Terms of Service
- Last updated
- August 1, 2026
- Effective date
- August 1, 2026
- Applies to
- the TAGO iOS app, www.tagorides.com, and any other TAGO service that links to these Terms
Plain-English summary#
Read this box first. It is a summary, not the agreement. Sections 0–25 control.
- TAGO is a carpool noticeboard, not a ride service. We do not own cars, employ drivers, or provide transportation. When you ride, you are getting in a private individual's car on a trip they were already planning.
- We take nothing per ride. 0% commission. No booking fee, no service fee, no tip. That is enforced in our code, not just promised here.
- What you pay is capped, and the cap is enforced in code. The total a Driver collects for a Trip does not exceed the IRS standard business mileage rate for the miles actually driven, at the rate in force on the day of your Trip — on both of our pricing paths, with Companions aboard, on event Trips, and on the fallback we use when a posted route length is missing. No minimum, on any path, can raise what you pay. The last one — a $2.00 per-seat floor — was removed on August 1, 2026; it is now only the lowest price a Driver can be shown on the price slider, and it can never reach a charge. A full car recovers the cost of the trip once and no more: a fourth person splits the same amount four ways instead of adding to the Driver's total. One measured exception, and it is cents: on the automatic cost-share path each share is rounded to the nearest cent before the shares are added together, so a total can land up to four cents over the cap on a very short Trip with a full car. Sections 6.2 and 6.3(a-bis).
- Drivers are reimbursed, not paid. No one makes money driving on TAGO. That is the whole design.
- We provide no insurance of any kind. None. Your driver's personal auto policy is the only coverage in the car. Drivers: many personal policies exclude carrying passengers for a fee. Call your insurer before you drive. See Section 12 — it is the most important section in this document.
- We do not check who anyone is. We do not look at driver's licences, insurance, vehicle registration, driving history, criminal history, or identity. TAGO collects no licence documents and runs no driver screening of any kind. Section 5 lists exactly what we do and do not do.
- You must be 18, and today you must sign up with a student email address. Both are requirements of using TAGO, and we are telling you plainly that neither is checked against any record — the student-email rule is applied in the app at sign-up, not on our servers. We expect to widen eligibility over time. Sections 3, 4 and 5.
- Rides start and end with a QR scan. The rider scans the driver's code. That scan is what starts the distance measurement and what stops it. No start scan, no charge.
- Money does pass through us. Your card is charged into our payment account, the driver's reimbursement is credited to an in-app balance, and they withdraw it later. We do not keep any of it, but we do hold it briefly. We are not a bank.
- We do not sell your data, ever. Any advertising we run is chosen from the page you are looking at — a route, a region, an event — never from a profile of you.
- No forced arbitration. No class-action waiver. If we have a dispute, we ask you to write to us first and give us 60 days to fix it. After that, you can go to court, including small claims court, and you can sue in your own county. Most companies our size take those rights away from you. We are choosing not to.
- This document can be terminated by either of us. You can delete your account in the app, and deletion removes your personal information from TAGO. Four categories are deliberately kept with your identity taken out of them: the financial ledger (tax law), safety reports in both directions (they protect the other person as much as you), the other party's copy of a conversation you had with them, and a one-way hash of your email address so an unsubscribe outlives the account. Section 20.1(d) says exactly what each one is and what its limits are.
And the things in here that cost you money or limit you. We are not going to list only the parts that flatter us.
- The final amount can be higher than the estimate you accepted, if the Trip runs longer than the route that was posted. It is still capped on the miles actually driven. Section 6.3(c).
- Paying by card adds the card processor's cost — currently about 2.9% plus 30 cents. Paying from your in-app balance does not. Section 7.4.
- There is a dollar cap on what you can recover from us — the greater of $250 or everything you paid through TAGO in the 12 months before the claim — and most claims must be brought within one year. The cap does not apply to death or personal injury caused by our own negligence, or to our own fraud. Sections 18 and 22.5.
- Driving records your location in the background for the length of a Trip, and opening the app records your last known location whether or not you are on a Trip. A Trip share link lets anyone holding it see your live position with no login — treat forwarding it as publishing it. Section 9.7.
How to read this document#
Every numbered section starts with a short paragraph in plain words. The lettered clauses under it are the operative terms. Where a clause exists to protect you, it says so.
Throughout, "TAGO," "we," "us," and "our" mean Tago Rides, Inc. "You" means you. "Rider" and "Driver" mean the two roles a user can take; the same person can be both at different times. "Trip" means one arranged journey. "Cost share" means the money a Rider contributes toward a Driver's costs for a Trip. "Companion" means a person you declare as travelling with you who does not hold their own account. "TAGO Parties" means Tago Rides, Inc. together with its officers, directors, employees, contractors, affiliates, successors, and assigns — where a clause protects "TAGO," it protects all of them, and nowhere in this document do they get a right against you that Tago Rides, Inc. does not have.
Your agreement to these Terms#
In plain words: this is a contract. You enter it by making an account and using TAGO. If you do not want to be in it, do not use TAGO — and if you are already in it, delete your account.
a. By creating a TAGO account, or by using TAGO in any way, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy, and you enter a binding agreement with Tago Rides, Inc. If you do not agree, do not create an account and do not use TAGO.
b. If you already have an account when a version of these Terms takes effect, continuing to use TAGO after the effective date is your acceptance of that version. Section 21 explains the notice you get first, and Section 20.1 explains how to leave instead.
c. If you use TAGO on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and "you" means both you and that organisation.
d. These Terms apply to you as a Rider, as a Driver, and as someone just browsing while signed in.
0. Read this before you use TAGO#
In plain words: we are not a background-check company and we are not an insurer. We check almost nothing about a person, and we are honest about the rest. Everything after this depends on you understanding that.
Before you post a Trip, accept a Trip, or get into a car:
a. We do not verify identity. We do not confirm that anyone is who they say they are.
b. We do not screen drivers. We do not check driver's licences, insurance policies, vehicle registration, vehicle roadworthiness, driving records, or criminal history. We do not conduct background checks of any kind. TAGO does not collect a driver's licence, a licence photograph, or any licence number — there is no driver-verification process here to pass or fail.
c. You must be 18, and we do not check it. Being 18 or older is a requirement of using TAGO (Section 3). We ask for a date of birth at sign-up. Nothing in our app or our servers currently computes your age from it, and we do not check it against any record. We are building that block; until it ships, this is the honest description. We cannot check the age of a Companion at all — the person who adds them is representing it. See Section 4.
d. A student email address is required to sign up, and the requirement is
applied in the app rather than on our servers. TAGO is open to students today,
and the sign-up screen requires an email address at a student domain. We do not
confirm enrolment, we do not contact any school, and we do not treat that address
as proof of anything about you. The rule is applied by the app; our servers do
not currently repeat it, so it is a requirement rather than a barrier we can
promise nobody gets around. The .edu marker shown on a profile is computed from
the address and means only that the address ends in .edu.
e. We do not verify phone numbers. A phone number can currently be marked verified by the app itself. Treat a phone number as self-reported.
f. We provide no insurance. Section 12.
g. We do not supervise Trips. We are not in the car. Our safety tools (Section 10) are aids, not supervision, and not a guarantee.
h. Some information you post is visible to people who are not signed in. Public search results are stripped of your name, your exact address, your exact time, your phone number, and your account id before they leave our servers, and we suppress results entirely when too few Trips match to keep an individual anonymous — currently, fewer than three matching Trips returns a count and no rows. Another signed-in member sees only a small public profile card — name, photo and rating — not your email address, your date of birth, your phone number, your saved locations or your balance. But a profile photo you upload is stored in a publicly readable location today. Treat anything you post as if a stranger could see it.
You use TAGO knowing all of the above. If any of it is not acceptable to you, do not use TAGO.
1. Who we are#
In plain words: TAGO is run by a real company with a real legal name. Here it is, so you know who you are contracting with and where to send a legal notice.
a. TAGO is operated by Tago Rides, Inc., a Delaware corporation.
b. Formal legal notice — including notice of a legal claim, service of process, or any notice these Terms require you to give us in writing — must be sent to our registered agent:
Tago Rides, Inc. c/o Legalinc Corporate Services Inc. 131 Continental Drive, Suite 305 Newark, DE 19713, USA
c. Everything else goes to email, not to our agent. Our registered agent accepts legal process only and will not read general correspondence. For support, complaints, safety concerns, or questions about these Terms, write to support@tagorides.com. For privacy requests, write to privacy@tagorides.com.
d. We may give you notice through the app, by push notification, by email to the address on your account, or by posting on www.tagorides.com. See Section 21. Section 24(d) states what makes up the whole agreement between us.
