1. Who we are and these terms
E-Rate Keeper is a product of its parent company, which operates the service and is the party to these terms. In these terms, "E-Rate Keeper", "we", "us", and "our" mean that company. Disclosure of the parent company is available upon written request to E-Rate Keeper, 1235 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Unit #1382, Washington, DC 20003, or legal@eratekeeper.com.
"You" means the person using the service and, if you use it for a school, school district, library, consortium or other organization, that organization. If you accept these terms for an organization, you confirm that you have the authority to bind it.
These terms incorporate our Privacy Policy. If you sign a separate written agreement or order with us, that agreement controls where it conflicts with these terms.
2. What E-Rate Keeper is, and what it is not
E-Rate Keeper is software that helps schools and libraries take part in the federal Schools and Libraries Universal Service Support Program, known as E-rate. It shows public information about E-rate applicants, tracks deadlines, and in the paid service prepares the answers for E-rate forms and lays them out in the order USAC's portal asks for them.
E-Rate Keeper is not:
- affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC), the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the U.S. Senate or any other government body;
- a law firm, and nothing in the service is legal, accounting or financial advice;
- a guarantee that your organization will receive, keep or be paid any E-rate funding.
Your organization decides what to request, chooses its vendors, enters information in its own USAC account, and certifies every form through its own authorized official. We do not sign in to your USAC account, hold your USAC credentials, submit forms on your behalf or certify anything.
3. Public information and reports
Our school and library reports are built from information USAC publishes as open data, including applications, funding decisions, payments, deadlines and equipment budgets. We copy that data on a schedule and present it in our own format and analysis.
Public data can be incomplete, delayed, corrected after the fact or simply wrong, and our processing of it can introduce errors. Reports reflect the data as of the date shown on them. You should confirm any figure or date against USAC's own tools and your own records before acting on it.
Reports describe organizations, not individuals, except that USAC's public records include the names and business contact details of officials who certify E-rate forms. Our handling of that information is described in our Privacy Policy.
4. Estimates and deadlines
Some figures in the service are estimates, and they are labeled as estimates. These include what a school or library that has not applied could receive, what similar applicants were approved for, consultant fee ranges, savings in the calculator, and the share of a budget E-rate would pay. Estimates rely on public data, program rules as we understand them, and assumptions, and your actual results will differ.
Deadlines shown in the service are worked out from public data and program rules. USAC's funding letters and notices to your organization are the authority on your deadlines. Filing windows and rules change, and some dates, such as future filing windows, are not announced when we show them.
5. Accounts
Some features require an account. You must give accurate information and keep it current. You are responsible for everything done through your account, for keeping your sign-in credentials confidential, and for the acts of anyone you allow to use it. Tell us immediately at legal@eratekeeper.com if you believe your account has been used without permission.
Your organization may add staff members to its account. Your organization is responsible for adding and removing them and for their use of the service.
6. Your responsibilities in the E-rate program
You remain responsible for your organization's participation in E-rate, including:
- following FCC rules and USAC procedures, including competitive bidding, the 28-day waiting period, eligibility, record retention and certification requirements;
- following the procurement, bidding and conflict-of-interest laws and policies that apply to your organization;
- the accuracy of the information you provide to us and enter in USAC's portal, including enrollment and lunch counts, costs and contracts;
- reviewing every value before you enter it and every form before your official certifies it;
- meeting every deadline, whether or not we alert you to it.
7. Deadline alerts and people you add
You can ask us to email deadline alerts to up to 25 addresses for a school or library. When you add someone else's address, you confirm that the person works for or with that organization and that you are authorized to sign them up. Everyone on the list can remove themselves at any time.
Alerts are a convenience. Email can be delayed, filtered or lost, and an alert can be wrong if the underlying public data is wrong. Do not rely on alerts as your only reminder of a deadline.
8. Your content and documents
In the paid service you may upload documents such as vendor quotes, contracts, bills and correspondence, and enter information about your organization. You keep all rights to that content. You give us a limited license to host, copy, process and display it only to provide, secure and support the service for you.
Do not upload student education records or other personal information about students. The service does not need them; E-rate uses only aggregate counts.
You confirm that you have the right to upload the content you provide and that it does not violate any law or anyone else's rights.
9. AI features
Some features use artificial intelligence, such as reading uploaded documents into line items and drafting replies to USAC reviewer questions. AI output can be wrong or incomplete. Every value it reads is shown beside its source for you to confirm, and every draft is for you to review and edit before you use it. You are responsible for what you submit.
10. Plans, billing and renewals
The free report and deadline alerts cost nothing. The paid service is a flat fee per organization, never a percentage of your E-rate funding. Current prices are on our pricing page.
- Yearly plans are billed in advance for one year and renew for another year unless cancelled before the renewal date. You may pay by card, or by purchase order and invoice.
- Monthly plans are billed by card at the start of each month at the rate shown for that month, and continue until cancelled. A cancellation takes effect at the end of the month already paid.
- Fees are not refundable except under the accuracy guarantee in section 12 or where the law requires.
- Prices do not include taxes. If your organization is tax-exempt, send us your exemption certificate and we will not charge sales tax.
- We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice. A new price applies from your next renewal or billing period after the notice period.
