Terms of service

HiveConf is operated by Ozark Bee Barn, LLC. By using the site, building an event, or buying anything, you agree to these terms. If you’re agreeing on behalf of a club, association, or company, you’re telling us you’re allowed to.

There are no passwords. You sign in with a link sent to your email address, so keep control of that mailbox — anyone who can read it can reach your events. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has. You’re responsible for what the people you add as organizers do with your event.

You keep ownership of everything you put into HiveConf. To run the service we need your permission to use it: you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, copy, adapt for different screen sizes and print, and publish your event content for the purpose of operating HiveConf and letting attendees use your conference. That license ends when the content is removed, apart from copies in backups and change history that age out on their own.

Because we publish it, you also confirm that you have the right to give it to us — including photographs, logos, and biographies of other people, and anything you send us for turnkey setup. If you don’t hold those rights, don’t upload it.

Organizers create listings for speakers and vendors, who often haven’t been asked first. That’s normal for a conference program, and it comes with a responsibility: publish only information you were given for that purpose, keep it accurate, and correct it when the person tells you it’s wrong.

Anyone listed can write to us directly and have their listing corrected or removed, and we will act on that without asking the organizer’s permission. We may also remove content that’s unlawful, infringing, or misrepresents somebody.

New events are reviewed before they can be published, and every event starts hidden — nothing is visible to attendees until an organizer deliberately publishes it. We may decline or unpublish an event that isn’t what the platform is for, and we’ll tell you why.

HiveConf uses AI to keep listings reading consistently: a light spelling and punctuation pass on text people enter, and — for vendor listings without a usable description — a description written from the business’s own public website, which is published. The privacy policy describes exactly where this happens.

Generated descriptions are drawn from public sources and can be wrong. They aren’t claims we make about a business, or an endorsement of it, and no business is bound by words we generated about it. Tell us and we’ll change or remove them. Organizers are responsible for reviewing what appears on their event.

• Add-ons are one-time charges covering one event — not subscriptions, and they don’t carry over to next year’s conference.
• Prices are shown on the pricing page in US dollars. We may change them, but never for something you’ve already bought.
• Payment is handled by Stripe under their own terms. We never receive your card details.
• Discount codes are valid for what they say and can be withdrawn at any time before they’re used.
• You’re responsible for any tax that applies where you are.

Two of the add-ons are things we make for you, and those stay refundable right up until we start making them. The other two are refundable for 14days as long as you haven’t used them. Nothing ends on a date you have to keep track of, and nothing ends without you confirming it first.

Refundable while unused

• Premium seat. Tell us within 14days and we’ll refund it in full, as long as no sponsor or banner has run on your event.
• No sponsor placements. Tell us within 14days and we’ll refund it in full, as long as the placements are still showing on your event.

Refundable until we start

• Turnkey setup. Refundable in full until you send us your first file. After that it isn’t refundable, whether or not you go on to run the conference.
• Custom theme. Refundable in full until you confirm your logo and we build your first set of palettes. After that it isn’t refundable, whether or not you go on to run the conference.

You will always be asked first.Before the custom theme builds anything, we show you the logo we are about to work from and ask you to confirm, in so many words, that going ahead ends the refund. Nothing is built until you do, and we keep a record of that confirmation: who agreed, when, and which logo. Ask and we’ll show it to you. Turnkey works the same way, since sending us your first file is a deliberate act and we say so before you send it.

If we can’t make usable sense of what you send us for turnkey setup, we’ll say so before starting and refund you rather than guess. If anything fails on our side, it doesn’t count against you and it doesn’t end your refund window.

If we get something badly wrong, we’ll make it right — that’s a separate matter from the policy above, and it doesn’t need a clause to happen.

If something about a payment isn’t right, please come to us first through the support page. We’ll sort it out with you, and a refund under the policy above is quicker than any bank process. Nothing in these terms limits your right to dispute a charge with your card issuer.

