Terms of Service

Last updated: 19 September 2026

What changed on 18 September 2026: we have made it clearer what a Walters Sentinel certificate is and is not (section 6A). Certificates are our own and are not official, government-backed or accredited, some rest on information organizations give us that we do not verify, and we are not responsible when that information is false. Anyone relying on a certificate does so at their own risk. Sections 10 and 11 say the same about liability.

What changed on 17 September 2026: new terms for certificates, website badges and Trust Centres, and for staff security training in Comply (section 6A), and a new section on "Sign in with Walters Sentinel", for people who use their account to sign in to other websites and for developers who add it to theirs (section 6C).

What changed on 19 September 2026: every service now has Single-User, Business and Premium plans, with a Free plan for Monitoring, Forms, Status Pages and Mail Shield; a Single-User plan is for one person; services can be picked in a Custom plan; every bundle includes a Monitoring plan; and the free trial is once per account (section 5).

What changed on 16 September 2026: paid plans are now subscriptions that renew automatically until you cancel, free trials take a payment method and continue as a paid subscription unless cancelled, and the services other than Monitoring no longer have a free plan (section 5). We also set out the reminders we send, how to cancel in one step, and the extra rights consumers have (section 5A). On 15 September 2026 these Terms were extended to cover the account hub and every Walters Sentinel service (sections 6A and 6B). You will be asked to accept them the next time you sign in.

1. Agreement

These Terms are a contract between you and Lewis Walters, a sole trader trading as Walters Sentinel, based in the United Kingdom ("we", "us"). They govern your use of walterssentinel.com and every address under it, including account.walterssentinel.com, monitoring.walterssentinel.com (previously app.walterssentinel.com), and the addresses of each service, together with everything provided through them (the "Service").

By creating an account, or by using the Service, you accept these Terms. If you are accepting on behalf of a company, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and "you" means that company.

If you do not accept these Terms, do not use the Service.

2. The Service

Walters Sentinel is a set of business services used from one account:

• Monitoring - checks websites, APIs, SSL certificates, domain expiry, DNS records, email authentication records and blacklist status that you configure, and alerts you when a check fails.
• Status Pages - public pages showing the status of your services and any incidents you publish.
• Mail Shield - checks the email security records of domains you manage, and analyses DMARC reports you upload.
• Sign - sends PDF documents for electronic signature and produces a signed copy with an audit trail.
• Desk - a help centre and ticket queue for requests from your customers or staff.
• Comply - a Cyber Essentials readiness checklist, policy templates, evidence storage and GDPR registers.
• People - staff records, holiday allowances and leave requests.
• Assets - a record of your devices, licences and renewals, with reminders.
• Bookings - public booking pages where your customers book appointments.
• Forms - forms and surveys, with the responses stored for you.

Monitoring reports on the availability of the things you monitor. It does not guarantee the uptime of your website, API or any third-party infrastructure, and monitoring something does not make us responsible for its performance.

3. Accounts and signing in

• You must provide an accurate email address you control. Account access and all security codes are sent there.
• One account signs you in to every service. You can be signed in to more than one account on the same browser and switch between them.
• "Stay signed in on this device" keeps that browser signed in to every service until you sign out. Do not use it on a shared or public computer. You are responsible for anything done by somebody using a browser you left signed in.
• You're responsible for anything that happens under your account, including by team members you invite to your organizations. An organization's owner is responsible for its members and for buying its plans.
• You must not share login credentials, attempt to bypass verification, or access another account or organization without authorisation.
• We may lock, suspend or terminate accounts for breach of these Terms, abuse, non-payment or misuse of the Service - see section 9.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to use the Service to monitor or check infrastructure or domains you're not authorised to, to facilitate illegal activity, or to probe, scan or send unusual load at targets in a way that could reasonably be mistaken for an attack.

You also agree not to use any service to:

• ask people for passwords, payment card numbers, bank log-ins or similar credentials, through a form, a help centre, a booking page or anything else;
• send spam, or messages people have not asked for;
• impersonate anybody, or ask anybody to sign a document under false pretences;
• publish or collect content that is unlawful, defamatory, discriminatory, infringes somebody's rights, or contains malware;
• collect special category data (such as health, ethnicity or religion) or criminal offence data without a lawful basis and the safeguards the law requires;
• try to read, change or interfere with another organization's data.

We may review content and configuration in any account, and remove anything that appears to breach this section, in line with our internal moderation process.