2. What TAGO is, and what it is not#
In plain words: we run a noticeboard. Drivers post trips they are already taking; riders find one going their way and chip in toward the cost. We are not in the transportation business, and we do not make money when you take a ride.
2.1 What TAGO is#
a. TAGO is a cost-sharing carpool platform. It is a place where private individuals who are driving somewhere anyway can offer empty seats, and where people going the same way can find them and contribute toward the cost of the Trip.
b. TAGO also helps riders connect to public transit — for example, a Driver dropping a Rider at a station, or collecting a Rider from one. TAGO is designed to reach transit, not to replace it.
c. TAGO takes no commission and charges no per-Trip fee. Our platform fee rate is hard-coded to zero on every settlement branch — it is defined once in our code as zero and no path sets it to anything else — and on the main settlement path an arithmetic check refuses to complete the transaction unless the Driver's credit equals the full cost share with nothing taken out. To be precise rather than flattering: that check guards the settlement credit path, not literally every credit our systems can write (a card payment confirmed later by our processor, and our internal reconciliation and refund sweeps, credit the same zero-fee amount without re-running it). The rate they all use is the same zero.
d. There is no tipping on TAGO. The feature was removed and no path exists to give a Driver money beyond the settled cost share.
2.2 What TAGO is not#
a. TAGO is not a transportation carrier, a taxi service, a common carrier, a motor carrier, a charter-party carrier, or a transportation network company (TNC). TAGO does not own, operate, lease, or control any vehicle.
b. TAGO does not provide transportation. Riders are transported by Drivers, who are private individuals, in their own vehicles, on trips they choose.
c. TAGO is not a party to the arrangement between a Driver and a Rider. When you accept a Trip, the arrangement is between the two of you. We provide the place where you found each other, the distance measurement, and the payment plumbing. We are not a participant, a guarantor, or a supervisor of that arrangement.
d. TAGO is not an insurer, an insurance producer, or an insurance broker. Section 12.
e. TAGO is not a bank, a money transmitter of your choosing, a deposit-taking institution, or a lender. Your in-app balance is not a bank account, is not insured, and does not accrue interest. Section 7.
f. TAGO is not an employer of Drivers, and Drivers are not our contractors or agents. Section 13.
2.3 How TAGO pays for itself#
In plain words: we do not make money from your Trips and we do not make money from your data. Here is where money is meant to come from instead, so you are not left guessing.
a. Zero commission is not a promotion. It applies to every Trip and every cost share. We are not reserving a right to start taking a cut of a Trip without amending these Terms under Section 21.
b. Advertising, if we run it, is contextual only. An advertisement or sponsored placement on TAGO is chosen from what is on the screen or in the request — a region, a route or corridor, an event, the general category of the page. No identifier for you, no profile of you, and no audience segment is sent to any advertiser or ad network, and we do not combine your Trips into a person-level profile for advertising. We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Our Privacy Policy describes the promotional placements that exist in the app today.
c. Affiliate and marketing arrangements. We may be paid when someone follows a link we show. Following a link is your action; what you then give that company is between you and them under their own privacy policy.
d. Arrangements with universities, employers, and businesses. A campus, employer, or business may pay us to make carpooling available to their community. We provide such partners aggregate, de-identified reporting only. We do not give a partner an individual's Trip history and we do not confirm whether a named person uses TAGO, without that person's separate, specific consent.
e. Optional paid features. We may later offer optional paid features, such as a subscription for Drivers. No such feature exists today. If we introduce one, it will be optional, it will be priced and described before you buy it, and we will give notice under Section 21. It will not change the zero commission on cost shares in 2.3(a).
f. We will not start selling personal information or running targeted advertising under these Terms. If that ever changed it would require an amendment under Section 21 and a rewritten Privacy Policy first.
3. Eligibility#
In plain words: you must be an adult, you must sign up with a student email address for now, you must be able to enter a contract, and you must be honest on your account.
a. You must be at least 18 years old to create an account or use TAGO. No one under 18 may use TAGO or travel as a declared Companion. There are no exceptions and there is no guardian-consent route. This is a requirement you are agreeing to, not something we verify — Section 4 says exactly what we do and do not do about it.
b. A student email address is required. TAGO is open to students today, and you must sign up with an email address at a student domain. This is a requirement of eligibility, not a credential we check: we do not confirm that you are enrolled anywhere, we do not contact your school, and the requirement is applied by the app at sign-up rather than by our servers (Section 0(d)). If the address you sign up with is not one we accept, you may join the waitlist on our website instead.
c. Who can use TAGO is expected to widen. Eligibility is currently limited to student email domains. We expect to expand it — to employees of participating employers and to university staff, and later to the general public — and we may add or remove accepted domains at any time. If we remove a domain your account depends on, we will give you reasonable notice where we can, and you keep access to your transaction history and to any balance we owe you.
d. You must be able to form a binding contract, and you must not be barred from using TAGO under any applicable law.
e. You must provide accurate information and keep it accurate — your name, your date of birth, your contact details, and, if you drive, your vehicle details.
f. One person, one account. Do not create an account for anyone else, and do not let anyone else use yours. (This does not prevent you from arranging a Trip for a Companion or with a Caregiver — see Section 11, which is the supported way to do that.)
g. If we have suspended or terminated your account, do not create a new one.
h. TAGO currently operates in California — the Sacramento region and the Bay Area, with other regions listed as coming soon. Do not rely on TAGO outside the areas where it is live.
4. Age — and exactly what we do about it#
In plain words: we require 18. We ask for your birth date. Today, nothing checks that answer. We are telling you this instead of claiming a verification we do not perform.
a. By using TAGO you represent and warrant that you are at least 18 years old.
b. Being 18 is a requirement. It is not something we verify. We collect a self-reported date of birth, we do not check it against any record, and we do not currently compute your age from it. As of the date of this document, our app checks only that a date was entered, and our server checks only that the date is well-formed. A person under 18 can complete sign-up today. We consider that a defect, not a design; a hard 18+ block is designed and being built, and this clause will be rewritten when it ships and not before.
c. We do not knowingly permit anyone under 18 to use TAGO. If we learn or reasonably believe an account belongs to someone under 18, we will terminate it, cancel any open Trips on it, and delete the account data in the ordinary course. If you believe a minor is using TAGO, tell us at support@tagorides.com and we will act.
d. TAGO is not directed to children and we do not seek to collect information from anyone under 18. If you are a parent or guardian and you believe your child has created an account, write to privacy@tagorides.com.
e. If you are under 18 and you use TAGO anyway, you are using it in breach of these Terms. Nothing in this Section is a waiver of any right a minor has under applicable law, and nothing here should be read as our claim that a contract with a minor is enforceable.
5. Your account — what we check and what we do not#
In plain words: we require a student email address, we ask for a phone number, and that is close to the whole list. A requirement is not a credential, and a badge on someone's profile is not proof of anything.
5.1 What we actually do#
a. Email. We require an email address, and sign-in is handled by our authentication provider. We do not claim more than that: whether an address is confirmed depends on our authentication provider's own email confirmation step, and we do not separately verify that an address belongs to you.
b. Phone number. We ask for a US mobile number so a counterparty can reach you about a Trip. Treat it as self-reported — see 0(e).
c. Student email address — a requirement, applied in the app. Signing up with an email address at a student domain is a condition of eligibility (Section 3(b)). The rule is applied by the app at the sign-up screen. Our servers do not currently repeat it, so treat it as a requirement of these Terms rather than as a gate we can promise holds — we would rather say that than let you assume a protection that is stronger than it is. People without an accepted address can join the waitlist on our website.
d. The .edu marker on a profile is not proof of enrolment. If the email
address on an account ends in .edu, the profile shows a .edu marker. That is
all it means — we compute it from the address suffix when the profile is
displayed. We do not confirm that anyone is enrolled at any school, and we never
call an account holder a verified student. Enrolment can lapse while an address
keeps working.
e. Vehicle details. If you drive, you tell us your vehicle's make, model, year, colour, plate, and seat count. We do not verify any of it. Your registered seat count matters — where you set your own price per seat it is the divisor in the cost-share cap (Section 6.2), so misstating it is both a breach of these Terms and a way of overcharging your Riders.
