Terms of Service

1. Who we are

Flood Monitor is operated by Kevin Austin, a sole trader trading as Flood Monitor (“we”, “us”, “our”). You can contact us at [email protected].

We intend to transfer this service to a UK limited company. If we do, we will update these terms and notify account holders by email before the transfer takes effect.

2. What this service is, and what it is not

Flood Monitor is supplementary to official Environment Agency flood warnings. It is not a safety-critical service and must not be relied on to protect life or property.

We monitor river and rainfall data published by the Environment Agency and apply our own analysis to identify conditions that may indicate a rising risk of flooding. The intention is to give you useful information earlier than an official warning might arrive. That intention is not a promise, and our analysis is not an official warning.

You must continue to:

• rely on official Environment Agency flood warnings as your primary source, and sign up for them directly; and
• call 999 in an emergency, and follow instructions from the emergency services.

Our coverage is England only. River level data for Wales is published by Natural Resources Wales, for Scotland by SEPA, and for Northern Ireland by DfI Rivers. We do not currently cover those areas.

3. The limits of what we can tell you

We want to be specific about how this service can fail, because it can:

• Our predictions can be wrong in both directions. We may alert you when nothing happens, and we may fail to alert you before a flood that does happen. Both are foreseeable and neither is a breach of these terms.
• Our data comes from third parties and may be wrong, delayed or missing. Measurement stations fail, transmit late, or report incorrect values. We publish what we receive.
• Availability is least certain when it matters most. During severe weather, the Environment Agency’s systems come under load and may slow down or stop responding, and demand on our own service is at its highest. A flood event is the most likely time for this service to be degraded or unavailable.
• Alerts may not arrive. Email and push notifications depend on networks, devices and providers outside our control. An alert we send is not an alert you receive, and absence of an alert never means absence of risk.

4. Accounts

We sign you in with a single-use link sent to your email address, so there is no password to manage. Keep access to your email account secure: anyone who can read your email can sign in as you. Tell us promptly if you believe someone else has accessed your account.

You are responsible for keeping your contact details accurate. We cannot deliver alerts to an address you no longer use.

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. One person or business may not create multiple free accounts to exceed free plan limits.

5. Free and paid plans

The free plan is available to anyone. Paid plans are offered only to customers acting in the course of a business, and by subscribing to a paid plan you confirm you are doing so for business purposes and not as a consumer.

Official Environment Agency warnings for the locations you monitor are never restricted by plan. Free accounts receive them on the same basis as paid accounts. What paid plans add is our own predictive signals, additional notification channels, more monitored locations, and the dashboard.

Plan limits are published in the app and may change. If we reduce what your plan includes, we will tell you by email at least 30 days beforehand and you may cancel.

6. Payment, renewal and cancellation

Payments are handled by Stripe. We do not receive or store your card details. Prices are in pounds sterling and, unless stated otherwise, exclude VAT.

• Subscriptions renew automatically each month or year until cancelled. You can cancel at any time from your account, which stops the next renewal.
• Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for. We do not give pro-rata refunds for part-used periods, except where you have a legal right to one.
• If a payment fails we will mark your account as overdue and try again. We will continue sending your alerts for a grace period rather than cut them off immediately. We are not prepared to stop warning someone about a flood because a card expired. If payment is not resolved within the grace period, the account reverts to the free plan.

Because paid plans are sold only for business use, the 14-day cancellation right under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 does not apply.

7. Acceptable use

You must not:

• present our predictive signals as official flood warnings, or in a way that suggests they come from the Environment Agency;
• resell, redistribute or republish our predictive signals or derived analysis without our written permission. This does not restrict your use of the underlying Environment Agency data, which is available under the Open Government Licence directly from its source;
• scrape, or place automated load on, the service outside a paid API plan, or attempt to circumvent rate limits;
• use the service in any safety-critical system, or in any context where failure could foreseeably cause death, injury or significant property damage.

8. Environment Agency data

This service uses Environment Agency flood and river level data from the real-time data API (Beta), published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The Environment Agency does not endorse this service and is not responsible for it. Our analysis, alerts and predictive signals are ours, not theirs.

9. Our liability to you

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded. Subject to that:

• We provide this service on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, timely, accurate, or that it will detect any particular flood event.
• We are not liable for any loss or damage arising from flooding, from an alert that was not sent, was delayed or was not received, from an alert that proved to be a false alarm, or from any action or inaction based on information from this service.
• We are not liable for business losses, including lost profits, lost revenue, lost or corrupted data, business interruption, or loss of anticipated savings, or for any indirect or consequential loss.
• We are not liable for the accuracy, completeness or availability of Environment Agency data, or for failures in third-party email, push, hosting or payment providers.
• Where we are liable, our total liability for all claims in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of (a) the total fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, and (b) £100.

You accept that these limits are reasonable given that this service is supplementary, low-cost, and built on data we do not control, and that official Environment Agency warnings remain available to you free of charge.

10. Suspension and termination

You may close your account at any time by emailing us. We may suspend or close your account if you breach these terms, if payment fails and is not resolved, or if we reasonably believe your use puts the service or other users at risk. Where practical we will tell you first.

We may withdraw the service entirely. If we do, we will give account holders at least 30 days’ notice by email and refund any period paid for in advance that we cannot deliver.

11. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. For changes that materially reduce your rights or what your plan includes, we will email account holders at least 30 days before the change takes effect. For other changes we will update this page and the date at the top. Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect means you accept it.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

If any provision of these terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.

13. Contact

Questions about these terms: [email protected]. How we handle your personal data is described in our Privacy Policy.