5. Plans, subscriptions, trials and payments

What is free. The email security check on our website, and the Monitoring Free plan for one website or API, cost nothing and need no payment details. Every other service needs a paid subscription. We may change what is free in future, with notice.

Plans. Every service, Monitoring included, has a Single-User, a Business and a Premium plan, each with the limits shown before you subscribe. Monitoring, Forms, Status Pages and Mail Shield also have a Free plan. A Single-User plan is for one person, the organization's owner; other members of the organization cannot use that service until it is on Business or Premium. Every service can be taken on its own, at its own price, together as a bundle, or together as a Custom plan, which costs the same as those services taken one at a time and puts them on one subscription, one invoice and one renewal date. An organization that already has a bundle or Custom plan can add any service that plan does not include as a separate subscription of its own, which renews and is cancelled on its own. Handbook and Risks also come with the Premium bundle, and Access reviews, Incidents and Visitors with Enterprise. Subscriptions are taken out for one organization at a time, by its owner; if you have no organization when you subscribe, we create one for you. If what you choose is covered more cheaply by a bundle, you are charged the bundle price and receive the whole bundle.

Monitoring with a bundle. Every bundle includes a Monitoring plan: Starter includes Monitoring Single-User, Growth and Business include Monitoring Business, Premium includes Monitoring Premium, and Enterprise includes Monitoring Enterprise, with white-label. A Custom plan does not include Monitoring. The included plan lasts as long as the bundle does. If your organization already pays for a Monitoring plan that the bundle covers, we stop charging for it; if your own plan is better, you keep it. When the bundle ends, your organization goes back to the Monitoring plan it had of its own, or to Free.

Subscriptions renew automatically. A plan or bundle is a subscription, paid monthly or yearly in advance. At the end of each period it renews for another period of the same length, and we take payment for it from the payment method you gave, until you cancel. The price, how often you pay and the date of the next payment are shown before you subscribe, on the Billing page of your account, and in the reminders we send.

Free trials. Where we offer one, a free trial lasts 14 days and is available once per account: once you, or any organization you own, have had a free trial or a paid plan of any kind, later plans are paid from the first day. You give a payment method when the trial starts, and nothing is taken during the trial. Unless you cancel before the trial ends, your subscription continues automatically when it ends and the first payment is taken then, and after that every month or year until you cancel. If you cancel during the trial, you are not charged. We may refuse or withdraw trials where we reasonably believe they are being misused, for example by creating organizations to get repeated trials.

Reminders. We email the organization's owner before a free trial ends, before each yearly renewal, and before every sixth payment of a monthly subscription. Each reminder says what will be taken, when, and how to cancel.

Cancelling. You can cancel a subscription at any time on the Billing page of your account, in one step, without calling or writing to us. Cancelling stops it renewing: you keep what you have paid for until the end of the current period, nothing more is charged, and we confirm the cancellation by email straight away. You can undo a cancellation until the period ends.

Changing plan. You can move to a different plan or bundle at any time. Moving to a more expensive one is charged straight away for the rest of the current period, and moving to a cheaper one is credited against future payments. During a free trial, a change takes effect without charge.

When a subscription ends, that service stops being available for new work. We do not delete your content because a subscription ended: it stays where it is, and it is all available again if you subscribe again. Our Privacy Policy explains how long we keep data for an organization that no longer uses the Service.

Price changes. We may change our prices. A new price applies to a subscription from its next renewal after we have given the owner at least 30 days' notice by email, and you can cancel before it applies.

Failed payments. If a payment cannot be taken we will try again over the following days and email the owner, who can update the payment method on the Billing page. If it still cannot be taken, the subscription may end and paid features stop.

Refunds. Payments are non-refundable, including for the rest of a period after you cancel, except where the law gives you a right to one (section 5A) or where we have charged you in error.

White-label/MSP arrangements agreed individually with us are billed as agreed, and renew only as agreed. We may suspend access for non-payment.

5A. If you are buying as a consumer

Walters Sentinel is built and sold for business use, and we expect almost every customer to be buying in the course of a business. If you are buying as a consumer - that is, wholly outside any trade, business or profession - you have additional rights that these Terms cannot take away, and section 5 is read subject to this section.

• When you first subscribe you have 14 days to cancel and receive a refund.
• When a free trial turns into a paid subscription, and when a yearly subscription renews, you again have 14 days from that payment to cancel and receive a refund.