5.2 What we do not check#
Everything in Section 0(a)–(e): identity, driver screening of any kind, age, enrolment, and phone numbers. Being 18 and holding a student email address are requirements you accept, not facts we have checked. We are repeating the list once, in the section about accounts, because it belongs in both places.
5.3 Your responsibility for your account#
a. Keep your password and your device secure. You are responsible for activity on your account.
b. Tell us promptly at support@tagorides.com if you think someone else has access to your account.
6. The cost-sharing model — what you pay and why it is capped#
In plain words: the person driving is not making money. They are recovering part of the cost of a trip they were already taking. We measure how far the car actually went, split the recovery across the people who shared it, and cap the result at the rate the IRS publishes for operating a vehicle on the day of the Trip. We take nothing.
6.1 The principle#
a. A Rider's payment is a contribution toward the Driver's cost of operating their own vehicle on that Trip. It is not a fare for a transportation service, not payment for labour, and not a commercial charge.
b. No Driver may use TAGO to make money. Attempting to do so — by overstating distance, understating seats, running unnecessary Trips, or arranging side payments — is a material breach of these Terms (Section 10.3).
c. No side payments. Do not ask a Rider for cash, an app transfer, or anything else outside TAGO, and do not offer it. The whole cap depends on the payment running through the platform.
6.2 The cap#
a. The whole-vehicle allowance. For every Trip we compute one allowance:
the IRS standard business mileage rate in force on the date of the Trip × the miles the vehicle actually drove
That allowance is the ceiling on what the Driver collects in total, however many people are aboard, and the only exception is rounding to the cent (6.3(a-bis)). On a Trip priced by TAGO's automatic cost share, the Driver's recovery is clamped at 100% of that allowance. Where a Driver has set their own price per seat instead, the same allowance is divided by the number of seats in their registered vehicle to give a per-seat ceiling, and that division rounds down, so a car filled to its registered capacity comes out at or just under the whole-vehicle figure and never above it.
b. A full car does not multiply what the Driver recovers. Most cost-sharing platforms cap each passenger's share against the driver's own self-estimated costs, which nobody can check. Ours works from one whole-vehicle allowance. Recovery is capped at 100% of the cost of the Trip: a full car recovers that cost once, and a fourth Rider splits the same amount four ways instead of pushing the Driver above the IRS ceiling. This clause exists to protect Riders and to keep TAGO a cost-sharing platform rather than a taxi service.
c. The rate, and why the date matters. We use the IRS standard business mileage rate as the ceiling, and a Trip is capped at the rate in force on the date of that Trip, not the rate in force when the payment settles. That matters in a year like this one: the IRS revised the rate mid-year, so 2026 has two rates — 72.5 cents per mile through June 30, 2026, and 76 cents per mile from July 1, 2026 (Notice 2026-10). A Trip driven in June and settled in August is capped at June's rate. We hold the rates as dated records rather than as a single number in our code, so a Trip is never re-priced by a later change and the ceiling never silently goes stale.
d. How the amount is measured. The amount is measured on the distance the vehicle actually travelled between the Rider's QR start scan and the end of the Trip, recorded from the Driver's device. Time is never a factor, and if no distance is recorded, there is no charge. There is no minimum trip charge.
One honest qualification. Actual measured miles are always the multiplier. But where a Driver has set their own per-seat price, the rate we multiply those miles by is derived from the posted route length, and that posted length can itself be an estimate produced from the start and end points rather than a driven route. Where no usable posted length exists at all — now a rare fallback, because a routed distance is recorded when a Trip is posted — you are charged the posted per-seat price you accepted, still limited by the ceiling on the miles actually driven. So: the miles are real; on that one pricing path the rate behind them can come from an estimate.
e. How distance and sharing reduce it. The first 8 miles of each Rider's own distance are priced at the full rate; beyond that the per-mile rate eases down the longer the Trip runs, toward a floor rate. Past those first 8 miles, the more people share the vehicle, the smaller each person's share — that is the point of a carpool — and once the car is full the Driver's total stops rising: another person aboard divides the same amount further instead of increasing the Driver's recovery.
f. The amount does not depend on fuel prices. No fuel price is an input to any calculation that sets what you pay. (We show Drivers a separate, informational comparison after a Trip. It is a display, never a charge.)
6.3 The ceiling, its one measured exception, and the things that can still move what you pay#
a. There is no exception to the ceiling, and there is no minimum charge anywhere on TAGO. The total a Driver collects for a Trip does not exceed the IRS standard mileage allowance for the miles actually driven, at the rate for the date of the Trip — save for rounding each person's share to the nearest cent, described in (a-bis) below. That holds on both pricing paths, with Companions aboard (a Companion occupies a seat and divides the same allowance rather than adding to it), on Trips posted to an event, and on the rare fallback we use when a posted route length is unusable — on that fallback you are charged the per-seat price you accepted, still clamped by the ceiling on the miles actually driven. A Trip with no recorded distance is charged nothing (6.2(d)), and a Trip cannot be rounded, floored, or topped up to a minimum: a short Trip is simply cheap.
An earlier version of this document disclosed a $2.00 per-seat minimum here as "the one place the cap can still be beaten." It was removed from the code on August 1, 2026. We tested the removal rather than reasoning about it: across 134,820 combinations of posted distance, seat count, chosen price, miles actually driven and party size, 2,781 came out above the IRS ceiling before the change — by as much as 1.53 times, and in ordinary three-, four- and five-seat cars, not only large vehicles — and none did after. The $2.00 figure now survives only as the lowest price the app will display on a Driver's price slider; it cannot reach a charge, and a test in our codebase re-runs that sweep to keep it that way. Where the honest per-seat ceiling is too small to be worth offering, we do not offer per-seat pricing at all rather than raise it.
a-bis. Rounding to the cent, and it is the one exception we know of. We will not write "never exceeds" when we have measured otherwise. On the automatic cost-share path each person's share is rounded to the nearest cent independently and those rounded shares are then added up, so the total can land a few cents above the allowance — we measured a worst case of four cents, on a half-mile Trip with eight people aboard. It is arithmetic rounding, not a margin, not a fee, and not a design choice that favours anyone; on an ordinary Trip the total sits far below the allowance. On the driver-set per-seat path there is no such effect at all: that ceiling is rounded down, so a full car comes out at or below the allowance exactly. We are disclosing single-digit cents because a document that says "never" and is wrong by four cents is a document you cannot trust on the larger numbers either.
The one qualification, and it is a real one. The per-seat ceiling is the allowance divided by the seats in the Driver's registered vehicle, so the guarantee is that a Driver collects no more than the allowance across the seats they told us their car has. That seat count is self-reported and we do not verify it (Section 5.1(e)) — a Driver who overstates how many seats their car has raises their own ceiling, and nothing in our system can catch that.
What we have closed, as of 1 August 2026, is every route by which a Driver could seat more people than the car they registered. Our servers now check the registered vehicle in all four places it can matter — posting a Trip, editing its seat count, publishing a Trip to an event, and at the moment a Rider is accepted, which is the one gate every Rider must pass through. A Driver with no registered vehicle on file cannot set a per-seat price at all; that Trip is priced by the automatic cost share instead. Companions and Caregivers each count as a person occupying a seat throughout. Before that change, an event Trip could seat eight people in a four-seat car — twice the allowance — and we would rather say so than describe only the fixed state.
b. If a total ever does come out above the ceiling, we owe you the excess. You cannot see the total collected across all seats, so it would be unfair to make your refund depend on you noticing. Wherever we find that a Trip total exceeded the ceiling for the distance driven — beyond the cent-rounding disclosed in (a-bis) — we refund the excess to every affected Rider within 30 days, without being asked and whether or not anyone complained. We will not describe that as an audit we run on a schedule, because today it is not one: the ceiling is applied at the moment you are charged, so a total above it would be a defect rather than normal operation, and we have no automated sweep looking for one. If you think a Trip of yours was over the ceiling, write to support@tagorides.com with the Trip and the date; we will review it against the recorded distance and the Driver's registered seat count and give you an answer, and any refund, within 14 days. Section 7.7 governs how we investigate and pay a correction, and it survives termination.
c. A Trip can cost more than the estimate you saw. The price shown when you accept a Trip is based on the posted route. Settlement is based on the distance actually driven. If the Trip runs longer than posted, your contribution can be higher than the estimate — still subject to the ceiling on the miles actually driven. If it runs shorter, you pay less.
d. Card processing costs are added on top. See Section 7.4. They are not part of the Driver's reimbursement and they are not part of the cost share.
