Terms & Conditions

Last updated September 25, 2026

01 Agreement to these terms

These Terms & Conditions are an agreement between you and Penny Planters, LLC (“The Penny Planter”, “we”, “us”), a Minnesota limited liability company. They cover your use of thepennyplanter.com, our iOS and Android apps, and everything we provide through them.

By creating an account or using the service you accept these terms and our Privacy Policy. If you do not accept them, please do not use the service.

02 Who may use the service

You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding contract. The service is designed for homeowners in the United States; we make no claim that it is appropriate or accurate anywhere else. You agree to give accurate registration details and to keep them current.

If you use the service on behalf of a business — for example as a realtor setting up client accounts — you confirm you are authorised to accept these terms on that business’s behalf.

03 What the service does

The service takes figures you enter about your home, mortgage and finances and turns them into calculations, comparisons, charts and educational explanations: your total monthly cost of ownership, your equity position, an estimate of the gain if you sold, payoff scenarios, a net worth summary, a yearly review and a document vault for your paperwork.

The homeowner tools are provided free of charge. We may introduce paid features in future; if we do, the price and terms will be shown before you buy anything, and nothing you already use will start charging you without your agreement.

04 Educational information, not professional advice

This is the most important section of these terms. Everything the service produces is general, educational information and an estimate based on the figures and assumptions you provide.

• It is not individualised financial, investment, tax, legal or accounting advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell, refinance, borrow against or hold any property or investment.
• It is not an appraisal, a broker price opinion or any other opinion of value by a licensed appraiser.
• It is not a loan offer, a pre-approval, a rate quote or a commitment to lend. We are not a lender, a mortgage broker, a real estate brokerage, an insurance producer, a tax preparer or an investment adviser, and we are not paid by any of them for your information.
• Using the service does not create a fiduciary, advisory, agency or professional relationship between you and us.

Before you act on anything you see here — a refinance, a sale, an extra payment plan, a tax position — talk to a licensed professional who knows your full situation. Tax outcomes in particular depend on facts this service does not ask for.

05 What the calculations assume

So that you can judge the output for yourself, here is what sits behind it:

• Loans are modelled as standard fixed-rate, fully amortising mortgages. Adjustable rates, interest-only periods, balloon payments, biweekly programmes, forbearance and recast are not modelled.
• Property value growth, where shown, is a straight-line estimate from your purchase date to your own estimate of today’s value. It is not a market forecast, and past appreciation does not predict future appreciation.
• Escrowed costs are converted from the annual amounts you enter. Tax assessments, insurance premiums, HOA dues and utilities change over time, and the service does not know when yours will.
• The maintenance reserve is a rule-of-thumb allowance, not a prediction of what your home will actually need.
• Mortgage insurance is modelled on the figures you enter and is removed on a simplified schedule. Your servicer’s own rules govern when it actually ends.
• The Home Sale & Gain figures show the gross gain between your purchase price and your estimated current value, compared against the federal capital gain exclusion amounts for a single filer and for married filing jointly. They do not account for selling costs, capital improvements, depreciation, partial-year or partial-use situations, the ownership and use tests, state or local taxes, or your eligibility for the exclusion at all. Treat them as a conversation starter for your tax professional, not as a tax calculation.

06 Your figures are your responsibility

The output is only as good as the input. If your loan balance, interest rate, term, purchase date or estimate of market value is wrong, every figure derived from it will be wrong too — often by a lot. You are responsible for the accuracy of what you enter and for checking results against your mortgage statement, tax bill and insurance documents before you rely on them.

07 Your account

Keep your password confidential and do not let anyone else use your account. You are responsible for what happens under it. Turn on two-factor authentication if you can, and tell us promptly if you believe your account has been accessed by someone else.

One account is for one person. Do not create accounts by automated means or on behalf of someone who has not asked you to.

08 Realtor accounts

A realtor may create and administer homeowner accounts for their clients through the Realtor Portal. If you are a realtor, you confirm that you have your client’s permission to create an account for them and to enter their information, that you will use the portal only for genuine clients, and that you will comply with the laws and licensing and advertising rules that apply to your profession — including those on unsolicited email and calls.

