keys generated on your device (see the Privacy Policy). If you enable a recovery method, we hold a sealed backup we cannot open.

If you lose your recovery secret, your message history cannot be recovered — not by you and not by us. This is a consequence of the encryption being genuine, and you accept it as a condition of using messaging.

4. Listings

When you publish a listing you confirm that:

You have the right to trade the item, and it is yours to trade.
The description is accurate and complete — what it is, how much of it there is, its condition, and anything a reasonable person would want to know before taking it home and eating it, planting it, or feeding it to an animal.
You have disclosed material facts, including known contamination, disease, spray or treatment history, allergens, and — for anything edible — how it was produced and stored.
You hold any licence, permit, registration, or inspection status the law where you live requires for what you are offering. Harvestkin does not obtain these for you and does not check whether you have them.
Any certification you claim is true, and any proof link you attach is genuine and one you are entitled to publish. Proof links are public.
Photos are of the actual item.

Listings are public

An active listing — its title, description, quantity, coarse location, photos, and any certification claim including its proof link — is readable by anyone on the internet, whether or not they have a Harvestkin account. Do not put anything in a listing you are not content to publish.

Local pickup only

Harvestkin is a local-pickup marketplace. Do not use it to arrange shipping or carriage of goods. The Service offers no shipping feature, and shipping is not enabled for any member. Shipping goods — particularly food, plants, and animals — triggers transport, biosecurity, and import rules that vary by jurisdiction, and Harvestkin does not currently support members in meeting them.

Meeting in person

You are meeting a stranger. Use ordinary sense: choose a public place where you can, tell someone where you are going, and stop if something feels wrong. Harvestkin does not screen members, is not present at your meeting, and is not responsible for what happens there.

5. Prohibited and Restricted Items

Never permitted

You may not list, offer, or seek through Harvestkin:

Anything illegal to possess, produce, or trade where either member is located.
Controlled drugs and narcotics, prescription medicines, and unapproved health or veterinary remedies.
Alcohol and tobacco, and other goods requiring an excise or retail licence, unless you hold every applicable licence and it is lawful for you to trade it this way. Absent that, do not list it.
Firearms, ammunition, explosives, and weapons, and their parts.
Human tissue, blood, or bodily fluids.
Protected, endangered, or otherwise restricted species, and products made from them, and any species whose movement is restricted where either member is.
Invasive or noxious species, and anything under a quarantine, pest, or disease order.
Stolen, counterfeit, or recalled goods.
Anything recalled, spoiled, adulterated, or known to be unsafe.
Services, labour, rentals, financial instruments, or digital goods. Harvestkin is for physical goods you grow, raise, or make.
Anything whose purpose is to move value — vouchers, gift cards, stored-value instruments, tokens, or currency of any kind.

Restricted — permitted only if you meet every applicable rule

Harvestkin classifies each kind of good so that the rules attaching to it are visible when you list. The classes and what they mean for you:

Class	Examples	Your obligations
Perishable	Fresh produce, dairy, baked goods, preserves	Handle, store, and hand over safely; state how it was produced and when; disclose allergens and any raw or unpasteurised ingredient. Some jurisdictions restrict which home-produced foods may be traded at all — this is your responsibility to know.
Live organism	Seedlings, plants, cuttings, seed, cultures, bees	Comply with plant-health, seed, quarantine, and movement rules. Do not move anything under a pest or disease order. Never list an invasive species.
Animal	Poultry, livestock, other live animals	Comply with every animal-welfare, movement, traceability, identification, and sale rule that applies. Do not list an animal you cannot lawfully transfer. Harvestkin performs no welfare check of any kind.
Meat or animal product	Meat, eggs, honey, raw milk	Comply with food-safety, inspection, and slaughter rules. Many jurisdictions prohibit trading uninspected meat or raw milk outright — if yours does, do not list it here.
Consumable craft	Home-made soap, cosmetics, candles, ferments	Comply with labelling, ingredient-disclosure, and product-safety rules.
Tool	Implements, equipment	Ensure it is safe and functional, and disclose defects.
Unregulated	Everything else	The general listing rules in Section 4 still apply.

The classification is a signpost, not permission. It tells you which body of rules is likely to apply. It is not advice, it is not a determination that your listing is lawful, and it does not transfer any part of your responsibility to us. Where the law where you are conflicts with anything in this section, the law wins and you must not list.

If you are unsure

Do not list it. Ask the relevant authority where you live, or ask us and we will tell you what we can — which will usually be that we cannot advise you on your local rules.

6. Trades Between Members

Every trade is between the two members making it. Harvestkin is not a party to it, has no rights or obligations under it, and gives no warranty about it, about either member, or about anything traded.

