GoRefer.io - the growth layer for tax firms

Terms of Service

Version 2.1 · Last updated: October 12, 2026

Version 2.1. Effective October 12, 2026.

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between GoRefer.io LLC, a Texas limited liability company ("GoRefer," "we," "us" or "our") and the business that signs up for GoRefer ("you"). They govern your access to and use of the GoRefer software service, including our websites, apps, browser extension and AI features (the "Service").

PLEASE READ THESE TERMS CAREFULLY BEFORE USING OUR SERVICE. By accessing or using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to the Data Processing Addendum, which is part of them. If you do not agree, you may not access or use the Service.

1. Eligibility and Accounts

1.1 Business Use Only

The Service is for businesses in the United States, such as tax preparation firms, service bureaus, Electronic Return Originators (EROs) and independent tax professionals. By using the Service, you confirm that you are acting for a business and have the authority to bind it to these Terms.

People who sign up to buy and take a firm's courses on the academy (gorefer.academy, any address ending in .gorefer.academy, and the custom domains firms connect to their academy) are learners, not customers of the Service. The Academy Learner Terms cover them. Section 4.5 covers a firm that sells courses there.

1.2 Account Registration

To use the Service, you must create an account. You agree to:

  • Give accurate, current and complete information when you register
  • Keep your account information up to date
  • Keep passwords and sign-in codes secure and confidential
  • Take responsibility for all activity under your account
  • Tell us right away about any unauthorized access

1.3 Account Administrators

The person who creates the account is its first administrator. Administrators control the account, including adding users, setting permissions, configuring settings, managing billing and accepting these Terms and the Data Processing Addendum for the business. You are responsible for the users you add and for what they do in the Service.

2. The Service

GoRefer provides a cloud-based service for:

  • Referral tracking and management
  • Commission and payout calculation, reports and exports for your payroll or accounts-payable process
  • Client, lead and preparer management, including client intake, texting and calling
  • Incentive, gamification and rewards programs
  • Landing pages for your firm
  • Analytics and reporting
  • AI-powered assistance (Gio)

3. Plans, Billing and Refunds

3.1 Plans

We offer subscription plans with different features and prices. Current plans and prices are at gorefer.io/pricing. We may change prices with 30 days' notice.

3.2 Free Trial

New accounts start with a 7-day free trial of the Scale plan. You provide a payment card when you start the trial, and nothing is charged that day. When the trial ends, the plan you chose at checkout begins and is charged to that card, together with its one-time setup fee, unless you cancel before the trial ends.

3.3 Billing

Subscription fees are billed in advance, monthly or yearly, based on the billing cycle you choose. Payments are processed by Stripe. Stripe collects and stores your card details; GoRefer does not store them. You authorize us to charge your payment method for all fees that apply.

3.4 Refunds

  • Free trial: 7 days. Cancel before it ends and you aren't charged.
  • 30-day money-back guarantee on your first subscription payment, monthly or annual.
  • Annual plans: a full refund if you cancel within 30 days of an annual charge, including a renewal.
  • Monthly plans have no contract. After your first payment's 30 days, you can cancel anytime. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the month you paid for, and partial months aren't refunded.
  • Setup and onboarding fees are non-refundable.
  • Services already used are non-refundable: texts, calls, phone numbers and Gio credits already spent.
  • Gio credit packs (firm or personal): unspent credits are refundable within 30 days of purchase, and a refund removes them. Purchased credits expire 60 days after purchase.
  • Unused phone and text balance is refunded on request when your firm closes its account.

To ask for a refund, email support@gorefer.io from an administrator's email address.

4. Commission Calculations and Payments

4.1 Calculations and Your Payments

GoRefer calculates commissions and prepares payout reports and export files from the rules you configure. You pay your preparers and partners through your own bank, payroll provider or accounting system. GoRefer never holds or moves your funds or your preparers' pay, and is not a payroll provider.

