Terms of Service

The short version

This page is long because the details matter, but the whole thing comes down to four ideas. They are repeated properly below; if the wording anywhere else contradicts this summary, the wording below governs.

• Sub40 is a noticeboard. Students post subleases, other students find them and message each other. That is the entire service.
• Sub40 is not part of your sublease. We are not your landlord, your broker, your agent, or a party to any agreement you sign. We do not hold your money, run background checks, or inspect apartments.
• What you post is yours and is your responsibility — that it is true, that the place is actually yours to sublease, and that you are allowed to sublease it.
• Most leases require the landlord to approve a sublease in writing. Getting that approval is on you, not on us.

1. Who these terms are between

These terms are an agreement between you and the people who operate Sub40, referred to here as "Sub40", "we", and "us". Sub40 is a small student project rather than a large company: at the time of writing it is built and run by two people.

A finished version of this document has to name the actual legal entity you are contracting with, because that determines who is on the hook and who you would sue. That has not been settled yet. [1] TO CONFIRM: what legal entity operates Sub40 — an individual, a general partnership, an LLC? If an entity exists or will be formed, its exact registered name and home state.

Legal notices normally have to be deliverable somewhere. [2] TO CONFIRM: the mailing address and the email address where Sub40 accepts formal legal notice. This is usually required, and it is a real-world address, so decide deliberately.

2. Who can use Sub40

Sub40 is built for one campus. Creating an account requires an email address at a UT Austin domain, and this is checked on the server when the account is created, not in your browser where it could be skipped. The domains currently accepted are utexas.edu, my.utexas.edu, and eid.utexas.edu.

A verified UT email tells you that the person on the other end of a conversation has a working UT address. That is a real and useful signal, and it is deliberately the only one we make. It is not a background check, an identity check, an enrollment check, or a promise that the person is honest. Treat it as the beginning of your own judgment, not a substitute for it.

You need to be old enough to enter a binding agreement to use the service, and subleases are binding agreements. [3] TO CONFIRM: the minimum age for a Sub40 account. 18 is the usual answer in Texas because that is when someone can be held to a contract, but some first-year students are 17 — decide whether they are excluded, and say so consistently on the signup page.

One person, one account. Do not create an account for someone else, share your login, or use an account after we have closed it.

3. What Sub40 is, and what it is not

Sub40 is a platform where UT students publish sublease listings and message each other about them. We host the listings, run the search, deliver the messages, and review listings before they go live.

What we are not

• We are not a party to your sublease. Whatever you and the other student agree, we did not agree to it and we cannot enforce it.
• We are not a landlord, a property manager, or a real estate broker or agent. We do not represent either side of a deal, and nothing we do should be read as brokering one.
• We do not hold, transfer, or escrow money. Rent, deposits, and application fees never pass through Sub40. If someone tells you to pay Sub40, that is a scam — report it.
• We do not inspect apartments, verify ownership of any unit, confirm that a lease exists, or check whether a landlord has approved a sublease.
• We do not run criminal, credit, eviction, or immigration checks on anyone, and we do not vouch for any user beyond the fact that their email address is at a UT domain.

We review listings before publishing them, which is a real check against obvious junk and obvious scams. It is not a guarantee of accuracy. A reviewer looking at a listing cannot tell whether the rent is right, whether the photos are of that unit, or whether the person posting actually lives there.

The /contact page currently tells students that most listings are reviewed within 24 hours. Before launch that should either become a commitment made on purpose or be softened, because a stated turnaround in a terms document reads as a promise. [4] TO CONFIRM: is the ~24 hour listing-review turnaround a target you are willing to state publicly, or should the site stop naming a number?

Sub40 does not currently take payments. A paid option to promote a listing is planned but is not live, no card details are collected anywhere on the site today, and these terms will be updated to cover pricing, billing, and refunds before any of that turns on. [5] TO CONFIRM: when paid listing promotion launches, what is the price, what exactly does it include, and what is the refund policy — particularly if a promoted listing is later removed for a rules violation?

4. Your listings are your responsibility

When you post a listing you are making a set of claims to other students, and you are the only one in a position to know whether they are true. So you are the one responsible for them.

