Terms and Conditions

These terms govern your use of Cairn, a federal capture platform for contractors and grant seekers. They cover what you may do with the product, what we commit to, how plans are billed, who is responsible for what you submit to the government, and how disputes are resolved. Please read them before you create an account. Our privacy statement explains separately how we handle information.

1. Who these terms are between

Cairn is provided by Kuhn Consulting LLC, a Colorado limited liability company doing business as Cairn (“Cairn”, “we”, “us”). These terms are an agreement between us and the organization for which you use the product (“you”, “your organization”). You accept them by creating an account, by accepting them in the product, or by using Cairn. If you are accepting on behalf of an organization, you represent that you are authorized to bind it, and “you” means that organization.

If your organization has signed a separate written agreement with us covering Cairn, that agreement governs to the extent it conflicts with these terms.

2. Accounts, users, and seats

Cairn is a business tool for adults acting for an organization. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly provide it to anyone under 18. An account belongs to your organization, not to the individual who created it; your administrators control who is invited, what role each person holds, and who is removed.

• Keep your credentials confidential, use a strong and unique password, and turn on two-factor authentication. You are responsible for activity under your account.
• Seats are licensed to named individuals. Do not share a login, and do not use one seat to give several people access.
• Remove teammates who no longer need access. Tell us promptly if you believe an account has been compromised.

3. Plans, features, and usage limits

Cairn is offered in plans — currently a free Starter plan, a paid Professional plan, and a quote-only Enterprise plan. Your plan determines which features you can use and sets usage limits, including the number of seats, the number of active pursuits, how many past-performance records you may store, and daily caps on searches, AI messages, and Recompete Radar scans. The plan names, features, limits, and prices in effect are those displayed in the product and at checkout.

Usage limits are enforced. When you reach one, the action is blocked until the period resets, you free up capacity, or you move to a plan with more room. Blocking at a limit is expected behavior rather than a service failure, and it is not grounds for a refund. We may change plans, features, and limits as described in section 13.

4. Fees, renewal, and cancellation

Paid plans are sold by subscription, monthly or annually, at the price shown when you subscribe. Payment is processed by our payment processor; we do not store your card details. Note that when you sign up for a paid plan, payment is taken as part of signup, before your account is created — if you abandon signup partway, no account is created.

• Auto-renewal. Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period, at the then-current price for your plan, until you cancel.
• Cancellation. You may cancel at any time. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and you keep access until then.
• No refunds. Except where the law requires otherwise, fees are non-refundable and we do not prorate partial periods, unused seats, or unused usage. Downgrading takes effect at the next renewal.
• Price changes. We may change prices. A change applies to you at your next renewal, and we will give you notice before it takes effect so you can cancel first.
• Taxes. Prices exclude taxes. You are responsible for any sales, use, value-added, or similar taxes, other than taxes on our income.
• Failed payment. If a payment fails, we may retry it and may suspend or downgrade paid features until it is resolved.

5. Your content, and the license you give us

Your content stays yours. That includes your company and capability profile, pursuits, proposals and their sections, scorecards, review comments, library content, and the documents you upload — solicitations, attachments, past proposals, resumes, and similar working files.

You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, transmit, display, and process your content, and to create derived material such as extracted text, summaries, drafts, and search indexes, for the sole purpose of operating and supporting the product for you. That includes sending the relevant parts of your content to the AI providers that serve a feature you use, and building retrieval indexes that stay scoped to your organization. This license ends when you delete the content or close your account, except for copies retained as described in section 6 and in our privacy statement.

You are responsible for what you upload. You represent that you have the rights and permissions needed to provide it to us and to have it processed as described above — which matters specifically for past proposals that may be marked proprietary, resumes and biographies of your personnel, and the contact details of customer references you record. Do not upload content you are not allowed to share.

6. Your data, backups, and loss

Your data is yours, and so is the responsibility for keeping a copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. Export what matters on a schedule of your own: the pipeline exports to CSV, and proposals export to DOCX and PDF.

What we do:

• Your pursuits, proposals, scorecards, library content, and documents are held on the Wildwood platform's infrastructure, separated by tenant and encrypted in transit.
• The service's data stores are backed up on a schedule we set, so that we can recover the service after a failure. Those backups are infrastructure copies, not a per-item restore service.
• Deleting a document, pursuit, proposal, or library asset is permanent from the product's point of view. There is no trash folder and no undo; the deleted copy persists only in backups until they age out.

What we do not promise:

• We do not commit to a recovery point or a recovery time. Depending on when a failure happens, changes made since the last backup may be lost.
• Restoration is best-efforts. If we restore from a backup, the recovered data may be incomplete or out of date, and we may not be able to restore an individual item on request.
• Where a feature says an action is permanent, it is.

When your account ends, you have 30 days to export your data, and we will help you do it. After that we may delete it at any time, and copies persist in backups until those expire on their schedule. Lost data is excluded under section 16, and the cap there applies.

