Constitution
TheBooker - Our Constitution
What this document is
This is the set of principles that guides every decision we make at TheBooker. It sits above our terms of service, our privacy policy, our pricing, and our product roadmap. When a question isn't covered by an existing policy - or when two policies seem to point in different directions - this document is what we use to guide us.
It's deliberately written in plain English. If a clause in one of our legal documents contradicts something here, this document is the proof that the legal document needs fixing.
Our values
Trust is the product. Tradespeople forward us their email. That's an extraordinary act of trust, and everything we do - our features, our pricing, our growth - has to be worthy of it.
Humans first. Behind every enquiry is a person whose boiler is broken, whose roof is leaking, whose wedding venue needs rewiring. Behind every tradesperson is someone trying to make a living and get home to their family. We build and operate for those people and for you, not for metrics, profit or shareholders.
We serve, we don't extract. Our customers pay us a fair price for a useful service. We do not look for additional ways to make money from their data, their customers, or their position in our pipeline. If a decision is good for us at our customers' expense, the decision is wrong.
Transparency by default. If we'd be uncomfortable explaining something to a customer, we shouldn't be doing it.
Kindness scales. We believe in the benefit of the doubt. Starting from a place of trust. That everyone deserves a kind word. We all need income to live, but that should never be at the expense of anyone else.
What this means in practice
These are commitments, not aspirations. We don't get to break them when it's convenient.
Your enquiries belong to you
Every email that arrives for you goes to you. We never redirect an enquiry to another tradesperson. We never accept payment to prioritise one customer's enquiries over another's. We never insert ourselves between you and the people trying to hire you. We are infrastructure that serves you - we are not a marketplace, a lead broker, or a middleman, and we will not become one.
Your data is yours
You can request a complete export of your data at any time. You can delete your account and your data whenever you want - no penalty, no retention clause that keeps it on our servers for years, no argument. This isn't a feature we charge for. It's how it should work.
We will ask before we learn from you
Your data may be used to improve how the system works - for example, to make our email classification smarter over time. When we do this, two things will always be true: we will have asked you first in plain English with a real choice, and the data will be fully and comprehensively anonymised before it is used. Names, addresses, phone numbers, business details, anything that could identify you or the people who contact you - all stripped out permanently.
If you say no, that's the end of it. If you say yes and later change your mind, you can withdraw at any time. We will never sell your data, your customers' data, or anything derived from them.
AI is named, not hidden
When AI is involved in something - drafting a reply, classifying an email, suggesting an action - you'll know. You see the draft before it goes out. You approve it, edit it, or throw it away. The AI works for you; it doesn't act in your name without your say-so.
We tell you what we charge, and that's what we charge
Our pricing is published and flat. No hidden transaction fees on your bookings. No charges that scale with your success. We are a young company and if our pricing needs to change, we will tell you, far in advance, and work with you to find a path which works for you.
Your rights are your rights
UK data protection law gives you the right to access, correct, delete, and port your personal data, and to object to certain uses of it. We treat those rights as the floor, not the ceiling. If you ask us about your data, we tell you. If you ask us to delete it, we delete it. You don't need to cite a regulation, fill in a special form, or wait a month - just ask.
How we use this document
When we write a privacy policy, terms of service, internal engineering rule, or pricing change, we read this first. If we're proposing something that conflicts with what's written here, we either change the proposal or - if we genuinely think this document is wrong - we have an honest conversation about updating it, with reasoning written down and we will tell you. Drift happens silently; we'd rather have it happen visibly or not at all.