Assess for yourself. Inspect what you are taking. Ask the questions you need answered. You are responsible for deciding whether to go ahead.
The Service records only that a trade happened. Marking a trade complete records that you and the other member each confirmed it, and when. It records nothing about what was traded on either side and nothing about what it was worth.
Disputes are between the two of you. If a trade goes wrong, take it up with the other member in the first instance. Harvestkin does not adjudicate trade disputes, does not determine who is right, does not order compensation, and holds nothing with which to compensate anyone — there is no money and no value in the Service to award.
What we will do. If a member is behaving badly, report them (Section 12). We can act on their account and their listings. That is the remedy we have, and it is a moderation action, not a resolution of your dispute.
You keep every legal right you have against the other member. Nothing here limits what you may pursue against them directly.

7. Messaging

Messaging exists so two members can arrange a trade. It is end-to-end encrypted; we cannot read it (see the Privacy Policy for what we can and cannot see).

Do not use messaging for harassment, threats, spam, solicitation, or anything unlawful.
Because we cannot read message content, we cannot moderate it. If someone mistreats you in a message, report them — tell us what happened in the report note, since we cannot see the conversation ourselves.
Messages are immutable. Neither you nor we can edit or selectively delete an individual message once sent.

8. Advisory Market Information

Harvestkin publishes advisory ratios showing, in aggregate, how much of one kind of good tends to be offered against another in a region over a period.

Read this before relying on any of it:

It is advisory market information. It is not a price, a valuation, an appraisal, a quotation, an index of settled trades, or financial advice.
It is derived only from public listings — from what people say they are offering and looking for. It is not derived from what any trade actually settled at, because the Service holds no such record.
Nothing in the Service uses it to settle anything. It is never applied to a trade, never proposed as terms, and never binding on anyone. What you agree with the other member is entirely up to the two of you.
It carries no identifiers, is aggregated with a minimum number of contributing samples, and cannot be traced back to any member, listing, or trade.
It may be wrong, stale, thin, or unrepresentative, and we make no warranty as to its accuracy or fitness for anything. Do not treat it as a valuation for any purpose, including any purpose of your own record-keeping.

9. Your Content and the Licence You Grant Us

You keep ownership of everything you publish — listing text, photos, your profile, and everything else you contribute ("Your Content").

You grant Harvestkin a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt for display, and publish Your Content for the sole purpose of operating and promoting the Service, including displaying your public listings on the public site and to search engines.

This licence is scoped to running the Service:

It ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies in ordinary backups until they age out, and except where we must retain something to meet a legal obligation.
It does not let us sell Your Content, license it to third parties for their own purposes, or use it in advertising for anyone other than Harvestkin.
It does not cover your messages: those are encrypted and we cannot read them, so no licence over them would mean anything.
We do not use Your Content to train AI models, and we do not supply it to anyone else to train theirs. The Service's one AI feature receives only the short name of a good you typed, and no other content and no identifier (Privacy Policy, Section 4).

Aggregate market information derived from public listings (Section 8) carries no identifier and is not Your Content; we may publish and retain it indefinitely.

You confirm you have the right to grant this licence for everything you publish, and that Your Content infringes no one's rights.

10. Ratings and Reputation

After a completed trade, either member may rate the other. A rating is a score from one to five and nothing else — there is no comment field.
Ratings are double-blind: neither of you sees the other's rating until both have rated or a fixed window has passed. Do not attempt to extract or trade a rating in advance.
A public reputation figure appears only once enough ratings have been revealed, so that no single rating can be read off a profile.
A rating cannot be deleted by anyone, including us. It is the record other members rely on.
A rating you gave survives your leaving Harvestkin, with your identity removed. Ratings you received are deleted with your account.
Do not manipulate ratings. No trading ratings for ratings, no fake trades to generate ratings, no retaliatory rating for a rating you did not like, and no pressuring a member over one. We may remove reputation obtained this way and act on the account.

11. Acceptable Use

You may not:

Break the law, or help anyone else to.
Impersonate anyone, or misrepresent who you are or what you are offering.
Harass, threaten, defame, or discriminate against a member.
Spam, advertise unrelated goods or services, or use the Service for commercial solicitation unrelated to a listing.
Publish someone else's personal information — including a precise address — without their consent.
Scrape, crawl at abnormal rates, or bulk-collect listings or member data.
Probe, disrupt, overload, or attempt to defeat the security of the Service, or access data that is not yours.
Reverse-engineer the Service other than to the extent that right cannot be excluded by law.
Use the Service to move value, to keep score of value, or to operate any settlement, clearing, or credit arrangement on top of it.

12. Reports, Moderation, and Takedown

Reporting. You can report a listing or a member from within the app, with a reason and a short note. Reports are read by our moderators and are treated as confidential. Do not use reports to harass someone.

