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.

The legal entity behind Sub40 is Sub40 LLC, a Texas domestic limited liability company (SOS file 806723546, effective July 30, 2026). That is who you are contracting with under these terms, and who is on the hook if something goes wrong.

Formal legal notices to Sub40 go by mail to the registered office at 10601 Clarence Dr, Suite 250, Frisco, TX 75033 (United States Corporation Agents, Inc.), or by email to support@thesub40.com.

2. Who can use Sub40

Sub40 is built around the UT Austin campus. Anyone can create an account with a working email, browse, message, and match. Posting a listing requires a UT Austin student email (utexas.edu, my.utexas.edu, or eid.utexas.edu), or a staff exception, and that check runs on the server when the listing is created, not only in the browser.

A UT email on a listing tells you the host posted with a working UT address. That is a real and useful signal for hosts, and it is deliberately the only host check we make. Renters may use a non-UT email. Neither case is 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 must be at least 18 to create a Sub40 account. Subleases are binding agreements, and 18 is the age at which Texas holds someone to a contract. If you are under 18, please do not create an account or post a listing.

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 the money in your sublease. Rent, deposits, and application fees never pass through Sub40, and anyone telling you to send those to Sub40 is running a scam. Report it. What Sub40 does charge hosts, through Stripe, is a success fee when a listing is marked leased, and optional Boost for placement. Neither is rent, a deposit, or part of your sublease.
• 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. A UT email on a listing is only the host check described above.

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.

We aim to review new listings within about a day. That is a goal, not a guarantee: a busy week or a listing that needs a closer look can take longer.

Sub40 can also fill in a sublease agreement template with the details two students give it and produce a PDF. That is a document-filling tool, not legal advice. The two students named in it are its only parties, they choose its wording, and Sub40 does not review it, enforce it, or stand behind it. It does not replace your landlord’s written consent.

Sub40 charges the host a success fee when a listing is marked leased. Listing and messaging stay free. When you mark a listing leased, Sub40 collects a success fee from the host: $250 for housing, or 25% of total parking rent for parking-only ($10–$99, from monthly price × lease days on a 30-day month). That is the pilot price for this semester. Boost is a separate option that buys placement, not a lease. Rent and deposits pass between the two students and never through Sub40. Hosts may also buy Boost ($19 for 30 days) for placement only: top of Explore and related surfaces, not a lease and not a promised renter. Payment for both is taken on Stripe's hosted checkout page, so no card details are collected anywhere on this site. The success fee is not refunded automatically. Undo puts your listing back on Explore; the charge stays. Closing again after that undo is free. For an exception, use Contact. The $19 Boost is not refunded automatically. For an exception, use Contact.

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 post a listing, or getting around the listing 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: email support@thesub40.com with "Security" in the subject line. We would much rather hear from you. We will not take legal action against anyone who looks into a problem in good faith, as long as they stop once they have confirmed it, do not access, change, or keep other people’s data, do not disrupt the service, and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before telling anyone else.

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), send a notice to our designated copyright agent: Sub40 LLC, Attn: Copyright Agent, 10601 Clarence Dr, Suite 250, Frisco, TX 75033, or support@thesub40.com with "Copyright" in the subject line. Include your contact details, the work you own, a link to the listing, a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized, a statement under penalty of perjury that your notice is accurate and that you own the work or may act for its owner, and your signature. We will remove or disable the material and tell the person who posted it.

If your listing was removed after a copyright notice and you believe that was a mistake, you can send us a counter-notice at the same address, as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act describes. We close the accounts of people who repeatedly post material they do not have the right to post.

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, appeal through the contact form at /contact; it works even when your account does not. Tell us which listing or account it is and why you think the call was wrong. Where we can, someone other than the person who made the original call reviews it, and we aim to answer within 7 days. The decision after an appeal is final.

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.

To the fullest extent the law allows, Sub40’s total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the service or these terms is limited to the greater of $100 or the amount you paid Sub40 in the 12 months before the claim arose.

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.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute between you and Sub40 that we cannot resolve by email will be heard in the state or federal courts located in Travis County, Texas, and you and Sub40 both agree to those courts’ jurisdiction. Either of us may instead bring a claim in small claims (justice) court if it qualifies. There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver in these terms.

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 page carries the date it was last updated at the top so you can tell which version you read. We may update them; the live page is authoritative.

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

Notice of a material change goes by email to the address on your account at least 14 days before the change takes effect. A change we have to make sooner, because the law requires it or to deal with fraud or a safety problem, can take effect when posted, and we will still email you about it.

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.

The published support mailbox alongside the /contact form is support@thesub40.com. Formal legal notices go to the registered office and email named in section 1: 10601 Clarence Dr, Suite 250, Frisco, TX 75033, or support@thesub40.com.