Portal access is granted by arrangement and may be withdrawn. The homeowner, not the realtor, owns the homeowner account and can take sole control of it at any time.

09 Your content and the Document Vault

The figures you enter and the files you upload stay yours. You grant us only the permission we need to operate the service for you — to store your content, process it to generate your results, and display it back to you. We do not use it for any other purpose.

You confirm that you have the right to upload what you upload. Do not store anything you have no right to hold, anything unlawful, or anything containing malicious code. We do not routinely review uploaded files, but we may remove content that violates these terms.

The vault is a convenience, not a backup service. Keep your own copies of anything important.

10 Acceptable use

Please do not:

• break, overload, probe or interfere with the service or the systems it runs on;
• scrape, crawl or bulk-download the service, or use it to build a competing product;
• copy, resell, white-label or redistribute the calculators, reports or content without our written permission;
• reverse engineer or attempt to extract the source code, except where the law expressly allows it;
• upload malicious code, or use the service to store or transmit anything unlawful; or
• access another person’s account, or use the service to impersonate anyone.

11 Our intellectual property

The service — including its software, calculators, report layouts, text, graphics, logos and design — belongs to Penny Planters, LLC or its licensors and is protected by copyright and other laws. “Penny Planters”, “The Penny Planter”, our logo and our tagline are our trademarks; a federal trademark application and a copyright registration have been filed.

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the service for your own household’s purposes — and, for realtors with portal access, for your own clients. Everything else is reserved. You may of course keep, print and share your own reports.

12 Feedback

If you send us an idea or a suggestion, we may use it freely and without obligation or payment to you. We are grateful for it — this simply avoids a dispute later about who thought of what.

13 Third-party links and services

The service may link to other websites or rely on third-party providers such as our host, our email provider and the app stores. We do not control them and we are not responsible for their content, their products or their privacy practices. Your use of the apps is also subject to Apple’s and Google’s own terms.

14 Availability and changes

We aim to keep the service running and accurate, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free availability. We may change, add, suspend or withdraw features, and we may need to take the service down for maintenance. If we discontinue a feature you rely on, we will give reasonable notice where we can.

15 Suspension, termination and deletion

You may stop using the service at any time and delete your account yourself — see Delete Your Account. Deleting your account permanently removes your properties, snapshots, annual reviews, net worth history and vault files, so export anything you want to keep first.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, that is being used unlawfully, or where we are required to do so. Where it is reasonable, we will tell you why and give you a chance to put it right. The sections that by their nature should survive — intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity and governing law — continue to apply after an account ends.

16 Disclaimer of warranties

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, and any warranty that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that any figure it produces will be accurate, complete or current.

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so some of the above may not apply to you.

17 Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither we nor our members, managers, employees or contractors will be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost savings, lost opportunity, lost data or business interruption, arising out of or relating to the service — including any decision you make on the basis of an estimate produced here — whether the claim is brought in contract, tort or otherwise, and even if we have been advised that such damages are possible.

Our total liability for all claims relating to the service will not exceed the greater of (a) the amount you paid us for the service in the twelve months before the claim arose, or (b) one hundred US dollars ($100).

Some states do not allow certain limitations of liability, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

18 Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Penny Planters, LLC and its members, managers, employees and contractors from any claim, loss, liability or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your use of the service, your content, your breach of these terms, or your violation of any law or of anyone else’s rights.

19 Governing law and disputes

These terms and any dispute arising from them or from the service are governed by the laws of the State of Minnesota, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Before filing anything, please contact us at info@thepennyplanter.com and give us 30 days to try to resolve the matter informally — most things are settled that way. If that does not work, you and we agree that any dispute will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Hennepin County, Minnesota, and we each consent to the jurisdiction of those courts. Either of us may still bring an individual claim in small claims court.

20 Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the service develops. The date at the top shows the current version. If a change is material we will give notice by email or in the service before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service afterwards means you accept the updated terms.

21 General

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us about the service and replace anything said before. If a provision is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing a provision on one occasion is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent; we may transfer ours in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of the business. Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, employment or agency relationship.