Terms of Use

These Terms of Use are a contract between you and Innovations App Lab LLC, a Texas limited liability company ("we", "us"), covering the LotHook website and application (the "Service").

You accept them by ticking the box that says you accept them and then creating an account. That is a deliberate choice on our part. Texas recognises electronic records and signatures under the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, Tex. Bus. & Com. Code ch. 322, and an affirmative tick is a far better record of agreement than a line of small print at the bottom of a page. When you accept, we record who you are, the time, which version of each document you accepted, a cryptographic hash of that exact text, and the network address the acceptance came from — so that if the existence of this agreement is ever questioned, there is something to point at.

You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract.

If your organization has a Subscription Agreement with us, that agreement governs the paid Service and controls over these terms wherever the two conflict.

LotHook is a record-keeping tool for parking permits. It lets a property's staff or its towing operator register vehicles, issue permits, let residents issue their own permits within limits the property sets, check a licence plate against those permits, and record what happened when a vehicle was towed.

That is the whole of it. It is a system of record. Everything in section 4 follows from that sentence.

Keep your password to yourself, use a real email address you control, and tell us promptly if you think someone else has got into your account. You are responsible for what happens under your account, except where it happens because of something we did wrong.

If you are a resident, you enrol through a link or QR code your property gives you, and you will need a unit code from your property. Your property decides whether you may issue your own permits and how many. We cannot enrol you, raise your limit or vouch for your unit — those are your property's decisions, and asking us to override them is asking us to override our own customer.

If you are staff, your organization's administrator decides your role and which properties you can see.

We may suspend or close an account that is being used to break these terms, the Acceptable Use Policy, or the law.

A "no permit" result means no matching permit was found in the system at that moment. It does not mean the vehicle is parked unlawfully, that notice requirements were met, that the signage was correct, or that a tow is permitted. Those are legal judgments and they belong to the towing operator and the property, who are licensed and insured to make them. We are not.

If you tow a vehicle, that is your decision and your responsibility, whatever the screen said.

The Acceptable Use Policy is part of these terms and sets out what you may not do. The short version is that plate checks are for enforcement at a property you are engaged to enforce, and running one for any other reason — curiosity, a personal dispute, tracking someone, doing a favour — is a breach of this agreement and may also break the law.

You also may not resell the Service, reverse engineer it, scrape it, probe it for vulnerabilities without our written permission, upload malware, or use it to harass anyone.

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and why. Two points belong here rather than there:

Data about residents and vehicles belongs to the property or operator whose account it sits under, not to us. We hold and process it for them. We do not sell it, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not use it to train machine learning models.

Some records are permanent by design. Tow records and their photographs cannot be edited or deleted through the Service — not by you, not by your administrator, and not by our support staff. The database grants no update or delete on those tables to any signed-in account at all, so this is a property of the system rather than a rule people are asked to follow. They can be corrected by appending an amendment, which leaves both the original and the correction in place. This is not an oversight and it is not negotiable: a tow record that could be quietly rewritten afterwards would be worthless as evidence to everyone, including the person whose vehicle was towed.

The Service, its software, its design and its documentation are ours and are protected by intellectual property law. We grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service while your account is in good standing. That is a licence, not a sale, and everything not expressly granted is reserved.

If you send us a suggestion, we may use it without owing you anything for it. We would rather have your suggestions than a claim about them later.

The Service runs on infrastructure operated by others — hosting, database, authentication, and email delivery — named in the Privacy Policy. We choose them carefully and contract with them, but we do not control them, and an outage or failure at one of them may interrupt the Service.

We work to keep the Service running and we do not promise it will never be unavailable. We may take it down for maintenance. This section does not create an uptime commitment; if your organization has one, it is in the Subscription Agreement.

These limits do not apply to a party's liability for fraud, for wilful misconduct, or to anything the law does not permit us to limit.

If you use the Service on behalf of a business — a towing company, an HOA, a management company — you will defend and indemnify us against claims arising from your use of the Service, from a tow or enforcement decision you made, or from your breach of these terms.

This section does not apply to a resident using the Service for their own household. We are not asking a tenant to indemnify a software company.

You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate access if you breach these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, or if we are required to by law.

Sections 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 15 survive termination.

This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The exclusive venue for any dispute is the state or federal courts located in Harris County, Texas, and both parties consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

There is no mandatory arbitration clause here and no class-action waiver. That is a choice, not an omission.

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the Acceptable Use Policy, are the entire agreement between us on this subject and replace anything said beforehand. If a provision is held unenforceable the rest stands. Our failure to enforce something is not a waiver of it. You may not assign this agreement; we may assign it to a successor to our business. Neither party is liable for delays caused by events outside its reasonable control.

Notices to you go to the email address on your account. Notices to us go to the email address in the Privacy Policy.

Changes. We may update these terms. For a material change we will give at least 30 days' notice by email, and we will ask you to accept the new version when you next sign in. Continuing to use the Service after a material change takes effect is acceptance of it. Every version is retained with its hash and its effective date.