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Terms of Service

Last updated: 20 August 2026

These terms are the agreement between you and Portwatch for use of our website and platform. Two things worth reading closely: Portwatch is currently in beta (section 3), and you — not Portwatch — are the sender of any outreach you send through it, which makes you responsible for complying with anti-spam law (section 7).

1. Agreement to these terms

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) form a binding agreement between you and Portwatch (“Portwatch”, “we”, “us”), operated by Nicholas Lazares. By creating an account, accessing the platform, or submitting a request through our website, you accept these Terms. If you are accepting on behalf of a company or fund, you confirm you have authority to bind that organisation, and “you” means that organisation.

Our Privacy Policy is incorporated into these Terms by reference. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

2. What Portwatch does

Portwatch is a software tool for sourcing acquisitions of small and mid-sized businesses. It helps you define an acquisition thesis, identify companies that may match it, compile research profiles on those companies from third-party and public sources, and draft and send outreach to their owners.

Portwatch is software. We are not a broker, dealer, investment adviser, business broker, or agent. We do not represent buyers or sellers, do not negotiate or advise on transactions, and take no fee or commission on any transaction you complete.

3. Beta service

Portwatch is currently offered as a beta. That means:

  • the service is provided free of charge for now, and access may be limited or invitation-only;
  • features may change, break, or be removed without notice;
  • we provide no uptime commitment, service level agreement, or support guarantee;
  • data may occasionally be lost — keep your own copies of anything important; and
  • we may end the beta, or your access to it, at any time.

If you give us feedback, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use it to improve our products, with no obligation to you. You are not required to give feedback.

4. Eligibility and accounts

  • Portwatch is offered in the United States only. You must be in the United States to use it.
  • You must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract.
  • You must give accurate registration information and keep it current.
  • You are responsible for your account credentials and for everything done under your account.
  • Do not share your account with anyone outside your organisation, and tell us promptly at nick@portwatch.ai if you suspect unauthorised access.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

  • use the service for any unlawful, deceptive, fraudulent, or harassing purpose;
  • send outreach that is misleading about who you are or why you are contacting someone;
  • contact anyone who has asked not to be contacted, by you or through us;
  • use the service to compile or sell contact lists as a product, or otherwise resell, republish, redistribute or transfer our research output or any contact data as a standalone data set — our upstream data providers prohibit onward redistribution, and we cannot grant you rights they withhold from us;
  • use the service, or any research output, profile, score or contact detail obtained through it, for any purpose regulated by the US Fair Credit Reporting Act or an equivalent law — including any decision about employment, credit, insurance, housing or tenancy, or eligibility for a licence or government benefit. Portwatch is not a consumer reporting agency, its output is not a consumer report, and it must not be used as one;
  • use the service to make any decision about an individual other than whether to approach them regarding the possible acquisition of their business;
  • use the service to locate, monitor or contact a person for any personal, non-commercial reason;
  • scrape, crawl, reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract our source code, models, or underlying data other than as the service intends;
  • probe or breach our security or authentication measures, or access another user’s data;
  • use automated means to place unreasonable load on the service, or circumvent any rate limit or usage cap;
  • upload malware, or content you have no right to upload; or
  • use the service in breach of any applicable sanctions or export control law.

6. Connected accounts

You may choose to connect third-party accounts — for example a Google account, so outreach sends from your own mailbox. When you do:

  • you authorise us to act on your behalf within the scope you granted, and only for that purpose;
  • you remain bound by that provider’s own terms, including Google’s program policies and Gmail sending limits and bulk-sender guidelines;
  • you confirm you are entitled to connect that account and to send from that address; and
  • you can disconnect at any time, in Portwatch or through the provider, which stops all further sending from that account.

What we do with data from connected accounts is set out in section 5 of our Privacy Policy. We are not responsible for a third-party provider suspending, rate-limiting, or terminating your account.

7. Outreach and anti-spam compliance

You are the sender. Messages sent through Portwatch go out under your name, from your address, and are your communications. You are solely responsible for their content and for the decision to send them.

You are responsible for complying with all law applicable to that outreach, which includes:

  • the CAN-SPAM Act, including its requirements for accurate headers, a functioning opt-out, and a valid physical postal address in commercial email;
  • state commercial email, telemarketing and consumer protection law in the recipient’s state; and
  • any marketing, privacy or telecommunications law that applies where a recipient is located.

