Terms of Service

Effective date: October 2, 2026

These Terms are the agreement between you and The Dads Standard, a business operating from Dallas County, Texas ("The Dads Standard," "we," "us"). They cover the website at dads-standard-site.onrender.com and thedadsstandard.com, the free tools, the paid documents and tools, and the subscriptions.

Read them. They are short on purpose. Some of these clauses exist to protect the business from being sued over how a court ruled in your case. Where that is the reason for a clause, we say so.

1.1 Accepting these Terms

You accept these Terms when you do any of the following: use the site, use a free tool, give us your email address, create an account, or buy anything. If you do not accept them, do not use the site.

1.2 What we are, and what we are not

The Dads Standard is not a law firm, does not employ lawyers to advise you, and does not give legal advice.

We sell self-help documents, reference material, and tools. You are representing yourself, or working with your own attorney. We are neither.

• No attorney-client relationship is created by anything on this site. Not by buying a document. Not by uploading a financial file. Not by emailing us. Not by anything we say back to you. We cannot be your lawyer and we are not acting as one.
• Nothing you send us is protected by attorney-client privilege. If you need privileged communication, talk to a licensed attorney in your state.
• Our documents are starting points, not finished filings. Family law differs by state, by county, and sometimes by judge. A form that is correct in Harris County, Texas may be rejected in Maricopa County, Arizona. Local rules change. Check your court's current requirements before you file anything.
• Our calculators produce estimates, not orders. The child-support estimator models 51 jurisdictions using published guidelines. A court is not bound by it. Judges deviate from guideline numbers, apply facts we never see, and reach different results. Do not make decisions based on an estimate alone.
• We do not review your case. We do not tell you whether to file, when to file, what to ask for, or whether a deal is good. Those are legal judgments. Get a lawyer.
• We are not your agent, and we do not accept service on your behalf. Where a service of ours handles court notices that you receive — for example by forwarding or summarizing them — you remain the recipient of record. The notice still goes to you, we never stand in for you with a court or another party, and nothing we do replaces official notice from the court, from the clerk, or from the other side.

If you are facing an emergency, a deadline, a protective order, a criminal allegation, or a possible loss of custody, hire a licensed family-law attorney in your state. Nothing we sell is a substitute for that.

What you are confirming. By using the site or buying anything from it, you confirm that you understand you are representing yourself or working with your own attorney; that we are not providing legal services to you; that you are not relying on us for legal advice; and that any decision about what to sign, file, ask for or accept in your case is yours, made on your own judgment or your attorney’s.

1.3 Who may use the site

You may use the site if you are 18 or older and legally able to enter a contract. The site is intended for users in the United States and the District of Columbia. We do not market it anywhere else. If you use it from outside the United States, you do so on your own initiative and you are responsible for your local law.

You may not use the site if we have previously closed your account for breaking these Terms.

Some products are not sold in every state. States regulate non-lawyer legal document services differently. Where a state’s rules make it inappropriate for us to sell a product there, we do not sell it there. Today that means the paid tiers from First Draft upward are not available to buyers in North Carolina. The restriction is shown on the packages page and applied at checkout. When you buy, you confirm you are buying from a state where that product is offered. If an order reaches us from a state where it is not, we may cancel it and refund it in full.

1.4 The license you get when you download a document

When you buy a parenting plan, a state packet, a modification kit, or any other file, you are buying a license to use it — not ownership of it.

The license is:

• Personal. It is for you.
• Limited to your own family-law matter. You may use it in your own case, or cases involving your own children. You may adapt it, edit it, fill it in, and file it with a court.
• Non-transferable and non-exclusive. It does not move to anyone else.

What the license does not allow, and this list is the point of the clause:

• You may not resell the file, in whole or in part, in any form, at any price, including free.
• You may not redistribute it — no posting it, no forums, no file-sharing, no Dropbox links, no group chats, no "here, use mine."
• You may not use it as source material for a competing product, template set, course, or document service.
• You may not use it in a law practice to serve clients. If you are an attorney, paralegal, legal document preparer, mediator, or any other professional, you may not use these documents in the matters of people you serve. That is a separate arrangement under a written firm agreement — The Counsel Desk — and until such an agreement is signed, this restriction applies to you. Nothing on the counsel page varies this license; only a signed firm agreement does. Contact us at support@thedadsstandard.com.
• You may not remove, cover, or alter the disclaimer printed at the bottom of a delivered document, or our copyright notice.
• You may not feed our documents, packets, or clause library into a machine-learning system for training, fine-tuning, or dataset construction.

You may show a document to your own attorney, your co-parent, a mediator in your case, or the court. That is normal use and it is allowed.

