Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") form the contract between you and Groupe Echo Inc., a corporation incorporated in Quebec, NEQ 1182473588, whose registered office is at 2390, rue du Cardinal, Terrebonne (Quebec) J7M 0B6 ("Groupe Echo", "we", "us").

"Echo" and "Echo Support" are product names: Groupe Echo Inc. is the only company you contract with. To reach us: contact@echo-group.ca, or by mail at the registered office.

• Service: Echo Support, online customer support software. It includes a chat widget to install on your website, an assistant that answers using artificial intelligence (AI), a knowledge base, conversation and contact management, and a dashboard.
• Customer: the person or company that creates an account and accepts these Terms.
• Organization: the workspace the Customer creates in the Service for its company or team.
• User: any person the Customer authorizes to access its Organization.
• Visitor: any person who writes to the Customer through the widget installed on the Customer's website.
• Customer Content: the documents, conversations, contacts and other data that the Customer, its Users or its Visitors add to the Service.
• AI-handled conversation: a conversation in which the AI assistant produced at least one answer. It is counted only once, in the month of its first answer, even if it goes on or is reopened.
• Reopening: a resolved conversation that the Visitor resumes within 24 hours of its resolution, from the same browser, is reopened. It is not counted again, either as a conversation or as an AI-handled conversation.

To use the Service, you create an account by providing accurate and up-to-date information. You are responsible for the confidentiality of your credentials and for all activity under your account, including by the Users you invite. If you accept these Terms on behalf of a company, you represent that you are authorized to bind it.

Actions taken by the Echo support team in your organization are not attributed to you: they are recorded under its name (section 11).

You agree to:

• Use the Service in accordance with its intended purpose and applicable laws
• Not attempt to circumvent security measures or the limits of your plan
• Not use the Service for illegal or abusive purposes
• Not import unlawful or defamatory content, or content that infringes third-party rights
• Respect the intellectual property rights of Groupe Echo and third parties
• Not use public endpoints (widget, API) for spam or attacks

The Service is offered as a free plan and several paid plans. The price and volumes of each plan (conversations per month on the free plan, AI-handled conversations per month on paid plans, users, knowledge base documents, history length, type of support) are those shown on our Pricing page when you subscribe. Counters reset on the first day of each month, at midnight, Montreal time.

• The free plan does not include the AI assistant. Once the number of conversations it includes for the month is reached, the widget opens no new conversation, and then asks the Visitor for nothing, until the first day of the following month.
• Paid plans have no monthly cap on conversations. Once the number of AI-handled conversations included in your plan for the month is reached, the assistant hands each new conversation over to your Users, and tells the Visitor so, until the first day of the following month. The conversations it was already handling go on with it, within the limits that follow.
• Within a single conversation, the assistant handles at most 15 Visitor messages; beyond that, it hands over to your Users. Messages handled by the assistant are also capped each month, at 15 times the number of AI-handled conversations in your plan; at that cap, it hands over in the same way.
• These volumes are hard caps: no overage is ever billed.
• Rate limits protect the Service against abuse, for example a bot opening conversations in a row. They are not aimed at normal use.
• Paid plans include the same features, except automation (routing, response times, macros and teams), which is reserved for the Business plan; they also differ in their volumes and support.
• The "Powered by Echo" mention appears in the widget on the Free and Essential plans. On the Pro and Business plans, you can remove it.

Paid plans are billed monthly, in advance, in Canadian dollars (CAD). Displayed prices exclude taxes: applicable taxes, namely GST and QST for a customer in Quebec, are added to the price. There is no annual subscription.

• No commitment: no minimum term.
• Automatic renewal: your subscription renews every month, and the saved payment method is charged at the start of each period, until you cancel.
• Payment: payments are processed by Stripe; your card numbers never pass through our servers.
• Price changes: we notify you by email at least 30 days before any price increase. You may cancel at no cost before it takes effect.

You may change paid plans from the Billing page of your dashboard, with the "Switch to this plan" button on the card of the plan you want: between the Essential, Pro and Business plans, monthly.

This button is available to the owner and the administrators, for a subscription taken out online, charged to a card and up to date with its payments. A plan that was not subscribed to online, or that is paid by invoice, is changed by writing to us. During a suspension of your access, the plan cannot be upgraded.

Before you confirm, the window shows the amount or the date of the change. When upgrading, the price difference for the rest of the current period, prorated, plus applicable taxes, is invoiced and charged immediately; the new plan applies as soon as the payment is confirmed, and if the payment fails, nothing changes.

When downgrading, the change takes effect at the end of the monthly period already paid: you keep your current plan, with its volume, history period and features, until the renewal, then the new plan applies, at its price. No credit or proration is granted for the current period (section 8). Until then, the "Cancel this change" button removes the planned downgrade.