If you dispute a charge with your card issuer instead of contacting us first, we may suspend the paid service while the dispute is open.
11. Purchase orders and public entities
Invoices are due within 30 days unless your purchase order or our written agreement says otherwise. Terms printed on a purchase order do not change these terms unless we agree to them in writing, other than billing details such as the PO number and billing address.
If your organization is a public school, school district, library or other government body, and a constitution, statute, regulation or policy that legally binds it prohibits or limits any part of these terms, including provisions on indemnity, limitation of liability, arbitration, governing law, venue, automatic renewal or payment timing, that part applies only to the extent the law allows. The rest of these terms still apply. Public records laws may require your organization to disclose these terms or its dealings with us, and nothing in these terms prevents that.
12. Accuracy guarantee
If you are on a paid plan and USAC denies or reduces funding on a form because a value the software prepared for that form was wrong under the program rules in effect when it was prepared, we will refund the fees you paid us for the funding year that form covers.
To claim the guarantee, write to legal@eratekeeper.com within 60 days of the USAC decision and include the decision letter. The guarantee applies only where:
- you entered the values as the software prepared them, without changes;
- the information you gave us, such as counts, costs, contracts and dates, was accurate and complete;
- the error was not caused by a change in program rules or USAC procedures after the form was certified, by USAC's own error, or by a deadline missed after the software showed it to you;
The refund is limited to the fees paid for that funding year and is your sole and exclusive remedy for errors in values the software prepared.
13. Acceptable use
You may not:
- use the service to break any law, including FCC rules and procurement laws, or to mislead USAC or anyone else;
- copy, scrape or redistribute our reports, analysis or software in bulk, or use them to build a competing product;
- access or try to access accounts or data that are not yours, or interfere with the service or its security;
- send spam or unwanted messages through the alert feature, or add people to alerts without authority;
- reverse engineer the software except where the law expressly permits it.
14. Our intellectual property
The service, including its software, design, text, analysis and the way it presents public data, belongs to us and our licensors. USAC's underlying public data remains public. These terms give you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service for your organization's own participation in E-rate while you follow these terms.
If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them without any obligation to you.
15. Third-party services and links
The service links to and relies on other parties, including USAC, the FCC and the Senate Commerce Committee, whose sites and documents we do not control. We are not responsible for their content, availability or accuracy.
16. Disclaimers
Except as expressly stated in section 12, the service, reports, estimates, alerts and all other content are provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that any funding will be approved, paid or kept.
17. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows:
- we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any loss of funding, revenue, data or goodwill, even if we were told they were possible;
- we are not liable for E-rate funding that is denied, reduced, rescinded, recovered or not paid, except for the refund under section 12;
- our total liability for all claims relating to the service or these terms is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or $100 if you have not paid us anything.
Some jurisdictions do not allow some of these limits, and in those places they apply only as far as the law allows.
18. Indemnity
To the extent the law allows your organization to do so, you will defend and indemnify us against third-party claims arising from content you provide, your organization's filings and certifications, or your breach of these terms or of the law.
19. Suspension and termination
You may stop using the service at any time and cancel a paid plan as described in section 10. We may suspend or end your access if you breach these terms, if we must to comply with law, or if your use puts the service or others at risk. We will give notice when it is reasonable to do so.
When a paid plan ends, you can export your documents and records for 60 days, after which we may delete them as described in our Privacy Policy. Sections that by their nature should survive, including disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity and dispute resolution, survive termination.
20. Changes to the service and these terms
We may change the service, including adding or removing features. We may update these terms. If a change is material, we will post the new terms with a new effective date and, if you have an account, notify you by email at least 30 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after the effective date means you accept the change.
21. Disputes and arbitration
Before starting any proceeding, the party with a complaint must send the other a written description of the dispute and the relief sought. Notices to E-Rate Keeper go to legal@eratekeeper.com and by mail to E-Rate Keeper, 1235 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Unit #1382, Washington, DC 20003. The parties will try in good faith to resolve it for 30 days after the notice is received.
If it is not resolved, and subject to section 11, any dispute arising out of or relating to the service or these terms, including whether a claim must be arbitrated, will be settled by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules, before a single arbitrator. The arbitration will take place in the State of Florida or, at E-Rate Keeper's election, by video conference. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court with jurisdiction.
Claims must be brought individually, not as a plaintiff or class member in any class or representative proceeding. Either party may bring an individual claim in small claims court, or seek an injunction in court to protect its intellectual property or confidential information.
22. Governing law and venue
Subject to section 11, these terms and any dispute arising out of or relating to them or the service are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. For any matter permitted to proceed in court, you and E-Rate Keeper agree to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the state and federal courts located in Florida.
23. General
These terms, the Privacy Policy and any written agreement or order between us are the entire agreement about the service. If any part is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. You may not assign these terms without our consent; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets. Neither party is liable for delays caused by events beyond its reasonable control. We may send notices electronically to the email address on your account or within the service, and these satisfy any requirement that a notice be in writing.
24. Contact
Questions about these terms go to legal@eratekeeper.com, or by mail to E-Rate Keeper, 1235 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Unit #1382, Washington, DC 20003.