Terms of Service

1. What RemoteStay is

RemoteStay is a service for finding and filing verified mid-term homes in Bali and Da Nang, for stays of thirty days and longer. It has two halves and both are live.

1.1 The waitlist is the front page. Joining costs nothing, commits the member to nothing, and a member’s position is the order people joined in.

1.2 The product is the listing side. A host creates a listing, films a walkthrough of the place in one take, uploads a document showing they are allowed to rent it out, sets a price, and hands the lot to a reviewer. What a reviewer approves, the host may publish — and a published listing has a public page and appears in a search that needs no account.

1.3 Every listing is filed by a host, against a property record that carries that host’s identifier. RemoteStay reviews and publishes; it does not file listings of its own.

1.4 Whether anything is bookable at a given moment is not something this page can state in advance. The switch that opens booking is already on — it was turned on before there was anything to book — so what decides it is whether a host has published a listing. If the search is empty, nothing is bookable and no request form is rendered anywhere on the site. The day a host presses publish that changes, with no announcement and no further decision, which is why this clause describes the mechanism rather than counting homes.

2. Definitions

• RemoteStay — the service described in section 1, and the operator of it.
• Member — anyone holding an account. A member may be a host, a guest, or both at once.
• Host — a member who files a listing for a place.
• Guest — a member who asks to stay in a listed place.
• Reviewer — a member of RemoteStay staff who reads the evidence behind a listing and decides whether it may be published.
• Listing — one place offered for stays, together with its price, its walkthrough, its speed test and its paperwork.
• Walkthrough — a single unbroken video recording of the inside of a place, filmed by the host, with sound.
• Verification — a reviewer’s recorded decision that a piece of that evidence was good on the day it was checked.
• Request to stay — a guest’s enquiry about a published listing for particular dates. It is not a booking and does not become one automatically.

3. Accounts

3.1 One account per person, and one email address per account. An address that already holds an account cannot open a second.

3.2 There are no passwords. A member signs in by clicking a link sent to their address, so the security of that inbox is the security of the account.

3.3 Until an address is confirmed, the account may browse, save homes and vote for an area. It may not create, edit or publish a listing, upload a document, submit a speed test, or ask to stay anywhere.

3.4 RemoteStay may suspend an account used to abuse the service or anybody on it. A suspended account keeps exactly five powers: it may read its own records, read its own notifications, export its own data, sign itself out everywhere, and close itself. Everything else is refused, and a suspended account that belonged to staff loses its console powers with the rest. The last of those powers is narrower than it sounds: closing is subject to 11.2, and settling a booking is not among the four, so a suspended member with a live booking holds the power to close and cannot reach it on their own. 11.2 sets out what happens then: the booking lapses, or RemoteStay staff decide it.

3.5 A member must be 18 or older. RemoteStay asks for a date of birth when an account is created and refuses to create one for a person under 18 on that day. It does not check the date against a document, and a member who gives a false one is in breach of these terms. RemoteStay may close an account it learns belongs to someone under 18.

4. Filing a listing

4.1 The host must be entitled to rent the place out. That is what the document is for: a reviewer reads it against the address the host typed and, where one is given, against the property’s registration number. Claiming an entitlement the host does not hold is the kind of mistake that costs a stranger a flight, which is why there is a person in the queue and not just a checkbox.

4.2 The document must be a PDF, and the file is checked on its bytes rather than on its name. It is attached to one listing and is readable by that listing’s host and by reviewers only.

4.3 The exact address is required. It is encrypted before it is stored, and it is unsealed for the host, for a reviewer, and for whoever is travelling on a confirmed booking of that listing. Nobody else, and not before that booking is confirmed — until then what a guest is shown is the area, which is the same rule on every listing here.

4.4 Everything the host states about the place — its price, what the price includes, its address, its registration number — is the host’s statement, and a reviewer’s approval does not make it RemoteStay’s.