The new plan applies to the current month as soon as it takes effect: after a downgrade, if the conversations handled by the AI that month already reach its volume, the assistant hands over to your Users until the first day of the following month. The history period of a plan kept for at least 30 days still applies for 30 days after leaving it (section 11).

The renewal date does not change. Moving to the free plan means cancelling, as set out in the rest of this section; cancelling, or moving to a higher plan, cancels a planned downgrade. If a cancellation is scheduled, first click "Resume". We confirm each plan change by email.

You may cancel your subscription at any time from the Billing page of your dashboard, with the "Cancel subscription" button on the "Current plan" card, available to the owner and the administrators of the organization, or by writing to contact@echo-group.ca. A plan that was not subscribed to online is cancelled by writing to us. We confirm the cancellation by email.

Cancellation takes effect at the end of the monthly period already paid: you keep access to your plan until that date, and no further payment is charged. Until then, the "Resume" button undoes the cancellation; we confirm that by email too.

If your last payment failed, the current period is not paid: cancellation takes effect immediately, and no further payment is attempted. A renewal nevertheless charged after your cancellation is a billing error on our part, which we correct (section 8).

An organization whose subscription was taken out online cannot be deleted from the dashboard while that subscription is not cancelled: cancel first. Cancelling does not delete your data; to have it destroyed, see section 11.

We may suspend or terminate your access in the event of a serious breach of these Terms (for example illegal use, an attack or spam), notifying you when circumstances allow.

No refunds: amounts paid are not refunded, including on cancellation, plan downgrade or non-use, except for a billing error on our part (for example a double charge), which we correct, and subject to the rights the law grants you.

A renewal charged after your cancellation is such an error. To report a billing error, write to contact@echo-group.ca; the correction is paid to the payment method used.

On paid plans, the assistant's answers are generated by a third-party language model (currently DeepSeek V4 Flash), which we access through OpenRouter; Cohere computes the knowledge base search vectors ("embeddings"). Part of this processing takes place outside Canada, as explained in our Privacy Policy.

An AI-generated answer may be inaccurate or incomplete. These answers are provided for information only, and Groupe Echo does not guarantee their accuracy. It is up to you to keep your knowledge base up to date and to check the answers given to your Visitors.

The Service, its source code, interfaces and documentation belong to Groupe Echo Inc. You retain full ownership of Customer Content. You grant us only the right to host it, process it and transmit it to our subprocessors to the extent needed to provide the Service to you.

By using the Service, you entrust us with personal information about your own customers: your Visitors' conversations, the contacts you import, the documents in your knowledge base. For this information, you remain the person responsible under Quebec's Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector, and Groupe Echo Inc. acts as your mandatary. This section sets out our commitments in that role (section 18.3 of that Act). For a Shopify store connected to the Service, the Shopify data processing agreement, accepted when the store is connected, sets out these commitments for the information that comes from the store.

Our commitments

• Limited use: we use this information only to provide the Service to you, keep it secure and answer your support requests. We do not sell it and use it for no other purpose.
• Confidentiality: only the people at Groupe Echo Inc. who need it to operate the Service have access to it, and they are bound by confidentiality. The security measures in place are described in our Privacy Policy. The conditions under which the Echo support team accesses your account are set out below.
• Subprocessors: OVH Hosting Inc. hosts the application and database in Beauharnois (Quebec). OpenRouter, Inc. (United States) receives every message handled by the AI and routes it to the provider that runs the language model. Cohere Inc. computes the knowledge base embeddings. Messages handled by the AI therefore leave Canada. The Privacy Policy keeps the full list up to date.
• Breaches and incidents: we notify the person in charge of the protection of personal information of your business without delay of any breach or attempted breach, by any person, of the obligations relating to the confidentiality of this information, and of any confidentiality incident affecting it, as soon as it comes to our attention. The notice goes to the owner of your organization, or to the address you designate for that person at vie-privee@echo-group.ca. We cooperate with the measures and reports the law requires of you.
• Verification: the person in charge of the protection of personal information of your business may carry out any verification relating to the confidentiality of this information. Upon request to vie-privee@echo-group.ca, we answer their questions and questionnaires, provide the description of our security measures and agree with them on any other verification they require.
• End of contract: when your subscription ends, or at any time, you may ask in writing at vie-privee@echo-group.ca that this information be destroyed. We confirm the destruction in writing once it is done. One automatic deletion takes place: files attached to a conversation are deleted as soon as it is marked resolved. Automatic deletion of conversations has been enabled since September 28, 2026: every night, it deletes each conversation, with its messages and attachments, whose last message is older than your plan's history period (7 days, 1 month, 3 months or 1 year, as shown on the Pricing page); after moving to a smaller plan, the period of a plan kept for at least 30 days still applies for 30 days after leaving it. Contacts, settings and the knowledge base are kept as long as the account exists. Backups are overwritten on their normal cycle.