7. Payments, your balance, and who holds the money#
In plain words: your card is charged after the Trip ends. The money goes through our payment account, the Driver's reimbursement lands in their in-app balance, and they move it out to their bank when they choose. We do not keep a cut, but we do hold the money for a while — so we will not pretend otherwise.
7.1 When you are charged#
a. A Rider is charged at settlement, after the Trip's QR end scan. Nothing is charged when you request, accept, or start a Trip.
b. If neither of our two pricing paths can resolve, settlement is deferred and nothing is charged.
7.2 Who holds the money — stated plainly#
a. The Rider's payment is charged into Tago Rides, Inc.'s own payment processing account with our processor.
b. The Driver's reimbursement is then credited to an in-app balance we maintain as a ledger, and the Driver withdraws it to their own account later.
c. So money does pass through TAGO between the Rider's charge and the Driver's withdrawal. We do not take a share of it (Section 2.1(c)), but we hold it in transit and we are telling you so.
d. Your in-app balance is not a bank account. It is not a deposit, it is not insured by any government agency, and it accrues no interest. It is a record of what we owe you or what you have pre-funded.
7.3 How a Rider's payment is funded#
We draw from your available sources in this order: TAGO points, then promotional credit, then your in-app balance, then your payment card.
7.4 Processing costs — who pays them#
a. Ride charges: the Rider bears the card processing cost, on top of the cost share. When a Trip is funded by card, we add an estimated processing cost — currently about 2.9% of the amount plus 30 cents — to the amount charged. The Driver receives the full cost share and none of this; it exists to cover what our payment processor charges us for taking your card.
b. It is an estimate, and we will tell you who keeps the difference. The surcharge is a fixed formula, not a pass-through of the processor's actual charge. It is collected into our own payment account, and the processor then deducts its real fee from that account. Where the estimate comes out above the real fee, the difference stays with TAGO; where it comes out below, TAGO absorbs the shortfall. The real fee differs from the estimate on, for example, a non-US card or a card type with a different rate. We are not going to describe this as "no revenue per Trip" and leave a spread unexplained — it is small, it is not why we exist, and it is disclosed here rather than discovered later.
c. Balance top-ups do not carry that surcharge. If you add money to your in-app balance, you are charged exactly the amount you chose, and TAGO absorbs the processing cost. A Trip funded from your balance therefore costs you less than the same Trip funded by card. We are disclosing the asymmetry rather than leaving you to discover it.
d. Withdrawals. TAGO absorbs the cost of transferring your balance out. You receive the full amount you withdraw.
7.5 Points and promotional credit#
a. TAGO points reduce what a Rider pays. They are funded by TAGO — a Driver's reimbursement is not reduced when a Rider uses points.
b. Promotional credit — from referrals, bonuses, or goodwill — is not withdrawable as cash. It can be spent on TAGO and nothing else. It expires or may be clawed back if we determine it was obtained through abuse or a broken referral. If we claw back credit we will tell you which credit and why, and you can contest it at support@tagorides.com — a person will look at it again.
c. Points and credit have no cash value, are not property, and we may change or end these programs prospectively.
7.6 Driver onboarding for reimbursements#
To receive reimbursements out of your balance, you complete onboarding with our payment processor. The processor — not TAGO — collects and holds the identity and bank information required by law (for example legal name, date of birth, tax identifier, address, and bank details). We do not receive or store those details.
7.7 Corrections, disputes, and refunds#
a. If you think an amount is wrong, tell us within 30 days at support@tagorides.com. We investigate using the recorded distance and scan history for that Trip and we correct genuine errors.
b. We may reverse a credit, adjust a balance, or issue a refund where a Trip did not happen as recorded, where our systems produced an incorrect amount, or where we find fraud or abuse.
c. Card disputes. Please come to us first — we can usually fix an amount faster than a dispute can. Filing a dispute with your card issuer is your right and we will not suspend you for using it in good faith. We may suspend an account where we see a pattern of disputes we believe to be fraudulent.
7.8 Taxes#
You are responsible for your own taxes. TAGO does not provide tax advice. Because a Driver's reimbursement is designed never to exceed the IRS standard mileage allowance for the distance driven — at the rate in force on the date of the Trip (Section 6.2(c)) — it is intended as a recovery of costs rather than income — but whether that is how your own tax situation treats it is a question for your tax adviser, not for us.
8. Requests, acceptance, and cancellation#
In plain words: either side can cancel before the Trip starts, and it costs nothing. But cancelling on someone is a real cost to them, so do not make a habit of it.
a. A posted Trip is an invitation, not a contract. A Trip arrangement forms when a Driver and a Rider both accept through TAGO.
b. Either party may cancel at any point before the Trip is under way — specifically, while it is requested, accepted, or being coordinated. The other party is notified.
c. There is no cancellation fee, no late-cancellation fee, and no no-show charge. No money moves when a Trip is cancelled. We do not have a penalty mechanism and we are not planning one.
d. Repeated cancellations, or leaving people waiting, may lead us to de-prioritise, suspend, or terminate your account (Section 20). Being reliable is the only thing that makes a carpool work.
e. A Driver may pause receiving requests. Drivers must not accept a Trip they do not intend to complete.
f. If a Trip becomes unsafe or unlawful to complete, stop. Neither party is required by these Terms to continue a Trip in those circumstances.
9. Starting and ending a Trip, and location during a Trip#
In plain words: the Rider scans a code on the Driver's screen to start, and scans again to finish. That scan is the honest record of who was in the car and how far it went. It protects both of you. Section 9.7 is about location, and it is the part of this section most worth your time.
a. A Trip starts when the Rider scans the Driver's TAGO QR code, and it normally ends with the corresponding end scan. Distance measurement, and therefore the cost share, runs between the start and the end of the Trip. A start scan is always required — no start scan, no charge. An end scan is not always required: if a Trip is ended automatically for safety under 9(e), it ends at the last recorded position and is settled on the distance measured up to that point.
b. The codes are cryptographically signed by our servers and expire. They are designed so that one cannot be forged or reused from a screenshot of an old Trip.
c. Why this protects you. A Rider cannot be charged for a Trip they never boarded, and a Driver cannot be asked to drive without a recorded start. Do not scan before you are in the vehicle, and do not scan an end code before the Trip is over.
d. Do not share, photograph for later use, or attempt to reproduce a QR code. Doing so is a material breach.
e. If a Trip appears to be abandoned — for example the vehicle stops moving and neither party responds to our prompts — our systems may send a safety check to both of you and may end the Trip automatically, recording the reason. This is a safety measure, and it affects how the Trip is settled.
f. A Trip that is auto-ended for safety can still be corrected. If the recorded end does not reflect what happened, tell us under Section 7.7.
9.7 Location — what is recorded, when, and what you can refuse#
In plain words: TAGO measures distance, so it uses your location. This is the most sensitive thing we handle, and it deserves its own space rather than a line buried in a section about QR codes. The Privacy Policy has the full detail.
a. During a Trip. Both phones send position while a Trip is live. On the Driver's device this continues in the background for the length of the Trip, so distance is measured correctly if the app is closed or the screen is off. iOS shows its own indicator the whole time. It stops when the Trip completes or is cancelled.
b. Whenever you open the app. While you are signed in, opening the app records your last known position — at most about once every five minutes — whether or not you are on a Trip. Only the latest point is kept. The Privacy Policy explains what this is for and how to switch it off; you can ask us to stop keeping it and to blank the stored point, and you do not have to give a reason.
c. We may ask Drivers to allow "Always" location — and you can say no. We request "While Using the App" as standard. Separately, if a Driver force-quits the app during a Trip, the app may show a prompt asking to upgrade to "Always" location so that measurement can resume by itself. That prompt is optional. Declining it changes nothing about your ability to drive on TAGO, and it never turns into tracking outside a Trip. We would rather tell you the prompt exists than claim we never ask.
d. Trip share links. A share link shows one live position for one Trip to anyone who receives it or is forwarded it, without signing in. It expires after about four hours and you can revoke it sooner. Treat sending it as publishing it.
e. If you turn location off entirely, matching, pickup, and distance measurement degrade, and a Trip may not be measurable. That is a real trade-off and we are not pretending otherwise.