What you are promising when you post

• The place is real, it is the place in the photos, and you have the right to sublease it.
• The price, the address, the lease dates, the unit type, and the amenities are accurate as you understand them, and you will fix them or take the listing down when they stop being accurate.
• The photos are of the actual unit and are yours to post — your own photos, or ones you have permission to use. Do not lift photos from a property management website or another listing.
• You will not list the same unit repeatedly to get more visibility, and you will not leave a listing up after the place is gone.

Your landlord almost certainly has to approve this

This is the single most common way a student sublease goes wrong, so it is worth being blunt about it. Most residential leases in Austin either prohibit subleasing outright or require the landlord to approve the subtenant in writing first. Subleasing without that approval can put you in breach of your own lease, and can get both you and the person moving in evicted.

Reading your lease, asking your landlord, and getting whatever approval it requires is your responsibility. Sub40 does not check it, cannot check it, and posting a listing here is not evidence that anyone approved anything. If your lease says no, the listing being live on Sub40 does not change that.

You keep ownership of everything you post. You give us permission to store it, display it on the site, and show it in search results and link previews so the listing can do its job. That permission ends when you delete the content, apart from copies sitting in routine backups for a while and anything we have to keep for a legitimate reason such as an unresolved report.

5. Messaging other students

Messages on Sub40 are readable only by the two people in the conversation. This is enforced by the database, not just hidden in the interface, and the notification emails we send deliberately contain no message text at all — only who wrote to you and about which listing.

That privacy has one limit worth stating honestly: messages sit in our database, so a system administrator has technical access to them, and we may read a specific conversation if we have to in order to investigate a report of harassment or fraud, or if we are legally required to. We do not read messages routinely and we do not read them for any commercial purpose.

Do not use messaging to harass, threaten, or spam anyone, and do not use anything you learn through a conversation for anything other than the sublease you were talking about. Contact details another student shares with you are not a mailing list.

6. Things you must not do

The list below is not exhaustive, and it is meant to be read as one idea: do not use a service built for students to hurt students.

Dishonesty

• Posting a place that does not exist, that you have no right to sublease, or that is materially different from what you describe.
• Asking for a deposit or any payment before a real agreement exists, or pressuring someone to pay fast.
• Impersonating another student, a landlord, a property manager, or Sub40 itself.
• Using someone else’s UT email address to get an account, or getting around the email check in any other way.

Harm to other people

• Harassment, threats, stalking, hate speech, or sexual harassment, in messages or in listing text.
• Discriminating in who you sublease to on the basis of race, colour, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, or disability. Fair housing law applies to subleases, and it applies to how a listing is worded as well as to who you say yes to.
• Posting someone else’s personal information, or reposting another student’s photos, address, or contact details from this site anywhere else.

Harm to the service

• Scraping, bulk-downloading, or harvesting listings, photos, or user information, by any means including automated ones.
• Trying to get at accounts, data, or parts of the system that are not yours, or probing the site for weaknesses without asking us first.
• Using Sub40 to advertise anything that is not a UT-area sublease.
• Uploading malware, or anything designed to break the site for other people.

If you find a security problem, tell us instead of using it. We would much rather hear from you. [6] TO CONFIRM: where should a security report go, and do you want to promise not to pursue people who report problems in good faith? A one-line safe-harbour statement is cheap and makes researchers far more likely to tell you first.

7. Reporting a listing

Every listing can be reported. If something looks like a scam, is obviously inaccurate, or breaks the rules above, report it — this is the main way we find out.

Reports are not visible to the person who posted the listing, and the system does not tell them who reported them. That is deliberate: on a single campus, a reporting system that exposes the reporter is one nobody uses.

Do not file reports you know to be false. A report is a claim about another student, and using it to bury a competing listing is itself a violation of these terms.

If you believe a listing infringes your copyright — most likely because it is using your photos — tell us and we will look at it. A published service normally names a specific agent to receive copyright complaints, and registers them, in order to get the protection that comes with it. [7] TO CONFIRM: do you want to designate and register a DMCA agent? It costs a small fee with the Copyright Office and it materially changes your exposure when a user posts someone else’s photos.

8. When we remove a listing or close an account

Listings are reviewed before they go live, and can be removed after they go live. We can remove a listing, hide it, or close an account when we believe the rules above have been broken, when a listing appears to be a scam or is materially inaccurate, or when we are required to.

We will tell you what happened and why, in plain language, unless there is a genuine reason not to — an active fraud investigation being the obvious one. A rejected listing already carries a reason today.