Because a subscription starts immediately, you are asking us to supply the Service straight away. If you cancel within one of these periods after using the Service, we may keep a proportionate amount for what was supplied before you cancelled, and refund the rest.

To cancel within these periods, cancel on the Billing page and email contact@walterssentinel.com to ask for the refund. Nothing in these Terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer, including your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 where a digital service is not supplied with reasonable care and skill.

6. Business plans, Enterprise, and White-label/MSP

Business plans let you remove Walters Sentinel branding from the public pages a service shows your own customers, such as a form, a booking page, a help centre, a status page or a signing page. Emails the Service sends may still identify Walters Sentinel. Where a plan includes priority support, it means your emails to us are answered ahead of others; it is not a guaranteed response time.

Enterprise arrangements are agreed individually in writing, and anything agreed there takes priority over these Terms where the two differ.

White-label/MSP monitoring customers may present the Service's monitoring and status-page features under their own branding to their own clients. None of this transfers ownership of the underlying platform, code or Walters Sentinel branding.

6A. Terms for particular services

Sign

Sign lets you send documents for electronic signature and records who signed, when, from which IP address, and a fingerprint of the original file. Under the law of England and Wales an electronic signature is usually valid for business documents, but you are responsible for deciding whether a document can be signed this way. Some documents need other formalities, for example deeds that must be witnessed, wills, and some property and court documents. We are not a party to any document you send, we do not check what it says, and we give no legal advice about it. Keep your own copy of anything signed: deleting a document deletes it permanently.

Comply

Comply helps you prepare. It is not a certification, and a readiness score is not a Cyber Essentials certificate. Certificates are issued only by certification bodies licensed by IASME. Checklists, templates and guidance are general information, not legal or professional advice, and you are responsible for the accuracy of your answers, your policies and your registers.

Mail Shield

Only add domains you own or manage. Checks read public DNS and public blocklists, and grades and recommendations are guidance. You are responsible for any change you make to your DNS: a wrong record can stop your email being delivered.

Status Pages

Status pages are public. You are responsible for what you publish on them. A component linked to a monitor shows what our checks see, subject to the limits in section 7.

People

People stores records about your staff, which may include sickness absence. You are responsible for using it lawfully and for your decisions as an employer. Allowances and working-day counts are calculated from what you enter and from UK bank holiday data published by GOV.UK, and are not employment or legal advice.

Desk, Bookings and Forms

These services collect information from your own customers. You are responsible for telling them how you use it, normally in your own privacy notice. The Service sends some emails to them on your behalf, such as booking confirmations and replies to their tickets. Anyone who fills in a form, raises a ticket or books with you is your customer, not ours.

Assets

Warranty and renewal reminders are a convenience. You remain responsible for renewing anything that matters to you.

Certificates, website badges and Trust Centres

A Walters Sentinel certificate states that particular checks we run passed at the time shown: for example that a domain has SPF, DKIM and an enforced DMARC policy, or that a website we monitor was available at least 99.9% of the time over the last 30 days. It is not an accreditation, an audit or a guarantee of security, and it is not a Cyber Essentials or any other government-backed certificate. A readiness certificate is self-assessed: it records the answers your organization gave and the person who confirmed them, and says so on its face. You are responsible for those answers being true.

Certificate pages, PDFs, badges and Trust Centres are public, and show your organization's name, the domain or website concerned and, for a training certificate, the learner's name. Certificates are re-checked automatically: if a check stops passing, the certificate and its badge say it is not currently verified until the check passes again, and it expires at the end of its period. You must not alter a certificate or badge, show one that is not currently verified as if it were, or suggest it means more than it says. We may withdraw a certificate that was issued on false information or is being misused.

Certificates are Walters Sentinel's own, and are not official. Every certificate, badge and Trust Centre is issued by Walters Sentinel alone. None is issued, approved, endorsed or recognised by any government, regulator, standards body, certification body or accreditation scheme, and none should be described or presented as if it were. "Verified" on a certificate means only that the checks it lists passed at the time shown.

We rely on what organizations tell us, and do not check it. Some certificates rest partly or entirely on information an organization gives us or on things it controls: the answers to a self-assessment and who confirmed them, who is included in training, what is in scope, and its own DNS records and websites. We do not independently verify that information, and our checks cannot tell whether records or systems were set up only to pass them. The organization that gave the information is solely responsible for it being true, complete and kept up to date. Walters Sentinel is not responsible for, and accepts no liability arising from, any certificate obtained or kept by giving false, incomplete or misleading information, or by changing records or systems temporarily to pass a check.