10. Conduct, safety, and prohibited uses#
In plain words: be a decent person in someone's car, and do not use TAGO to run a business, harass anyone, or break the law. Our safety tools help; they do not protect you.
10.1 Everyone#
a. Treat the other person with respect. No harassment, threats, discrimination, sexual advances, hate speech, or violence.
b. No unlawful conduct, and nothing unlawful in the vehicle. No weapons. No open containers. No smoking, vaping, or drug use without the other party's agreement.
c. Be where you said you would be, when you said you would be there.
d. Wear your seatbelt. Follow the Driver's reasonable requests about their own vehicle.
e. Do not damage the vehicle or anyone's property. If you cause damage, you are responsible for it. TAGO does not settle damage claims between users.
f. Do not misrepresent who is travelling. Declare Companions (Section 11).
10.2 Drivers#
a. Hold a valid, current driver's licence for the vehicle you drive.
b. Drive a vehicle you are legally entitled to drive, that is registered, roadworthy, and legal to operate.
c. Carry the insurance the law requires, and read Section 12 before your first Trip.
d. Never drive impaired by alcohol, drugs, medication, or fatigue. Never drive distracted.
e. Report your registered seat count accurately. It is the divisor in the cost-share cap (Section 6.2). Overstating your seats overcharges your Riders and is a material breach.
f. Do not make a detour materially beyond the posted Trip without your Rider's agreement.
g. Do not use TAGO to operate a for-hire, taxi, limousine, delivery, or courier business, and do not solicit passengers for one.
h. What these standards are, and what they are not. The requirements in 10.1 and 10.2 are conditions of access to TAGO, imposed for safety and for legal compliance. They are not instructions for performing services for TAGO. TAGO has no right to control the manner or means of any Driver's driving, and does not exercise one. See Section 13.
10.3 Prohibited across TAGO#
a. Using TAGO to make money, or to attempt to defeat the cost-share cap by any means — including inflating distance, understating seats, unnecessary Trips, coordinated posting, or side payments.
b. Impersonating anyone; using another person's account; misrepresenting your identity, age, or vehicle.
c. Scraping, crawling, bulk-collecting, or reselling anything from TAGO; using bots or automated access; circumventing rate limits or our anonymity protections.
d. Reverse engineering, probing, or interfering with TAGO's systems or security; accessing another user's data.
e. Manipulating ratings, reviews, referrals, points, or promotional credit.
f. Using TAGO's messaging to advertise, spam, recruit, or solicit.
g. Using another person's contact details on TAGO without their permission (Section 11).
10.4 Safety tools — what they are and are not#
a. TAGO provides an emergency button, live Trip sharing with a link you control, trusted contacts, the QR scan record, and post-Trip reporting.
b. These tools are aids, not a guarantee of safety. They do not screen anyone, they do not monitor your Trip, and they cannot prevent harm.
c. In an emergency, call 911 immediately. Do not rely on the app. Our emergency button places a call to 911 from your own phone; it does not summon help from TAGO.
d. Trip sharing. A share link exposes one live location for one Trip to anyone who receives the link or is forwarded it, without signing in. It expires after about 4 hours and can be revoked by you at any time. Only send it to people you trust, and remember that they can pass it on.
e. Reporting. Report a safety concern in the app or at support@tagorides.com. We review reports, but we are not an investigative authority and we cannot resolve disputes about what happened in a car. Serious matters belong with the police.
f. Messages you send through TAGO are stored. They are not scanned by us or by any automated system, and no AI reads them. They are visible to our staff when we investigate a report, and they are retained. See the Privacy Policy.
11. Companions, Caregivers, and Trusted Contacts — other people's information#
In plain words: TAGO lets you name other people — someone riding with you, someone who helps arrange your Trips, someone to text if something goes wrong. Those are real people whose names and numbers you are handing us. Get their permission first.
a. Companions. You may add a Companion to a Trip — someone travelling with you who does not have their own account. You must declare Companions before the Trip. Companions occupy seats, and their presence affects how the cost share is divided. Companions must also be 18 or older. You are responsible for your Companion's conduct as if it were your own.
By adding a Companion you confirm that you have their authority to agree to these Terms on their behalf, and that they are bound by them — including Sections 16 (assumption of risk), 17 (disclaimers), and 18 (limitation of liability). You will indemnify the TAGO Parties for any claim brought by or on behalf of a Companion you added, on the terms of Section 19. A Companion has no account and no separate agreement with us, so the person who brings them is the person who answers for them.
b. Caregivers. You may name a Caregiver who helps arrange or accompany your Trips. Where a Caregiver acts on your behalf through TAGO, they do so with your authority and you remain responsible for the account. If you are named as someone's Caregiver, only act within what that person has actually asked you to do.
c. Trusted Contacts. You may store up to five contacts to text about a Trip. TAGO never contacts them. When you tap the button, your own phone's messaging app opens with a message you send yourself.
d. Your obligation to the people you name. Companion, Caregiver, and Trusted Contact names and phone numbers are stored on our systems, and Companion and Caregiver details are shown to your Driver so they know who is in the car. Before you enter someone's name and number, get their permission. You must not add anyone who has not agreed. You are responsible for the information you enter about other people, and you must remove it when it is no longer accurate.
12. INSURANCE — TAGO PROVIDES NONE#
In plain words: there is no TAGO insurance. Not for Riders, not for Drivers, not for vehicles, not for anything. The only insurance in the car is the Driver's own personal auto policy — and Drivers need to check that it actually covers this. Read all of it.
12.1 The flat statement#
a. TAGO PROVIDES NO INSURANCE OF ANY KIND. No liability coverage, no collision coverage, no comprehensive coverage, no uninsured or underinsured motorist coverage, no medical payments, no personal injury protection, no contingent coverage, no excess or gap coverage, no occupational accident coverage, no property coverage.
b. TAGO holds no policy that covers you, your passengers, your vehicle, your belongings, or any Trip. There is no coverage that "kicks in" during a Trip. Nothing about opening the app or scanning a code changes what you are insured for.
c. TAGO is not an insurer, insurance producer, broker, or agent, and nothing in this document is insurance advice or a representation about what any policy covers.
d. The only insurance that applies to a Trip is the Driver's own personal automobile insurance, plus any coverage a Rider carries themselves.
12.2 Drivers — do this before your first Trip#
a. Call your own insurer and ask, specifically, whether your policy covers carrying passengers who contribute toward the cost of the trip. Not "carpool" in general — ask about passengers who pay you something.
b. Why we are pressing this. Personal auto policies commonly contain a livery or for-hire exclusion — language that removes coverage when the vehicle is used to carry passengers for a fee or for compensation. If that exclusion applies to a Trip, your insurer may deny a claim entirely: your own injuries, your vehicle, your passenger's injuries, and a third party's claim against you.
c. This is why TAGO is built the way it is. TAGO takes no commission, and a Driver's recovery is clamped in our code to the IRS standard mileage allowance for the miles actually driven, at the rate in force on the date of the Trip — recovered once for the vehicle, not once per seat. That structure is cost-sharing rather than carriage for hire. We cannot tell you whether it preserves your coverage — only your insurer can, and their answer will depend on your policy and your state. Nothing in this document is a representation about what any policy covers.
d. You must maintain at least the insurance your state requires for the vehicle you drive, and you must stop driving on TAGO if that lapses.
e. Get the answer to (a) in writing if you can. If your insurer says a Trip is not covered, do not drive on TAGO.
f. Some insurers offer an endorsement or a separate policy for this kind of use. Ask. TAGO does not recommend, sell, or receive anything from any insurer.
g. We have no duty to check. TAGO does not verify, monitor, or inquire about any Driver's insurance, and assumes no obligation to do so. There is no field anywhere in our systems that records a policy.
12.3 Riders — what this means for you#
a. If you are hurt, or your belongings are damaged, on a Trip, your recourse is against the Driver and whatever coverage the Driver actually has — not against TAGO.
b. We do not verify that any Driver has insurance at all. We do not ask for a policy number, we do not see a declarations page, and we have no field anywhere in our systems to record one.
c. Consider what coverage you carry yourself — health insurance, and any uninsured-motorist coverage on your own auto policy.