4.2 Payouts From Your Own Stripe Account

If you add a key from your own Stripe account, GoRefer can send the preparer payouts you approve. Each payment is made from your Stripe account, on your instruction, only after you approve it in GoRefer, and Stripe processes it under your agreement with Stripe, including Stripe's fees. GoRefer doesn't hold or move the funds. Preparers enter their bank details on Stripe's form; GoRefer doesn't receive them. You can remove the key in GoRefer or expire it in Stripe at any time. Use this only for contractors: employees are paid through payroll.

4.3 Your Responsibility

You are responsible for your commission rules, for checking every calculation before you pay, for worker classification (W-2 or 1099), withholding and information returns, and for your agreements with your preparers and partners. GoRefer is a software tool and does not give legal, tax or employment advice.

4.4 Client Payments

If you accept client invoice payments through GoRefer, you connect your firm's own Stripe account, and Stripe processes the payments on that account under your agreement with Stripe. Your firm is the merchant of record: Stripe's processing fees, refunds and disputes for those payments are between your firm and Stripe. GoRefer's platform fee, shown on our pricing page and in your account, is deducted automatically from each client payment.

4.5 Selling Courses on the Academy

If you sell courses or bundles on the academy, this section applies to you in addition to the rest of these Terms.

  • You are the seller. Your firm is the seller and the merchant of record for every course you sell. GoRefer provides the platform and is not the seller.
  • Direct charges on your Stripe account. Each sale is a direct charge on your firm's own Stripe account, under your agreement with Stripe. Stripe's fees, refunds, chargebacks and sales tax are your firm's. You are responsible for the sales tax on your sales.
  • GoRefer's fee. Our fee is the percentage for your academy plan, shown in the Service. We take it as an application fee on each sale. We keep the fee when a sale is refunded, unless we choose to return it.
  • Your content and claims. You are responsible for your courses, storefront and marketing, and for everything they say. That includes any continuing education (CE) or credit claim, any claim about an approval, accreditation or result, and the advertising rules that apply to tax professionals, including section 10.30 of Circular 230. Do not state that a course earns CE or other credit unless you are approved to offer it, and give the details the approving body requires.
  • Your refund policy. You must publish a refund policy for your academy and honor it. You must also give buyers a way to reach you.
  • Announcements. Announcements you send to your learners are your messages. You must follow the CAN-SPAM Act and other email laws, include your postal address, and honor unsubscribes.
  • Moderation. We may review courses and storefronts, remove or hide content, stop sales of a course, or suspend your storefront or your ability to sell, when we reasonably believe it is needed to follow the law, protect buyers or enforce these Terms.
  • If your academy plan lapses or you go over its limits. We will tell you first. If it is not fixed, we stop new sales of the affected courses and then close them to buyers. Buyers lose online access to a closed course.
  • If you cancel GoRefer or turn the academy off. Your learners' access to your courses ends with it, because the courses are hosted for you through the Service. Tell your buyers before you do this. Refunds to them are yours to decide under your refund policy; GoRefer does not refund them.

A learner who has finished a course keeps access to the certificate they earned.

5. Acceptable Use

You agree not to use the Service to:

  • Break any law or regulation
  • Infringe anyone's intellectual property rights
  • Send malware, viruses or other harmful code
  • Try to gain unauthorized access to our systems or to another customer's data
  • Interfere with or disrupt the Service
  • Commit fraud
  • Collect information about people without the consent the law requires
  • Send unsolicited messages (spam), or texts or calls without the consent the law requires
  • Impersonate another person or business
  • Use automated means to access the Service without our permission
  • Reverse engineer, scrape or build a competing product from the Service

6. Intellectual Property

6.1 Our Intellectual Property

The Service, including its software, content, features and functionality, is owned by GoRefer and protected by copyright, trademark and other intellectual property laws. You may not copy, modify, distribute or create derivative works from it without our written permission.

