Terms of Service
Working draft — pending legal review. Below is an honest summary of how Threshold operates and the obligations on both sides.
What Threshold does
Threshold reads inbound cold solicitations to your Gmail inbox, auto-replies with a tier-based paywall, holds the resulting payment in escrow via Stripe (manual-capture authorization), and — when you engage with the sender — captures the payment and routes a share you specify to a designated charity. You decide which senders to engage with and which to refund.
What you're responsible for
The content of replies you send through Threshold, honoring any services you agree to render after a paywall payment captures (e.g. attending a call you accepted), keeping your Gmail account in good standing with Google, and providing accurate Stripe Connect onboarding information when collecting payouts. Threshold cannot and will not engage with senders on your behalf without a signal of engagement from you — either a Gmail reply we detect, or a manual capture click.
Escrow and refunds
Every paywall payment is authorized but not captured. Money only moves from the sender when (a) Threshold detects your reply in the Gmail thread and the 48-hour grace window elapses, or (b) for a call-tier booking, when you mark the call done. If you don't engage within 21 days of payment, the authorization auto-cancels and the sender pays nothing. Refunds are available one-click before capture; after capture, refunds require contacting support.
Fees
Threshold charges a 16% platform fee on each captured paywall payment when your charity allocation is below 85%. When your charity allocation is 85% or higher, Threshold charges no platform fee. Stripe processing fees (~2.9% + 30¢) apply when the fee is charged and come out of the gross. The breakdown is visible to you on the Paywall page before any payment occurs.
Charity routing
The charity share of each captured payment is transferred via Stripe Connect to the selected charity's connected account. The charity issues you (the recipient of the paywall payment) a donation receipt for the charity-share amount; for tax purposes you are treated as the donor of record. We list only charities that have completed Stripe Connect onboarding with us. The current catalog and selection are on the Charity page.
Disputes
If a sender disputes a captured payment, Threshold passes the dispute to Stripe under standard chargeback rules. Sender-side disputes prior to capture are handled directly — the sender can request a refund and you can honor it one-click from your dashboard, before any money has moved. We do not litigate refunds; the escrow + 21-day auto-cancel pattern is designed to make most disputes unnecessary.
No marketplace, no public profile
Threshold is currently a tool for individual recipients filtering their own inbox. We do not list you publicly, broker introductions, expose your paywall outside the direct reply-to-cold-email flow, or rank/score recipients against each other. Any future marketplace-style features would be opt-in and disclosed separately.
Acceptable use
Threshold is for filtering legitimate cold solicitations to your real inbox. Don't use it to extort payment for service you don't intend to deliver, to harass senders, or to charge for replies to people you have an existing professional duty to (e.g. fiduciary clients). We may suspend accounts that abuse the paywall pattern.
Termination and data deletion
You can disconnect Threshold from Gmail and request account deletion at any time. We'll honor any outstanding paid-request lifecycle (capture or refund as you direct) and then purge your user record, requests, and known-senders cache. Anonymized training examples persist; by the time they exist, every reference to you has been scrubbed by a two-pass redactor.
Changes to these terms
We'll update this page as the product evolves. Material changes (new fees, new data uses, new third parties) will be flagged via email to your registered Gmail address before they take effect.
Questions? Email hello@thresholdmail.com.