Terms of sale

Who you are dealing with

Plate Software is supplied by Paramount Plates Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16366988, whose registered office is at 42 Moorside, Spennymoor, DL16 7EA, United Kingdom.

In this document, “we”, “us” and “our” mean Paramount Plates Ltd, and “you” means the business named at checkout.

You can reach us at hello@platesoftware.co.uk or on 0191 367 3451, Monday to Saturday, 8:00am to 4:30pm.

What these terms cover

These terms govern your subscription. The licence agreement governs your use of the software itself, and the cancellations and refunds page sets out how a subscription ends and when we refund. All three form one contract between us, and you accept all three at checkout.

If anything in the licence agreement conflicts with these terms, these terms take priority.

Who we sell to

Plate Software is business-use software. Subscriptions are sold to businesses, and the Business Licence belongs to the business named at checkout rather than to an individual.

You confirm at checkout that you are buying for the purposes of that business. If you are buying as an individual for personal use, you have additional rights that these terms do not remove — the cancellations and refunds page explains them.

Your order and our acceptance

Choosing a plan and paying is an offer to buy. The contract begins when we email your licence key, which normally happens within a few minutes of payment.

We can decline an order. If we do, we refund you in full and tell you why. The reasons would be that we do not believe the purchase is being made by a business, that we cannot confirm a supplier registration you have given us, or that we have previously ended a contract with you.

What you are buying

A subscription gives your business the right to use Plate Software at the tier you selected, for the period you have paid for, on the number of computers your Production Licences allow.

Every subscription includes one Production Licence. Additional Production Licences are bought separately and are priced independently of your tier.

Plate Software runs on Windows. There is no macOS or Linux version. Check that before you buy — it is the one incompatibility we cannot fix for you.

How your licence key reaches you

Payment produces a signed licence key, emailed to the address you gave at checkout. You paste it into the application on the computer that will produce plates. It takes about a minute.

Each key runs to the end of the period you have paid for, plus seven days. When a renewal payment succeeds we email a new key before the old one lapses, so there is no gap. If you pay monthly, that means a new key by email every month.

A key we have issued cannot be withdrawn. We have no way to disable, revoke or remotely stop one, and nothing about your key reports back to us. It simply stops working on its expiry date. This matters in both directions: your software cannot be switched off by us, and a key you share with someone else cannot be taken back.

Prices

The price published on this website is the total amount payable. The price shown at the time you subscribe is the price you pay for that term.

If any tax becomes chargeable on these subscriptions we will publish that change here before it takes effect, and it would apply from your next renewal rather than to a term you have already paid for.

Payment options and minimum terms

Three payment options are offered, and the commitment differs between them. This is set out on every pricing card and again in your basket before payment.

• Annual upfront: billed once for twelve months, renewing annually.
• 12-month plan paid monthly: a twelve-month agreement collected monthly. The full twelve-month term is payable and the plan cannot be cancelled part way through.
• Monthly Flex: a rolling monthly subscription with no minimum term, cancellable before your next billing date.

Price changes at renewal

We do not change the price of a term you have already paid for. At renewal you renew at the price published at that time, and we will notify you of any change at least 30 days before it applies.

Renewal

Subscriptions renew automatically so that production is not interrupted. You can turn renewal off at any time and your subscription then runs to the end of the period you have paid for.

Upgrades and downgrades

You can move up a tier or add Production Licences at any time, and the change applies from your next billing date. Moving down a tier applies at your next renewal rather than immediately, because the term you are in has been paid for at the higher tier.

Email us to make either change. There is no self-service upgrade in the application or on this site yet.

Failed payment

If a payment fails we will tell you by email and say the date your current key stops working. Your software keeps running normally in the meantime, and the payment provider retries automatically over the following days.

If no payment is taken by that date, the key expires and production stops. Nothing is deleted, and everything resumes when a payment succeeds and a new key is issued.

If you stop paying a 12-month plan

The full twelve months is payable. If a monthly payment fails, or you cancel your payment method, and it is not put right within 14 days of us asking, the remaining monthly payments for that term become due immediately and we may ask for them as a single amount.