12.4 Acknowledgement#
By using TAGO you acknowledge that TAGO provides no insurance, that TAGO does not verify any Driver's insurance, and that you accept the risk described in this Section and in Section 16.
13. Drivers are not TAGO's employees, contractors, or agents#
In plain words: nobody works for TAGO by driving on TAGO. Drivers are private individuals sharing the cost of trips they were already taking.
a. Drivers are private individuals. They are not TAGO's employees, workers, contractors, subcontractors, agents, partners, joint venturers, franchisees, or representatives, and they do not perform services for TAGO.
b. TAGO does not engage, hire, assign, dispatch, schedule, direct, supervise, train, or pay Drivers for services. Drivers choose whether to drive, where to drive, when to drive, which route to take, and whom to accept.
c. TAGO sets conditions of access to the platform (Section 10) and may remove access when they are broken. Those conditions exist for safety and legal compliance. They are not instructions about how to perform services for TAGO, TAGO has no right to control the manner or means of any Driver's driving, and removing someone's access to a noticeboard is not the supervision or discipline of a worker.
d. A Driver's reimbursement is not wages, salary, commission, or compensation for services. It is a contribution from Riders toward the Driver's own cost of operating their own vehicle on a trip they chose to take.
e. No Driver may hold themselves out as representing TAGO, and no Driver has authority to bind TAGO or to make any statement on TAGO's behalf.
f. Riders are not TAGO's customers for a transportation service, because TAGO does not provide one.
g. Nothing in these Terms creates an employment, agency, partnership, or joint-venture relationship between TAGO and any user, or between a Rider and a Driver.
14. Messaging, notifications, and SMS consent#
In plain words: we send you push notifications and email about your Trips. We do not send text messages today. If we ever do, the consent terms below apply and you can stop them by replying STOP.
14.1 What we send today#
a. Push notifications about your Trips, requests, messages, and safety prompts, and email for account, Trip, and support matters.
Marketing email and promotional push are ON by default, and you have to turn them off. We are telling you the default rather than describing a choice you were never offered. To turn them off: in the app, Profile → Settings → Notifications, and switch off the promotional and marketing-email options; or email privacy@tagorides.com and we will do it for you. Every marketing email also carries an unsubscribe link. Ride and safety notifications are separate switches on the same screen.
b. Transactional messages are part of the service. You cannot opt out of messages we must send to operate a Trip you are in — a Driver arriving, a Trip cancelled, a safety prompt, a settlement receipt — while you have an active Trip.
c. TAGO does not currently send SMS text messages. No text-messaging service is connected to our systems. When you use "text my trusted contacts" or the call and text buttons for a Companion or Caregiver, your own phone's messaging or dialler app opens and you send the message yourself. TAGO sends nothing.
14.2 SMS consent — the terms that apply if and when we enable text messaging#
These terms are carried forward from our SMS program disclosure and apply to any text message TAGO sends. Our full SMS program details, including the exact consent language shown at the point where you enter your number, are at www.tagorides.com/sms-opt-in. That page is public and requires no login.
a. How you consent. You opt in by entering your mobile number in the app and tapping to continue on the screen where the consent language is shown. That is an explicit, user-initiated action.
b. What we would send. Transactional messages only: one-time passcodes for account verification, account security alerts, and Trip status notifications.
c. Frequency. Message frequency varies based on your activity.
d. Cost. Message and data rates may apply, depending on your mobile carrier and plan.
e. How to stop. Reply STOP to any TAGO message to cancel. After you send STOP, we will send one confirmation message and then stop sending SMS messages. Reply HELP for help, or email support@tagorides.com.
f. Consent is not a condition. Consent to receive SMS is not a condition of purchase and not a condition of using TAGO.
g. Carrier and opt-in data. Mobile information will not be shared with third parties/affiliates for marketing/promotional purposes. All the above categories exclude text messaging originator opt-in data and consent; this information will not be shared with any third parties.
h. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.
i. If you change or give up your mobile number, update it in the app so we do not message someone else. You confirm you are the subscriber or the authorised user of the number you give us.
14.3 Messages between users#
Messages you exchange with another user through TAGO are for coordinating Trips. Do not use them to advertise, harass, or solicit. Section 10.4(f) explains how they are stored.
15. Content and intellectual property#
In plain words: what you post stays yours; you give us permission to show it where the product needs to. TAGO's own app, name, and design stay ours.
15.1 Your content#
a. "Your Content" means anything you upload or write on TAGO — your profile photo, vehicle photo, bio, Trip posts and notes, messages, ratings, reviews, report descriptions, and support correspondence.
b. You keep ownership of Your Content.
c. You grant TAGO a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt for display, and transmit Your Content for the purpose of operating, securing, and improving TAGO, and for the safety and legal purposes described in these Terms and the Privacy Policy. This licence is sublicensable only to the service providers who run TAGO on our behalf — our hosting, database, storage, email, notification, mapping, and payment providers, and the internal tools we use to run the business — and only for those same purposes. It is limited to running the service and lasts as long as we hold the content. The Privacy Policy names those providers and what each receives.
d. We will not identify you in marketing without asking you first. We will not use your name, your photograph, your words, or an identifiable Trip of yours in advertising, a testimonial, or a case study unless you agree. The internal tools we use to draft marketing material cannot reach your personal information — the accounts, vehicle and location tables are outside what they can read at all, and they see only the specific columns we have listed for them. Our Privacy Policy describes those tools; read it, because it is more specific than a promise here.
e. You are responsible for Your Content. Do not upload anything you do not have the right to upload, anything unlawful, anything that infringes someone else's rights, or anyone else's photograph without their permission.
f. We may remove Your Content if it breaches these Terms, and we may retain copies where we need them for safety, dispute, or legal purposes.
g. Feedback. If you send us a suggestion, we may use it without obligation to you. Do not send us anything you consider confidential.
15.2 Our content#
a. TAGO — the app, the website, the software, the designs, the databases, the name "TAGO", the Tago Rides logo, and everything else we created — belongs to Tago Rides, Inc. or our licensors.
b. We grant you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the TAGO app and website for their intended purpose. That is the whole licence. Nothing else is granted.
c. Do not copy, modify, distribute, sell, licence, frame, or create derivative works from TAGO; do not remove our notices; do not use our name or logo without written permission.
d. Third-party material. TAGO includes maps, geocoding, routing, payment, messaging, and cloud services from other companies, subject to their own terms. Their names and marks belong to them.
e. Aggregated and de-identified data. TAGO owns the aggregated and de-identified data and statistics we derive from use of TAGO — for example how many Trips ran on a corridor — and may use them to operate, improve, and report on TAGO and in partner and public reporting. This does not include personal information about you, we will not attempt to re-identify it, and we will not permit a partner to. If it can identify you, it is Your Content or your personal information, and this clause does not reach it.
15.3 Copyright complaints#
If you believe content on TAGO infringes your copyright, write to support@tagorides.com with enough detail to identify the work and the material, your contact details, a statement of good-faith belief, a statement that your notice is accurate, and your signature. We will respond and may remove the material.
16. Assumption of risk#
In plain words: getting into a stranger's car, or letting a stranger into yours, carries real risk. TAGO does not remove that risk. You are choosing to accept it.
Note on who is protected. In this Section and in Sections 17 and 18, protections given to "TAGO" are given to the TAGO Parties as defined at the top of this document.
a. You understand that using TAGO means travelling in a private vehicle with people you may not know, arranged through a platform that does not screen, verify, supervise, or insure anyone.
b. You voluntarily assume the risks of doing so, including the risk of traffic collisions, unsafe or impaired driving, unroadworthy vehicles, uninsured or underinsured Drivers, misrepresentation, theft, property damage, harassment, assault, illness, delay, and being left without a ride.
c. You are responsible for your own decisions about whom to travel with and whom to accept. If something feels wrong, do not take the Trip. Nothing in these Terms obliges you to get into or stay in a vehicle.
d. This Section does not limit any liability that cannot be limited under applicable law, and it does not apply to a claim arising from our own fraud, gross negligence, or wilful misconduct.
