Terms of service

Effective: 25 October 2026

These terms are an agreement between Bravery Media LLC, a Texas limited liability company at 5900 Balcones Dr. Ste 20207, Austin, TX 78731 ("Bravery", "we", "us"), and the organization that subscribes to Benchmark Monitor ("you", "the customer"). If you accept them for a university, college, agency or other organization, you confirm that you are allowed to bind it.

You accept these terms when you complete checkout, accept an invitation, or sign in to app.benchmarkhe.com. If you don't agree, don't use the service.

1. What Benchmark Monitor is

Benchmark Monitor ("the service") compares the performance of an institution's public website against a set of other institutions you choose (a "competitor set"). It is delivered as:

• a report each month for each competitor set, emailed to its recipients and readable in the app, plus a first report shortly after you set the competitor set up; and
• the app at app.benchmarkhe.com, where you manage competitor sets, recipients, your account and billing.

The reports are built from scans we run of public web pages each week, using Google Lighthouse (lab measurements) and, where Google publishes it, field data from the Chrome User Experience Report (measurements from real visitors). We measure things like speed, accessibility and page weight, combine them into scores, and show how each institution in the set stands and what moved.

2. What the scores are, and what they are not

Please read this section. It governs how you may rely on the reports.

• They describe public websites, nothing else. We only scan pages anyone can load without signing in. A score says nothing about an institution's teaching, research, admissions or any other quality.
• They are measurements, and measurements move. A score can change week to week for reasons unrelated to the site, such as network conditions or the load on the site at scan time.
• Our tools change. We update the browser and Lighthouse versions we scan with on a regular schedule, and we improve our methods. Either can move every institution's scores at once. We may also recompute past scores when we correct a method, so a figure in an older report may differ from the same figure shown later.
• Some sites can't be measured. A site that blocks our scanner, a page that fails to load, or a dimension Lighthouse can't measure leaves a gap. We show a gap as "no current score" or similar. We never fill it with a made-up number, and an institution with too few recent measurements may be shown unranked.
• Some report text is generated automatically. Parts of the written analysis are produced by software, including AI language models, and checked automatically against the report's numbers before it is published. The numbers come from our measurements; the sentences are an aid to reading them.
• No guarantee of results. We don't promise any ranking, score, traffic, enrollment or other outcome, and we don't promise that acting on a report will improve anything.

If you think a figure about an institution is wrong (for example a page we treat as an admissions page isn't one), email support@benchmarkhe.com. We'll look, and correct it if we agree.

3. Plans

You buy one of these plans. Current prices, and the limits of each plan (how many competitor sets, institutions per set and recipients), are shown on our pricing page and at checkout. The limits shown when you buy are part of your plan.

A Seat is a competitor set, not a person. Seat and Campus plans have one sign-in, for the account owner. Inviting teammates to sign in is a Portfolio feature. Reports can still go to the recipients you add to each competitor set, within your plan's limit, whether or not they have a sign-in.

4. Your account

• Signing in. There is no password. We email a sign-in link and a one-time code to your address. Keep access to that mailbox secure: anyone who controls it can sign in as you.
• One sign-in means one person. Don't share the sign-in on a Seat or Campus plan. If more people need to sign in, Portfolio supports teammates.
• Roles. On Portfolio, owners and admins can change billing, competitor sets and teammates; other roles can read.
• Accurate details. Give us a real name for your organization and a working email address, and keep them up to date. We send billing notices there.
• Business use. The service is for organizations, not consumers. You must be 18 or older to use it.

5. Recipients and report links

• You choose the recipients. When you add someone's email address as a recipient, you confirm that you're allowed to share it with us for this purpose and that the person would expect to receive these reports (usually a colleague, or for an agency, its client).
• Every report email has a stop link. A recipient can stop reports from your organization at any time. The stop covers every competitor set in your organization for that address. We honor it even if you add the address again; the recipient can resume from the same page, or from their own account.
• Report links are private, not secret-proof. Each email carries a private link to the report. Anyone who has the link can open the report until the link stops working, so treat it like a password and don't forward it outside the people it is meant for. A link stops working 90 days after the email is sent, when the recipient stops reports or is removed from the competitor set, or when we revoke it.
• Spam complaints. If a recipient marks a report as spam, we stop sending reports to that address.