5. The walkthrough, and the people in it

5.1 A walkthrough is filmed in one take. RemoteStay reads the file it receives and records whether the take was continuous; a take that fails that check is kept rather than discarded, because it is evidence either way.

5.2 The microphone is open for the whole take. The recorder asks the browser for the camera and the microphone together. Anybody in those rooms is filmed and anybody within earshot is recorded — one of the prompts asks the host to say the date out loud, so it is not incidental.

5.3 RemoteStay is not in the building and cannot ask those people anything. The host is, so warning them before the take begins falls to the host and to nobody else. The recorder says so on screen while the take is running; here it has the weight of these terms behind it.

5.4 When the camera opens the recorder also asks the browser for a position. The host may refuse, and refusing does not stop the listing going through. A position that is given is stored precisely, is shown to reviewers only, and is never treated as proof of anything — it is a number a browser reported, and a browser can be told what to report.

6. The recording, and the licence in it

6.1 The recording belongs to the host. Filming a walkthrough does not transfer the copyright in it to RemoteStay, and nothing on this page transfers anything. The host owns what they owned before they pressed record and may do whatever else they like with the footage.

6.2 What RemoteStay needs instead is permission to do the things the product actually does. That is a short list and this is the whole of it. The host grants RemoteStay a licence to:

• keep the file on RemoteStay’s own server, and in the nightly backups taken while it is there;
• show it back to the host;
• show it to reviewers, who have to watch it to decide whether the listing is real — and each time a member of staff opens one, that access is written down;
• once the host publishes the listing, serve it to anybody who opens that page, and use the stills the host’s browser cut from the take as the picture on the listing card and as the preview image a chat app or a social network draws when somebody pastes the link. A platform that draws one keeps its own copy for as long as it likes, and that part is outside anybody’s control here.

6.3 Nothing beyond that. RemoteStay does not take the right to put a walkthrough in an advertisement, to hand it to anybody else to use, or to use it for anything other than the listing it was filmed for. A permission this section does not describe is one RemoteStay does not have, and taking a further one means writing it here first.

6.4 The licence runs for as long as RemoteStay holds the recording. RemoteStay keeps the file while the listing is live, and after that until it is removed under the retention section of the Privacy Policy, which states the period and runs it on a schedule. There is no button that deletes a recording on its own; closing the account deletes every recording on every listing the member held, in the same step as the listings are retired, as section 11.4 says. A listing does stop being served sooner or later — paused by its host, taken down by RemoteStay, lapsed on the clock in section 7.4, or retired when the account closes — and from that moment the public cannot reach the video, leaving the host and RemoteStay’s reviewers as the only people who can open it. Until it is removed, the file stays, along with the copies in whatever backups were taken while it was live, and those copies outlive the removal until they rotate out. That is what is true rather than the arrangement anybody wants, and it is written down so a host can decide what to film knowing it.

6.5 The same applies to an uploaded document. What is held, where, and for how long is set out in the Privacy Policy.

7. Publication, pausing and takedown

7.1 Only a reviewer’s approval makes a listing publishable, and only the host presses publish. A published listing is public: the page, the search result, the card picture and the link preview are all reachable without an account.

7.2 A host may pause their own listing at any time. It leaves search, the map and every shortlist it was saved to, and it stops taking requests. Bookings already made against it are unaffected.

7.3 RemoteStay may take a published listing down. A takedown requires a written reason, and that reason is emailed to the host and shown on their screen unaltered — it is the whole of what they are told. A takedown pauses the listing rather than destroying it: the verification stands, and the host may publish again unless their account is suspended.

7.4 Verification is evidence with a shelf life. A walkthrough verification lasts 12 months and a speed test lasts 90 days. An hourly job takes down a listing whose verification has lapsed and tells the host it has done so.

8. Fees, and the launch offer

8.1 RemoteStay’s commission on a host’s rent is 0%. A guest pays 5% of the value of the stay, capped at the equivalent of 400 USD.