17. Disclaimers#
In plain words: we provide the platform as it is. We do not promise it will always work, and we do not stand behind the people you meet on it.
a. TAGO is provided "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE." To the fullest extent permitted by law, the TAGO Parties disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, and quiet enjoyment.
b. We do not warrant that TAGO will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free; that distances, times, or estimates will be accurate; that a Trip will be available when you need one; that a Trip will happen as arranged; or that any user is who they claim to be.
c. We make no warranty about any user. Not their identity, age, enrolment as a student, licence, insurance, vehicle, driving ability, honesty, or safety.
d. We make no warranty about third-party services — maps, routing, payment, messaging, transit information — that we use or link to.
e. Content on TAGO comes from users. We do not endorse it and we do not verify it.
f. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this Section may not apply to you. Nothing here limits any non-excludable statutory right you have, including under California law.
18. Limitation of liability#
In plain words: if something goes wrong, there is a ceiling on what you can recover from TAGO. This is the clause most likely to matter if you are ever hurt, so we have written it in plain view rather than burying it.
a. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the TAGO Parties are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, lost opportunity, or loss of goodwill, arising out of or relating to TAGO — even if we were told such damages were possible.
b. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the total liability of the TAGO Parties to you for all claims arising out of or relating to TAGO or these Terms is limited to the greater of (i) $250 and (ii) the total amount you paid through TAGO in the 12 months before the claim arose — cost shares and the card processing costs added to them, counted together.
We are explaining this figure rather than leaving you to wonder. TAGO takes no commission, so a cap measured on "what you paid to TAGO" would be zero — that is why the cap is measured on what you paid through TAGO for Trips, with a fixed floor underneath it so it can never come out at nothing. This cap does not apply at all to the claims listed in 18(c), which include death or personal injury caused by our own negligence.
c. This limitation does not apply, and nothing in these Terms limits our liability, for: death or personal injury caused by our own negligence; our own fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; our gross negligence or wilful misconduct; or any liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law.
d. Specifically, the TAGO Parties are not liable for the conduct of any user — Driver, Rider, Companion, or Caregiver — including their driving, their vehicle, their insurance, their honesty, or anything that happens during or after a Trip. TAGO is not a party to the arrangement between them (Section 2.2(c)).
e. These Terms do not ask you to release claims you do not know about, and there is no waiver of California Civil Code § 1542 in this document. An earlier draft carried one; it was struck, because it operated on a release these Terms never contained and it took something from you without explaining it.
f. These limits apply regardless of the legal theory — contract, tort, statute, or otherwise — and are a fundamental basis of the bargain between us. Because TAGO takes no commission, we receive nothing from your Trips out of which to fund unlimited liability.
g. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limitations, so parts of this Section may not apply to you.
19. Indemnity#
In plain words: if someone sues us because of something you did, you cover it. This is narrower than it usually is: it covers your conduct, not ours.
a. You will indemnify, defend (at our election), and hold harmless the TAGO Parties from any claim, demand, loss, liability, damage, cost, or expense, including reasonable attorneys' fees, arising out of or relating to:
- your breach of these Terms or of any law;
- your conduct during, before, or after a Trip, including your driving and the condition and insurance of your vehicle;
- Your Content, and information you enter about another person (Section 11);
- a claim brought by or on behalf of a Companion you added (Section 11(a));
- your dispute with another user;
- your taxes.
Note what is not on that list: your ordinary, lawful use of TAGO. An earlier draft made "your use of TAGO" itself a trigger, which would have made a well-behaved user liable for our legal costs. It was removed.
b. This indemnity does not cover any claim to the extent it arises from our own negligence, wilful misconduct, or breach of these Terms.
c. We will notify you of any claim we want covered, and you may not settle a claim in a way that imposes any obligation on us without our written consent.
20. Suspension, termination, and account deletion#
In plain words: you can leave at any time and delete your account in the app. We can suspend an account when we need to, and we will tell you why when we can.
20.1 Your right to leave#
a. You may stop using TAGO at any time.
b. You can delete your account in the app — Settings → Account → Delete account. If your account has a password, we ask you to enter it first. Deleting an account is irreversible, and being signed in on a device that somebody else has picked up is not enough proof that the request is yours. If your account has no password — some accounts created before August 2026 do not — we delete on your signed-in session alone, as before. We begin deletion immediately, not on a queue or after a waiting period. Read 20.1(d) for what that reaches and what it does not.
c. You cannot delete your account while you have a Trip in progress — one that has been accepted, is being coordinated, or is under way — as either Rider or Driver, because doing so would destroy the other person's Trip. Finish or cancel it first, then delete.
d. What deletion removes, and the things it keeps. Deleting your account closes it at once and removes your personal information from TAGO — your profile and photo, your date of birth and contact details, your vehicles and their photos, your saved places, your routines, your ratings, your payment identifiers, your location records, your device tokens, the Companion, Caregiver and Trusted Contact details you entered, and your Trip records. Your sign-in identity is deleted last, and we check that your account row is actually gone before we tell you the deletion succeeded — we would rather report a failure than a silent one.
Four categories are kept, deliberately, with your identity taken out of them — and a fifth that applies only if you were a member of TAGO staff. We would rather set them out than let you find them later. Both California's CCPA/CPRA and the GDPR expressly allow retention of records needed for a legal obligation and for detecting and preventing fraudulent or illegal activity, and that is the ground each of these sits on.
The financial ledger. Amounts, dates, types and Trip references survive, because tax and accounting law requires us to be able to produce our own books (the IRS minimum is three years; we keep seven in practice). Your identity is taken out of it — the account reference is removed and replaced with a one-way code that keeps a former account's rows grouped together without identifying you and without being reversible into your account. The per-Trip split behind each entry, and the Trip's distance and date, are kept the same way, because a ledger you cannot reconcile is not a ledger.
Safety reports — in both directions. A report someone filed about you and a report you filed about someone else are both kept, with the names removed: your account reference is stripped from the report, from the investigation thread, from anything attached to it, and from the record of who handled it. The report you filed is the record that protects the other person, and destroying it when you leave would take their protection with you. An honest limit: what somebody typed in the free text of a report may still name you, and no automatic scrub of ordinary prose is reliable. We are telling you that rather than implying a clean sweep.
The other party's copy of your conversation. Messages you sent in a Trip chat are not deleted out from under the person you were talking to — a conversation is their record as much as yours, and removing one side of it leaves them replying to statements that vanished. Your name comes off: you appear as a deleted user, and the content stays. In practice this reaches very little, because messages are tied to the Trip they were about and your Trip records are deleted; what survives is the copy attached to the other person's own Trip.
A one-way hash of your email address, if you unsubscribed. If you turned marketing email off, we keep proof that this address must not be mailed — stored as a one-way hash, never as the address itself. This is the one case where deleting data would harm you: a suppression record that dies with the account means the next import emails someone who asked us not to.
Staff attribution, if you were a TAGO administrator. Things an administrator published — a mileage rate, an email template, a curated listing, an entry in an administrative log — keep the item and drop the person. This applies to staff accounts only, never to Riders and Drivers.
What we now do about our payment processor, and what we still cannot do. We direct our payment processor to delete your customer record and to close your payouts account, automatically, as part of the deletion — you do not have to ask, and it is not a manual promise. What that direction cannot reach is the identity and bank information the processor collected from you directly for its own legal obligations (Section 7.6): anti-money-laundering, know-your-customer and tax-reporting rules bind the processor, not us, and require it to keep those records. We will not pretend to erase what the law requires somebody else to keep. An honest limit we are still closing: payment records created before August 2026 carry an internal account number of ours in the processor's own metadata. New records carry only a random reference that means nothing once your TAGO account is gone. Clearing that older metadata is work that has been written and has not yet been run, and until it has, the older records remain technically linkable by us even though we commit not to do it (Privacy §6.2).
Two more things we do not control, and will not imply we do. Files attached to a safety report stay in the storage the report depends on — deleting the evidence would defeat keeping the report, and that storage is deliberately not swept. And free text somebody typed into a report may still name you; no automatic scrub of ordinary prose is reliable, so we are telling you rather than implying a clean sweep.
If you think something of yours survived that should not have, email privacy@tagorides.com. We will confirm within 10 business days and complete the erasure, or refuse in writing with reasons, within 45 days — subject to checking that the request is yours and to the exceptions the law allows us (legal obligations, an open safety matter, fraud prevention, or a transaction still in flight). The Privacy Policy sets out the categories in detail.
