Terms of sale and service

Who these terms are with

Northing is a product of Oran Dynamics, a company established in Ireland. In these terms "we" and "us" mean Oran Dynamics, and "you" means the person or business buying the receiver or the subscription.

TODO(legal): registered office address, company registration number, and VAT number once registered. The same strings are owed on the privacy notice and on the retail packaging.

Two things, sold together, owned separately

An order is for two distinct things, and keeping them distinct is the point of the product:

• The receiver. Northing One, a one-time purchase of $999. Once it is paid for, it is yours outright.
• The corrections service. Northing RTK, a subscription. The first 12 months are included in the receiver price; after that it renews at a flat $299 for each following 12 months.

Ending the subscription does not affect the hardware. The receiver keeps working with no subscription at all, on the free Northing Global mode built into every unit, at 10–20 cm accuracy. It does not lock, expire, or phone home for permission to work. That is a term of sale here, not only a marketing line.

A subscription is tied to one specific receiver, identified by its serial number. TODO(legal): whether an unexpired entitlement transfers with a receiver that is sold on, and what the new owner does to claim it.

Ordering, and when you are actually charged

Placing an order does not charge you. The pilot batch is being built, and taking money for a device that has not been made yet is the thing this industry does that we are not going to do.

1. You order. Checkout runs through our payment provider, Stripe, and stores your card for later use. No money moves. We record your order as reserved and email you a confirmation that says exactly that.
2. We build and allocate a unit. If we cannot fulfil your order we tell you, release the card, and you have paid nothing. Reserving a place is not a contract of sale on our side until we accept it by charging.
3. We charge when your unit ships. $999 is taken from the stored card at fulfilment, and you get a receipt. That charge is the point the sale is concluded.
4. The included year starts on the ship date. Your first renewal is 12 months after it, and you are emailed a reminder before every charge.

Charges appear on your statement as Oran Dynamics, the company behind Northing. Card details are handled by Stripe and are never stored on our systems.

Prices are published in US dollars. TODO(legal): whether prices are stated inclusive or exclusive of tax, the currency actually billed, and who is importer of record for shipments outside the EU. Duty and import tax are not addressed anywhere on this site yet.

The corrections subscription

Northing RTK renews automatically at a flat $299 for each following 12 months. Flat means flat: no per-hour metering, no tiers to outgrow, and no charge that depends on how much you used it.

You get a reminder email before every charge. Not a receipt afterwards. Before. It states the date and the amount, and it is sent whether or not anything changed. An auto-renewal you were not reminded about is a charge we consider ourselves to have got wrong.

Cancelling

Cancel at any time, from your account page or by emailing us. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the 12-month period you have already paid for: you keep RTK until that date, and we do not charge again.

After it lapses your receiver falls back to Northing Global, which costs nothing and needs no account. Resubscribe whenever you like. TODO(legal): whether we refund the unused part of a period when someone cancels mid-term, or only stop the next charge.

Price changes

We can change the renewal price. If we do, the new price applies from your next renewal and never mid-period, and we tell you before the reminder email rather than in it. TODO(copy): needs a sourced number — the notice period we commit to, and whether a price change carries a right to cancel with a refund.

If a renewal payment fails

We email you and retry. Your receiver does not stop working while that is happening; it falls back to Northing Global if the subscription lapses. TODO(legal): the retry window, and whether RTK continues during it.

Fair use, in plain English

A subscription covers one receiver, connected one at a time. Each receiver gets its own service credentials, issued to that unit. Those credentials are not to be shared between units, published, or passed to anyone else, and the receiver never hands them to you or to your phone in the first place.

The ceiling is there to stop one subscription being run as a fleet, not to catch a busy season. In plain English: the subscription is sized for one person's working year, in the region of 1,000 to 1,200 hours of connected time per 12 months. That is roughly ten hours a day, five days a week, right through a long season, and most people will not come close to it.

If you pass it, we contact you and talk about a fleet arrangement. We do not meter you by the hour, we do not add per-hour charges to a subscription you have already paid for, and we do not cut you off mid-field without a conversation first.

