Terms of Service

This agreement

These terms are between you and Homing Star ("we", "us") — an independent prototype run by one person, with no company yet formed behind it. They govern your use of Homing Star. By creating an account, or by using the questionnaire as a guest, you agree to them.

Our Privacy Notice explains what we do with your information, and forms part of this agreement.

This is a prototype, and you use it at your own risk

Homing Star is an early work in progress, published so people can try it and tell us whether it is any use. It is free, it is run by one person, and no company has been formed behind it.

That has consequences worth stating plainly rather than burying:

• The service is provided as-is and as-available, with no warranty of any kind. It may be wrong, it may break, it may change under you, and it may disappear.
• Its numbers are estimates from a model, not advice, and not a promise about what any lender will do.
• We accept no responsibility for what you do with it, or for any loss — financial or otherwise — arising from your use of it or from anything it told you.
• Do not make an irreversible decision on the strength of what Homing Star says. Check anything that matters with a qualified professional first.
• There is no support commitment, no uptime commitment, and no guarantee your data will still be here tomorrow. Keep your own copy of anything you would mind losing.

None of this is a way of dodging responsibility for acting in good faith. We will not misuse your information, we will not sell it, and if something goes wrong we will tell you. What we cannot do is stand behind a free prototype as though it were a finished, insured, professionally advised product — because it is not one, and pretending otherwise would be the real disservice.

Some jurisdictions do not allow all of these exclusions, and where the law gives you rights that this section tries to remove, the law wins.

What Homing Star is

Homing Star is a planning tool. You answer questions about your situation and it estimates what you could realistically afford, what a deposit would actually cost you, how far off your timeline is, and what would have to change to close the gap.

It is a model. It works from the answers you give and from reference figures we maintain, and its output is an estimate for planning purposes.

What Homing Star is not

This is the most important section on the page.

• We are not a lender, a mortgage broker, a real estate agent, or a licensed financial adviser, and we are not acting as your fiduciary.
• Nothing Homing Star produces is financial, investment, tax, or legal advice.
• No output is a loan offer, a pre-approval, a pre-qualification, a rate lock, or a commitment to lend by anyone.
• A real lender will assess your full credit file and your documentation, and may reach materially different numbers than we do. Theirs are the ones that count.
• We do not hold, move, or have access to your money, and we cannot make a payment or a transfer on your behalf.
• We take no commission and receive no referral fee. We do not route you to any lender, broker, or agent.

Decisions you make about buying a home are yours. Before committing to anything, take advice from someone qualified and regulated to give it.

Your account

• You must be at least 18 years old.
• Give accurate details, and keep your email address current — it is how you recover access.
• Your username must start with a letter and be 3 to 30 characters of letters, numbers, or underscores. Usernames are unique, and are visible to other members of any journey you join.
• An account is for one person. Do not share your credentials. To plan together, share a journey — it is built for exactly that.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access to it.
• Do not pick a username that impersonates someone else or that you have no right to use. We may reclaim one that does.

Using it as a guest

You can work through the questionnaire without an account. We want to be exact about the trade-off, because it is not reversible.

• Guest answers are stored in your browser, not on our servers.
• They are therefore tied to that one browser on that one device, and will not follow you elsewhere.
• Clearing your browser data deletes them permanently. We cannot restore them, because we never held them.
• Create an account and the answers you have already given are carried across into it.

Shared journeys

• The person who creates a journey owns it, and only the owner can invite members, remove them, or manage invite links.
• Members other than the owner can view and edit the journey's plan and finance data, but cannot change who is in the journey.
• Anyone who redeems an invite link gains that access, so only send one to a person you intend to give it to.
• Everything you contribute to a shared journey is visible to every member of it, including your individual financial contribution. Do not put anything in a shared journey that you are unwilling for its members to see.
• Removing someone from a journey stops their future access. It does not unsee what they have already seen.

Acceptable use

Do not:

• Use Homing Star for anything unlawful, or to infringe someone else's rights.
• Enter another person's financial details without their knowledge and agreement.
• Try to reach accounts, journeys, or data that are not yours, or probe or circumvent our security controls.
• Scrape the service, or hit it with automated traffic beyond ordinary use.
• Resell, redistribute, or commercially exploit our output or the listing data we display.
• Post anything abusive, harassing, or unlawful to a journey wall.
• Upload malicious code, or otherwise try to damage or overload the service.

Accuracy, and the limits of the model

We say these on the product pages rather than burying them here, but they are terms too.

• The rate, property tax, and insurance figures behind the model are national averages we maintain by hand. They are not a live market feed. Each is shown with the date it was set, and you can substitute your own figures for tax and insurance.
• We model a single 30-year fixed loan. Adjustable rates, 15-year terms, rate buydowns, second liens, and seller concessions are out of scope.
• Rental income is not counted toward borrowing capacity, so an investment purchase reads conservatively.
• For a build, construction cost is estimated from a size and a finish level rather than from a builder's quote. The result is a wide band, and it does not model construction-loan interest during the build.
• Property listings come from a third-party data provider. We do not verify them, and listing details, availability, and prices may be wrong or out of date. Confirm anything that matters with the agent or seller.
• Where a required answer is missing we show no range at all, rather than a confident number resting on a gap. Treat that as a real result, not a failure.

What it costs

The Plan and Decide phases are free, and our intention is that they stay free. We may charge for later phases in future. If we ever introduce a charge for something that is free today, we will tell you before it applies to you, and you will not be billed for anything without agreeing to it first.

Availability and changes

We do not promise uninterrupted service. We may change, suspend, or withdraw features, and we may take the service down for maintenance. We will give notice of significant changes where we reasonably can.

We may update our calculations and reference figures as methodology or market conditions change. Results you saw before may therefore differ from results you see later on the same answers.

Ending it

• You may stop using Homing Star and delete your account at any time.
• We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, or where we are required to.
• Closing your account does not remove your past contributions to journeys that other people are still using.
• The sections on disclaimers, liability, and governing law survive the end of this agreement.

Disclaimers

Homing Star is provided as-is and as-available. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, whether express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, that its estimates will prove accurate, or that any lender will lend you any amount.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost savings, lost opportunity, or the cost of substitute services, arising out of your use of Homing Star.

In particular, and without limiting the above, we are not liable for a purchase you did or did not make, a loan you did or did not obtain, or an offer you did or did not place, in reliance on anything the service told you.

Homing Star is free, and no money has ever changed hands between us. To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability to you for any claim arising out of or relating to these terms or your use of the service is limited to one hundred US dollars.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and of the state in which the operator is resident. Naming a specific state here would mean inventing a jurisdiction nobody has agreed to, so it is left until there is a registered entity with a home state to name.

If you are a consumer, you keep the benefit of any mandatory protections of the law where you live, whatever this section says.

There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver in these terms. Both were left out deliberately rather than by oversight: they take rights away from you, and a free prototype has no business doing that.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Where a change is material we will tell account holders before it takes effect, and continuing to use Homing Star afterwards means you accept the updated version. If you do not accept it, stop using the service and delete your account.

Contact

Email eamon.duffy0@gmail.com. That reaches the person who built Homing Star, and it is the only channel — there is no company, no support desk, and no postal address yet.