20.2 Our right to suspend or terminate#
a. We may suspend or terminate your access, with or without notice, if you breach these Terms, if we believe you have put someone's safety at risk, if we believe you are under 18, if we detect fraud or abuse, if we are required to by law, or if we discontinue TAGO in your area.
b. Where we can, we will tell you the reason and give you a way to respond. Write to support@tagorides.com if you think we got it wrong.
c. We may withhold a balance during an investigation of fraud, abuse, or a safety matter. We will tell you in writing within 5 days that we are holding it and why, and we will release it within 30 days unless we tell you in writing that we need longer and why. Anything you are owed is paid out when the investigation closes.
d. We may remove a Trip post, a message, or Your Content without terminating your account.
20.3 What survives#
a. Termination does not cancel any payment obligation either of us already owes.
b. The following survive termination: Sections 1 (who we are), 2.2 (what TAGO is not), 7.7 (corrections and refunds, including an overage refund under 6.3(b)), 7.8 (taxes), 10 (conduct, as to conduct before termination), 11(d) (information about others), 12 (insurance), 13 (not employees), 15 (content and IP), 16 (assumption of risk), 17 (disclaimers), 18 (limitation of liability), 19 (indemnity), 20.3, 22 (disputes), 23 (Apple), and 24 (general).
20.4 We may change or discontinue TAGO#
TAGO is live, and it changes. We may add, change, or remove features, change where we operate, and discontinue TAGO or any part of it. We do not guarantee uptime or continued availability. Where a change materially affects you, we will give notice under Section 21.
21. Changes to these Terms, and how you will hear about them#
In plain words: we can update these Terms, but we will not do it silently. Material changes get actual notice and a date before they take effect.
a. We may amend these Terms. When we do, we will change the "Last updated" date and post the current version at www.tagorides.com/terms.
b. For material changes — anything that meaningfully affects what you pay, what you are liable for, how disputes are resolved, or your privacy — we will give you notice at least 14 days before the change takes effect, by email to the address on your account, by in-app notice, or both.
c. Continuing to use TAGO after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms. If you do not accept them, stop using TAGO and delete your account (Section 20.1) — that is your remedy, and we will not charge you anything for taking it.
d. We will keep the prior version available on request at support@tagorides.com so you can see what changed.
e. A change to these Terms does not apply retroactively to a dispute that already arose before the change took effect.
22. Disputes — how we handle disagreements#
In plain words: we are not taking your day in court away from you. We ask you to write to us first and give us 60 days to fix the problem, because that resolves almost everything faster than a lawsuit. After that, you can sue. You can use small claims court. You can sue in your own county. And you keep the right to join a class action. Most companies make you give all of that up. We have deliberately chosen not to.
22.1 Talk to us first — required#
a. Before either of us starts a legal proceeding, the complaining party must send a written Notice of Dispute and give the other 60 days to resolve it. This 60-day step does not apply to a small claims action, or to a request for emergency or injunctive relief — we are not going to use a waiting period to delay the cheapest route you have.
b. You send yours to us at support@tagorides.com with the subject "Notice of Dispute", or by mail to our registered agent (Section 1(b)). Include your name, the email on your account, what happened, and what you want. We send ours to you at the email address on your account.
c. During the 60 days, both of us will negotiate in good faith. Either of us may ask for a phone or video call, and the other will make a reasonable effort to take it.
d. The 60 days pause any applicable limitation period, to the extent the law allows.
e. This step exists because it works, and because a company with no per-Trip revenue would rather spend the money fixing your problem than litigating it.
22.2 If that does not resolve it#
a. No mandatory arbitration. These Terms do not require you to arbitrate any claim, and we are not asking you to give up a jury trial.
b. No class-action waiver. These Terms do not waive your right to participate in a class, collective, coordinated, or representative action.
c. Small claims court is expressly available. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small claims court if it is within that court's jurisdiction. We affirmatively prefer it for small disputes: it is cheaper and faster for you than anything else.
d. Public enforcement rights are untouched. Nothing in these Terms waives, limits, or requires you to give up any right to seek public injunctive relief, or to report conduct to, or participate in a proceeding brought by, a government agency.
e. If we ever adopt arbitration, we will do it by amendment with advance notice under Section 21, it will apply only to disputes arising after it takes effect, and it will include a real opt-out.
22.3 Governing law#
a. These Terms and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of TAGO are governed by the laws of the State of California, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules, and by applicable federal law.
b. Tago Rides, Inc. is a Delaware corporation, and Delaware law governs its internal corporate affairs — but not our relationship with you. We have deliberately chosen the law of the state where TAGO actually operates and where our users live, rather than the law of the state where the company is filed.
c. Nothing in this Section deprives you of the protection of any mandatory consumer-protection law of the place where you live.
22.4 Venue#
a. A proceeding may be brought in the state courts located in Yolo County, California — the county of our principal place of business — or in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, and each of us consents to that jurisdiction.
b. You also keep the right to bring a proceeding in the county where you live. We will not object to venue there on the ground that it is inconvenient for us. This clause exists to protect you: an exclusive venue at the company's own doorstep is exactly the kind of clause that makes a consumer contract one-sided, and we are not asking for it.
22.5 Time limit#
This clause shortens the time you have to sue us, so it is also flagged in the summary at the top of this document. Any claim arising out of these Terms or your use of TAGO must be brought within one year after the claim arose, or within the shortest period the law allows if that is longer than one year. This does not apply where a longer period is required by law, and it does not apply to a claim for personal injury.
23. If you use TAGO from the Apple App Store#
In plain words: Apple distributes our app but has nothing to do with running it. These clauses are here because Apple requires them.
a. These Terms are between you and Tago Rides, Inc. only. Apple Inc. is not a party.
b. Apple has no obligation to provide maintenance or support for the TAGO app.
c. If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple and Apple will refund your purchase price, if any. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation with respect to the app.
d. Apple is not responsible for any claim relating to the app, including product liability, any failure to conform to a legal requirement, or a claim under consumer-protection or privacy law.
e. Apple is not responsible for the investigation, defence, settlement, or discharge of any third-party claim that the app infringes intellectual property rights.
f. You represent that you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated as terrorist-supporting, and that you are not on any US Government restricted-parties list.
g. You must comply with any applicable third-party terms when using the app.
h. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of this Section and may enforce it against you.
i. Contact for app questions: support@tagorides.com.
24. General#
a. Severability. If any provision of these Terms is unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, or struck if it cannot be. The rest stays in force.
b. No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of it.
c. Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, on notice to you.
d. Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and the SMS terms in Section 14 are the entire agreement between us about TAGO and supersede our earlier terms, including the version dated May 4, 2026.
e. Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a failure to perform caused by something beyond our reasonable control — natural disaster, fire, flood, epidemic, war, civil unrest, government action, labour action, utility or network failure, or the failure of a third-party service TAGO depends on. This does not excuse a payment obligation.
f. Headings and summaries. Section headings and the plain-English summaries are for readability. If a summary and an operative clause conflict, the clause controls — but tell us at support@tagorides.com, because a summary that misleads is a bug in this document and we will fix it.
g. Language. These Terms are written in English. A translation is provided for convenience only; the English version controls.
h. Export and sanctions. You may not use TAGO in violation of US export control or sanctions laws.
i. Third parties. Except for Apple under Section 23, these Terms create no third-party beneficiary rights.
j. Notices to you. We may give notice by email to the address on your account, by in-app notice, or by push notification. Keep your email address current.
k. Accessibility. We want TAGO to be usable by everyone. If you hit an accessibility barrier, tell us at support@tagorides.com and we will work with you on it.
l. Survival of your statutory rights. Nothing in these Terms limits any right you have that cannot be limited by agreement.
25. Contact#
| For | Use |
|---|---|
| Support, safety concerns, complaints, questions about these Terms | support@tagorides.com |
| Privacy requests and questions | privacy@tagorides.com |
| Notice of Dispute (Section 22.1) | support@tagorides.com, subject "Notice of Dispute" |
| Formal legal notice and service of process | Tago Rides, Inc., c/o Legalinc Corporate Services Inc., 131 Continental Drive, Suite 305, Newark, DE 19713, USA |
Emergencies: call 911. Do not email us.
We are an online service and we answer by email. We do not operate a telephone support line, and we would rather tell you that than publish a number nobody answers. Email reaches a person; that is deliberate, not a gap.
Tago Rides, Inc., a Delaware corporation. Principal place of business: Yolo County, California. Formal legal notice and service of process go to the registered agent address in the table above.