8.2 Every account is granted the launch offer when it is created: 50% off those fees for 14 days, counted from the account’s first booking rather than from the day RemoteStay opens — so a host whose first guest arrives months later still gets the whole of it. It lapses if that first booking has not happened within 90 days of launch.

8.3 Where a member joins through another member’s referral link, each of them gets 10% off once the referred member actually books; a signup earns nothing on its own. Referral discounts stack to 30% and no further.

8.4 The two offers combine by multiplying rather than adding. At their maximum together, the amount payable is 35% of the standard fee, not 20%. RemoteStay would rather write that down than have a member work it out from a bill.

8.5 One thing about the paragraphs above that a reader is entitled to know rather than to work out from a bill. Because the host commission is zero, for a host the launch offer is a discount on nothing; the fee it actually reduces is the guest fee. It comes off that fee after the cap in 8.1 has been applied, so on a stay large enough to reach the cap the offer is half of the cap, not half of a larger number the cap then cuts down.

8.6 A referral cannot buy a place further up the queue. Nothing can — the position is a rank over the order people joined in, computed fresh each time it is shown, and there is no mechanism anywhere to change it.

9. Requests to stay, and money

9.1 A guest may ask about a published listing for particular dates. Four things can then happen and no others: the host accepts, the host declines, the guest withdraws, or nobody answers and the request expires under 9.2.

9.2 A request nobody answers expires. RemoteStay closes it 42 hours after the last thing that happened on it, and writes to the host and to the guest to say so. The clock measures silence rather than age: a host who accepts on the second day starts it again, and so does the confirmation that follows. The job that closes them runs once an hour, so a request ends between 42 and 43 hours after it falls silent rather than on the stroke of the forty-second. Expiry reaches three stages and no others — a request waiting for the host, a request the host has accepted, and a confirmation that has been sent and not yet accepted — so it never ends a booking anybody has paid on. It is not the only exit. A guest may withdraw a request at any point up to accepting the confirmation on it, and either side may cancel a booking from the host’s acceptance until the stay begins, on the terms in 9.4 to 9.7. Both of those belong to a member whose account is not suspended. Under 3.4 a suspended account may not withdraw a request, may not cancel a booking at any stage, and may not write to the other party to ask them to act in its place, so where a suspended guest’s request has gone unanswered, expiry under this clause is what ends it — on the clock set out above, and without either party doing anything.

9.3 Where a host accepts, the guest is sent a confirmation setting out the dates, the rent and the fees in section 8. Accepting it records that the guest agrees to what the confirmation says, and ends the option of withdrawing the request; it takes no card and charges nothing. The deposit and the first payment are a separate step, asked for after acceptance: the guest is asked to authorise the deposit, and the first month is charged once the deposit is authorised. Nothing is booked, and the dates are not held, until the first payment has been taken. A stay is priced in the currency the home is listed in; every charge is taken in US dollars, at an exchange rate fixed before the first payment is taken, shown on the booking page and kept for the whole booking; the deposit is authorised in the currency the home is listed in. The deposit is an authorisation against a card rather than money RemoteStay holds: it is released when a booking ends without a claim, and sent to the claim window when a stay has actually happened. A host has 7 days after the stay ends to open a damage claim, capped at the deposit amount in the booking currency. The host must describe the damage and provide evidence. The guest has 7 days from the claim being opened to respond and provide their own evidence. Silence is neither consent nor refusal: an unanswered claim goes to staff for a decision. Silence alone never authorizes a charge or payout.

9.4 Cancellation before check-in. A guest who cancels 30 or more days before check-in is refunded the rent; the guest fee is retained. A guest who cancels inside 30 days of check-in pays for the first 30 nights of the booking whether or not they are slept in, and is refunded any paid night beyond the thirtieth; the guest fee is retained. A guest who has paid for 45 nights and cancels 29 days out is therefore refunded 15 nights. There is no tier between those two: the same rule applies at 29 days out and at one day out.