If you break this license, it ends immediately. We may also close your account and seek any remedy available to us.

1.5 Intellectual property

We own the site, the documents, the packets, the clause library, the calculator logic, the jurisdiction research, the text, and the design — or we license them. Nothing you buy transfers ownership of any of it.

Court forms published by a state or county are public documents; we do not claim to own them. What we claim is our own drafting, our own organization of the material, our own research, and our own software.

You own what you write. If you type your own facts into a document, a calculator scenario, or an intake, those words are yours. We do not claim them.

1.6 Accounts and security

Some purchases create an account. Free tools — the twelve-question order diagnostic, the child-support estimator, and the affidavit walkthrough — do not require one.

If you have an account:

• Give accurate information and keep it current.
• Keep your password to yourself. One person, one account. Sharing an account with someone else to split the price is a breach of these Terms and of the license in section 1.4.
• You are responsible for what happens under your login.
• Tell us at support@thedadsstandard.com as soon as you suspect someone else is in your account.

We may suspend or close an account that is being shared, used to redistribute files, or used to break these Terms.

1.7 Buying, prices, taxes, and subscriptions

One-time purchases. We sell seven one-time tiers, currently ranging from $0 to $999. Prices are in US dollars. The price shown at checkout is the price you pay.

Subscriptions. We sell two subscriptions, currently $9 per month and $29 per month or $290 per year. A subscription renews automatically at the end of each term, at the price then in effect, until you cancel.

• Canceling. You can cancel at any time from your account, or by emailing support@thedadsstandard.com. Cancel before the renewal date to avoid the next charge.
• What happens when you cancel. Your subscription runs to the end of the term you already paid for. Then it stops. Files you already downloaded stay yours under the license in section 1.4. Access to subscriber-only material ends.
• Price changes. If we change a subscription price, we will tell you by email before it takes effect, and you can cancel before it does.

Payment. Payments are processed by Stripe. We do not see or store your full card number. Your payment is also subject to Stripe's own terms.

Taxes. Prices shown may not include sales tax. Where we are required to collect sales, use, or similar tax on a digital product, it is added at checkout and shown before you pay.

Failed payments. If a payment fails or is reversed, we may suspend access until it is resolved.

Refunds are covered in a separate document — the Refund Policy — which is part of this agreement.

1.8 The services performed by hand, and what you upload for them

Three paid services are performed by a person rather than downloaded:

• The Financial Fact-Check sets a sworn financial affidavit against the records behind it. It asks you to upload bank statements, tax returns, pay stubs, card statements, and peer-payment or processor history.
• The TalkingParents message analysis reads a certified co-parenting message record in thread order and codes each message against ten written definitions. It asks you to upload that record.
• Calculator Pro saves and compares scenarios you enter yourself. It asks for no uploads.

If you upload anything for either of the first two:

• You must have the right to share what you upload. Upload your own documents, or documents you are legally entitled to possess and disclose. Do not upload anything you obtained by going through someone else's mail, phone, email, accounts, or files. Do not upload documents belonging to a third party who has not agreed to it. If uploading a document would break a court order, a protective order, a sealing order, or a confidentiality agreement, do not upload it.
• You are responsible for that. If a third party makes a claim about a document you uploaded, section 1.12 applies.
• We treat what you upload as confidential. How we store, retain, and delete it is described in the Privacy Policy.
• We are reviewing documents, not auditing them. We work from what you give us. We do not verify that a statement is complete, authentic, or unaltered, and we do not go looking for what is missing. We are not accountants, forensic accountants, tax preparers, or auditors, and this service is not an audit, a valuation, or a forensic examination.
• Remove what does not need to be there. If a document contains a Social Security number, a full account number, or another person's sensitive data that is not needed, redact it before uploading.
• A message record is your own record, and you are responsible for producing it. A co-parenting message record necessarily contains messages written by the other parent, and usually information about your children. It is issued to you, for your own account, by the service that holds it. Before you send it, satisfy yourself that producing it does not break a court order, a protective order, a sealing order, or that service’s own terms in your case. If you are not sure, ask your attorney first.

What these services produce, and what they are not.

• The deliverable describes documents; it does not give an opinion about them. A Financial Fact-Check reports what the records show and what they do not. A message analysis reports which written definition each message matched and quotes the words that matched it. Neither states a conclusion about what any of it means, whether anyone did anything wrong, or what a court should do with it.
• They are not expert reports, and nobody here is an expert witness. We are not retained as an expert in your case, we do not offer testimony, and we will not appear as a witness. If you need an expert, you need a licensed one.
• A person checks the work before it ships, for accuracy only. That check confirms the figures trace to the documents and the codes match their written definitions. It is not a legal review, it is not an audit, and no one adds commentary on what the record means.
• The finished deliverable is yours. You own the workbook and the memo we produce for you, and the resale and redistribution limits in section 1.4 do not apply to them. You may file them, and show them to your attorney, your co-parent, a mediator or the court. We keep our rights in the underlying software, formats, definitions and methods.
• Section 1.2 applies to these services in full. They create no attorney-client relationship, nothing you send us is privileged, and none of it is legal advice.

