Terms of service

These terms are the contract between you and NorthernLayer, a business in Ontario, Canada. By creating an account or using the service you accept them.

If you are using the service for a business — which almost everyone here is — you are agreeing on that business's behalf and confirming you may do so. Nothing in these terms removes rights you have as a consumer if you are one.

Questions about anything below go to hello@northernlayer.com.

Your account is created automatically after a successful one-time payment, and your studio opens without a separate signup step. Future sign-in uses a one-time email code or Google with your checkout email. If that address already belongs to an account, verification is required before linking the purchase to that account; you can still use your purchased studio in the checkout browser immediately. Keep your inbox secure and tell us straight away if it is compromised.

Your studio is personal to you and may hold credit packs and an optional subscription. If a team needs several people editing, each person needs an account; sharing sign-in details also means everyone's shoots land in one dashboard.

You must give us an email address that reaches you. Everything we have to tell you — a failed payment, a change to these terms — goes there.

You upload photographs of a property. Your browser converts them, groups them into rooms, and merges bracketed exposures. Each room is then enhanced according to the settings you choose, and you download the results.

The enhancement is performed by an AI model. It takes about thirty seconds a room and runs several rooms at once. We do not promise a particular result on a particular photograph, and we cannot: the input is your photograph and the output depends on it.

We may change how the service works, including which model performs the editing, as long as we do not materially reduce what your plan gets you during a period you have paid for.

The one-time pack costs $29 USD for 100 edit credits. It does not create a subscription, renew automatically, or expire. Payment is processed by Stripe and credits become available after successful payment. A failed edit returns its reserved credit; each successfully completed edit, including a new edit of the same image, uses one credit.

Subscriptions are billed monthly or yearly in advance and priced in US dollars — including for Canadian customers. Payment is handled by Stripe, so we never see your card details. Plans currently run from $29 a month; the prices, billing intervals and allowances on the pricing page are the current ones and are part of these terms.

Prices exclude any sales tax that may apply where you are. If that changes, we will show the tax at checkout before you pay rather than adding it to a later invoice.

Your subscription renews automatically on its monthly or yearly billing interval until you cancel. Cancel any time from your account: you keep full access until the end of the period you have already paid for, and you are not charged again.

When you confirm an upgrade, it takes effect immediately and Stripe shows any prorated amount due before you approve it. A downgrade, including a move from annual to monthly billing, takes effect at your next renewal; your current plan and allowance stay active until then, and you can cancel the scheduled change from Settings.

Each subscription includes the image allowance shown on the pricing page. Monthly plans reset monthly; annual plans grant the full year's allowance when the yearly period starts. An image is one finished room, not one file uploaded — a bracketed room merges into a single image whatever the number of frames off your card, and it counts once. Subscription allowances do not roll over into the next billing period. Separately purchased credits do not expire and are used after any available subscription allowance.

If a payment fails, Stripe retries it over the following days and your access continues while it does. We would rather a card that needs replacing did not cost you a client handover.

If we change our prices we will tell you at least 30 days before it affects a renewal, and you are free to cancel before it does.

Run a real shoot through the service. If the results are not good enough to send to a client, email hello@northernlayer.com within 60 days of your first payment and we will refund it in full. No forms and no argument.

The guarantee applies once, to your first payment, whether for a credit pack or a subscription. After that, cancelling a subscription stops the next payment rather than refunding the current one. Refunding a credit pack removes the corresponding credits from your balance; completed work is not deleted.

This is in addition to, and does not limit, any statutory right to cancel that you have as a consumer.

Each plan includes a set number of finished images. Monthly plans renew that allowance every billing period; annual plans include the whole year's images from the day you subscribe, so a busy spring and a quiet January even out.

Running out does not charge you anything automatically. You can see how many edits are left before you start a shoot. Buy another credit pack or choose a larger subscription when you need more.

If usage on one account looks less like a busy studio and more like an automated pipeline or several businesses sharing a login, we will contact you to agree a sensible arrangement before we do anything else. We will not cut off a shoot in progress.

