Terms of Service

BingoBuddy is a dabbing assistant. It reads photos of paper bingo cards you bought elsewhere and marks them on your screen as numbers are called. It is a convenience tool for games run by other organizations.

You must be 18 or older to use BingoBuddy. This is an adults-only service and we do not knowingly provide it to anyone under 18. You confirm your age when you make an account. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18 we will close it and delete what we hold about them; if you believe a child has made an account, email general@pi-atawi.com and we will deal with it.

The reason is the shared games: BingoBuddy lets people play in the same room and talk to each other in a live chat. That is not somewhere we are willing to put children.

BingoBuddy is not a gambling service. We sell no bingo cards, run no games of chance, award no prizes, and never pay money or anything of value to users. Fees buy access to software only.

BingoBuddy is independent. We are not connected to, endorsed by, sponsored by or partnered with any bingo operator, radio station, charity or other organization whose games you play.

This is the most important thing in these terms. BingoBuddy can misread a number, mishear a call, or miss one entirely. Photos can be blurry, microphones mishear, and phones lose connection.

Always check your own paper cards before claiming a win, and follow your bingo's rules for verification. Your paper cards, and your bingo operator's records, are the official record of any game — not this app.

You use BingoBuddy at your own risk. We are not liable for missed wins, misread cards, missed calls, rejected claims, or any loss of a prize.

You sign in with your email address and a one-time code. Keep access to that mailbox secure — anyone who can read your email can sign in as you. One account is for one person; don't share it.

You must be old enough to enter into a contract where you live, and old enough to take part in the bingo games you play.

BingoBuddy is sold as scan packs. You buy a number of photo scans outright. There are no subscriptions and nothing renews — you are never charged again unless you choose to buy another pack.

• 15 scans — $3.99 CAD.
• 40 scans — $6.99 CAD.
• 60 scans — $9.99 CAD.
• 120 scans — $19.99 CAD.

Every pack includes a year of membership. Buying any pack unlocks the members-only features — listening to the caller, the bingo yell, the large flashboard, the full pattern library and the full dabber palette — for 365 days from the date of purchase, on top of the scans themselves. Buying another pack at any time starts a fresh 365 days from that date. Membership does not depend on having scans left: if you spend every scan, you keep the members-only features for the rest of your year.

Scans you buy do not expire. There is no date to use them by. Buy a pack tonight, play again next winter, and the scans you did not use are still there. Packs add together: scans you buy stack on any you already hold. Your account page shows how many scans you have.

Free scans do run out. Scans we give you rather than sell you — referral rewards and any promotional scans — last 90 days from the day you claim them, and only a limited number of them may be used each day (see §9). When you take a photo, a free scan is always used before a scan you paid for, so a free scan is never left to run out while a bought one is spent in its place.

How much scanning is available. Scanning is a shared service. If usage across all accounts spikes far beyond normal, scanning pauses for everyone until the following day, and there is also a daily limit on how many photos one account may scan. Your scans are never lost when either happens — they stay on your account and are there when scanning resumes.

If a payment is reversed. If a pack is refunded, or the payment for it is charged back through your card company, the unused scans from that pack come off the account and the membership year is worked out again from the packs still standing. Scans from that pack that were already used cannot be taken back and we do not ask for them. Scans from any other pack are not touched.

You can give bought scans to a friend. From your account page, scans you paid for can be given to a friend on your friends list — 1 to 25 at a time, up to 25 a day, once the pack is at least 7 days old. Given scans keep their no-expiry, may be used at the same daily rate as other free scans, and cannot be given onward. You have 60 seconds to undo a gift, as long as your friend hasn't started using it. If the payment behind given scans is later reversed, the unused ones are withdrawn from wherever they sit.

Scans have no cash value. They pay for reading your photos and nothing else. Scans cannot be sold, traded outside the app, or turned back into money, and giving scans in exchange for money or anything else of value is grounds for closing both accounts.

All prices are in Canadian dollars and may change; a change never affects scans you have already bought. Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card number.

One photo is one scan. A photo may contain up to 8 strips of cards, laid out as two rows of four with the phone held upright. There is no limit on how many photos you take. A photo counts whether or not cards are found in it, because the cost of reading it is incurred either way.

Photos with more than 8 strips. Beyond eight strips the printed numbers are too small in the photograph to read reliably, so the photo is rejected and you are asked to retake it with fewer strips. The first three rejected photos each day cost you nothing. After that a rejected photo does use a scan, because reading far enough to count the strips still costs us. An account that has never bought a pack gets one free rejected photo in total rather than three a day.

Free scans — referral rewards, promotional grants and gifts — stay with the account that got them. Bought scans may be given to a friend under §5, and nothing may ever be sold or exchanged for money. Playing, dabbing, typing cards in by hand, game setup and the demo are free and unlimited. Only reading cards from photographs uses a scan.

Your first scan is free. Every new account gets one free scan so you can see the app read your own cards before you spend anything. It is a full scan — up to 8 strips, exactly like a bought one. If it fails for a reason at our end, you get it back.

Photos without bingo cards. A photo containing no bingo cards still uses a scan, and you are warned each time it happens. More than three such photos in a row automatically suspends scanning on the account pending review; reviews take 1–5 business days. Deliberate or repeated misuse of the scanner is grounds for suspension or permanent closure of the account under §10.

