Terms of Service

1. What Kite is

Kite is a prepaid phone line and messaging service. It gives each person you add to your account their own phone number. When they call that number from their facility’s phone system and say their passphrase, they can talk with an AI assistant. You can also have the assistant answer messages sent through the prison system’s own messaging service.

These terms are an agreement between you and Kite (“Kite”, “we”, “us”). By creating an account you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not create an account.

You are the customer. The person inside is the user. You open the account, you pay, and you control the balance. They make the calls.

2. Who can open an account

You must be at least 18 and legally able to enter a contract. You must not be prohibited by a court order, a condition of release, or a facility rule from communicating with the person you are adding. You are responsible for knowing whether such a restriction applies to you; we cannot check it for you.

You may only add a person you have a genuine relationship with and a lawful reason to contact.

3. How the service works, and what has to happen first

We assign a phone number to each person you add. Some systems require that number to be on their approved call list before it will work, and only they can add it. Not every system has such a list, and we cannot tell you in advance whether a particular facility does. Where one applies, approval can take several days and in some systems it needs staff review. We cannot add a number to anybody’s list, ask for it to be approved, or find out where a request has got to.

Each line has a passphrase: words you choose, or words Kite picks for you. You can see it and change it on your dashboard, and you give it to them. The line answers by asking for it and opens for nothing else. Anyone who has the passphrase can spend your balance, so treat it the way you would treat a card number.

4. What it costs

Kite is prepaid. There is no subscription and nothing recurring. You add money to a balance and calls and messages draw it down. When the balance runs out the service stops until you add more. Nothing is ever charged to your card automatically. Every payment happens because you chose to make it.

• Calls: $0.10 per minute, charged to the next whole minute. There is no connection fee, and no charge for a call that never connects or that ends before the passphrase is accepted.
• Messages: $0.20 to $0.40 each, depending on the prison system. It varies because the postage the system charges us varies; we pass that difference through instead of averaging it. The price for your person’s system is on your dashboard, and on a call the line tells them the price before it sends anything to their tablet.
• Web lookups: free. If the assistant looks something up because it was asked to, you are not charged for it.
• A minimum balance of $0.30 is needed to start a call. Below that, calls are declined rather than cut off part-way.

Top-ups run from $5.00 to $500.00. Some amounts earn bonus credit; the amount is shown on the button before you pay. You can pay by card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or from your bank account through Link. Payments are handled by Stripe — we never see or hold your card number.

Prices can change. If they do, the new price applies to calls and messages made after the change, never to balance you have already bought. We will tell you before a change takes effect.

5. Your balance

Your balance is prepaid credit for Kite services. It is not a deposit account, it earns no interest, and it cannot be transferred to another account or withdrawn as cash except as a refund under section 6.

Your balance does not expire. If your account is inactive for a long time we may release the phone number (section 8), but the money stays yours.

If you have more than one person on your account, they draw on the same family balance. You can set a limit for each person so no one can spend everything. Setting a limit moves no money — it only sets a ceiling.

6. Refunds and cancellation

You can cancel at any time by simply not adding more money. There is nothing to cancel and no notice to give, because there is no subscription. To close your account entirely, email [email protected] from the address on your account and we will close it and refund any unused balance.

Unused balance

You may request a refund of your remaining unused balance at any time, for any reason. Email [email protected] from the address on your account. We refund to the original payment method within 10 business days. Bonus credit that we added as a promotion is not refundable in cash and is deducted first.

Adding money for someone else

You can add money for a person you support. When you do, that money is theirs to spend on Kite’s calls and messages. It is not held for you, you cannot set it aside for calls or for messages specifically, and you cannot take it back once they have spent it.

More than one person may be adding money for the same person. We do not tell you who they are, how much they have added, or whether anybody else is contributing at all — and we do not tell them about you. You see what you added and what is left of it. They see their whole balance, because it is theirs and they are the one deciding whether they can afford to call.

You can ask for a refund of whatever is left of your own contributions at any time, on the same terms as above. Money is spent in the order it was added, and any promotional credit we added is spent first and is never refundable in cash. So if you added money before somebody else did, yours is used first — and a refund can come back as nothing even though that person still has a balance. We will always tell you the figure before you decide.

If you reverse a payment through your bank, the amount is removed from that person’s balance, which can stop their line working. They may already have spent it. We would much rather sort it out with you directly, so please write to us first.

When something went wrong

If you were charged for a call or message that failed — a call that never connected, a message the facility rejected, a duplicate charge — tell us and we will credit it back. You do not need to argue the point; if the record shows it did not work, we refund it.

We cannot refund what the facility’s own phone or messaging provider charged you. That is a separate bill from a separate company, and it is not ours to return.

If you disagree with a charge

Please contact us before disputing a charge with your bank. We can almost always fix it faster than a chargeback, and a chargeback automatically suspends the account while the bank investigates — which cuts off the person relying on it. If we cannot resolve it, you keep every right you have to dispute the charge with your card issuer or bank.

7. Free credit

When you have saved a card and confirmed your email address, the first person you add who has not already had free credit gets $2.00 of free credit, or $5.00 if you entered a friend’s referral code before adding $10.00. No money is taken when you save the card. The free credit belongs to that person. Until you have added $10.00 in total, it pays only for calls to our demo line and for their messages; after that, whatever is left is ordinary credit for that person and can also pay for calls to their own number.