If you are relying on somebody else's certificate. A certificate shows what our automated checks found, or what the organization told us, at the time shown. It is not a statement by Walters Sentinel that the organization is secure, trustworthy, or compliant with any law, standard or contract, and it is not an audit. If you rely on one to buy from, contract with, insure, lend to or otherwise trust an organization, you do so at your own risk and should make your own enquiries. Walters Sentinel has no contract with you through a certificate and owes you no duty because of one.

Security awareness training

The training course in Comply is general guidance to help staff recognise common threats. Passing it does not mean a person, or your organization, cannot be caught out by an attack, and a training certificate records only that the person passed the course on the date shown. You are responsible for inviting only people you have a basis to email, and for the rest of your security.

6B. Personal data you put into the Service

This section is set out in full, with the annexes a data protection review needs, in our Data Processing Agreement. That agreement is part of these Terms and applies to your account automatically - there is nothing to request and nothing to sign, though we will sign a copy if your own policy requires one.

When you use a service to hold personal data about other people, you are the controller of that data and we are your processor. That includes form responses, tickets, bookings, signers, staff and leave records, asset assignments, and personal data in DMARC reports or evidence files. You confirm you have a lawful basis for it and have told those people what they need to know. For that data, we will:

• process it only to provide the Service to you, and on your documented instructions, which are these Terms and how you configure the Service;
• make sure anyone authorised to access it is bound by confidentiality;
• protect it with appropriate technical and organisational measures, described in our Privacy Policy;
• use only the sub-processors on our published list, give you at least 30 days' notice before adding another, hold each of them to equivalent obligations, and remain responsible to you for what they do;
• help you, within reason, to respond to people exercising their rights, and with security, breach notification and data protection impact assessments;
• tell you without undue delay after becoming aware of a personal data breach affecting it;
• delete it when you delete it, or delete the organization it belongs to - immediately and permanently, as section 9 explains;
• make available the information reasonably needed to show we meet these obligations.

Where this data is transferred outside the UK by a sub-processor, the transfer is covered by the safeguards described in the Privacy Policy.

6C. Sign in with Walters Sentinel

If you use it to sign in to another website

Some websites let you sign in with your Walters Sentinel account. Before anything is shared we show you the name and address of the website and exactly what it will see, which is at most your name and your email address. It never receives your password, and nothing about your organizations or your services. Those websites are not run by us: what they do with your details is governed by their own terms and privacy policy, and we are not responsible for them. You can remove a website's access at any time from Developers in your account.

If you add it to your own website

You may register apps from Developers in your account. You receive a client ID and a client secret, and you must:

• keep the client secret confidential, only on your own servers, and replace it straight away if it may have been exposed;
• register only websites you own or run, and give the app your own name, not one that suggests it is run or endorsed by Walters Sentinel;
• use the details you receive only to sign people in to your website and to run their account with you, tell people how you use them in your own privacy policy, and comply with data protection law as the controller of that data;
• not sell those details, use them to build profiles of people across other websites, or send marketing that people have not agreed to;
• use the "Sign in with Walters Sentinel" button and name only to offer signing in, without changing the design in a way that misleads.

The feature is provided free and as it is, and it relies on the same service availability as the rest of Walters Sentinel (section 7): keep another way for people to sign in to your website. We may suspend or delete an app that breaks these terms, puts people at risk, or is used for anything other than signing in, and we may change or withdraw the feature, giving notice where we reasonably can.

7. Service availability, and what we do not promise

We work hard to keep the Service running and to catch problems on the systems you ask us to watch. But no online service can promise perfection, and this section matters more than any other in these Terms, so it is written plainly.

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude all warranties, conditions and terms implied by statute or common law, including any implied terms about satisfactory quality or fitness for a particular purpose.

We do not warrant that:

• the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, or free of errors;
• we will detect every outage, failure or degradation of your systems;
• every alert, reminder, confirmation or other email will be delivered, delivered promptly, or reach every recipient - including emails to your own customers, signers and staff;
• our checks, grades and calculations will always be accurate, or free of false alarms;
• certificate, domain, DNS, email-record, warranty or renewal warnings will always be raised in time, or at all.