7. Federal data is public record, and scores are an aid

Cairn retrieves opportunity, award, and entity information from public U.S. Government systems including SAM.gov, Grants.gov, and USAspending.gov. We pass that information through as we receive it. It can be incomplete, delayed, amended, or withdrawn by the agency that published it, and we do not warrant its accuracy or availability. Always open the official notice at its source and verify the details — including deadlines, set-asides, and eligibility — before you rely on them.

Fit scores, rankings, probability-of-win figures, and similar indicators are triage aids computed from the profile you give us. They are not predictions, professional advice, or any assurance that you are eligible for an opportunity or will be awarded anything.

Cairn is an independent commercial product. Cairn is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the U.S. Government or any federal agency.

8. Your credentials and connected accounts

Some features depend on credentials that belong to you rather than to us:

• SAM.gov API key. New accounts may use a shared platform key during a short setup period, currently 14 days and set by us. After that you must supply your own free api.data.gov key. These keys expire on the schedule the issuing system sets, and keeping yours current is your responsibility.
• Grants.gov submission certificate. To file through Grants.gov you upload your own certificate, enrolled for an Authorized Organization Representative of your organization, together with its password. You authorize us to use them solely to transmit the submissions you approve. You remain the Authorized Organization Representative and the signatory of everything filed, and you are responsible for keeping the certificate valid and for revoking it when it should no longer be used.

You must comply with the terms of any third-party system you connect, and you must not use ours or anyone else's credentials to exceed the access you have been granted.

9. Submissions, deadlines, and the system of record

Cairn helps you assemble and file work, but the responsibility for it is yours. You alone are responsible for meeting deadlines, for following the instructions in the solicitation or funding notice, for the accuracy and completeness of every representation and certification you make, and for the eligibility of your organization to compete.

• Electronic submission through Grants.gov is available for grant applications only. Contract responses are assembled here and filed by you through the channel the solicitation specifies.
• Grants.gov, not Cairn, is the system of record for anything filed through it. The tracking number that system issues is the authoritative evidence of submission, and you should confirm it there.
• Approving a submission package in Cairn is an explicit human sign-off: you are attesting that you have reviewed every document and field.
• We do not warrant that any transmission will succeed, arrive on time, or be accepted. Do not leave a filing to the last hours before a deadline.

10. AI features, and your responsibility for the output

Cairn uses AI models to draft, summarize, analyze, and research. When you use an AI feature, the relevant content — your prompt, the pursuit context, and the documents you have grounded the work on — is sent to the provider serving that feature. We select providers whose terms prohibit using content submitted through our account to train their general-purpose models.

AI output can be wrong, incomplete, or non-compliant. It is a drafting aid, and every submission remains yours to review, correct, and approve. Do not treat generated text as legal, contractual, pricing, or professional advice. The assistant does not change your data on its own: when it proposes an action that would write to your account, it pauses and waits for your approval.

Some features use web search to compile short professional backgrounds for the government points of contact named on a public notice. That material is AI-generated from public professional sources, is limited to a professional context, and may be inaccurate or attached to the wrong person. Treat it as an unverified starting point, do not rely on it to make a decision about any individual, and do not use it for any purpose that would require consent or a permissible purpose under applicable law.

11. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• copy, resell, sublicense, or provide the product as a service to anyone outside your organization, or use it to build a competing product;
• reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive the source code, prompts, models, or scoring methodology, except to the extent that restriction is unenforceable where you are;
• scrape or bulk-extract the product, interfere with its operation, probe it for vulnerabilities without our written permission, or circumvent seat, rate, or usage limits;
• use Cairn for anything unlawful, or in a way that breaches a solicitation's own terms, a nondisclosure or teaming agreement, procurement integrity rules, or another party's rights;
• upload malware, or content that infringes, misappropriates, or violates the privacy of anyone else;
• upload classified information, controlled unclassified information (CUI), or material subject to export control under ITAR or the EAR. Cairn is a commercial product and is not accredited or certified for handling that material. This is a restriction on your use, not a statement about our security posture.

We may investigate suspected misuse and may suspend access as described in section 18. We do not routinely review your content, and we are not obliged to monitor it.

12. Our intellectual property, and your feedback

We own the product and everything in it other than your content: the software, the interface, the documentation and help material, the fit-scoring and ranking methodology, and the prompts, skills, and workflows behind the AI features. These terms grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the product during your subscription, and nothing more. Our name and logo are ours; do not use them without permission except to state factually that you use Cairn.

If you send us feedback, suggestions, or bug reports, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free license to use them without restriction or obligation to you. We will not identify you as the source without your permission.

13. Changes to the product, and availability

We are actively developing Cairn and may add, change, or remove features. If we remove something material, or make a change that materially reduces what a paid plan provides, we will give you notice and you may cancel under section 4.

The product is provided on an as-available basis. We do not offer a service level agreement or an uptime commitment, and we may take the service down for maintenance. Cairn also depends on systems outside our control — the federal data sources, our AI providers, our identity and application platform, our payment processor, and our hosting — and their outages, rate limits, and changes can interrupt features.

14. Confidentiality

Each of us may receive non-public information from the other. The receiving party will use it only to perform under these terms, will protect it with at least reasonable care, and will not disclose it except to people and service providers who need it and are bound by comparable obligations, or where the law compels disclosure — in which case, where permitted, the receiving party will give notice first. This does not apply to information that is public, already known without duty of confidence, or independently developed.