6. Payment

• Card through Stripe. You pay by card at checkout, through our payment processor Stripe. We don't see or store your full card number. Stripe's own terms apply to the payment.
• Subscriptions renew automatically. A monthly plan renews each month and an annual plan each year, at the then current price, until you cancel. We charge the card on file at the start of each period. We email annual customers 30 days before an annual renewal with its date and amount.
• Purchase orders and invoices. We take payment by card for now. If your institution can only pay against a purchase order or an invoice, email support@benchmarkhe.com before you buy. We may agree to it in writing, case by case. We can supply a W-9 and complete supplier forms on request.
• Promotion codes. You can enter a promotion code at checkout. A code can be limited to certain plans, a number of uses or a date, and we decide what it gives. If a discounted checkout means nothing is due today, Stripe may not ask for a card.
• Discounts and complimentary periods end. When a discount or a complimentary (free) period ends and there is no card on file, your subscription ends with it. To keep it, add a card on your billing page before the end date (for a complimentary period, then choose to continue). If a card is on file when a discount ends, you are charged the regular price from then on. We email you 14 days before a discount or complimentary period ends.
• Changes to your plan. On your billing page:
  • Adding or removing Seats is prorated from today and keeps your billing date. Before anything is charged we show you Stripe's price for the change, and you're charged only when you confirm.
  • Switching plans is prorated from today, and your billing cycle restarts on the new plan from today. Switching plans resets the number of Seats you pay for to 1.
  • Unused time from a downgrade or a removed Seat is credited to your account balance and used against your next invoices. It is not paid back to your card (see the refund policy).
• Failed payments. If a renewal payment fails, nothing is switched off straight away: Stripe retries the card and we ask you to update it. If the payment still fails at the end of the retries, the subscription ends.
• Tax. Prices are in US dollars and exclude sales tax, VAT and similar taxes. Where we are required to collect tax (for example sales tax on customers in Texas), we add it to your invoice. If your institution is exempt, email your exemption certificate to support@benchmarkhe.com before you buy, or as soon as you can; we stop charging tax once we have it on file. Tax already charged on an invoice before the certificate arrives is refunded if the certificate reaches us within 60 days of that invoice.
• Price changes. We may change our prices. A change applies to you from your next renewal, and we email you at least 30 days before it does.

Refunds and cancellation are covered by our Refund and cancellation policy, which is part of these terms.

7. Cancelling

You can cancel at any time: an owner or admin chooses Cancel subscription on the billing page, which opens Stripe's billing portal to confirm. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for. Until then you keep full access and reports keep going out. You can undo a cancellation in the billing portal before that date. The refund policy explains what is and isn't refunded.

8. Acceptable use

You may use the reports for your organization's own work, and share them inside your organization. On Portfolio, you may also share a client's reports with that client. You may quote individual figures publicly (for example in a presentation or a news story) if you name the source as "Benchmark Monitor by Bravery Media"; you may not publish whole reports.

You must not:

• resell, sublicense or republish the reports or the data in them, or use them to build a competing product or dataset;
• share a sign-in, or let more people sign in than your plan allows;
• get around your plan's limits, for example by creating several accounts to avoid buying another Seat;
• scrape the app, or access it by automated means other than an interface we provide for that purpose;
• probe, overload or try to break the security of the service, or access another customer's data;
• present a report as our endorsement of, or criticism of, any institution, or alter a report and present it as ours;
• use the service to harass anyone, or in breach of any law, including anti-spam law when you add recipients.

We may suspend access if we reasonably believe you're breaking these rules or that your account is putting the service or other customers at risk. Where we can, we'll tell you first and give you a chance to fix it.

9. Your data and ours

• Yours. The choices you make in the app (your competitor sets, your recipients, your account details) are your data. We use them to provide the service and to support you.
• Ours. The scans, scores, rankings, methods, report content and design, and the software are ours, or our licensors'. We give you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the reports as these terms allow, for as long as your subscription lasts. You may keep copies of reports you received or printed while you were a customer and keep using them internally after it ends.
• Public website data. Our measurements are of public web pages and belong to no customer. The same measurements of an institution may appear in reports for other customers and in our other publications.
• Aggregate use. We may use information about how the service is used, with nothing that identifies you or a person, to run and improve it.
• Feedback. If you send us ideas or suggestions, we may use them without owing you anything.

10. Privacy and where data is held

Our privacy policy explains how Bravery Media handles personal data in Benchmark Monitor.

The service's database and application are hosted in the European Union (Supabase and OVHcloud). Some providers we use, including Stripe for payments and Amazon Web Services for email, process data in the United States; the privacy policy lists them.