Where both of us are acting in the course of a business, late payment carries interest and fixed recovery costs under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998, and we may claim both. That Act does not apply if you are a consumer.

If your subscription ends

Your key runs to the end of the period you have paid for. After it expires the application still opens, and you keep access to your projects, templates, printer profiles and calibration. What stops is the production of final printable output.

Nothing is deleted and nothing is held hostage. Your work is on your own computer throughout.

When we can end this contract

We can end this contract, or stop issuing licence keys, if:

• you do not pay when payment is due and it is still unpaid 14 days after we have asked you for it;
• you break this contract or the licence agreement seriously, and either it cannot be put right or you have not put it right within 14 days of us asking;
• you use the software to produce plates you are not lawfully entitled to produce;
• your business stops trading.

One power we do not have

If your company goes into administration, liquidation, a moratorium or a company voluntary arrangement, we cannot end this contract for that reason alone. Section 233B of the Insolvency Act 1986 says we cannot, and we would rather tell you that than write a term pretending otherwise.

We can still end it if the office-holder agrees, if a court gives us permission, or if you do not pay for what we supply after that point. We will not ask you to clear an old balance as the price of carrying on.

What ending the contract actually does

We stop issuing new keys. Any key already in your hands keeps working until it expires, because we have no way to withdraw one. We say this plainly rather than claiming a power we do not have.

If we end the contract you keep the period you have already paid for, unless we ended it because plates were being produced unlawfully — in which case we will not refund it.

What the software does not warrant

Plate Software supports road-use plate layouts and BS AU 145e production workflows. It is not DVLA-approved software and it does not certify a manufactured plate.

The material, printer, ink or toner, manufacturing process, supplier markings and finished product all remain relevant to compliance. Responsibility for the finished plate, and for confirming the customer's entitlement to the registration, rests with your business.

We provide the software with reasonable care and skill. We do not promise it will be free of every defect, or that it will be available without interruption.

What we are responsible for

We are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of us breaking this contract, or of us failing to use reasonable care and skill.

We are not responsible for:

• loss of profit, loss of business, loss of contracts, loss of goodwill or loss of anticipated savings;
• the cost of remaking or recalling plates, or of compensating your own customers;
• any fine, penalty or enforcement action arising from a plate you supplied;
• loss or corruption of your projects, templates or calibration values, which are held on your own machine and which you are responsible for backing up — but see the paragraph below if you are a consumer;
• anything caused by hardware, printers, drivers, materials, blanks or software we did not supply.

The most we can be liable for

Whatever the cause, our total liability to you is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, and £500. This limit applies to business customers. If you are a consumer it does not apply to you — your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 are unaffected and we do not attempt to cap them.

Nothing in this contract limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for defective products under the Consumer Protection Act 1987, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

If you are a consumer and our software damages your device or other digital content you hold, and we did not use reasonable care and skill, section 46 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 gives you a right to repair or compensation. Nothing above limits that, and the exclusions in the previous section do not apply to it.

Complaints

If something has gone wrong, email hello@platesoftware.co.uk with the word “complaint” in the subject and tell us what happened. We will acknowledge it within two working days and give you an answer within ten working days, or tell you why we need longer.

One person reads and answers these. There is no queue and no script.

General

Neither of us is responsible for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our control, for as long as that lasts.

We may transfer this contract to another business, for example if ours is sold. Your rights are unaffected. You may not transfer it without our written agreement.

If a court finds part of this contract unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

Delay in enforcing a term is not a waiver of it.

This contract, the licence agreement, the cancellations and refunds page and the security and vulnerability disclosure page are the whole agreement between us about your subscription.

Nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce this contract.

Notices to us go to hello@platesoftware.co.uk. Notices to you go to the email address on your order.

This contract is governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes about it are for the courts of England and Wales. If you are a consumer living in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can bring proceedings in your own courts instead, and we will only bring proceedings against you there.