Terms of use
Last updated October 10, 2026
The short version: Custom Boat Manual keeps your boat’s records and helps you look after her, but it doesn’t replace her manuals, a surveyor or a mechanic — check anything that matters before you act on it. Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel, and you can cancel any time from your account page. Your records are yours.
1. Agreeing to these terms
By creating an account or using Custom Boat Manual or Vessel Guide (“the service”), you agree to these terms and to our privacy policy. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the service.
2. What the service is — and isn’t
The service keeps boat records, writes owner’s-manual chapters, schedules, checklists and wiring diagrams from what you tell it, and answers questions with an AI assistant. It works from your answers, your documents and general references, and it can be wrong: an answer can miss something about your boat, misread a manual, or be out of date.
- It isn’t a marine survey, an inspection, or advice from a licensed surveyor, mechanic, electrician or naval architect.
- Your engine, equipment and boat manufacturers’ instructions, and the law (including Coast Guard rules), come first wherever they differ from anything the service says.
- You are responsible for your boat, for the safety of everyone aboard, and for checking anything safety-related — fuel, electrical, gas, steering, through-hulls, navigation — with a qualified person before you rely on it.
- Vessel Guide’s matches, model pages and scorecards are a starting point for your own research and a survey, not a recommendation to buy any boat.
3. Your account
You need to be an adult to have an account. Keep access to your email account safe — it’s how you sign in. You’re responsible for what happens under your account, including on boats you share. Tell us if you think someone else has used it.
4. Free week, subscriptions and payment
- Free week: a new account can use Custom Boat Manual free for its first 7 days, with 3 troubleshooter questions. No card is needed. After that, your boats and everything in them need a subscription; what you’ve added is kept, and you can download or delete it at any time. Vessel Guide, saved buyer searches, the Learn pages, the model pages and the hull ID check stay free.
- Subscription: currently $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year, plus sales tax where it applies. It covers your boats and everyone you share them with. Payment is taken by Stripe.
- Automatic renewal: your subscription renews automatically at the end of each month or year, at the price then in effect, until you cancel. We’ll tell you before a price change applies to you, and you can cancel before it does.
- Cancel any time from your account page (“Cancel, switch plan or change card”). Cancelling stops future renewals; the subscription runs to the end of the period you’ve already paid for. Deleting your account cancels it at once.
- Refunds: except where the law requires otherwise, payments already made aren’t refundable, including for part of a period. If something went wrong with a charge, write to us and we’ll look at it.
- If a renewal payment fails, Stripe retries it for a while; if it still fails, the subscription ends. Your records stay, closed until you subscribe again.
We may change what’s free and what isn’t, with notice on the site; a change never applies to a period you’ve already paid for.
5. Sharing a boat
When you share a boat, the people you invite see her records according to the role you give them, and can add to them if their role allows. You can change their role or remove them at any time, and they can leave.
6. Your content
What you add — profiles, logs, photos, manuals and notes — stays yours. You give us permission to store it, process it (including with the AI providers named in the privacy policy) and show it to you and the people you share with, only to run the service. Only add documents you’re entitled to use. If you choose to share a photo for a public model page, you give us permission to publish the edited copy described in the privacy policy, and you can ask us to take it down.
7. Fair use
Please don’t misuse the service: no attempts to break in, overload it or get around its limits, no automated scraping, no reselling it, and nothing unlawful or that infringes someone else’s rights. We may suspend accounts that do.
8. Other companies’ services
The service relies on other providers — hosting, email, AI models and payments — and links to other sites, such as valuation tools and history-report services. Their own terms apply to them, and we aren’t responsible for services we don’t control.
9. Disclaimers
THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT, TO THE EXTENT THE LAW ALLOWS. We don’t promise that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that anything it produces is complete or correct. Keep your own copies of anything important — you can download all your data from your account page.
10. Limitation of liability
TO THE EXTENT THE LAW ALLOWS, WE AREN’T LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, OR FOR LOSS OF DATA, PROFITS OR PROPERTY, ARISING FROM YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE, AND OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ANY CLAIM IS LIMITED TO THE GREATER OF WHAT YOU PAID US IN THE 12 MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM AND US$50. Some places don’t allow these limits, so they may not all apply to you.
11. Ending your use
You can stop using the service and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, or close the service with reasonable notice, in which case you’ll be able to download your data first.
12. Changes and the law
We’ll post changes to these terms here and update the date above; for a significant change we’ll also tell account holders by email or on the site. These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington, USA, except where your local consumer law gives you rights that can’t be waived.
13. Contact
Email hello@customboatmanual.com.