Terms of Service

The service is operated by BuildFormStudio, a sole proprietorship based in the United States. Throughout these terms, “we,” “us,” and “BuildFormStudio” mean that operator, and “you” means the person or organization with an account.

You can reach us at support@buildformstudio.com or by opening a ticket from your dashboard. We aim to answer every message, and a ticket is the fastest route because it arrives with your account attached.

BuildFormStudio provides managed hosting for MyBB forums: we provision and run the server, database, TLS certificates, backups, and software updates so you can operate a forum without managing infrastructure. You get full file access over SFTP and full access to your forum’s database — it stays your forum, not a walled garden.

BuildFormStudio is an independent hosting provider. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the MyBB Group, and “MyBB” is the property of its respective owners. MyBB itself is free, open-source software licensed by its authors; what you pay us for is the hosting and management around it.

You must provide accurate information and be at least 16 years old — or the age of digital consent where you live, if that’s higher — to create an account. You are responsible for safeguarding your credentials and for everything done under your account. Tell us promptly if you suspect unauthorized use.

One account per person or organization. Creating additional accounts to obtain extra free trials is a breach of these terms, and we may close the duplicates.

Plans are per forum. A plan sizes one forum — its storage, memory, and CPU allotment. If you run several forums, each carries its own plan and its own subscription.

Your free trial. Each account gets one 30-day free trial, on its first forum, with no card required. It is one trial per account, not one per forum: once that trial has been used, any further forum you create starts on a paid plan and is charged when you create it. If you don’t move your trial forum to a paid plan before the 30 days are up, it is paused — not immediately deleted — and we email you first. After a grace period it is removed.

Billing. Paid plans are billed in advance on a recurring basis — monthly or yearly, whichever you pick — and renew automatically until canceled. Prices are shown at checkout and exclude taxes unless stated otherwise. If we change the price of a plan you’re on, we’ll tell you before it takes effect and you can cancel instead.

Canceling. You can cancel at any time from your billing page. Cancellation stops future renewals and takes effect at the end of the period you’ve already paid for — your forum keeps running until then. We don’t charge a cancellation fee and we don’t make you email us to do it.

Refunds. Paid plans carry an unconditional 14-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked. The window runs for 14 days from your first paid charge, and covers everything you’ve paid within it. You claim it yourself from your billing page — there’s no form and no approval step — and we refund to the card you paid with, which banks typically post within 5–10 business days.

The guarantee is one per account. Claiming it cancels the subscription and takes the forum offline, since it refunds what you paid for that service. Outside that window, fees already paid are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise. If a failed payment leaves an invoice unpaid, we’ll retry it and notify you before suspending anything.

If a mandatory consumer-protection law where you live gives you a stronger cancellation or refund right than this section does, that law applies and nothing here limits it.

Each plan comes with a stated allotment of storage, memory, and CPU, and your forum runs within it. We don’t meter page views or charge overage for a busy day — a forum getting popular is the point.

What the allotment is not for is running things that aren’t a forum: cryptocurrency mining, general file or media storage unrelated to your community, proxying or relaying traffic, bulk email sending, or sustained load generated by something other than real visitors. Where activity like that threatens the performance or stability of other customers on the same hardware, we may throttle it or ask you to move to a larger plan, and we’ll contact you before taking action unless the problem is urgent.

You retain ownership of the content and data in your forum. You grant us only the limited rights we need to host and operate it for you — to store, process, back up, and transmit it. We don’t use your forum’s content for our own purposes, and we don’t train anything on it.

For data-protection purposes, you are the controller of your forum’s content and your members’ personal data, and BuildFormStudio is your processor — we handle that data only to provide the service and on your instructions. That makes you responsible for your own privacy notice to your members, for having a lawful basis and any required consents (including cookies and any age or parental-consent rules), and for answering your members’ privacy requests. Business and EU/UK customers can request our Data Processing Addendum, which governs this processing and our sub-processors. See our Privacy Policy for how we handle your own account data.

You can export everything at any time over SFTP and the database tools — no export fee, no ticket required. Deleting a forum or your account removes the associated data from active systems, subject to the retention described in the Privacy Policy.

You agree not to use BuildFormStudio, or allow your forum or its members, to:

• break any applicable law, or infringe anyone else’s rights, including intellectual property;
• host malware, phishing pages, or any content that sexualizes minors;
• send spam, or operate the service to facilitate fraud or abuse;
• attack, overload, probe, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to our systems, other customers’ forums, or any third party;
• resell or sublicense the hosting itself, except as we’ve expressly agreed in writing.