TODO(copy): needs a sourced number — the ceiling figure has to be pinned before this is public, and the homepage FAQ describes it as applying to "thousands of connected hours a year", which is a different number from the range drafted here. One of the two has to move.

What is not fair use, and is a breach of these terms: reselling or redistributing the correction stream, feeding it to receivers other than the one it was issued for, or presenting the service as your own.

Service availability

Northing RTK is provided on a best-effort basis and carries no uptime guarantee. It depends on a correction stream we source from an upstream corrections provider, on our own infrastructure, on satellite visibility where you are standing, and on your phone having a data connection. Any of those can be down without either of us doing anything wrong.

We carry out maintenance, and we will schedule anything disruptive outside working hours where we can. TODO(legal): whether we commit to a maintenance notice period, and to what.

Coverage zones can change: they can be added to, and they can be withdrawn. Where RTK reaches today is set out in the coverage guide, gaps included, and we check your location before you pay rather than after. TODO(legal): the remedy if coverage is withdrawn from your area during a period you have already paid for. A pro rata refund is the obvious answer and has not been decided.

Accuracy figures, and what this equipment is not for

The accuracy numbers published on this site are typical results measured in logged field sessions, stated with the conditions they were measured under. They describe what the equipment did, not what it will do for you: sky visibility, obstructions, how the antenna is mounted, distance to the nearest reference station and the state of your phone's data connection all change the answer. Nothing on this site is a guarantee of accuracy in your conditions.

No autonomous-operation warranty. Northing One is a positioning device. It is not designed, tested or certified for autonomous or unattended machine control, for safety-of-life navigation, or as a sole means of navigation. Do not use it to steer or move a machine that nobody is watching. A competent person must remain in control of, and responsible for, any machine acting on a position from a Northing receiver, and must be able to stop it. It is not certified for aviation, for maritime safety-of-life use, or for regulated survey work where a certified instrument is required.

TODO(legal): this is the most important paragraph on the page and needs a specialist read. Also: whether we say anything about third-party autosteer systems a receiver may be plugged into, given we do not control what they do with a position.

Your account

You need an account to manage a subscription. Use an email address you actually read, because it is where renewal reminders, receipts and service notices go. Keep your sign-in to yourself, and tell us if you think someone else has got into your account.

What we store against an account, and why, is set out in the privacy notice.

Firmware, apps and the published protocol

The firmware on the receiver is licensed, not sold, and updates are free. The Bluetooth protocol is published and the SDK is free: you may build your own app against the receiver, and you do not need our permission to do it. That is the whole point of the product and it is not going to be withdrawn in a terms update.

What that permission does not extend to: extracting or reusing the service credentials the receiver holds, redistributing the correction stream, or removing the safeguards that stop a receiver being used outside its entitlement.

TODO(legal): the firmware and SDK licences are referred to here and do not exist yet. Also whether "updates are free" is time limited, and what we commit to on security updates after a model is discontinued.

Warranty, returns and your statutory rights

Hardware faults are covered by the warranty. Changing your mind, and cancelling before a unit ships, are covered by returns and cancellation.

Nothing in these terms takes away rights you have by law as a consumer. Where a term here and your statutory rights disagree, your statutory rights win.

Liability

We do not exclude or limit liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be excluded by law.

TODO(legal): everything else. The cap, the excluded categories of loss, and how they interact with the safety clause above. Nothing is drafted here on purpose — a limitation clause written by an engineer is worse than no clause, because it looks like it was reviewed.

Changes to these terms

These terms will change as the product ships. Material changes that affect an active subscription are emailed to the people they affect, not edited in silently, and the date at the top of this page moves with every change. TODO(legal): notice period for a material change, and what a customer who does not accept one can do.

Governing law

Drafted as: these terms are governed by the law of Ireland, and the Irish courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the EU or EEA, you keep the mandatory protections of your own country's law and can bring proceedings there.

TODO(legal): confirm the Irish law and forum clause, and add the variants for customers in the United States and Australia, where the consumer statutes are not the same and a blanket Irish forum clause may not stand. Also whether we are obliged to name an online dispute resolution body.

Contact

Questions about anything on this page, before or after you buy: hello@northinggnss.com. It is answered by the person who wrote the firmware, and the same address handles support.