The Service depends on things outside our control: the public internet, DNS, your own hosting, email providers' willingness to deliver our email, and the suppliers listed in our Privacy Policy. A check runs from one place at a time and cannot see everything a customer of yours might see.

Walters Sentinel is a set of tools, not a substitute for your own processes. Monitoring does not prevent outages, fix them, or reduce their consequences. You remain responsible for backups, redundancy, renewing your own certificates, domains and licences, keeping your own copies of important documents and records, and actually acting on the alerts and reminders we send.

We offer no service level agreement and no uptime guarantee on any plan, except where an Enterprise agreement says otherwise in writing. We may change, suspend or withdraw parts of the Service, and will give reasonable notice of anything material where we can.

7A. Things outside anyone's control

Neither party is liable for failing to perform where the cause is outside its reasonable control. That includes: failures of the public internet, DNS or third-party networks; outages at our hosting, database, email or payment suppliers; cyber attacks including denial of service; power failures; changes in law; industrial action; fire, flood, epidemic or natural disaster; and war or civil unrest.

If such an event continues for more than 30 days, either party may end the contract by written notice.

7B. Suppliers we depend on

The Service runs on suppliers named in our Privacy Policy. If one of them fails, the Service may fail with it. We choose them carefully and will act reasonably to restore service, but we are not liable for their acts or omissions beyond the limits in section 10.

8. Email retention

Email you send to contact@walterssentinel.com is stored only for as long as we need it to answer you. Every message and attachment in that mailbox is permanently deleted 15 days after it is received, whether or not it has been read or replied to. Deletion is automatic and irreversible - we cannot recover a message once it has passed 15 days, so please keep your own copy of anything you may need later. If your query needs a longer record (for example a billing dispute), tell us and we'll capture the relevant details in your account record before the mail is removed.

Email sent to no-reply@walterssentinel.com is discarded the moment it arrives. It is never stored, never read, and never replied to. Always use contact@walterssentinel.com if you need a response.

9. Suspension, locking, deletion, and termination

We may lock an account automatically after repeated failed sign-in attempts, for your own security. Administrators may lock, suspend or terminate accounts for breach of these Terms, suspected fraud, abuse of the Service, or monitoring or checking of unsafe or unauthorised targets.

We are not required to warn you before we delete data, and we are not required to warn you while we are doing it. An organization and everything in it can be removed immediately and without prior notice, without a countdown, without a grace period, and without an opportunity to export or object first. That includes its monitors and their history, status pages, documents and signatures, tickets, form responses, bookings, staff and leave records, assets, policies, evidence and registers. Deletion is permanent and cannot be reversed - we do not keep a copy, and there is nothing for us to restore afterwards. No refund is given for any paid period remaining at the point of deletion (see section 5).

Where we take this kind of action we will email you the reason afterwards, as a courtesy rather than an obligation. You may appeal by contacting contact@walterssentinel.com, but an appeal does not pause, delay, or reverse a deletion that has already happened.

Keep your own copy of anything you would not want to lose. Most services let you export or download it.

10. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Walters Sentinel is not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential damages, or for losses arising from:

• downtime of infrastructure you monitor, including our failure to detect or alert on an outage;
• whether a document signed through Sign is valid or enforceable;
• the outcome of any certification assessment, audit or regulatory inquiry;
• any certificate, badge or Trust Centre being relied on by anyone, or any information an organization gave to obtain or keep one turning out to be false, incomplete or misleading;
• decisions you make about your staff;
• missed, late or double bookings, tickets, reminders or emails;
• changes you make to your DNS or email configuration.

Our total liability for any claim relating to the Service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose. Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, such as liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or fraud.

11. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify Walters Sentinel against claims, losses or damages arising from your breach of these Terms or misuse of the Service. That includes monitoring or checking targets you weren't authorised to, content you publish or collect through the Service, documents you send for signature, and personal data you put into the Service without a lawful basis. It also includes any claim by anybody who relied on a certificate, badge or Trust Centre of yours that was obtained or kept with false, incomplete or misleading information you gave us.

12. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and any dispute is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

13. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When a change is material we will update the date above, say what changed, and ask you to accept the new Terms the next time you sign in. If you do not accept them, stop using the Service and cancel any subscription; what you have already paid for is not refunded, but it continues under the Terms you accepted until the end of the current period.

14. Contact

Questions about these Terms: contact@walterssentinel.com