You are responsible for your forum’s content and your members’ conduct, including having appropriate rules, active moderation, and any notices your community is legally required to display. We don’t pre-screen what your members post, and hosting a forum doesn’t make us its editor.

Backups run in layers and are included on every plan: your files and database are backed up nightly, encrypted before they leave the server, and stored off-site — and on top of that we snapshot the database hourly and ship its transaction log every few minutes. You can restore from the restore points your plan includes, yourself, from your dashboard.

Even so, keep your own copies of anything you can’t afford to lose. Backups are a safety net, not a guarantee, and we are not liable for data loss to the extent your own export would have prevented it. Exporting is free and always available.

We work hard to keep the service fast and available, and we publish live platform status at our status page. We do not currently offer a contractual uptime guarantee or service credits; if we ever do, it will be in a separate written agreement.

We may perform maintenance, and we may change or discontinue features as the platform evolves. Where maintenance is planned and likely to be disruptive, we’ll give notice on the status page. Where a change materially reduces what your paid plan does, we’ll tell you in advance and you may cancel and receive a pro-rated refund of the unused period.

We keep the underlying software patched, including MyBB and its security releases, to keep the platform safe. You choose how your forum handles MyBB updates — automatic, notify-only, or off — from your forum’s settings, but we reserve the right to apply a security fix ourselves where leaving it unpatched would put you or other customers at risk.

We may suspend or terminate a forum or an account that breaches these terms, poses a security or legal risk, or has fees outstanding — using reasonable judgment and, where practical, giving notice and a chance to fix it first. Suspension for non-payment follows a grace period, not an immediate switch-off.

You may stop using the service and delete your forum or account at any time. Deleting a forum schedules it with a 7-day grace window during which you can restore it yourself — a mistaken deletion, yours or someone else’s, is not final. After that window, and after any notice period, we delete it from active systems, subject to the retention and backup rotation described in the Privacy Policy.

Around termination for any reason, you may export your data during the notice or grace period. If we terminate your account without cause, we’ll refund the unused portion of what you’ve prepaid.

We respond to valid copyright notices. If you believe material on a forum we host infringes your copyright, send a notice to support@buildformstudio.com that includes all of the following:

• your physical or electronic signature;
• identification of the copyrighted work you say has been infringed;
• identification of the material you say is infringing, with enough detail — a URL — for us to locate it;
• your name, address, telephone number, and email address;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
• a statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act for them.

An incomplete notice may not be actionable, so please include everything. On a valid notice we may remove or disable access to the material and will notify the forum operator.

Counter-notice. If your material was removed and you believe that was a mistake or a misidentification, you may send a counter-notice to the same address including your signature, identification of the removed material and where it appeared, a statement under penalty of perjury that you believe in good faith it was removed by mistake, and your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court for your district (or, if you are outside the United States, for any district in which we may be found). We may restore the material after the statutory waiting period unless the original complainant files a court action.

Repeat infringers. We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances.

To report abuse — illegal content, phishing, malware, or a forum being used to harm people — email support@buildformstudio.com with enough detail to identify the material. To report a security vulnerability in our platform, use security@buildformstudio.com instead; our Security page explains how we handle those and what we ask of you.

The service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied — including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement — to the maximum extent permitted by law. We don’t warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of harmful components.

Some jurisdictions don’t allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

To the extent permitted by law, you agree to defend and indemnify BuildFormStudio against claims, damages, and costs arising from your forum’s content, your members’ activity, or your breach of these terms or of applicable law.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, BuildFormStudio is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, or lost data. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us for it in the three months before the claim arose.

Some jurisdictions don’t allow these limits, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing in these terms excludes liability for fraud, or for anything else that can’t lawfully be excluded.

We may update these terms as the service evolves. For minor changes we’ll revise the date at the top. For changes that materially reduce your rights, we’ll give you at least 30 days’ notice by email or in the dashboard before they take effect, and if you don’t agree you can cancel before then. Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect means you accept it.

If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest stays in force and the unenforceable part is narrowed to the minimum extent needed to make it valid. Our not enforcing a provision isn’t a waiver of it.

You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent; we may transfer ours in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, on notice to you. Neither of us is liable for a failure to perform caused by events genuinely outside our control. These terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any written agreement we sign with you, are the entire agreement between us about the service.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, the United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the state and federal courts located in Illinois have exclusive jurisdiction — except that either of us may bring a claim in small-claims court. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live.

Questions about these terms? Email support@buildformstudio.com, or open a ticket from your dashboard.