You keep every right you have in the photographs you upload and in the enhanced images that come back. We claim no ownership of either, on any plan, and you have full commercial rights to use the results however you need — client delivery, portals, print, your own portfolio.

You grant us only the permission needed to run the service: to store your photographs, to process them, and to pass them to the service providers described in our privacy policy for the purpose of producing your edit. That permission ends when you delete the images or close your account.

You confirm that you own or are licensed to use everything you upload, and that uploading it does not infringe anyone else's rights — including the rights of any person appearing in a photograph and of any property owner who has restricted photography of their property.

A property photograph is a representation of something someone is being asked to spend money on, and altering what is in it can be a regulatory matter as well as a professional one — Canada's Competition Act on misleading representations, MLS and portal rules on material alteration in the US, consumer-protection and advertising rules elsewhere. Which of them applies depends on where the listing is, not where we are.

The service is built around that. Every edit instructs the model to make only the changes you selected and otherwise preserve the exact composition, property contents, window views and photographed sky without adding, removing, moving, replacing, restyling or inventing anything. Camera removal and privacy blur are the deliberate exceptions you control.

But an AI model is probabilistic, and no instruction is a guarantee. You are responsible for reviewing every image before you publish it or hand it to a client and for knowing what rules apply in the market where the listing appears.

Do not use the service to misrepresent a property, to remove or conceal a defect, or to depict something that is not there. That is a breach of these terms as well as, quite possibly, the law.

You must not:

• upload anything unlawful, or anything you do not have the right to upload;
• upload material that is obscene, or that depicts a person in a way they have not agreed to;
• use the service to produce images intended to deceive, including of properties that do not exist;
• share, resell or sublicense access to your account, or use it to run an editing service for others under your own subscription;
• script, scrape or automate against the service outside features we provide for that purpose;
• attempt to get around allowances, entitlement checks or any other limit, or to access another account's projects or images;
• reverse engineer the service, or attempt to extract the prompts or models behind it;
• do anything that puts the availability of the service for other customers at risk.

We aim to keep the service available at all times but do not guarantee it. It depends on third-party infrastructure and on an AI provider, and any of them can have a bad day. Planned maintenance will be announced where we can.

Support is by email at hello@northernlayer.com, and our aim is a reply within one working day. Support covers the service; it does not extend to editing your photographs for you or to advice on your own equipment.

If the service is unavailable for a prolonged period within a paid month, contact us and we will make it right.

The service — the software, the interface, the name and the branding — is ours or our licensors', and these terms give you a right to use it, not any ownership of it. Your right to use it lasts as long as your account does.

Feedback you send us we may use freely, without owing you anything for it. That is a licence to act on a good suggestion, not a claim over your photographs, which section 7 governs.

You can cancel at any time from your account, and you can ask us to close it and delete your data by email.

We can suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, and we will tell you why. Where the breach is one that can be fixed, we will normally ask first. For a serious breach — particularly section 8 or 9 — we may act immediately.

If we close your account for a breach, unused allowance is not refunded. If we close it for any other reason, we refund the unused part of the period you have paid for.

When an account closes, download anything you want to keep. We delete stored images after closure and cannot recover them afterwards.

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited — including, if you are a consumer, your statutory rights.

Subject to that: the service is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, that it will be free of errors, or that any particular photograph will be enhanced to a standard you find acceptable — which is what the money-back guarantee in section 5 is for.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profits, lost business or lost data, or for any loss arising from an image you published without reviewing it.

Our total liability to you in any twelve-month period is limited to the amount you paid us in that period.

You are responsible for keeping your own copies of your original photographs. We are a processing service, not a backup.

We may update these terms. The date at the top shows the version in force, and for a material change we will email account holders at least 30 days beforehand.

If you do not accept a change, cancel before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept it.

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stands. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

You may not transfer your rights under these terms to someone else without our agreement. We may transfer ours if the business is sold, and your rights are unaffected if we do.

These terms are the whole agreement between us about the service, and they replace anything said beforehand.

They are governed by the law of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, and the courts of Ontario have jurisdiction — except that if you are a consumer, nothing here takes away a protection or a right to sue locally that the law where you live gives you and does not let you sign away.