On reading the Terms of Service

Should you have to?

I made a mistake. I used a QR code service a year ago, and now that my year’s payment is up, they’re going to delete the code. It turns out I wasn’t buying what they promised, and the fine print of their terms of service back them up. I won’t be back to them any time soon, I switched to Unitag, happily paying them a little more to get a lot more in return.

A few weeks ago, WeTransfer changed their Terms of Service and basically claimed that they owned everything and anything you transferred, forever. A backlash pushed them to walk it back (a bit) but that’s a lot of trust, burned forever. Once a customer switches, they don’t come back. [Thanks to Jonathan for the tip]

Every time you use any service online, you’re entering into some sort of contract. And setting expectations is essential, but too often, the MBAs adopt a nickel and dimes approach, figuring that the system gives them no choice. If everyone else is racing to the bottom, they should too.

One printing service I’ve used asks how many pages your book is when giving a price. Inevitably, after they get the doc they raise the price, pointing out that the file is two pages longer than was quoted. I finally figured out that they were counting the inside front cover and inside back cover as ‘pages’. No one does that in the real world, but it helps them, the accountants figure, offer a lower price to get the order, then they can boost it later.

This is deception as a business model.

That’s an option, certainly. But why choose it? Why devote so much of your day to racing to the bottom, burning trust as you go?

The metric is simple: every time you have to tell people they should have read the TOS, then either your marketers or your legal team has made a mistake. You’ll need a TOS, sure, but you don’t want to rely on it to communicate.

One approach is to bet on a stream of easily distracted, trickable, low-interest customers you can take advantage of as you race to the bottom. The other is to count on information to be shared, customers to care and word of mouth to build trust.

July 18, 2025