Forward — Terms of Service
Effective date: September 18, 2026
Last updated: October 11, 2026
1. Who we are, and what these terms do
Forward ("Forward," "we," "us") is a personal and household budgeting application operated by Stephen Mayer. These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a binding agreement between you and Forward covering the Forward web app (PWA), iOS app, Android app, and the forwardbudget.app websites (together, the "Service").
By creating an account, signing in, or paying for a membership, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.
Our Privacy Policy (https://app.forwardbudget.app/privacy) explains what data Forward collects and how it is handled. It is part of these Terms.
2. Forward is a budgeting tool, not financial advice
Forward is a calculator and a record-keeper. It is not a bank, not a money transmitter, not a lender, and not a financial, investment, tax, accounting or legal adviser. Nothing in the Service is financial, investment, tax or legal advice.
Forward never moves money. It does not make payments, transfer funds between accounts, or hold a balance on your behalf. Every figure it shows — Assigned, Funded, Spent, Available, carryover, projections, forecasts and targets — is a calculation over the data you or your linked institutions provide. Those figures can be wrong if the underlying data is wrong, incomplete, stale, or delayed, and forecasts are estimates about the future, not promises.
You are solely responsible for your own financial decisions, for the accuracy of what you enter, and for reconciling Forward against your actual bank and card statements. Your financial institution's records govern your real balances — not Forward's.
3. Eligibility and your account
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You must be at least 13 years old (or the age of digital consent where you live, if higher) to use Forward, and at least 18 — or otherwise legally able to enter a contract — to buy a membership.
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You must provide accurate account information and keep it current.
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One person, one account. Do not share your sign-in credentials.
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You are responsible for everything that happens under your account and for every person you invite into your household.
Keeping your account secure is your responsibility: use a strong, unique password, keep your email account and devices secure, and tell us at support@forwardbudget.app immediately if you suspect unauthorized access.
4. Households, sharing and your data
Forward organizes data into households. Anyone you invite into your household can see and change that household's budget data, including its transactions and account balances. Invite deliberately: invitation is a grant of access to your financial information, and Forward cannot un-see data on your behalf once a member has viewed it.
You keep ownership of the data you put into Forward. You grant Forward only the license needed to operate the Service for you — to store, process, compute over, back up and display your data to you and to your household members. We do not sell your personal or financial information, and we do not use your financial data for advertising.
You can export your data at any time, and you can request deletion of your account as described in the Privacy Policy. Forward's budget ledger is append-only by design: corrections are recorded as new entries rather than edits, and account deletion is the exception that removes the underlying records themselves.
5. Bank connections and other third-party services
Forward relies on independent third parties to operate. Plaid Inc. provides bank-account connection (https://plaid.com/legal/). Google Cloud Platform and Firebase provide hosting, database storage, authentication and AI categorization. Stripe, Inc. and Link, LLC handle payments. Each of these is a separate company with its own terms and its own security program, and your use of a connected bank account is also governed by your agreement with that institution and with Plaid.
Forward does not receive or store your bank login credentials — those are entered directly into Plaid's interface and never pass through Forward's servers. Forward does not receive or store your card number.
Forward does not control these providers and does not guarantee their availability, accuracy or security. If a bank feed is delayed, incomplete or wrong, or a provider suffers an outage or a security incident of its own, that is outside Forward's control — see sections 12 and 13.
6. Free tier and paid membership
Forward has a free tier and a paid membership. The free tier includes the paycheck-first planner, manual entry, CSV and YNAB/EveryDollar import, data export, any number of budgets, two members, and unlimited history. The membership adds a third household member and more, bank sync when it ships, and AI categorization when it ships.
We may change what each tier includes. If a change would remove something you are already using, we will give you notice first; a household that already has more members than a tier allows on the day a gate takes effect keeps them.
7. Founding membership: price, term and renewal
The founding membership is not yet available to buy. This section and sections 8 to 10 set the terms that will apply to it, and they take effect for you when you purchase; they will be revised before the offer opens if any of it changes.
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The founding membership is $79.00 USD, and your price is locked at $79 a year for as long as your household stays a member.
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Your first term is two years: it runs for 730 days from the day you buy. You pay $79 once at purchase and nothing more until then.
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When the first term ends, the membership renews automatically every 12 months at your locked $79, charged to the payment method on file, until you cancel.
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If you bought before October 5, 2026, your first term runs to January 1, 2028, as it said when you bought, and renews every 12 months from then.
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Cancelling stops the next charge and keeps your access to the end of the term you have already paid for. There is no partial refund of a term in progress.
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The founding offer is open through January 31, 2027.
Prices are in US dollars and exclude tax, which is calculated and collected at checkout where applicable. If you buy outside the United States you may be shown a local-currency amount by our payment processor; the locked price is the $79 USD price, so a local amount can move with exchange rates.