6.2 Your Content

You keep ownership of the data and content you and your users put into the Service ("Your Content"), including your clients' information. You give us a limited license to host, store, reproduce, transmit, publicly display and perform Your Content, including courses, videos, files and storefront pages, to the people you make it available to, only to provide the Service. Where Your Content includes personal data, the Data Processing Addendum describes how we handle it.

6.3 Feedback

If you give us feedback or ideas about the Service, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license to use them.

7. Data Protection

7.1 Privacy Policy

Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle information about you, your users and visitors to our websites.

7.2 Data Processing Addendum

The Data Processing Addendum is part of these Terms for every firm that uses the Service. It explains how we handle your clients' information as your service provider, including tax return information. An administrator accepts these Terms and the Data Processing Addendum for your firm at sign-up, and again when either one changes.

7.3 Your Clients' Information

You decide what information about your clients and contacts you put into the Service and how you use it. You confirm that you have the right to give it to us and to have us process it for you as these Terms describe.

8. Your Clients and Their Consents

You are responsible for following the laws that apply to how you use the Service with your clients, leads and other contacts, including:

  • Texting. Get the consent the law and the phone carriers require before you text someone, honor opt-out requests, and send only the kinds of messages people agreed to receive.
  • Calls. If you record calls, give the notice and get the consent that the law requires where you and the other person are located.
  • Tax return information. Get the consents that section 7216 of the Internal Revenue Code and its regulations require before you use or disclose tax return information for any purpose other than preparing the return, including referral and reward programs.
  • Email. Follow the CAN-SPAM Act and other email laws for marketing email you send.
  • Landing pages. If you add advertising or analytics tags to your landing pages, tell visitors and get any consent the law requires.
  • Your own notices. Give your clients the privacy notice and terms the law requires. GoRefer lets you publish your own Privacy Notice and Terms for your client portal and landing pages; you are responsible for their content.

9. AI Features

Gio and the other AI features produce drafts and suggestions. They are not tax, legal or financial advice, and they can be wrong. A qualified person at your firm must review AI output before you rely on it or put it on a return.

Our AI provider is Microsoft. Before text is sent to an AI model, we mask Social Security numbers, ITINs, EINs and bank account and routing numbers. Masking can miss a number written in an unusual way. Names and other details in a document or conversation can still reach our AI provider, which reads uploaded documents in full to pull out their details. We do not use your data to train AI models. Some AI features use Gio credits, as shown in the Service.

10. Beta Features

Some features are labeled beta, including the GoRefer Autofill (Beta) browser extension. Beta features are provided as is, may change or stop at any time, and are not covered by any availability target. The Autofill Beta Terms also apply to the extension.

11. Third-Party Software and Integrations

The Service works with other companies' software, including professional tax software and integrations your firm chooses to connect. GoRefer is not affiliated with or endorsed by the makers of tax software. You must hold your own license to any third-party software you use with the Service and follow its terms. We are not responsible for third-party software or for changes to it. When you connect an integration, you direct us to send it the information it needs, and your agreement with that provider governs what it does with it.

12. Service Availability

12.1 Availability

We aim for 99.9% monthly uptime. This is a target, not a promise, and we do not guarantee uninterrupted access. We announce scheduled maintenance in advance when we can.

12.2 Changes to the Service

We may change, update or stop features of the Service. We will give reasonable notice of material changes that hurt your use of the Service.

13. Suspension

We may suspend all or part of your access, without notice if needed, when we reasonably believe it is necessary to protect the Service, our customers or your clients' information, for example after a security incident or a compromised account. We may also suspend access if fees are past due after we have told you about them. We will restore access once the problem is fixed.

14. Termination and Your Data

14.1 Termination by You

You may cancel your subscription at any time in your account settings or by contacting support. Unless you receive a full refund under section 3.4, cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period.

