These terms are an agreement between Paul Swiech, an individual doing business as Astray in South Carolina ("Astray", "we", "us"), and the church or organization that subscribes to or uses Astray ("you", "your"). By subscribing you accept them on your organization's behalf. Section 3 sets out what each person with an Astray account agrees to personally.
Astray is software for pastoral care. It connects to your Planning Center account, reads the ministry data you authorize, and helps your team notice who needs attention — people drifting out of attendance, first-time givers, care follow-ups, next steps.
Astray does not replace Planning Center and does not become the system of record for your congregation. Planning Center remains your source of truth. If you stop using Astray, your Planning Center data is unaffected.
You are responsible for who you invite, what permissions you grant them, and what they do with the access you give. Astray provides roles and per-permission overrides; configuring them appropriately is your call.
Accounts are for named individuals. Do not share credentials between people. Administrators must use multi-factor authentication, and some actions require a recent multi-factor check regardless of how you configured your account.
You must promptly remove access for anyone who leaves your staff or volunteer team. We provide the tools; we cannot know when someone's role ends.
Everyone with an Astray account uses it for a church or organization that uses Astray. Before you first use Astray, and again when we publish a change to these terms that we mark as requiring it, we ask you to agree to them. By agreeing, you personally agree that you will:
Section 14 applies to your own use of Astray as it does to your organization's.
Your organization, not you, is our customer. It is responsible for fees, for its agreement with us about its congregation's information, and for what it asks us to do with that information. When your organization removes your access, these terms stop applying to your use of Astray, but your commitment to keep what you saw confidential continues.
Astray reads from Planning Center using a connection you authorize and can revoke at any time from within Planning Center or from Astray. We request only the scopes the features you use require.
Your relationship with Planning Center is your own, governed by your agreement with them. We are not responsible for their availability, their pricing, or changes they make to their API. If Planning Center becomes unavailable, parts of Astray will not work, and that is not a failure of these terms.
Some features draft text for you — an outreach message, a summary. When you use them, the relevant context is sent to our AI provider to generate that draft. For care-related drafts this includes recent pastoral care notes for the person concerned, as written by your team.
Section 4 of the Privacy Notice describes this in detail and names the provider. Read it before enabling AI features if your congregation's notes are sensitive, because they are.
Drafts are suggestions. A person on your team reviews and sends them. Astray does not send anything to a member of your congregation on its own.
Subscriptions are monthly or annual and priced by average weekend attendance, which you attest to when subscribing. Prices are in US dollars. Payment is by card, processed by Stripe; we never see or store your full card details.
Your subscription renews automatically until cancelled. Cancelling stops the next renewal and keeps your access through the end of the period you have already paid for. There are no prorated refunds for a partial period.
If the attendance band you attested to stops matching your congregation, tell us and we will move you to the correct tier at your next renewal.
We may change prices. Existing subscribers get at least 30 days' notice before a change affects them, and you may cancel before it takes effect.
If a payment fails we will retry it and tell you. If it keeps failing your access may be restricted until billing is resolved. Restriction is not deletion: your data remains, and access is restored when payment succeeds.
We will not restrict access without notice, and we will not delete anything because of a failed payment.
We refund duplicate charges, verified billing errors, unauthorized charges, anything the law requires, and anything we decide to refund as a matter of judgment. Beyond that, subscription fees are not refundable.
Your congregation's data is yours. We process it to provide Astray and for no other purpose. We do not sell it, we do not use it to advertise to anyone, and we do not use it to train AI models.
Once your organization accepts the Data Processing Addendum, it governs how we handle your congregation's data, including what we do when you leave. Until then, this section and the Privacy Notice describe how we handle it.
Care notes often mention health — a surgery, a diagnosis, a hospital stay. Astray is built for that kind of pastoral note, but it is not built to meet the requirements of the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Astray is not a HIPAA "covered entity" or "business associate", and we do not sign business associate agreements.
Most churches are not covered by HIPAA. If yours is — for example, because it runs a clinic or a counselling practice that bills health insurance — do not use Astray to hold protected health information from that work.
Do not use Astray to break the law, to harass anyone, or to attack the service or the people using it. Do not attempt to reach another organization's data. Do not resell access.
Astray is built for pastoral care. Using congregational data to target people commercially, politically, or in any way a reasonable member would find a betrayal of their church's trust is not what this is for, and is a breach of these terms.
We work to keep Astray available and do not promise it always will be. We do not offer a service level agreement at this tier. We will give reasonable notice of planned maintenance where we can.
You may cancel at any time, effective at the end of your paid period.
We may suspend or end your access if you materially breach these terms and do not fix it within 30 days of us telling you, or immediately if the breach is causing harm to other customers or to people whose data we hold.
When the agreement ends, our deletion obligations in the Data Processing Addendum apply if your organization has accepted it, and section 6 of the Privacy Notice applies if it has not.
Astray is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we disclaim implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.
Astray helps your team notice things. It does not exercise pastoral judgment and is not a substitute for it. Nothing Astray surfaces — or fails to surface — is professional, medical, legal, or counselling advice, and decisions about the people in your care remain yours.
To the extent the law allows, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits or lost data, even if warned they were possible.
Our total liability arising out of this agreement is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.
These limits do not apply to your obligation to pay fees, to either party's indemnity obligations, or to anything the law does not permit to be limited.
You will defend and indemnify us against third-party claims arising from your use of Astray in breach of these terms, or from your lack of authority or legal basis to provide us the data you provide.
We will defend and indemnify you against third-party claims that Astray itself infringes their intellectual property.
We may update these terms. For a material change we will publish the updated terms at least 30 days before they take effect, show a notice in Astray that links to them and states the date, and ask each person with an Astray account to accept them there. From that date, Astray asks anyone who has not yet accepted to do so before they continue. If your organization does not accept a material change, it may cancel before the change takes effect.
A change that is not material — a correction or clarification that changes no one's rights — takes effect when we publish it and does not need to be accepted again.
These terms are governed by the laws of South Carolina, without regard to conflict of laws rules. Disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in South Carolina.
These terms, with the Privacy Notice and, once your organization accepts it, the Data Processing Addendum, are the entire agreement between us about Astray. If any provision is unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Neither party may assign this agreement without the other's consent, except to a successor of substantially all of its business.
Notices to us go to info@astray.care. Notices to you go to the email addresses of your administrators.