These terms are the agreement between Monochrome, based in Lebanon ("we", "us"), and the business that installs the Inner Circle app on its Shopify store ("you", "the merchant").
Installing Inner Circle means you accept these terms. If you are accepting on behalf of a company, you confirm you are authorised to do so.
1. What Inner Circle does
Inner Circle gates purchasing on your Shopify store. Visitors can still browse, search and be tempted, but buying is held back behind either an access code or an access request you approve. It can hide or replace prices, gate the buy button, collect interest lists, issue access codes, and turn requests into Shopify draft orders.
2. What you need to do for it to work
- Enable the app embed in your theme. Nothing is gated until you do. Online Store → Themes → Customize → App embeds → Inner Circle → Save.
- Test your own storefront after installing, after changing your theme, and after changing your Inner Circle settings. Theme layouts vary enormously and yours is the only one that matters.
- Keep your form lawful. You decide what the access request form asks. You are responsible for having a lawful reason to collect it, for telling your visitors what you will do with it, and for getting consent where consent is required.
- Do not collect sensitive data through the app. Health, ethnicity, religion, political views, sexual orientation, biometric or genetic data, criminal records, government identifiers, and payment card numbers are all out of bounds.
- Do not use the app to discriminate unlawfully. Gating by tag, email or campaign must comply with the consumer protection and equality law that applies to you.
3. What you allow the app to do in your store
By installing, you authorise Inner Circle to:
- Read your products and collections, so it knows what to gate
- Read your customer records, so it can recognise who is signed in and check tags
- Write tags onto your customer records, which is how access follows a signed-in customer between devices
- Create draft orders, when you convert an access request into one
- Emit events into Shopify Flow, if you build flows on them
You can withdraw all of this at any time by uninstalling.
4. Plans and payment
Pricing is handled by Shopify Managed Pricing. You choose and pay for your plan inside Shopify, and Shopify handles trials, changes mid-cycle and currency. Charges appear on your Shopify invoice.
- Shopify's billing terms govern payment, cancellation and refunds. We do not process your payments and cannot issue refunds directly. Ask Shopify.
- Development stores get every feature free, permanently.
- We may change our prices. Existing merchants get at least 30 days' notice by email, and the change applies from your next billing cycle. Uninstalling before it takes effect avoids it.
- If your plan lapses or payment fails, features above the free tier stop working, and the app falls back to the free tier rather than the top one. Your data is kept while the app remains installed.
What a downgrade does and does not take away
Because this app controls who can buy from you, a downgrade that quietly changed access would be worse than one that charged you. So:
- Configuration you have already created keeps working. Access tiers, scheduled locks and auto-approve rules that exist go on doing what they do. Only creating and editing them requires the plan that includes them. We do not revoke tiers on a downgrade, because doing so would silently reopen products you had locked.
- Releasing people from the waitlist is never gated, on any plan. If you downgrade with people queued, you can still let every one of them in. The plan is enforced where the queue fills, not where it empties.
- Above the free plan's limits, creation stops rather than existing things breaking. Locks and codes you already have past those limits keep working; new ones wait until you move back up.
- Your data stays for as long as the app is installed, whatever plan you are on. Uninstalling is what deletes it. See the Privacy Policy.
5. What the app does not promise, and please read this one
Inner Circle is a merchandising control, not a security system. This matters enough that we would rather say it plainly than bury it.
- The gate fails open. If our servers cannot be reached within the reveal timeout, the page shows itself unlocked. This is deliberate: an outage on our side must not blank out your storefront. The consequence is that during an outage, network problem or timeout, prices and buy buttons you intended to hide may be visible.
- Hiding is visual on the page itself. Purchases are genuinely blocked on our servers, and editing the page in a browser will not get an order through. But a determined visitor may be able to read a price out of the page source, a cached copy, a search engine result, a feed or a third-party app. If a price must never be seen by the wrong person, do not publish it on a public storefront.
- Theme compatibility is best-effort. We ship selectors covering the common themes, and a settings field for adding your own. We cannot guarantee correct behaviour on a customised or unusual theme, and you must verify yours.