Deleting a person's data. A person can ask us to delete their personal data by emailing support@benchmarkhe.com. We carry it out by hand and confirm when it's done. If that person is the only owner of an organization with a live subscription, we'll first ask you to make someone else an owner or let the subscription end. Invoices and payment records are kept as the law requires.

After your subscription ends. You can no longer sign in to see reports, and no more are sent. We keep your organization's reports and settings for 12 months after the end, so they are there if you come back, then delete them. Ask us to delete them sooner and we will.

11. Availability and support

We aim to keep the service available and the reports on schedule, but we don't promise uninterrupted service or a particular delivery day. We may need to take the service down for maintenance, and a report can be late if a scan or a provider fails. We don't offer an uptime commitment or service credits.

Support is by email at support@benchmarkhe.com. We aim to reply within two business days (US Central time).

We may change the service, for example by adding, changing or removing features or measurements. If we make a change that materially reduces what your plan includes, we'll tell you first, and if you're on an annual plan you can cancel and get a refund of the unused part of your fees.

12. Warranties and disclaimers

We will provide the service with reasonable care and skill. Apart from that, and to the extent the law allows, the service and the reports are provided as is and as available. We make no other warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy or non-infringement. Section 2 describes the limits of the data; you are responsible for the decisions you make with it.

13. Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows:

• Neither of us is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, enrollment, goodwill or data, even if told they were possible.
• Each party's total liability arising out of or relating to these terms or the service is limited to the fees you paid us for the service in the 12 months before the event that gave rise to the claim.
• These limits don't apply to your obligation to pay fees, to a breach of section 8, or to liability that the law doesn't allow to be limited (such as fraud).

14. Indemnity

To the extent the law allows, you will defend and compensate us against third-party claims arising from recipient addresses you added without the right to, or from your use of the service in breach of section 8. If you're a public institution whose law doesn't allow you to give an indemnity, this section applies only as far as that law allows.

15. Term, ending and suspension

• These terms apply from the moment you accept them until your subscription ends, and afterwards for anything that by its nature should continue (payment owed, sections 9 and 12 to 17).
• You can end your subscription by cancelling (section 7).
• We can end your subscription by giving you 30 days' notice by email, or straight away if you materially break these terms and don't put it right within 14 days of our notice. If we end it without cause, or because we stop offering the service, we refund the unused part of any fees you paid in advance.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. For a change that matters to you, we email the account owner at least 30 days before it takes effect and post the new version with a new effective date. If you don't agree, cancel before the change takes effect; if you're on an annual plan and the change reduces your rights, you can instead ask for a refund of the unused part of your fees. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the new terms. Small fixes that don't change anyone's rights (typos, clearer wording) take effect when posted.

17. Law and disputes

• Governing law. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict of laws rules.
• Venue. Any dispute goes to the state or federal courts in Travis County, Texas, and both of us agree to their jurisdiction.
• Talk to us first. Before starting a claim, email support@benchmarkhe.com and give us 30 days to try to resolve it.
• Public institutions. If you are a public institution and the law that governs you doesn't allow you to agree to a term here (for example the choice of law or venue, an indemnity, or a limit of liability), that term applies to you only as far as your law allows, and the rest of these terms still apply. Nothing here waives any immunity you have under law.

18. General

• Whole agreement. These terms, the refund and cancellation policy and the plan you bought are the whole agreement about the service. If you and we sign a separate written agreement for the service, it takes precedence where the two conflict. Terms in a purchase order or a supplier form don't apply unless we sign them.
• Assignment. You may not transfer these terms without our written consent. We may transfer them to an affiliate or to a successor to our business, and will tell you if we do.
• Events beyond control. Neither of us is liable for a delay or failure caused by events beyond reasonable control, such as a provider outage, a network failure or a natural disaster. This doesn't excuse payment.
• Notices. We send notices to the account owner's email address. You send notices to support@benchmarkhe.com.
• If a term is invalid, the rest still applies. Not enforcing a term isn't a waiver of it.
• No third-party rights. Only you and we can enforce these terms.
• Independent parties. Nothing here makes us partners, employees or agents of each other.
• Export and sanctions. You confirm that you are not in, or acting for someone in, a country or list subject to US sanctions.

Contact

support@benchmarkhe.com
Bravery Media LLC, 5900 Balcones Dr. Ste 20207, Austin, TX 78731