Terms of service

01The agreement

These terms are the contract between you and Who Can It Be, LLC (“PhoneShield”, “we”) for the PhoneShield service: the website, the dashboard, the iPhone app, the phone numbers we answer for you, and the notifications we send. By creating an account or forwarding a phone to a PhoneShield number you accept them. If you set PhoneShield up for someone else, you are the customer and you are responsible for having their permission.

Our privacy policy explains what we keep and why. It is part of this agreement.

02What PhoneShield does

You forward a phone number to the PhoneShield number we assign you. Calls to it are handled in three tiers: numbers on your blocked list and on the shared scam list are refused before your phone rings; favorites ring you straight through; everyone else answers one question at a front desk that says it is one. Depending on the answer and your settings the call rings you, goes to Nora the assistant, becomes a message, or is declined. You see every call, its transcript and the reason in the dashboard and the app.

PhoneShield handles incoming calls only. Your own number, your carrier and your ability to make calls, including emergency calls, are unchanged. We do not provide phone service and a PhoneShield number cannot be used to place calls to emergency services.

03Your account

• You must be at least 18 and give us accurate contact details.
• Keep your password and app devices to yourself; what happens under your sign-in is yours to answer for.
• Only forward numbers you control or are authorised to manage. Forwarding someone else's phone without their permission is a breach of these terms and probably of the law.
• Tell us promptly if you believe your account has been used without your permission; we will help you lock it.

04Callers, transcripts and consent

The front desk introduces itself to every caller and asks what the call is about. What the caller says is transcribed so you can decide. We do not keep audio recordings. You authorise us to answer, transcribe and summarise calls to your forwarded number on your behalf, and you are responsible for making sure that is lawful where you and your callers are, including any notice your jurisdiction requires.

05Acceptable use

Do not use PhoneShield to:

• Harass, threaten, defraud or deceive anyone, or record or intercept calls unlawfully.
• Report a number to the shared scam list that you know is not a scam.
• Resell the service, run a call centre through it, or route bulk or automated traffic to it.
• Probe, overload or reverse-engineer the service, or use it to build a competing product from our data.
• Break any law, or get us to.

We may suspend or close an account that does any of this, refuse traffic that looks abusive, and remove shared list entries that were made in bad faith.

06The plan and payment

PhoneShield is $29.99 a month, billed in advance through Stripe. Each month includes 150 minutes of Nora, the assistant; minutes beyond that are $0.12 each and billed at the end of the period. Refusing scammers, the front desk, ringing you and messages do not count against the minutes. The pricing page is the current statement of the plan; if it changes we will tell you at least 30 days before it applies to you.

• There is no free trial. You can cancel at any time from the dashboard and the plan ends at the close of the period you paid for.
• We do not refund partial months, except where the service was unavailable through our fault for a substantial part of the period, in which case ask us.
• Prices exclude any taxes we are required to add.
• If a payment fails we will retry and email you; the number is released if the account stays unpaid for 30 days.

07Your PhoneShield number

We assign your PhoneShield number from our carrier and we keep it for you while your plan is active. It is not a number you own or can port. When an account is closed or unpaid the number returns to the pool after a cooling-off period, and we recommend removing call forwarding on your phone before that.

08Availability and what we cannot promise

We work hard to keep PhoneShield answering, and we design it so that a failure falls back to letting a call through or taking a message rather than losing it. Still, phone networks, carriers, speech recognition and AI models all fail sometimes, and a call may be misclassified, missed or delayed. PhoneShield is a screening service and not a guarantee that no scam call will ever reach you, or that every wanted call will.

The service is provided as is. To the extent the law allows, we make no warranty of any kind, and our total liability to you for anything arising from the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the three months before the claim. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, including money lost to a caller. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

09Content and ownership

Your lists, settings, messages and transcripts are yours. You give us the licence we need to store, process and display them to run the service, and to use call transcripts in aggregate to improve how calls are handled. The PhoneShield software, brand, voices and scripts are ours; you may use them only through the service.

10Ending the agreement

You can close your account at any time from the dashboard, and you should remove call forwarding on your phone first. We can end the agreement on 30 days' notice, or immediately if you breach it or if a provider we depend on stops serving us in a way we cannot replace. Sections on payment owed, liability and governing law survive the end.

11Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida and the United States. If we have a dispute, write to us first and we will try to settle it within 30 days. Otherwise it belongs to the state or federal courts located in Florida, and you and we each agree to that. Any claim must be brought individually, not as part of a class.

12Changes to these terms

We will email account holders about changes that matter at least 14 days before they take effect, and the date at the top of this page always reflects the current version. Continuing to use PhoneShield after that date is acceptance of the new terms; if you do not accept them, close your account before then.