Terms

Terms

Last updated 29 August 2026.

1. What these terms cover

These terms govern use of the Rookery application and the rookery.haus website. By using Rookery you agree to them. If you are using an installation somebody else set up, you are also subject to whatever that household decides about its own records, which is a matter between you and them.

2. What Rookery is

Rookery is a private record-keeping and coordination tool for a household and the people it engages to care for its children. It records a care log, routines, a schedule, hours worked, messages, and documents the household chooses to store. It is a place to write things down and to see what was written.

3. What Rookery is not

• It is not an employer, an agency, a staffing service, or an intermediary.
• It does not introduce caregivers to households or households to caregivers.
• It does not process, hold, transmit, or disburse payment for work.
• It is not a payroll provider, a tax service, or a bookkeeping service.
• It does not perform background checks and does not vouch for any person.
• It does not provide legal, tax, employment, medical or childcare advice.

4. Rookery imposes no requirement on a household

This section states the position the whole product is built on, and nothing elsewhere in these terms should be read as qualifying it.

Rookery does not require a household to arrange its affairs in any particular way. Features that record hours, notice periods, guaranteed hours, or agreements exist because a household may find them useful, and a household may leave every one of them switched off. Their presence is not a statement that a household is obliged to use them, and their absence from an installation is not a failure of that household.

Determining whether a person is an employee or an independent contractor, what wage and overtime law applies, what must be withheld, what must be reported, what insurance is required, and what records must be kept and for how long, is the responsibility of the household. Rookery does not make those determinations and does not verify them.

Where the software applies a rule, such as a notice period before a shift may be changed, it applies the rule the household configured. It does not represent that the rule satisfies any legal requirement.

5. Accounts, access and honesty of the record

A household grants access to the people it chooses and may withdraw it. You are responsible for the security of the device you sign in on. Do not use another person's access.

Rookery is designed so that the record cannot be quietly rewritten. Some actions are deliberately permanent, some are reversible only while nobody has relied on them, and some are recorded with the identity of whoever took them. Do not misrepresent hours worked, care given, or events that did not happen.

6. Records concerning a child

A care record belongs to the household that keeps it, on behalf of the child it concerns. A person given access to it is given it for the purpose of caring for that child, and for no other. Do not copy, publish, or disclose a child's record, a photograph of a child, or a household's address or access information, to anyone outside the household. This obligation survives the end of any engagement.

7. Availability, data, and what happens if it breaks

Rookery is provided as it is. It is not warranted to be uninterrupted or free of faults, and no warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement is given, to the fullest extent the law permits.

Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. A household can export its hours as a file at any time, and should.

Rookery is not a safety system and must not be relied on as one. The emergency card is a convenience that displays information a household entered. In an emergency, call emergency services.

8. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Rookery and its developer are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost data, or amounts claimed to be owed between a household and a person it engages. Total liability for any claim arising out of or relating to Rookery is limited to the greater of the amount you paid for it in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred United States dollars.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or any right you have as a consumer that cannot be waived.

A dispute between a household and a person it engages, about wages, hours, conditions, or the end of an engagement, is between them. Rookery is not a party to it. Records held in Rookery may be evidence in such a dispute, and the software is built so that both sides can see the same record in the same words.

9. Nothing here limits protected rights

Nothing in these terms, and nothing in any agreement generated by Rookery, restricts any person's right to discuss their own pay or working conditions, to organize, to report a concern about the welfare or safety of a child to any authority, to report a suspected violation of law to a government agency, or to cooperate with an investigation. Any provision that would have that effect does not apply.

10. Ending

You may stop using Rookery at any time. A household may withdraw a person's access at any time. Sections 6, 7, 8 and 9 survive.

11. Changes to these terms

A material change is announced in the product to the people affected before it takes effect, rather than published silently and dated.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the State of California, without regard to its conflict of laws rules, and the courts of Los Angeles County have jurisdiction. This does not deprive a consumer of the protection of mandatory law in their own place of residence.

13. Contact

Rookery is provided by Robb Dixon, an individual, in Pasadena, California. Written notice: Robb Dixon, 45 S Arroyo Pkwy, Pasadena, CA 91105. By email: legal@rookery.haus.