Echo support team access to your account

This subsection applies from October 10, 2026. For organizations created before that date, access with changes made without your request applies from November 9, 2026 (section 14).

• Who: only the people at Groupe Echo Inc. designated for support, currently its president, from a restricted administration tool, with a personal account protected by mandatory two-factor authentication and reachable only from authorized addresses.
• When: at any time, without a request from you, to provide the Service and help you (check that it works properly, fix an error, configure or troubleshoot), to answer a support request, to keep the Service secure or to meet a legal obligation. An access lasts at most one hour.
• What support sees: your dashboard as you see it, including conversations and contacts. It does not see your API keys, your webhooks and their logs, your single sign-on (SSO) and external logging (SIEM) settings, your Shopify store settings, or your exports.
• What support changes: during an access with changes, of 15 renewable minutes, it can do what you can do in your dashboard, including replying to your Visitors on behalf of your team (the reply carries the first name of the Echo person), except: the items listed above; adding, suspending or reactivating a member, changing a member's role or removing a member; your members' personal settings and the statements only you can make, such as your store platform; using the AI features billed to your plan; subscribing to, changing or paying for a plan; accepting an agreement; deleting all your conversations at once, merging all your duplicate contacts at once, or activating a campaign.
• Members: at the owner's written request, we can prepare an ownership transfer, a role change or the removal of a member. Nothing changes until the owner confirms it themselves, signed in to their dashboard; an ownership transfer only takes effect 48 hours after it is confirmed, and any owner can cancel it until then. The owner is notified by email.
• Live transparency: during an access, the dashboard of every signed-in member of your organization is framed in red and shows that an Echo team agent is present; a button shows, live, the pages they open (their address, never their content) and the changes they make. The owner and admins can end the access in one click. The owner receives an email as soon as a change is made.
• Log: every access is recorded: who, when, for what reason, the pages opened and, for each change, what changed. The log does not copy the content of conversations. It is kept for 24 months, and your dashboard shows the accesses of that period.
• No cross-customer matching: we never match your organization's information with another's. No search, list or profile of Visitors is made across organizations.

Deleting an organization: 30-day trash

• When: we delete an organization at the written request of its owner, or in the cases of serious breach set out in section 7.
• Trash: the organization is first placed in a trash for 30 days. It is closed immediately: dashboard, widget, assistant, outgoing emails and API. Its subscription is cancelled, and no further payment is charged. Emails received at its support address during those 30 days are not kept. The owner is notified by email.
• Restoring: during those 30 days, on request to contact@echo-group.ca, we restore the organization as it was, without those emails, on the free plan; a paid plan must be subscribed to again.
• Permanent deletion: after 30 days, all of the organization's data is destroyed, with no way back: conversations and messages, contacts, notes, documents and files, knowledge base, settings, members and invitations. Only the billing information required by tax law and the log of support accesses remain, without the content of conversations, for their retention period. Backup copies are replaced on their normal cycle. The owner then receives written confirmation of the destruction.

Your responsibilities

• Inform your Visitors and contacts, and obtain the required consents, in particular about the use of an AI assistant and about their messages being communicated outside Quebec.
• Add to the Service only the information useful for your customer support, and avoid adding sensitive information (health, social insurance numbers, banking details): it is not masked before being sent to the language model.
• Forward to us your customers' requests (access, correction, deletion) that require our involvement.

We strive to keep the Service available, without guaranteeing that it will be free of interruptions. Interruptions may occur for maintenance, for updates or because of an outage at a provider.

Without prejudice to the rights the law grants consumers, and except in the case of intentional or gross fault on our part:

• Groupe Echo Inc. is not liable for indirect damages, such as loss of profits, customers or data, resulting from the use of the Service or the inability to use it;
• its total liability is limited to the amounts you paid it for the Service during the 12 months preceding the event giving rise to the claim.

We may change these Terms, for example to reflect a change in the Service or in the law. For any significant change, we notify you by email at least 30 days before it takes effect, showing you the new clause and its effective date. If you refuse the change, you may cancel at no cost before that date. Otherwise, continued use of the Service after that date constitutes acceptance. The date of the version in force appears at the top of this page.

This clause applies without prejudice to the rights the law grants consumers.

These Terms are governed by the laws of Quebec and the federal laws of Canada that apply there. They are written in French; this English version is provided for convenience, and the French version prevails in case of discrepancy.

In the event of a dispute, please write to us first at contact@echo-group.ca: we will seek an amicable solution. Failing that, the dispute falls under the competent courts of Quebec, without prejudice to the rights the law grants consumers.

Groupe Echo Inc.
2390, rue du Cardinal, Terrebonne (Quebec) J7M 0B6, Canada
Subscription, cancellation, billing and general questions: contact@echo-group.ca
Personal information: vie-privee@echo-group.ca