9.5 A stay that has begun. A guest cannot end a booking they have started. Once a stay is under way it ends early only if the host and the guest both agree, or under 9.10 where a month’s rent is not paid; a guest who leaves without that agreement remains liable for the whole of what they booked. To agree, one of them proposes on the booking’s page the day the guest moves out and what is handed back to the guest, and the other accepts or declines. What is handed back is what they agree, and it may not be more than the unused days at the stay’s daily rate, which is the monthly price divided by thirty. RemoteStay records the agreement and its staff issue the refund; accepting does not move any money by itself. The booking keeps its dates until the agreed day has passed, no monthly payment due on or after that day is charged, and the deposit goes to the claim window in 9.3 as it does after any stay.

9.6 Where RemoteStay or the host is the cause. A host who cancels before check-in returns everything the guest paid, the guest fee included. A host who ends a stay that has begun returns every unused day of it, again with the fee. RemoteStay does not keep a fee on a booking the guest did not get.

9.7 The clauses above are the whole of the cancellation policy, and they are computed by a single function in the service rather than applied by hand, so a figure quoted here and a figure charged cannot come apart. A refund is returned to the instrument it was paid from.

9.8 A host and a guest may write to each other about a request. Until a first payment on it has cleared, contact details are removed from a message before it is stored — email addresses, phone numbers, messaging links and social handles — and the stripped version is what is kept. That applies to what the host and the guest write to each other. RemoteStay may write into the same thread; such a message is labelled as ours, is read by both of you, and is not stripped. Nor is anything you write to RemoteStay support: a conversation with us is not part of any booking thread, is read by you and by us and by nobody else, and is stored as written, so that you can give us a number to reach you on.

9.9 The confirmation records commercial terms between a host and a guest. It is not a tenancy agreement, RemoteStay is not a party to it, and anything the two of them settle outside it is theirs.

9.10 Rent that is not paid. After the first month, each month’s rent is taken from the card the first payment was made with, 14 days before the day that month begins. If the card is declined, RemoteStay asks it once more, no earlier than 7 days before that day and at least a day after the decline, and writes to the guest after each declined attempt. If the second attempt is declined too — or the first was refused in a way that makes asking again pointless — the stay ends at 11:00 on the day after the second attempt ran, or would have run, in the time of the city the home is in. From that moment the guest’s account is suspended under 3.4 and looked at by a person, what was owed for the stay stays owed, and RemoteStay writes to the guest and to the host to say the stay has ended. This is the one way a stay that has begun ends without the agreement 9.5 describes, and the job that ends it runs once an hour, so a stay ends within the hour after 11:00 rather than on the stroke of it.

9.11 Reviews. Once a stay has ended — on the day the guest leaves, or earlier under 9.5 or 9.10 — the host and the guest may each write a review of it, for 14 days. RemoteStay writes to both to say the window has opened. Neither review is shown until both have been written or the 14 days have passed, whichever comes first; a review nobody wrote is simply absent. A review is its author’s own account and RemoteStay does not verify it.

10. What RemoteStay does not promise

10.1 No date is promised for opening properly, and no home is promised in any particular city. Being on the waitlist is not a reservation and does not become one.

10.2 The search shows what exists, which may be nothing. An empty result is the state of a market still being filled, not a fault.

10.3 A verification is a record of what was true when it was checked, not a standing guarantee. Somebody stood in the place with a camera, a reviewer watched the take, and a speed test was run. Both go stale on the clocks in section 7.4 rather than being rechecked continuously.

10.4 None of it is a guarantee about the host. RemoteStay asks a host for an identity document before a home goes live and a reviewer opens the scan, compares it with the paperwork on the listing and decides the identity check by hand; that is a decision made once, not a continuing statement about who they are. How long the scan is held is set out in the Privacy Policy.

11. Closing an account

11.1 A member may close their account from their account, subject to 11.2. What that erases, and what it leaves behind, is set out in the Privacy Policy. Closing an account ends any offer attached to it.