The unglamorous truth is that this is two people making judgment calls quickly, and sometimes they will get one wrong. If we get yours wrong, tell us through the contact form at /contact and we will look again — it works even when your account does not. [8] TO CONFIRM: how does a student appeal a removal or a closed account? The /contact form reaches us, but who handles an appeal and roughly how long a student should expect to wait have not been decided.

You can close your own account and delete your own listings whenever you want. Closing an account does not cancel a sublease you have already agreed to with another student, and it does not undo anything you owe them.

9. What we do not promise

This section is where terms documents usually turn into shouting capitals. Here is what it actually means.

Sub40 is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind, whether stated or implied. We are not promising the site will always be up, that it will be free of bugs, that search results are complete, that any listing is accurate, or that any student you meet here is trustworthy or will do what they said. To the extent the law allows, we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

In particular, we do not promise anything about the conduct of other users, the condition or legality of any unit, or the outcome of any sublease arranged here. If a sublease goes badly, that dispute is between you and the other student.

This is a small project with a small budget, and pretending otherwise would not help you. Nothing above is an attempt to disclaim liability for our own fraud or for anything the law does not let us disclaim.

10. Limits on what we owe you

To the fullest extent the law allows, Sub40 is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost opportunities, arising out of your use of the service — including anything that flows from a sublease you found here.

A real version of this section also caps total liability at a specific number, and that number has to be a deliberate decision rather than a copied default. It matters more than usual here, because Sub40 charges most users nothing, so the usual cap of "what you paid us in the last twelve months" would come out at zero for nearly everyone. [9] TO CONFIRM: what is the cap on Sub40’s total liability, and is a cap that lands at $0 for free users something you are comfortable defending? This is a genuine question for the lawyer, not a formality.

Some states do not allow these limits, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

If your use of Sub40 causes a legal claim against us — for example because of something you posted or something you did to another student — you agree to cover the resulting costs, to the extent the law allows.

11. Disputes and governing law

If something goes wrong between you and us, write to us first. Almost everything at this scale is fixable by a person reading an email, and neither of us wants the alternative.

Beyond that, this draft deliberately does not state which state’s law governs, where a dispute would be heard, or whether disputes go to arbitration — because none of that has been decided, and stating it wrongly would be worse than leaving it open. These are consequential choices, especially an arbitration clause and a class-action waiver, which affect what a student can do if something goes badly. [10] TO CONFIRM: which state’s law governs these terms, and where are disputes resolved — courts in a named county, or arbitration? If arbitration, decide separately whether it includes a class-action waiver and a small-claims carve-out. This is a lawyer question, not a fill-in-the-blank.

Disputes between two students about a sublease are not ours to resolve. We may remove a listing or close an account, but we cannot recover a deposit, enforce an agreement, or decide who was right.

12. How these terms change

These terms will change. This draft in particular is expected to change substantially before launch, and this page carries the date it was last updated at the top so you can tell which version you read.

When we make a change that materially affects you, we will update the date at the top and give notice before it takes effect. Small corrections — fixing a typo, clarifying a sentence that was confusing — take effect when posted.

How that notice actually reaches you needs deciding, and the honest options differ a lot in effort. [11] TO CONFIRM: how are users notified of material changes to these terms — an email to every account, a banner in the app on next sign-in, or notice on this page only — and how much warning do they get before the change takes effect?

If you keep using Sub40 after a change takes effect, that counts as accepting it. If you do not want to, you can close your account.

13. Getting in touch

Questions about these terms, reports of something wrong on the site, and requests to have an account looked at all go to the same place: the contact form at /contact.

It works whether or not you are signed in, and it does not require a UT email address, so you can still reach us even if you have been locked out of your account. What you send is written down before we try to email anyone about it — so your message survives even if our outbound mail does not — and it lands in a queue a person works through. Replies come by email to whatever address you put in the form, so put in one you can actually read.

What the form is not yet is a published address. A document like this normally names one, and formal legal notice normally has to be deliverable somewhere more specific than a support queue. [12] TO CONFIRM: the real support mailbox to publish alongside the /contact form — a working address a person can write to directly, and who reads it. [2] TO CONFIRM: the mailing address and the email address where Sub40 accepts formal legal notice. This is usually required, and it is a real-world address, so decide deliberately.