Venue terms
Who this is between
Sarx, and a venue that agrees to host first dates. It covers what you agree to, what Sarx pays for, what it costs, and what we hold about you.
These are not the app's terms. A student agrees to those in the app, and the early-access list has its own at terms.
What Sarx is
A campus matching app. Every student is verified by a campus email address before they can see anyone or be seen. When two of them match, the app deals them a small number of vetted places, they pick one, and the table is held. Your room is one of the places it can pick.
A first date through Sarx happens in a public room with staff in it. That is a rule about safety, and it is the reason the app needs venues at all.
What you agree to
Hold the table. When Sarx sends you a booking for two at a stated time, it is a booking and not a request. The couple arrives having already agreed to come.
Serve them your menu. A Sarx couple orders from the same menu as everyone else in the room. There is no special menu to prepare, and nothing to agree about what they eat.
Be the room you described. The photograph and the line you write are what a student is shown before they walk in. Keep them true to the place.
Nothing here is exclusive and nothing here asks you to turn anybody away. You serve whoever walks in, and you can work with anyone else you like.
What is not allowed on Sarx — set out in the site terms and the acceptable use policy — applies to venues as it does to everyone else.
The first dinners, and the $200
On a new campus, Sarx pays for the first dates rather than the couple. We pay up to $200 of the bill, for whatever they order from your menu. Whatever the night runs past that settles with the guest, exactly as it would on any other night.
Two bounds, stated plainly because they are the ones that matter to you. $200 is the cap on a night, and the launch programme is capped at 300 dates on a campus. When those are used it stops, and a couple pays for itself.
You do not invoice anybody and no student fronts the money. Settlement is arranged between you and the founder directly, and it is done by hand — there is no automatic payout, and we would rather say so than let you assume one.
What it costs
A flat monthly fee to be one of the places a match can be sent. The same whether the app sends you two couples in a month or twenty. There is no charge per cover, and nothing is taken out of the bill.
There is no figure on this page, because the figure is yours. It is agreed when you are invited. The exact amount — how much, in what currency, how often — is on screen before you enter a card, and on your venue page afterwards. Both are read from the same record.
The price you agree to is the price you keep. Changing what venues pay is a new price rather than an edit to yours, so moving you onto it would be a deliberate act somebody had to take and tell you about.
When billing starts
Not when you put a card on file. Billing starts the day your campus opens, and not before.
Putting a card on file stores it with Stripe and puts your room in the set from the first night. Nothing is charged that day. If your campus never opens, you are never billed.
When the campus opens the first charge is taken, and it recurs from there at the interval shown on your venue page.
Your card
You enter it into Stripe's own fields on our card page: the fields belong to Stripe, and the number goes from your keyboard to Stripe. Sarx never sees or stores a card number. What we keep is what Stripe hands back — the brand, the last four digits, and the month and year it runs out — which is enough to tell you which card is on file and nothing more.
You can replace it at any time from your venue page, including while you are being billed. If Stripe tells us a card has been detached or has stopped working, we say so on that page rather than letting you find out on a billing morning.
Cancelling
Before your campus opens there is nothing to cancel but a stored card. Tell us, and we take your room out of the set and remove it. Nothing has been charged, so there is nothing to refund.
After billing has started, tell us and we stop the subscription. A person does it rather than a button, so allow a working day, and if you want a particular month not to run, write before that month's billing date. A charge already taken is not refunded, except as the refund policy says.
We can end it from our side too. If the room stops being somewhere we would send two students on a first date, we stop sending them and we stop billing you.
No-shows
Sometimes a table is held and nobody comes.
You hold the table, and Sarx does not pay you for an empty one. If nothing is served there is no bill to settle, and the monthly fee does not change. It is the same as any other booking that did not arrive, and we are not going to dress it up as anything else.
What we do is on our side of the line. A student who does not turn up can be reported in the app, and it counts against their account. That is the part we can actually control, and across a term it is worth more to you than a credit would be.
What we hold about you
Listed rather than summarised, so that you can check it.
The record of the venue. Its name, its address, the campus it is near, a contact name, an email address and a phone number, and the founder's own notes on the conversation. Nobody outside Sarx reads those notes.
What you typed to ask for an invitation, if that is how you came in: the room's name, the address, the email, the phone, and anything else you wrote. It is kept as written and is never edited afterwards.
The account. The email address the invitation was sent to, and a password stored as a hash that nobody can read back. Who may act on the venue is recorded and kept: when access is taken away it is stamped rather than deleted, so "who could sign in, and when" is a question that still has an answer later.
The card you write for students. The name, the kind of place, the price band, the closing time, the sentence about the room, and the address.
The billing record. What you agreed to pay, Stripe's identifiers for you, and the brand, last four digits and end date of the card. Never a card number — the database refuses anything in that column that is not exactly four digits.
We do not sell any of it. It reaches three companies outside Sarx and no others: Stripe, who take and charge the card; MailerSend, who deliver our email; and Bunny.net, who store and serve the photograph.
How long we keep it. There is no timer on it. Ask us and we take your room out of the set, remove the photograph and remove the card. We keep the billing record — what a business was charged is not something we are willing to delete — and we keep the record of who had access and when.
The photograph
One photograph of the room, and it does most of the work: it is the largest thing a student sees when your place is dealt to them.
What we do to it. Whatever you upload is decoded and written back out as a JPEG, no more than 1600 pixels on its long edge. Everything that is not the picture is dropped on the way through — the camera, the timestamp, the colour profile, and the one that matters, the location. A phone records where the photographer was standing, which is not the same thing as your address.
Where it lives. On a content delivery network, at a web address of its own. That address is not secret: anybody who has it can fetch the photograph without signing in. Photograph the room, and nothing you would not put in the window.
What you are giving us permission to do. By uploading it you tell us you have the right to, and you let Sarx show it to students in the app and use it where we describe the places a date can happen. Take it down whenever you like, from your own page.
If something goes wrong
Sarx matches people and holds a table. What happens in your room is yours — the food, the service, the licence, and the safety of everybody in it — exactly as it is on any other night. We do not employ your staff and we are not a party to the meal.
Nor do we vouch for anybody beyond what we actually check. A student is verified as currently enrolled with a campus email address. That is the check. It is not a background check, and we do not present it as one.
Changing these terms
If we change them in a way that affects what you owe or what you have agreed to do, we write to the address on your account before it takes effect. The rest of the time this page is simply the current version, and it is the one that applies.
Asking us something
Use the contact form. It reaches the founder directly, and a venue question is answered by the person who would be signing the agreement at our end.
Everything above describes what Sarx does today. If you are reading it because you are about to put a card on file and something in it does not match what you were told, do not put the card on file — write instead, and we will fix whichever of the two is wrong.