- Other apps can interfere. Anything else that rewrites your product pages may conflict with gating.
You accept these limits as part of using the app.
6. Email
Shopify provides no general way for apps to send email to a customer. Flow's email actions can only reach a fixed address, and draft-order invoices are tied to an order, so neither can carry an access code to the person who asked for one. The app therefore sends customer-facing email itself, through our own email provider, listed in Sub-processors.
Three things follow from that, and you should know all three:
- It is sent under your name. The sender name is your shop and replies go to your address. Only the technical sending address behind the name is ours, which means your customers deal with you and not with us.
- You can take it over. Configure your own SMTP server or Resend account in Settings and the same messages send through it. Delivery then becomes your responsibility and your provider's.
- Nothing is dropped silently. Anything that cannot be delivered is shown to you in the admin with its subject and body, to send by hand. We still emit a Shopify Flow trigger for every event, which is how you pipe these into your own tooling. But a trigger being accepted is not delivery, and we do not count it as such for anything sent to a customer.
We do not guarantee that any message is delivered, and you should not rely on the app for anything time-critical.
7. Availability and support
We aim to keep the app running and available, but we do not offer a guaranteed uptime level. Maintenance, Shopify platform changes and provider outages can all interrupt service.
Support is by email at hello@monochrome.digital. We aim to respond within two business days.
8. Things you must not do
- Resell, sublicense or rebrand the app without our written agreement
- Reverse engineer or copy it, except where the law says you may
- Attack, overload, probe or attempt to circumvent it
- Use it for anything unlawful, or in breach of Shopify's own terms
We may suspend or terminate access for a serious or repeated breach. Where practical we will warn you first.
9. Who owns what
We own the app: its code, design, name and documentation. Nothing here transfers any of that to you. You get a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use it while your account is active.
You own your data: your settings, locks, codes, access requests and the information your shoppers give you. We hold it on your behalf and use it only to run the service for you. We may use anonymous, aggregated statistics that cannot identify you or any shopper to improve the app.
10. The app is provided as-is
To the fullest extent the law allows, the app is provided as-is and as-available, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that it will gate every element on every theme.
11. Limit of our liability
To the fullest extent the law allows:
- We are not liable for lost profits, lost sales, lost or exposed pricing, loss of goodwill, loss of data, or any indirect or consequential loss, even if we were told it was possible.
- Our total liability to you, for everything combined, is capped at the total fees you actually paid for Inner Circle in the 12 months before the claim arose. Where you paid nothing, our liability is capped at US$100.
Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.
12. You cover claims arising from your use
You will defend and indemnify us against claims, damages and reasonable costs arising from your use of the app, the content of your access request form, your handling of the information your shoppers give you, or your breach of these terms.
13. Data protection
Where we handle personal data on your behalf, the Data Processing Addendum applies and forms part of these terms. Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and why.
You are the controller of your shoppers' information. We are your processor. You are responsible for the lawfulness of what you collect and for answering your shoppers' requests about it.
14. Ending the agreement
- You can end it at any time by uninstalling the app.
- We can end it on 30 days' notice, or immediately for a serious breach.
- On uninstall, everything belonging to your store is permanently deleted 48 hours later, when Shopify instructs us to erase it. Export anything you want to keep before you uninstall.
- Sections 9 to 12 survive termination.
15. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. Material changes come with at least 30 days' notice by email, and continuing to use the app after that means you accept them. If you do not, uninstall.
16. Law and disputes
These terms are governed by the laws of Lebanon, and the courts of Beirut, Lebanon have exclusive jurisdiction.
This choice does not affect your own obligations under the data protection law that applies to you, and it does not limit any mandatory rights you have under the law of your own country.
17. General
- Assignment. You may not transfer this agreement without our consent. We may transfer it as part of a sale or reorganisation of the business.
- Severability. If a clause is unenforceable, the rest stands.
- No waiver. Not enforcing something once does not give it up.
- Entire agreement. These terms, the Privacy Policy and the Data Processing Addendum are the whole agreement between us on this subject.
- Notices. We contact you at the email address on your Shopify account. You contact us at hello@monochrome.digital.
18. Contact
Monochrome, Lebanon