Portwatch is built for contacting businesses in the United States. If you use it to contact anyone outside the United States, you take on the law of that country yourself — including Canada’s CASL and the GDPR and ePrivacy rules in the UK and EU, which impose consent requirements US law does not. We do not support that use and it is at your own risk.

In practice, and as a condition of using the service, you agree to:

  • describe yourself and your purpose accurately, and not use deceptive subject lines or headers;
  • include a working way to opt out, and honour opt-out requests promptly;
  • stop contacting anyone who asks you to stop, and not transfer them to another campaign or re-approach them under a different thesis;
  • pass any opt-out, correction or deletion request you receive to us at nick@portwatch.ai so we can suppress that person across the platform; and
  • maintain any lawful basis or consent your jurisdiction requires for the contact you are making.

We may suspend sending, throttle your account, or terminate access if we reasonably believe your outreach breaches this section, generates significant spam complaints, or puts our infrastructure or sender reputation at risk.

8. Your content

You keep all rights in the content you submit — your theses, uploaded memos, lead lists, notes, and outreach drafts. You grant us a limited, non-exclusive licence to host, copy, process, and display that content solely to operate and support the service for you, and to comply with law.

You confirm you have the rights necessary to submit your content, including any lead list you upload, and that submitting it does not breach anyone’s rights or any agreement you are under.

We do not use your content to train generalised AI models. On termination you may export your content, and you may ask us to delete it as described in our Privacy Policy.

9. Research output and data accuracy

Portwatch compiles information from third-party and public sources and uses automated systems, including large language models, to summarise and score it. This output is a research aid, not a verified record. It can be incomplete, out of date, or wrong — including revenue and headcount estimates, ownership and contact details, and thesis-fit scores.

Verify independently before you rely on it. You are responsible for conducting your own due diligence before contacting a company, making an offer, or entering any transaction. We label the confidence of what we surface where we can, but we do not warrant the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any purpose of any research output, score, or estimate.

Research profiles concern identifiable people and can include personal contact details and an estimated age, drawn from the sources described in section 6 of our Privacy Policy. Handle that information accordingly: use it only for the purpose set out in section 5, keep it secure, do not disclose it further, and delete it when you no longer need it. Estimates about an individual — including age and tenure — may be wrong, and you should not treat them as verified fact about that person.

10. No professional advice

Nothing Portwatch produces is investment, legal, tax, accounting, or valuation advice, and nothing in the service is an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any business or security. Acquiring a business carries risk, including total loss. Engage qualified professional advisers before acting.

11. Fees

Portwatch is free during the beta. We will announce pricing before public launch and give you 30 days’ notice by email before any charge applies to your account. You will never be charged during the beta without agreeing to a paid plan first.

12. Intellectual property

The service, including its software, models, interfaces, scoring methodology, documentation, and the Portwatch name and marks, belongs to us and our licensors. These Terms grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service for your own acquisition search while your account is in good standing. No other rights are granted, expressly or by implication.

13. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or accuracy. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that it will surface any particular company, produce any lead, generate any reply, or result in any transaction.

14. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost revenue, lost business opportunity, lost or inaccurate data, or the cost of substitute services, even if advised of the possibility.

Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the service is limited to the greater of the amounts you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or US$100. Because the beta is free, you acknowledge this will normally be the latter.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.

15. Indemnity

You will indemnify and hold us harmless against any claim, loss, liability, and reasonable legal cost arising from your use of the service, your content, your outreach, or your breach of these Terms — including any claim brought by a recipient of your outreach or by a regulator in connection with it.

16. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the service and close your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access, with or without notice, if you breach these Terms, if we reasonably believe your use creates legal or security risk, or if we discontinue the service. On termination the rights granted to you end immediately; sections 8 to 15 and 17 survive.

17. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, without regard to conflict of laws rules. The courts of Suffolk County, Massachusetts have exclusive jurisdiction, and both parties consent to that venue.

18. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms as the product and the law change. We will post the updated version here with a new date, and for material changes we will give notice by email or in the product before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the updated Terms.

19. General

  • Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us on this subject.
  • Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
  • No waiver. Not enforcing a right is not a waiver of it.
  • Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them, and transfer the rights and obligations under them, in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, or on the incorporation of the Portwatch business into a company — in which case that company assumes these Terms in our place, and we will tell you when it happens.
  • Independent parties. Nothing here creates a partnership, agency, employment, or joint venture.
  • Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control.

20. Contact

Portwatch, operated by Nicholas Lazares
nick@portwatch.ai