It is given once per card, once per account and once per person: a card that has earned free credit on any Kite account does not earn it again, each account gets it at most once, and a person who has had free credit through any family does not get it again. Accounts that received our earlier free trial keep it and do not also get this credit. Free credit is used before anything you have paid for, has no cash value and is never refunded. When it runs out, the demo line stops and messages wait until money is added — we do not charge your card automatically.

8. Your phone number

A dedicated number requires a small first top-up. The number is yours while the account is active. If it goes unused for an extended period we may release it, after warning you by email first, because we pay a monthly rental on every number whether or not anyone calls it.

If a facility or carrier blocks the number, we will try to issue you a replacement. We cannot promise one will be available, and a replacement has to go through the approval process in section 3 again.

9. What you may not use Kite for

You, and anyone using your account, must not use Kite to:

• Contact anyone who has a protective order against the person calling, or whom the person calling is prohibited from contacting
• Relay, forward or three-way a call or message to another person — Kite is an assistant, not a way to reach someone the facility has not approved
• Break a facility rule, a court order, or a condition of release
• Plan, commit or conceal a crime, or harass or threaten anyone
• Share a passphrase with anyone other than the person it belongs to
• Resell Kite, or open accounts on behalf of people you do not know
• Attack, reverse engineer, or attempt to gain unauthorized access to the service

We may suspend or close an account for any of these without notice, and we will refund any unused balance when we do, unless we are legally prevented from doing so.

10. The assistant is not a lawyer, a doctor, or an emergency service

It does not give legal advice.

The assistant can explain legal words, procedures and deadlines in plain language. It is not a lawyer and nothing it says is legal advice. It will not give you case citations, because AI systems are known to invent cases that do not exist, and a fabricated citation in a real filing can cost somebody their appeal. Check anything that matters against the prison law library or a licensed attorney before relying on it.

It does not give medical or mental health advice.

Nothing the assistant says is a diagnosis or treatment.

It cannot be used to get help in an emergency.

Kite cannot call 911 or any emergency service, and cannot alert facility staff. If someone is in danger, they must use the facility’s own emergency procedures. Do not rely on Kite for anything urgent.

The assistant can be wrong. It is a machine that produces plausible text, and it will sometimes state something false with complete confidence. Treat what it says as a starting point, not an answer.

11. What we cannot promise

We do not control the phone system your call arrives on, and we cannot guarantee the service will be available. A facility can block our number, change its rules, restrict phone hours, or go into lockdown, and any of those will stop the service working with no warning to us. The prison system’s messaging provider can reject a message for its own reasons, and does not refund the postage when it does.

Calls placed from a correctional facility are monitored and recorded by that facility and its phone provider, under their rules. Using Kite does not make a call private from them, and nothing we do can change that. What Kite itself keeps is set out in our Privacy Policy.

The service is provided as is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

12. Limits on our liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim relating to Kite is limited to the amount you paid us in the three months before the claim arose. We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses.

Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits. Where that is so, they do not apply to you, and nothing here limits liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

13. Suspension, closure and changes

You may close your account at any time and request your unused balance back. We may suspend or close an account that breaches section 9, that we are required to close by law, or where we reasonably suspect fraud. Except where the law prevents it, we return unused balance when we close an account.

We may change these terms. If a change materially affects you we will email you before it takes effect, and continuing to use Kite after that date means you accept the change. If you do not, close your account and ask for your balance back.

14. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington, United States, without regard to its conflict of law rules. Nothing here removes any right you have under the consumer protection law of the place you live.

15. Resolving a dispute

Talk to us first

If something goes wrong, email [email protected] and describe the problem and what you want done about it. Most things are fixed this way. Neither of us may start arbitration until 60 days after that email, so there is a real chance to sort it out first.

Individual arbitration

If we cannot resolve it, you and Kite agree that a dispute between us will be settled by binding individual arbitration rather than in court, under the Consumer Arbitration Rules of the American Arbitration Association. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section.

You do not have to travel to arbitrate. The arbitration will be held by telephone or video, on documents alone, or in the county where you live — your choice. Except for the consumer filing fee, Kite pays the arbitration fees for any claim under $10,000. An arbitrator can award you anything a court could, including your costs where the law provides for them.

You keep the right to bring a class action

There is no class action waiver in these terms, and that is deliberate. Claims brought on a class, collective or representative basis are excluded from arbitration entirely and may be brought in court. Nothing here stops you from joining or starting one, or from participating in a class action somebody else brings.

Small claims court is also always available to either of us, for any claim that qualifies. You can complain to a government agency — a state attorney general, the FCC, the FTC — at any time, and nothing in these terms limits that.

How to opt out

You can refuse arbitration and keep your right to go to court. Email [email protected] with the subject line “Arbitration opt-out” and the email address on your account, within 30 days of creating it. That is the whole process. Opting out costs you nothing, changes nothing else about your account, and we will not treat you differently for it.

If any part of this section is found unenforceable, the rest of it still applies. If the exclusion of class claims from arbitration is found unenforceable, this entire arbitration section does not apply and disputes go to court.

16. How to reach us

Support: [email protected]. We answer billing and refund requests within two business days.

For privacy questions, see our Privacy Policy. Payments are processed by Stripe, whose privacy policy covers what they do with your card details.