11.2 A member with a stay outstanding cannot close. Where a member is party to a request or a booking that is still live — as the host or as the guest — the service refuses the closure and says which booking is holding it. The way out is to settle that booking first, and a member whose account is not suspended has one: a host may decline a request they do not want, a guest may withdraw one up to accepting the confirmation on it, either side may cancel between the host’s acceptance and the start of the stay under 9.4 to 9.7, and a stay that has begun ends under 9.5. A suspended account has none of them. Under 3.4 it may not decline, withdraw or cancel, and it may not write to the other party to ask them to act in its place, so a suspended member with a live booking holds the closure 11.1 gives them and cannot reach it. Where what is holding the closure is a request the host has not answered, a request the host has accepted, or a confirmation that has been sent and not accepted, that booking expires on its own under 9.2 and the closure opens when it does; the wait is a matter of hours rather than an indefinite one. In every other case the refusal stands for as long as the booking is live. A suspended member is not left there: a closure they ask for while a booking holds it is passed to RemoteStay staff, who decide what happens to that booking case by case, and you can close the account once the booking has ended. The erasure is delayed by that decision, not withheld by it, and the account page says a person is looking while it is pending. This is a deliberate limit on closing an account, and it exists because the alternative is a person on the other side of a booking with nobody to answer them.

11.3 A closure that does go ahead retires every listing the member holds, in the same step. Those listings leave the site permanently: retirement is the one listing change that cannot be undone, and there is no route back to publication for a listing that has been through it.

11.4 What closing an account does and does not do with what is left, stated here as well as in the Privacy Policy. It deletes the walkthrough, the stills cut from it and every uploaded document, including the paperwork behind a listing that was published — the listing is retired in the same step, so no published page is left standing on evidence that is gone. It does not delete the property record or the sealed address: those hang off the property rather than off the member, and nothing removes them. Completed and cancelled bookings stay on the record of the person at the other end of them. Nor does it remove the customer record held by Stripe, our payment processor: a payment is a financial record with its own retention rules and outlives the account it belonged to. What closure removes is our own pointer at it.

12. Changes to these terms

12.1 RemoteStay may amend these terms, and an amended version takes effect when it is published on this page. The date at the top is the version being read.

12.2 No notice period is promised. RemoteStay may say something in advance and sometimes will, but nothing here obliges it to, and nothing notifies a member when this page changes. A member who wants to know should read the date.

12.3 An amendment does not change the terms of a booking already confirmed. That booking runs on the version published when it was confirmed.

13. Liability

13.1 RemoteStay is not a party to the arrangement between a host and a guest. It lists places, checks evidence about them, carries messages and moves money between the two. It does not own, let, manage, inspect or control any place on the site, and it is not a landlord, a letting agent, an insurer or a party to any stay.

13.2 What happens in or around a stay is between the host and the guest. That includes the state, safety, legality and habitability of the place, anything said or done by either of them, damage, injury, loss, theft, nuisance, eviction, a place that is not as described, a guest who does not arrive, a host who does not admit them, and every tax, permit, licence or registration either of them owes. RemoteStay is not liable for any of it.

13.3 The service is provided as it is. RemoteStay does not warrant that the site is available, uninterrupted or error-free, and to the fullest extent the law allows it excludes every implied warranty and every indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, including lost profit, lost data and the cost of alternative accommodation.

13.4 Where RemoteStay is nonetheless found liable, its total liability on any claim is limited to the fees it actually received on the booking the claim arises from.

13.5 Indemnity. A member indemnifies RemoteStay against any claim, loss, liability or cost, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of their use of the service, a stay they hosted or took, anything they published on the site, or their breach of these terms or of the law.

13.6 Nothing here excludes a liability that cannot lawfully be excluded. Some jurisdictions do not allow parts of 13.3 and 13.4; where that is so, those parts apply as far as that jurisdiction permits and no further, and the rest of this section stands.

14. Governing law, and where a dispute goes

14.1 These terms are governed by the law of the State of New Mexico, United States of America, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules.