Our security practices are described in the privacy statement, and this section does not promise more than that statement says. No system is perfectly secure, and part of keeping your account safe is on you.

15. Disclaimer of warranties

THE PRODUCT AND ALL CONTENT AND OUTPUT ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW WE DISCLAIM THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTY ARISING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE.

We specifically do not warrant that the product will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free; that federal data, fit scores, or AI output will be accurate, current, or complete; that any submission will be transmitted, received, or accepted; or that using Cairn will make a proposal compliant with a solicitation or result in an award.

16. Limitation of liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, NEITHER PARTY WILL BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST REVENUE, LOST DATA, OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY. THIS INCLUDES A LOST BID, A MISSED DEADLINE, A PROPOSAL FOUND NON-COMPLIANT, A REJECTED OR LATE SUBMISSION, AND A LOST OR REDUCED AWARD.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OUR TOTAL LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE PRODUCT WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (a) THE FEES YOU PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (b) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS. These limits apply even if a remedy fails of its essential purpose, and they reflect the allocation of risk that the price of the product is based on. If you use the free plan, our liability is limited to one hundred U.S. dollars. Nothing in these terms limits liability for fraud, for wilful misconduct, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

17. Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold us harmless from third-party claims, and from resulting losses, damages, and reasonable legal fees, arising out of your content, your submissions and certifications to any government or funder, your use of a third party's data or credentials, your breach of these terms, or your violation of law or of another party's rights. We will notify you of the claim, you control the defense of it, and you will not settle in a way that imposes an obligation on us without our consent.

18. Suspension and termination

You may stop using Cairn at any time, and you may cancel or close your account as described in section 4. We may suspend or terminate access if you materially breach these terms, if a payment is not made, if your use puts the service, our other customers, or a third party at risk, or if we are required to by law. Where practical we will give notice and a chance to fix the problem first, except where the risk requires us to act immediately.

When your access ends you have 30 days to export your content, and we will help you do it. After that we may delete or de-identify your information at any time, as described in section 6 and in the privacy statement, except where we must keep records for legal, tax, or audit purposes or to resolve a dispute. Sections that by their nature should survive — your content license as applied to copies we still hold, fees already owed, confidentiality, intellectual property, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnification, and dispute resolution — survive termination.

19. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. When we do, we revise the version and the “last updated” date above, and we surface material changes in the product so you are not expected to re-read this page to notice them. Because acceptance is recorded per version, a material change may require you to accept the updated terms in the product before you continue. Continued use after the changes take effect is acceptance of them; if you do not agree, stop using Cairn and cancel.

20. Governing law and dispute resolution

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules and the U.N. Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

Talk to us first. Before starting a formal proceeding, send us a written description of the dispute and what you want, and give us 30 days to try to resolve it informally. This step is a condition of starting arbitration or a lawsuit, and it pauses any applicable limitation period while it runs.

Arbitration. If we cannot resolve it, any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the product will be settled by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules, before one arbitrator, seated in Denver, Colorado. The arbitrator decides questions of arbitrability and may award any relief a court could award to that party individually. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

Individual claims only. Claims must be brought individually. Neither of us may bring a class, collective, consolidated, or representative action, and the arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over any form of representative proceeding. If this paragraph is held unenforceable as to a claim, that claim proceeds in court under the venue clause below and the rest of this section still applies to every other claim.

Exceptions. Either of us may bring a claim in small-claims court if it qualifies, and either of us may seek injunctive relief in court to stop actual or threatened infringement or misuse of intellectual property or confidential information. For any dispute that is not arbitrated, the state and federal courts located in Denver, Colorado have exclusive jurisdiction, and both parties consent to that venue and waive any objection to it.

Jury waiver, and time limit. To the extent a dispute proceeds in court, both parties waive any right to a jury trial. Any claim must be brought within one year after it arises, or it is permanently barred, except where the law does not allow that limit.

Opting out of arbitration. You may reject the arbitration and class-waiver paragraphs by notifying us in writing within 30 days of first accepting these terms. An opt-out does not affect the rest of this section, and we will not treat you differently for exercising it.

21. General terms

• Entire agreement. These terms, our privacy statement, and any order form or written agreement we sign with you are the entire agreement about the product, and replace any earlier understanding. If an order form conflicts with these terms, the order form controls for that subscription.
• Severability and waiver. If a provision is unenforceable, it is limited to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force. Not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these terms without our written consent, except to a successor to your business. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a delay or failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control, other than an obligation to pay.
• Independent parties. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, agency, teaming arrangement, or employment relationship, and neither party may bind the other.
• Government use. We are not a party to your contracts with the government, and nothing in a solicitation, contract, or grant award flows down to us unless we agree to it in writing.
• Notices. We may give notice by email to your account address or in the product. Send legal notices to us at [NOTICE ADDRESS], and by email to the address below.

22. Contact us

Questions about these terms, or a notice you need to send us? Email [email protected].