Terms of Service

Last updated 2 September 2026 · Version terms-2026-09

Portava is a trading name of MemberAssistant Ltd, a company registered in Northern Ireland (company number NI733574) with its registered office at 102 Northland Road, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, BT48 0AS. In these terms, “Portava”, “we” and “us” mean that company.

These terms are the agreement between us and the organisation that uses Portava. If you are signing up on behalf of an organisation, you are confirming that you are allowed to enter into this agreement for it, and “you” means that organisation.

What Portava provides

Portava is software that a membership organisation uses to run a member portal: a directory, events, news, a knowledge base, discussions, direct messages, membership billing, and an AI assistant that answers from that portal’s own content.

We provide the software and keep it running. You decide what goes in it. Your members, your content, your rules about who sees what, your decisions about the data you hold. We do not moderate your portal, curate your directory, or make decisions about your members.

Your account and your administrators

You are responsible for who you give administrator access to, and for what they do with it. Administrators can see and change member records, send email to your whole membership, and take payments. Give that access deliberately, and take it away promptly when someone leaves.

Keep sign-in credentials secure. Tell us straight away if you think an account has been compromised. We support two-factor authentication and single sign-on, and we recommend using them.

We may need to enter your portal to investigate a problem. That capability is restricted to our platform administrators, expires automatically after an hour, refuses administrative changes while in use, and is logged when it starts and ends. It does not currently require your prior approval — we would rather state that plainly than imply a control we have not built. Tell us if your organisation needs support access gated on its own authorisation.

Your data, and your members’ data

Your content and your members’ data remain yours. We claim no ownership of it. We hold it to provide the service, and for nothing else. We do not sell it, use it for advertising, use it to train AI models, or use one organisation’s data to benefit another.

For your members’ personal data you are the data controller and we are your processor, under UK GDPR. That relationship requires a written data processing agreement, and you already have one: our Data Processing Agreement at portava.ai/dpa forms part of these terms and applies from the moment you begin using Portava. You do not need to sign anything for it to be in force, though we will provide a signature copy if your procurement process requires one.

Our privacy policy explains what we hold, who else is involved in providing the service, and how members exercise their rights.

You are responsible for having a lawful basis to hold the member data you put into Portava, and for telling your members what you do with it. We are responsible for handling it only as you instruct.

What you may not do

Do not use Portava to break the law, to send unsolicited bulk email to people who have not agreed to hear from you, to harass anyone, to publish content you do not have the right to publish, or to attempt to reach another organisation’s portal or data.

Do not attempt to circumvent the platform’s security or access controls, resell access to organisations that are not yours, or use the service in a way that degrades it for others.

If content on your portal is unlawful, we may remove it. We will tell you when we do and why.

Fees and payments

Two different kinds of money move through Portava, and they work differently.

What you pay us — your subscription. This is billed in advance and continues until cancelled. Fees are quoted excluding VAT unless stated otherwise. If a payment fails we will tell you and give you a reasonable chance to fix it before restricting the service.

What your members pay you — membership fees, event tickets. These are taken through Stripe as direct charges on your own Stripe account. The money goes to you, not to us and then on to you. You will need a Stripe account, and Stripe’s own terms apply to it. Stripe’s processing fees are theirs and are deducted by them.

We take a platform commission on those member payments, at the rate set out in your order or agreed in writing with you. It is recorded against each payment so you can see it.

Refunds to members are yours to decide and yours to make. Where you refund a member payment, the commission on it is returned too.

Availability

We work to keep Portava available and will give notice of planned maintenance where we reasonably can. We do not currently offer a contractual uptime guarantee, and we would rather say so than publish a number we have not built the operations to keep. If that changes it will be written into an order, not implied here.

Things outside our reasonable control — a failure at a hosting provider, a payment provider outage, a network problem between you and us — are not a breach of this agreement, though we will tell you what is happening and what we are doing about it.

Ending the agreement

You may cancel at any time. Your service continues to the end of the period you have paid for. We do not refund the unused part of a period unless we have failed to deliver something we committed to.

We may suspend or end the service if you do not pay after we have asked, if you use Portava in a way these terms forbid, or if we are legally required to. Except where the law requires immediate action, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.

Whatever the reason it ends, you can take your data with you. For 30 days after the agreement ends, you keep the ability to export your data. After that we delete it, other than records we are legally required to keep. If you need longer, ask — we would rather agree a date than have you lose something.

We will not hold your data hostage over a dispute about fees.

Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited by law.

Subject to that, neither of us is liable to the other for loss of profit, loss of business, or indirect or consequential loss. Our total liability under this agreement in any twelve-month period is limited to the fees you paid us in that period.

We provide Portava with reasonable skill and care. Beyond what these terms say, and beyond what the law implies and does not allow us to exclude, we do not make other promises about the software.

Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose. We take backups and take them seriously, but a backup is our safety net, not a substitute for yours.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Every version carries a date and a version marker at the top, and we record which version was accepted rather than only that “the terms” were accepted. For changes that materially affect you we will give reasonable notice, and if you do not accept them you may cancel before they take effect.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of Northern Ireland, and the courts of Northern Ireland have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

Contact us

Write to , or to MemberAssistant Ltd, 102 Northland Road, Londonderry, Northern Ireland, BT48 0AS.