What moderators can do. We may, at our discretion and without prior notice where the circumstances warrant it:

Remove a listing. A removed listing is withdrawn from the public board. Its owner is told it was removed by moderation.
Reject a proposed name for our goods catalogue.
Grant or withhold a verified badge on a certification claim. A badge means a moderator reviewed the claim — it is not our warranty that the certification is valid.
Suspend or terminate an account (Section 13).

What moderators cannot do. Moderators have no access to message content — that is a property of the encryption and the database permissions, not a policy we could change quietly. They also cannot alter or delete a rating or a completed trade record.

We are not obliged to monitor. We do not pre-screen listings and we have no general monitoring duty. We act on what is reported or noticed. Removing one thing does not oblige us to remove another, and not removing something is not our endorsement of it.

Intellectual property complaints. If you believe something on Harvestkin infringes your rights, write to us at the address in Section 19 with enough detail to find it and to establish your claim, and we will review it.

Appeals. If your listing or account is actioned and you think we got it wrong, write to us. We will look again. We do not promise a particular outcome.

13. Suspension and Termination

By you. You may stop using the Service at any time and may ask us to delete your account. How deletion works, what it removes, and what survives it are set out in the Privacy Policy, Sections 6 and 7. Ratings you gave, and reports you filed, survive with your identity removed; a completed trade record survives for the other member.

By us. We may suspend or terminate your account if you breach these Terms, if your use exposes another member or us to legal risk or harm, or if we are required to by law. Where it is reasonable and lawful to do so, we will tell you why and give you a chance to respond.

We may discontinue the Service. Harvestkin is a young product. If we shut it down or materially withdraw a feature, we will give reasonable notice and, where practicable, a way to take your data with you.

What survives termination: Sections 8 (advisory information disclaimer), 9 (to the extent stated there), 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18.

14. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available." We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, error-free, or that any listing, member, rating, or piece of advisory information is accurate, lawful, safe, or fit for any purpose.
We give no warranty about any good listed on Harvestkin — its quality, safety, provenance, legality, condition, edibility, health, or fitness for any purpose. We never see it.
We give no warranty about any member, including whether they are who they say they are, whether they will turn up, or whether they will behave decently.
Advisory market information is provided without warranty of any kind (Section 8).
You use the Service, and meet other members, at your own risk.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and any non-excludable rights you have as a consumer under the law where you live. [Consumer-law carve-outs by jurisdiction — COUNSEL TO CONFIRM.]

15. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, and subject always to the paragraph above:

We are not liable for anything arising out of a trade between members, including any loss, injury, illness, damage to property, harm to plants or animals, contamination, regulatory penalty, or dispute arising from goods traded, from a meeting, or from a member's conduct.
We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive loss, or for loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, opportunity, or data, however caused.
Our total aggregate liability to you for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim and [CAP AMOUNT — COUNSEL TO CONFIRM]. If you have paid us nothing — which is the case for every member on a free account — that is the cap you should expect, and it is the honest consequence of a free service that takes no part in your trades.

16. Indemnity

To the extent permitted by law, you will indemnify Harvestkin against claims, losses, and reasonable costs arising from your listings, your content, your trades, your conduct on the Service, and your breach of these Terms or of any law — including any claim brought by another member or by a regulator in relation to something you listed or traded. This does not apply to anything caused by our own breach or negligence.

17. Governing Law and Disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of [British Columbia, CANADA — OWNER CONFIRMS], without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and the courts of [British Columbia, CANADA — OWNER CONFIRMS] have non-exclusive jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of the country where you live, or of the right to bring proceedings in your local courts. [Consumer forum rules by jurisdiction — COUNSEL TO CONFIRM.]

Before going to court, please write to us. Most problems are quicker to fix by email than by claim form, and we will engage in good faith.

18. Changes to These Terms

We may change these Terms. When we do, we update the Last Updated date at the top and publish the new version from the single source that feeds both the site and the app — so the two are never out of step.

For a material change, we will give reasonable notice in the app before it takes effect. If you do not accept a change, stop using the Service and ask us to delete your account — continuing to use it after the change takes effect means you accept it.

19. Miscellaneous

Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service.
Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, it is severed and the rest stands.
No waiver. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given it up.
Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to a successor to our business, on notice.
No third-party rights, except that our affiliates may rely on Sections 14, 15, and 16.
Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely beyond our reasonable control.
Language. These Terms are written in English; a translation is provided for convenience and the English text governs where they differ.

Contact

[Mailboxes below are placeholders pending owner confirmation.]

Legal notices, complaints, and appeals: legal@harvestkin.com
Privacy requests: privacy@harvestkin.com
Everything else: support@harvestkin.com
Postal address: [REGISTERED ADDRESS — OWNER CONFIRMS]