BingoBuddy lets you host a game, join someone else's, and talk to the room in a live chat. Everyone in a room can see the other players' names, their picture if they have one showing, and the numbers they are holding.

How to behave. No harassment, threats, hate, sexual content, or content involving children. No spam, scams or advertising. Your picture must be of you, and never of a child. Don't share anyone else's personal information, and don't pretend to be someone else.

What you can do about someone. You can block any player at any time — they disappear from your chat, you disappear from theirs, and they are not told. You can report a message or a player, and reports about sexual content, threats, or anything involving a child hide the message straight away and reach us immediately. The host of a room can remove anyone from it and hide anything said in it.

What we do about it. We may hide a message, remove a player from a game, suspend an account, or close it permanently. A closed account is signed out everywhere at once. Reported content is kept rather than deleted, because we may be required to preserve it and hand it to police. Serious matters are reported to the authorities.

You can refund a pack yourself, in the app. Open your account page and press Refund this pack. You do not have to ask anyone, give a reason, or wait for us to reply.

• Within 35 days of buying the pack.
• If you have used 8 scans or fewer from it.
• Once per account. After that, email general@pi-atawi.com and a person will deal with it.

If BingoBuddy never read a single card from a pack, you get all your money back — every time, with no limit and no time bar. If it did not work for you, you did not get what you paid for, and that is the end of it.

Where you have used some scans, we refund the ones you have not used, in proportion to what you paid. A 60-scan pack bought for $9.99 with 10 scans used refunds $8.33. The scans you used stay used and you are not charged for them twice. Unused scans come off the account when the refund is issued.

Refunds go back to the card you paid with — we cannot send them anywhere else — and usually take 5 to 10 days to appear, depending on your bank. A refund also ends the membership year that came with that pack, unless another pack is still standing. Your scanned cards, your game setup and everything else on your account are untouched.

Nothing here limits your legal rights. This section is what we offer on top of them, not instead of them. You keep every right you have under Alberta's Consumer Protection Act and other Canadian consumer law, including the right to take a payment up with your own bank or card company. Nothing in these Terms asks you to give that up, and we would not ask you to.

A free access code is a gift, not a purchase. Each code locks permanently to the first account that redeems it and cannot be used by anyone else, transferred or exchanged for money. We may withdraw a code that hasn't been redeemed, or one obtained by deception.

Every account has a referral link. When someone who signed up through your link buys a scan pack for the first time, you earn one referral credit. Reaching a milestone makes a reward available; it is never granted automatically. When you choose to claim it, every credit on your counter is used up and your count returns to zero — including any credits above the milestone you claimed. You may instead keep going toward a higher milestone. The ladder can be climbed again as many times as you like.

Milestones pay free scans, on the same ladder for every account, whether or not you have ever bought a pack. Earned scans differ from bought scans in two ways: they may only be used at a limited daily rate, and they expire sooner. The current milestones, daily rate and expiry period are shown on your account page and may change at any time.

A referral credit counts only after the payment behind it has settled for a short holding period. If that payment is later refunded or charged back, the credit is withdrawn. Rewards have no cash value, are not transferable, and cannot be exchanged for money. Referring yourself, creating accounts to refer, or using disposable addresses to generate credits voids the credits and any rewards obtained from them, and is grounds for closure of the account under §10. We may change or end the referral programme at any time; rewards already claimed are not withdrawn.

Please don't:

• create accounts in bulk, or use disposable addresses to dodge limits
• upload photos that aren't bingo cards, or anything unlawful
• resell, sublicense or share your access
• copy, scrape or reverse-engineer the app, or attack the service

We may suspend or close an account for any of these, and we may pause scanning service-wide if usage looks abnormal. If we close a paid account without cause, we refund the unused part.

We do our best to keep BingoBuddy running, especially on game nights, but we don't promise it will always be available or error-free. It depends on things outside our control — your phone, your connection, your browser, and services we rely on. Plan for the possibility that it is unavailable, and keep dabbing your paper cards if it matters.

If we ever stop running BingoBuddy. We may decide to close the service. If we do, we will give you at least 90 days' notice in the app and by email to the address on your account, we will stop selling packs straight away, and scanning will keep working for the whole of that notice so you can use the scans you already hold. If you still hold unused scans that you paid for when the service closes, email general@pi-atawi.com and we will refund them at the price you paid.

The photos you upload stay yours. You give us permission to process them for the sole purpose of reading the numbers and returning them to you. Full photos are not kept after processing; your scanned cards, called numbers and small photo thumbnails are stored with your account so your cards follow you between devices, and clearing your cards deletes them — see the Privacy Policy.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim connected with BingoBuddy is limited to what you paid us in the previous 12 months. We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, including lost prizes or winnings.

Some jurisdictions don't allow certain limits; where that is the case, these limits apply only as far as the law permits.

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects you we'll say so in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use BingoBuddy after that means you accept the updated terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Alberta and the federal laws of Canada that apply there. Disputes go to the courts of Alberta.

general@pi-atawi.com — BingoBuddy is a product of PI-ATAWI Investment Enterprise, an Indigenous-owned company based in Alberta, Canada.