1.9 Acceptable use

Do not:

• Use the site to break the law, or to help anyone break the law.
• Use our material to harass, intimidate, stalk, or threaten anyone — including a co-parent.
• Upload malware, or anything designed to damage the site.
• Scrape, crawl, spider, or bulk-download the site, the packets, the clause library, or the jurisdiction data, or use automated tools to extract them.
• Attempt to access another user's account, files, or uploads.
• Probe, scan, or test the security of the site, or get around any access control or paywall.
• Impersonate us, or suggest we endorse you, your firm, or your product.
• Misrepresent what we are — in particular, do not tell a court, a co-parent, or anyone else that a document was prepared by a lawyer, reviewed by a lawyer, or produced by a law firm. It was not.

1.10 Disclaimer of warranties

The site, the documents, the packets, the tools, and the calculators are provided "as is" and "as available."

To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.

We specifically do not warrant that:

• A document will be accepted by any court, clerk, judge, or mediator.
• A document or packet reflects the current law, rule, or local practice in your jurisdiction on the day you use it.
• A calculator result matches what a court will order.
• Any particular outcome — custody, possession, support, or otherwise — will follow from using anything we sell.
• The site will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free.

Some states do not allow certain warranty exclusions. Where that is true, the exclusions above apply only as far as that state allows.

1.11 Limitation of liability

This clause exists to keep the price of a document from turning into the price of a custody case, and we would rather say that plainly than bury it. We sell documents for between $0 and $999. We do not control your facts, your court, your judge, your co-parent, or your deadlines, and we cannot carry the financial risk of how your case turns out.

To the fullest extent the law allows:

• Our total liability to you, for everything, is capped at the amount you actually paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. If you paid nothing, our liability is capped at $100.
• We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages.
• We are not liable for lost custody time, lost possession, an adverse ruling, a missed deadline, a rejected filing, a support amount you did not expect, lost income, lost profits, lost data, or emotional distress.

This cap applies whether the claim is in contract, tort, negligence, strict liability, statute, or anything else, and it applies even if we were told the damage was possible.

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain damages. Where that is true, this section applies only as far as that state allows, and our liability is limited to the smallest amount that state permits.

Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including liability for fraud.

1.12 Indemnity

If someone else brings a claim against us because of what you did, you cover us. Specifically, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless The Dads Standard and its owners, officers, employees, and contractors from any claim, loss, liability, or cost — including reasonable attorneys' fees — arising out of:

• your use of the site or anything you bought;
• a document you uploaded that you did not have the right to share;
• your breach of these Terms or of the license in section 1.4;
• your violation of any law or of anyone else's rights.

We will tell you about the claim and let you control the defense, as long as any settlement that affects us is agreed with us first.

1.13 Changes to these Terms

We may change these Terms. When we do, we will change the effective date at the top and post the new version.

• If the change is material, we will give notice on the site, and by email to account holders, before it takes effect.
• Changes apply going forward. They do not change the terms of a purchase you already made.
• If you keep using the site after a change takes effect, you accept it. If you do not accept it, stop using the site and cancel any subscription.

1.14 Suspension and termination

You may stop using the site at any time, and close your account by emailing support@thedadsstandard.com.

We may suspend or close your access if you break these Terms, if we are required to by law, or if we stop offering the service. If we close your account for a reason other than your breach, and you have paid for something you have not received, the Refund Policy applies.

Sections that by their nature should survive termination do survive it — including the license restrictions, intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity, and governing law.

1.15 Governing law and venue

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Any dispute must be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Dallas County, Texas, and you and we each consent to personal jurisdiction there.

If the law of your home state gives you a right you cannot waive by agreement — including a consumer-protection right or a right to bring a claim in small-claims court where you live — this section does not take that right away.

1.16 Severability, waiver, assignment, entire agreement

• Severability. If a court finds any part of these Terms unenforceable, that part is limited or removed and the rest stays in force.
• Waiver. If we do not enforce something right away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to a successor if the business is sold or reorganized.
• Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and the Refund Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about the site, and they replace anything said before.

1.17 Contact

The Dads Standard
7617 Dunoon Ave, Dallas, Texas 75248
support@thedadsstandard.com