14.2 Termination by Us

We may suspend or terminate your account if you:

  • Violate these Terms
  • Fail to pay fees when due
  • Engage in fraudulent activity
  • Pose a security risk to the Service

14.3 Your Data After Cancellation

While your account is open, you can export your data from the Service. If you need help with an export, contact support before you cancel.

When a firm cancels, we show the date its data will be deleted. After the retention period ends, we delete the firm's workspace: its users, client records, messages, call recordings, voicemails and Gio cases, the documents stored for it in our current document storage, and its account with our phone provider, whose numbers are released. Records on legal hold are kept until the hold is released. Billing and payment records are kept for at least 7 years for tax and accounting purposes, proof that a person agreed to receive messages or asked to stop is kept in a reduced form for up to 5 years, and our security audit trail is kept. Deleted data can remain in our backups for up to 30 days, until those backups expire. Each deletion is recorded. Ask legal@gorefer.io to confirm when your firm's data was deleted and what was kept.

15. Disclaimers

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. We disclaim all warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure. We are not responsible for errors in commission calculations, AI output or autofilled data that you do not review before you rely on them.

16. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, GOREFER SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, including loss of profits, data or business opportunities, arising from your use of the Service.

Our total liability for all claims arising from the Service shall not exceed the fees you paid us in the twelve (12) months before the claim.

17. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless GoRefer and its officers, managers, employees and agents from any claims, damages, losses or expenses (including legal fees) arising from:

  • Your use of the Service
  • Your breach of these Terms
  • Your violation of anyone else's rights
  • Your Content
  • Your failure to get a consent or give a notice the law requires
  • Disputes between you and your preparers, partners or clients

18. Dispute Resolution

18.1 Governing Law

These Terms shall be governed by the laws of the State of Texas, United States, without regard to conflict of law principles.

18.2 Arbitration

Any dispute arising from these Terms or the Service shall be resolved through binding arbitration in accordance with the rules of the American Arbitration Association. The arbitration shall be conducted in Collin County, Texas. Any court proceeding these Terms allow, including one to enforce an arbitration award, shall be brought in the state or federal courts serving Collin County, Texas.

18.3 Class Action Waiver

You agree to resolve disputes on an individual basis and waive any right to participate in class action lawsuits or class-wide arbitration.

19. Electronic Communications and Notices

You agree that we may give you agreements, notices, receipts and other communications electronically, by email to your account administrators or in the Service, and that these meet any legal requirement that they be in writing. Keep your administrators' email addresses current. Send legal notices to us by email at legal@gorefer.io.

20. General Provisions

20.1 Entire Agreement

These Terms, together with the Data Processing Addendum, the Autofill Beta Terms (if you use the extension), our Privacy Policy and our Cookie Policy, are the entire agreement between you and GoRefer about the Service. If these Terms and the Data Processing Addendum conflict on how your clients' information is handled, the Data Processing Addendum controls.

20.2 Severability

If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect.

20.3 Waiver

If we do not enforce a right or provision of these Terms, that is not a waiver of it.

20.4 Assignment

You may not assign or transfer these Terms without our written consent. We may assign our rights and obligations without restriction.

20.5 Events Beyond Our Control

We are not responsible for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control, such as natural disasters, failures of the internet or of our service providers, labor disputes, or acts of government.

20.6 Survival

Sections that by their nature should continue after these Terms end will continue, including fees owed, intellectual property, your data after cancellation, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification and dispute resolution.

20.7 United States Only

The Service is offered to businesses in the United States. You may not use or export the Service in violation of U.S. export control or sanctions laws.

21. Changes to These Terms

We may change these Terms. We will email account administrators before a material change takes effect, and we will post the new version here with its effective date. When these Terms or the Data Processing Addendum change, an administrator will be asked to accept the new version for your firm. If you do not agree to a change, you may cancel before it takes effect.

22. Contact Us

If you have questions about these Terms, contact us at:

GoRefer.io LLC, Dallas, Texas
Email: legal@gorefer.io
Website: https://gorefer.io