The deal, in plain words.

You agree to them when you submit a booking. The funnel says so at the point you tap the button:

Submitting confirms your consent above and agreement to our Terms of Service.

The consent to be texted is separate, is its own tick box, and is described in our SMS Policy. What we do with what you tell us is in our Privacy Policy.

You need a mobile number that can receive a text, and you must be 18 or older to hold an account and book a ride. Book only for yourself, or for someone who knows you are booking for them and agrees to be contacted about the ride — the number on the booking is the number a driver will call.

Riders under 18 ride with an adult — someone 18 or older in the car with them — unless the trip was arranged with us beforehand. To arrange one: a parent or guardian books it from their own account, tells us who the young rider is and who is meeting them at the other end, and we confirm it before the day. A driver who arrives to find a young rider alone on a trip that was not arranged that way will not take it, and there is no charge when that happens.

We do not ask anyone's date of birth, so these are rules you keep rather than a check the app performs. Booking a ride is you telling us both of them are met.

A booking is a request, not a guaranteed car. It becomes a ride when dispatch assigns a driver to it, and you can see that happen — the driver's name and the ride's status are on your ride the moment they are set. Freedom Rides runs a small bench in a limited area, so a request can be declined, and at times booking is open only to members.

We arrange the ride and the driver drives it. Freedom Rides is a car service, not a marketplace where you contract with a stranger, and it is not public transport with a timetable to keep.

• Fares come from a rule, not an auction: there is no surge. A set route has a flat price; anything else is priced from the rule in force at the time.
• The estimate you see before you book is an estimate. The fare is settled when the ride completes, from the pricing rule active at that moment, and is then frozen onto the ride — a later price change never rewrites an old fare.
• If you have a card saved, a completed ride is charged to it automatically. If you do not, we send you a bill to pay.
• Tips are optional, always. Nothing is added unless you add it.
• Card details are entered on Stripe's payment page and never reach us. A failed payment is a debt for the ride you took, not a free ride.

You can cancel a ride from your account, and dispatch can cancel one too — if that happens we record who canceled it and why. Freedom Rides charges no cancellation or no-show fee through the app today; if that ever changes it will be written here and in the funnel before it is charged to anyone.

Open a refund request from the receipt for that ride. A person reviews it — dispatch, not a bot — and approves or declines it with a note. Every status change on a ride is timestamped, so a disagreement has a record to look at rather than two memories.

For anything that is not a fare dispute, write to us through the contact form.

• Treat the driver and their car as you would a neighbor's — because that is generally who they are.
• No smoking, no open containers of alcohol, and nothing illegal in the vehicle.
• Wear a seatbelt, and bring the right seat for a child who needs one.
• Do not give us someone else's phone number as your own, and do not book a ride you have no intention of taking.

A driver may end a ride that becomes unsafe, and we may decline to carry someone who behaves this way toward a driver.

Your account is your phone number, so keep control of the number and the phone. Anyone who can read a code sent to it can book as you. Tell us if you lose the number or it changes hands.

We may suspend or close an account that is being used for fraud, for abuse, or to book rides nobody intends to take. You can ask us to close yours at any time; the Privacy Policy explains what survives that and why.

The app arranges rides and keeps the record of them. It does not promise a car within any particular time, does not promise that the service covers your address, and does not guarantee that a text or push notification arrives — carriers and phones do what they do. Vehicles are driven by their drivers, not by us.

We are answerable for the two things we actually do: arranging the ride you booked, and handling your money correctly — the fare the rule produced and no more, the tip you chose and no more, and a refund put back when one is owed. Get either wrong and we put it right.

Past that, what we owe you for any one trip is limited to what that trip cost. If the ride never happened you were never charged for it, and there is nothing to refund. We are not answerable for what a delay costs you somewhere else — a flight you miss, an appointment you are late for, a connection that does not wait. Freedom Rides is a small bench of cars in a limited area and it can be full, so leave yourself room when a trip has a deadline, as you would with any ride.

Two things that limit does not touch: it takes away no right the law where you live will not let you sign away, and it does not cover our own recklessness or anything worse. A company that could write its way out of those should not be trusted with the ride.

Start with us. Nearly everything — a fare that looks wrong, a trip that went badly, an account we closed — is settled faster by a person reading your note than by anything formal, and every ride carries a timestamped record we can both look at. Money disputes have their own route: open a refund request from the receipt for that ride.

If that does not settle it, you keep every option the law gives you, small-claims court included. We do not make you arbitrate and we do not ask you to give up a class action. Signing those away is the standard move and we are not making it.

These terms are governed by the law of the state Freedom Rides operates in, working out of Bonney Lake, Washington. A claim that ends up in front of a judge belongs in the courts serving the place the ride was booked from or taken in — where we are, and where you were.

We will update this page when the arrangement changes, and the date at the top moves with it. A change that affects rides you have already booked does not apply to them retroactively.