You authorize recurring charges for the membership until you cancel. You can cancel at any time by emailing support@forwardbudget.app, or from the billing portal in the app once your membership is active.
8. Who you are buying from
Payments are processed by Stripe, with Link, LLC acting as merchant of record — meaning Link, LLC is the seller for the transaction. Your card statement and your receipt will show "Link, LLC" or a similar descriptor rather than "Forward."
Link, LLC collects and remits applicable sales tax, VAT and GST, issues your receipt and tax invoice, and reviews and responds to card disputes. Forward provides the Service itself, and your membership entitlement inside Forward follows the payment either way. If you do not recognize a charge, please check for that descriptor and contact us at support@forwardbudget.app before disputing it with your bank — we can usually identify and resolve it the same day.
9. Refunds
Full refund within 60 days, no questions. The 60 days run from your founding purchase — email support@forwardbudget.app and we will refund the full $79.
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The 60 days run from your original founding purchase. A renewal does not re-open the window.
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After day 60, charges are final and non-refundable, except where a refund is required by law or where section 16 or 17 gives you one. Your remedy is to cancel: the next charge stops and your access runs to the end of the term you have paid for.
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A renewal charge can be avoided entirely by cancelling before the renewal date. We will send a reminder before each renewal.
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If we refund you, your membership ends: the subscription is cancelled, pending household invitations are revoked, and anyone already in your household stays a member of it. Your data is not touched or deleted by a refund.
Our payment processor may also issue a refund within its own 60-day window to resolve a complaint. The effect on your membership is the same as a refund we issue.
10. Payment disputes and chargebacks
Talk to us first. Nearly every billing problem is a misread descriptor, a forgotten renewal, or a refund we would have given you anyway — and we can fix all three faster than a bank can.
You agree that before asking your bank or card issuer to reverse a Forward charge, you will contact us at support@forwardbudget.app and give us 10 business days to resolve it. We commit to responding within 2 business days, and to refunding in full without argument any charge that is inside the 60-day window in section 9.
The refund policy in section 9 is disclosed to you here, on our pricing page, and on the checkout page before you pay. By completing a purchase you acknowledge that you have read it and that you accept it as the agreed refund term of the sale.
After the 60-day refund window has passed, a charge you authorized is final. If you initiate a chargeback for such a charge instead of cancelling, you are in breach of these Terms.
If that happens, we may do any of the following:
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Immediately suspend or terminate your membership and revoke your household's entitlement and any pending invitations, exactly as a refund would.
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Contest the dispute, and provide to the card network these Terms, the record and timestamp of your acceptance of them, your receipt, the checkout page's disclosure of the refund policy, and your account's access and usage logs showing the Service was delivered and used.
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Recover from you the disputed amount together with any chargeback fee we are charged, as a debt, to the extent permitted by law.
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Decline to sell you a membership in the future.
We will not delete your data over a payment dispute, and we will not remove anyone from your household over one. You can export your data at any point.
Nothing in this section limits any right you have that cannot be waived by law. If a charge was genuinely unauthorized — a stolen card, or a charge you never agreed to — dispute it, and tell us so we can help. Your statutory rights as a cardholder, including under the US Fair Credit Billing Act and any equivalent law where you live, are unaffected by these Terms.
11. Acceptable use
Do not:
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Use the Service unlawfully, or to store data you have no right to.
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Attempt to access another household's data, probe or breach our security or access controls, or test them without our prior written permission.
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Scrape, overload, disrupt or reverse-engineer the Service, or circumvent rate limits, paywalls or entitlement gates.
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Resell or sublicense the Service, or use it to build a competing product.
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Upload malware, or anything designed to interfere with the Service or its other users.
Forward, its name, logo, design and software are owned by Forward and its licensors. These Terms grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the Service, and nothing more.
12. Security, and incidents outside our control
We take security seriously and describe our actual measures in the Privacy Policy and at https://www.forwardbudget.app/security.html — encryption in transit, envelope-encrypted bank tokens, database-level row isolation between households, private networking, and short-lived deployment credentials. If a security incident affects your data, we will notify you without undue delay after becoming aware of it, as the Privacy Policy says and as applicable law requires.
But no system, and no company, can be made perfectly secure. We do not warrant or guarantee that the Service, or any provider it depends on, will never be subject to unauthorized access, and no statement we make about our security is a guarantee against a breach.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Forward is not liable for any loss, damage or claim arising out of or relating to:
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A security incident, breach, outage, data loss or data exposure originating in the systems of a third party — including Plaid, Google Cloud, Firebase, Stripe, Link, your financial institution, your device maker, your operating system, your browser, or your email provider — and not caused by our own failure to maintain the safeguards described above.