If a chargeback is filed on a payment made for an event:

• The event’s paid upgrades are removed and the event is hidden from attendees until the chargeback closes. Nothing you’ve entered is deleted, and the event can still be edited.
• The account that made the payment owes a chargeback fee of $15. If the upgrades weren’t wanted, it also owes what handling the chargeback actually cost us, if anything, which we’ll tell you in writing first.
• Until that’s paid, the account can’t start new events or buy add-ons. Events it already runs aren’t affected. It’s paid by bank transfer.
• If the chargeback is withdrawn or decided in our favor, the event and its upgrades come back straight away. The fee is still owed.
• If it’s decided in the cardholder’s favor, the upgrades don’t come back. The event goes back up on the free plan once what’s owed is paid, and if it isn’t paid, we may remove the event.

The person who made the payment is told the details. The event’s other organizers are told only that there’s a payment issue with the event and who to talk to.

For $199 we enter a conference you have already built. Send us the spreadsheet, the printed program, the vendor PDF, or the page on your website, and we put the schedule, speakers, vendors, rooms, and venue details into HiveConf and check them.

It is not conference planning. We aren’t deciding your program, resolving which of two draft schedules is current, chasing your committee for answers, or assembling a plan out of email threads. If what you have is a set of decisions still being made rather than a finished conference, this isn’t the right service and we’ll tell you so before taking your money.

We work from what you send. Where sources disagree or a detail is missing, we flag it for you rather than inventing an answer. A few things stay with you because they need your eyes — most notably drawing your rooms onto the floor plan, and the decision to publish.

Once your event is entered as you submitted it, it is yours to run. We hand it back complete and the work is finished at that point. Every change after that is yours to make: room swaps, schedule moves, talk edits, a speaker who cancels, a vendor added the week of the show. The app is built so you can do all of it yourself, and nothing about buying this service makes us the ones who keep your event up to date.

Organizers can connect an assistant to an approved event. It shows a plan and waits for your approval before saving, can’t email anyone, and can’t publish an event. You’re responsible for what you approve. Use it for your own events at a reasonable volume; we may rate-limit or disconnect access that threatens the service for everyone else.

This is currently free while in preview and will become a paid feature. We’ll give organizers notice before that changes.

While it is in preview, the assistant comes with no promise of availability at all. Assistant work is far heavier on our servers than anything else on the platform, and it shares them with conferences that are running that day. We may limit, suspend, or switch it off entirely at any time — without notice, without explanation, and including in the middle of your work. If assistant load ever threatens a live conference, the conference wins, every time.

Nothing you have already saved is affected, and every change an assistant can make you can also make by hand in the admin pages. Plan accordingly: do not let an assistant be the only way you can meet a deadline.

Don’t use HiveConf to publish unlawful, misleading, or infringing material; impersonate somebody; harvest contact details from listings; probe or overload the service; or work around its limits. Automated access is fine through the interfaces we provide, at sensible volumes.

We’ll run the service with reasonable care and fix things promptly. We don’t promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we don’t offer a guaranteed uptime. The attendee app keeps working offline from its saved copy, which covers the common venue problems — but on the day of your conference, have a printed schedule at the registration desk. We build the flyer and the print-ready program for exactly that reason.

The service is provided “as is”, without warranties of any kind to the extent the law allows.

To the extent the law allows, we aren’t liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost revenue, lost attendance, or lost data, and our total liability for any claim is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before it arose, or one hundred US dollars.

Some places don’t allow these limits, and where that’s true they don’t apply to you. Nothing here limits liability for fraud or anything else that can’t be limited by law.

If someone brings a claim against us because of content you put into HiveConf — a photograph you didn’t have the rights to, a biography published against someone’s wishes, a file sent to us for setup — you agree to cover our reasonable costs in dealing with it. We’ll tell you promptly and won’t settle anything in your name without asking.

You can stop using HiveConf whenever you like and ask us to remove your event. We can suspend or end access that breaks these terms or puts the service or other people at risk, and except in serious cases we’ll warn you first and give you a chance to put it right. Links to past events may keep resolving after a conference ends so that shared links don’t break.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Missouri, and the courts there are where disputes are handled, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

Formal legal notices should go to Ozark Bee Barn, LLC at our registered address, and by email to our legal address. For anything that isn’t a formal notice, the support page will get you a faster answer.

We’ll update this page when things change and move the effective date at the top. For changes that matter — pricing, refunds, what we do with content — we’ll tell organizers rather than relying on you to notice. Carrying on using HiveConf after a change means you accept it.