14.2 The state and federal courts sitting in Bernalillo County, New Mexico have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of these terms or the service, and both parties submit to them.

14.3 This clause governs the relationship between a member and RemoteStay. It does not decide the law of a stay itself: a place is let where it stands, and the law of that country applies to what happens in it.

14.4 Where a member deals with RemoteStay as a consumer, a mandatory consumer-protection right under the law of their own country is not displaced by 14.1 or 14.2.

15. Language

15.1 This page may be published in more than one language. The English version is the agreement. A translation is provided so that a reader can follow what they are agreeing to; it is not a separate contract, and where a translation and the English differ, the English governs. Signing up, and paying, is agreement to the English version.

16. Who RemoteStay is, and how to reach it

RemoteStay is operated by Momentum Minds LLC, a limited liability company formed in the State of New Mexico, United States of America.

8206 Louisiana Blvd NE, Ste A #7489, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87113, United States.

Replying to any email from RemoteStay reaches a person, and so does writing to hello@remotestay.net. Either is the route for a question about these terms, a notice under them, or a complaint.

17. Conduct, reports and enforcement

17.1 Conduct. A member must not use RemoteStay to threaten, harass, coerce, defraud or discriminate against anybody on it; must not film, list or offer a place they are not entitled to rent out, or misrepresent who they are; must not ask for or take a payment for a booking outside the service once a request has been made; and, during a stay, must not enter a guest’s home unannounced as the host or bring in people the booking does not name as the guest. Messages, walkthroughs, listings and reviews are all uses of the service, and this clause reaches every one of them.

17.2 Reports. A member may report another member they have a booking with, about that booking. A report is read by RemoteStay staff and by nobody else. When it is read it is sorted by severity into one of four tiers, from a risk to somebody’s safety down to a matter of quality that belongs in a review or a claim rather than a report; the tier sets how quickly a person reads it and which of the decisions in 17.3 are open on it, and a report about safety or about fraud may bring a suspension under 3.4 while it is being read. It is filed with a note and, where the reporter chooses, with messages from the booking thread; what is attached is kept for the period the Privacy Policy states for a report, which depends on how the report ended. A report is not a review and does not change one: nothing filed under this section delays, removes or alters a review either party writes.

17.3 What RemoteStay may decide. On a report, or on what it finds on its own, RemoteStay may decide to take no action; to keep a note on the account; to warn the member; to withhold a particular use of the service from them; to suspend the account under 3.4; or to remove the account from the service. Every one of those is a decision about who may use RemoteStay and how. None of them is a finding that the member did what was reported, and RemoteStay does not publish one as such. No decision is taken by a count of reports or by a rule running on its own: a person reads what was filed, and a report with nothing attached and nothing else beside it is closed with no action and kept on the record.

17.4 A live stay is not ended by any of it. A decision under 17.3 reaches what the member may do next on RemoteStay — a restriction withholds the one use it names, and a suspension withholds every power but the five 3.4 lists, and writing to the other party on a live booking is not one of the five. It does not end a stay that is under way, does not move anybody out of a home, and does not change a payment the booking already schedules or a payout the host is owed. A stay that has begun ends only as section 9 provides. What happens inside a home is a matter between the two people in the booking and the law of the place, as 14.3 says, and RemoteStay does not report a member to the police on anybody’s behalf.

17.5 What the member is told. A member RemoteStay decides against is told the decision in writing, and told what in these terms it rests on. A member may dispute a decision by replying to that letter or by writing to the address in section 16, and a person reads it. Where a decision concerns two members, both are told the decision in the same words.

17.6 What is never published. RemoteStay does not publish the contents of a report, does not tell one party what the other wrote in that party’s words, does not mark a listing, a profile or a review with a report or a sanction, and does not publish a list of accounts it has removed. Where a listing stops being bookable because of a decision under 17.3, a guest with a booking on it is told that it is no longer bookable and no more.