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Compromise of your own credentials, email account, device or network, including phishing, credential reuse, malware, SIM-swap or an unlocked device.
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Anything done by a person you invited into your household, or anyone they allow to use their account, or access that continues because you did not remove a member you no longer trust.
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Data you export, screenshot, share, sync to another service or otherwise take outside the Service.
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A previously unknown vulnerability (a zero-day) in software we use, before a fix is available to us; an attack that defeats commercially reasonable safeguards; or a denial-of-service or other attack on infrastructure we do not operate.
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Any event beyond our reasonable control, including cyberattack, war, terrorism, nation-state or state-sponsored intrusion, natural disaster, pandemic, labor dispute, power or internet failure, government action, or the failure or discontinuation of a third-party service Forward depends on.
This section allocates risk between us. It does not reduce our obligation to notify you of an incident, and it does not apply to our own gross negligence, willful misconduct or fraud — see section 14.
13. The Service is provided as is
THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, FORWARD DISCLAIMS ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, ACCURACY, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.
We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, error-free or secure, that any calculation, projection or forecast will be accurate or suitable for your circumstances, that bank data will be complete or current, or that defects will be corrected. Forward is currently operated by one person, and is offered on that basis.
You are responsible for keeping your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. Export is available at any time and is the intended way to do that.
14. Limitation of liability
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, FORWARD WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOST PROFITS, LOST SAVINGS, LOST BUSINESS, LOSS OF GOODWILL, OR LOSS OF OR CORRUPTION OF DATA, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES, AND EVEN IF A REMEDY FAILS OF ITS ESSENTIAL PURPOSE.
FORWARD'S TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE TOTAL AMOUNT YOU PAID FORWARD IN THE 12 MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS ($100).
This cap applies in the aggregate across all claims, and applies whether a claim is based on contract, warranty, tort (including negligence), statute or any other theory. Because Forward never moves money, a claim that Forward caused you a financial loss is a claim about a calculation or a record, and this cap is the agreed limit of it.
These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be excluded or limited by law. Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for our own gross negligence or willful misconduct, or for any other liability that the law where you live does not permit us to exclude.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties or the limitation of certain damages, so parts of sections 12 to 14 may not apply to you. If you are a consumer, you may have statutory rights that these Terms cannot affect, and those rights stand alongside these Terms. Where a provision is found unenforceable, it is limited to the minimum extent necessary and the rest of these Terms stay in force.
15. Indemnification
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Forward and Stephen Mayer from any claim, loss or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your misuse of the Service, your breach of these Terms, your violation of law or of anyone else's rights, or the acts of a person you invited into your household. This does not apply where the claim arises from our own gross negligence or willful misconduct.
16. Suspension and termination
You can stop using Forward at any time, cancel your membership from the billing portal, and request deletion of your account as described in the Privacy Policy.
We may suspend or terminate your access if you materially breach these Terms — including section 11's acceptable use and section 10's chargeback term — if we are required to by law, or if continuing to provide the Service to you would expose Forward or its users to material risk. Except where the breach makes notice impossible or unlawful, we will tell you why and, where the breach can be fixed, give you a chance to fix it. If we terminate without cause, we will refund the unused portion of any term you have paid for.
Sections 2, 4, 9, 10, and 12 through 18 survive termination, along with any other section that by its nature should.
17. Changes to the Service and to these Terms
Forward is under active development and its features will change. We may update these Terms; when we do, we will update the "Last updated" date above. For material changes — including any change to pricing, the refund policy, or sections 12 through 18 — we will give you notice in the app or by email at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and it will not apply retroactively to a dispute that already exists.
Your locked founding price is not subject to this section: we will not raise it by amending these Terms.
If you do not accept a change, your remedy is to cancel before it takes effect; if the change is one you reasonably object to and you cancel because of it, tell us and we will refund the unused portion of your current term.
18. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Michigan, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law principles, and the courts located in Michigan have jurisdiction — except that if you are a consumer, you keep the benefit of any mandatory protections and any right to bring proceedings in the courts of the country where you live.
Before filing anything, email us at support@forwardbudget.app with a description of the problem and what you want. Most disputes end there, and we will engage with you in good faith for 30 days.
Either of us may bring an individual claim in small-claims court instead, if it qualifies. Any claim you bring must be brought within one year after it arises, to the extent that limit is enforceable where you live.
19. Everything else
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These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and Forward about the Service.
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If any provision is held unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in effect.
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Our not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.
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You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them to a successor in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, on notice to you.
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Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, employment or agency relationship, and there are no third-party beneficiaries.
20. Contact
Questions about these Terms, your membership, a charge, or a refund: support@forwardbudget.app.
We read every email at that address, and a refund request inside 60 days is answered with a refund, not a question.