stitch/ Terms of Service / Places Business TermsPlaces Business Terms
Effective Date: July 14, 2026 - Last Updated: July 14, 2026
These terms apply if you create a Places Business Account or use Stitch's Places tab to add, claim, verify, or manage a place. They supplement, and are part of, our general Terms of Service.
1. About These Terms
These Places Business Terms ("Business Terms") are a supplement to, and are incorporated into, Stitch's general Terms of Service. They apply specifically to the Places tab and to anyone who creates a Places Business Account, adds or claims a place, requests ownership verification, edits place details, uploads owner photos, or otherwise uses Stitch's business/place-management tools ("Places Business Tools"). If you only search for and view places as a customer or browser, the general Terms of Service and Privacy Policy already cover you, and Section 9 of these Business Terms (Ratings, Reviews & Photos) applies to any rating, review, or photo you contribute. You do not need a Places Business Account to search Places, view a place profile, get directions, leave a review, or upload a customer photo. If there is a conflict between these Business Terms and the general Terms of Service on a matter specific to Places, these Business Terms control. On everything else - account eligibility, acceptable use, disclaimers, liability limits, arbitration, and regional provisions - the general Terms of Service continue to apply in full.
2. Places Business Accounts Are Independent Workspaces, Not Legal Verification
A Places Business Account is an independent management workspace for adding, claiming, verifying, and managing places on Stitch - it is not the same thing as your Stitch account. Day-to-day, you access a Places Business Account using your regular Stitch login, not a separate sign-in - every Places Business Account requires a password, tied to that account's contact email and contact phone, used only to link to or recover access to the account (see Section 3), and it is never a substitute for signing in to Stitch normally or for inviting members. You may create or belong to more than one Places Business Account (for example, one for your own business and another you manage on behalf of a client), and a Places Business Account may have multiple members, each with a role (owner, admin, manager, employee, or agency) that determines what they can do within that workspace. Creating a Places Business Account requires a contact name, a primary contact's role (owner, manager, employee, agency, or other), a contact email, a contact phone number, and a password, and, optionally, an organization name, website, and city/state. The contact email and contact phone must each be unique to that account - the same email or phone cannot be used to create or verify more than one Places Business Account. Places Business Accounts created before this requirement took effect may not have a password set; an owner or admin of such an account can set one at any time from the account's dashboard, and until they do, no one can link to or recover that account using its contact email or phone. We do not collect and will not ask you for tax identification numbers, Social Security numbers, Employer Identification Numbers (EINs), articles of incorporation or other formation documents, government-issued identification, or banking information as part of a Places Business Account. If a page or message ever asks you for these, it is not a legitimate part of Stitch's Places Business Account flow and you should not provide it. Creating a Places Business Account, by itself, does not verify, certify, or legally confirm that you own or are authorized to represent any business. It is a gate that must be passed before you can attempt to add or claim a place - the actual claim is still subject to duplicate checks and, in most cases, ownership verification as described in Section 7. A Places Business Account's contact email and phone must be unique to that account and are verified through their own OTP process - separate both from Section 7's place-ownership verification and from the listing-contact verification described in Section 6, which covers the phone number and email you enter for a specific listing, not the Business Account's own contact details. Confirming control over any of these contact methods is not legal ownership by itself. Stitch does not perform business registry checks, corporate filings review, or identity verification beyond these OTP processes, and a Places Business Account should not be treated as proof of ownership for any purpose outside Stitch. BOTH the contact email and the contact phone number on a Places Business Account must be verified before that account can attempt ownership verification for any place - verifying only one is not sufficient, and Stitch will not offer the option to attempt a place's ownership verification to an account that has not verified both. This eligibility requirement is separate from, and a prerequisite to, the place-specific ownership verification described in Section 7: passing it only means the workspace is eligible to attempt a claim, not that any claim has been made or any place has been verified.
3. Business Account Members, Roles & Responsibilities
A Places Business Account can have multiple members, each a regular Stitch user granted a role within that workspace: owner, admin, manager, employee, or agency. Owners and admins can invite or remove members, change member roles, and edit the account's profile details; only an owner can close the account. Owners and admins are responsible for who they grant access to and for the actions those members take using the Places Business Tools. Stitch may treat an action taken by any authorized member - adding or editing a place, responding to a suggested edit, uploading a photo, attempting ownership verification - as an action of the Business Account as a whole, not solely of the individual member who performed it. Any member currently viewing a Business Account's dashboard can sign out of that Business Account, which only leaves the dashboard and never signs them out of their Stitch account. A Business Account's password - required at creation and tied to that account's contact email and contact phone - is not an everyday login and does not create any session by itself. It exists so that, using their own signed-in Stitch account, an owner or admin can link to a Business Account they don't currently belong to, or so that someone who has lost their membership on the account (for example, after being removed by mistake, or after losing access to their original Stitch account) can prove they control the account's contact email/phone and regain owner access. This password is never a substitute for member access and must not be shared with employees or contractors as a way to grant them day-to-day access - use the invite/member-role system in this section instead. It uses the same password-strength requirements as a regular Stitch account password. Passwords are stored using a one-way cryptographic hash; Stitch does not store this password in plaintext or any reversible form and cannot look it up or read it back to you. By creating or joining a Places Business Account and using the Places Business Tools, you represent and agree that: - You will only add, claim, verify, edit, or otherwise manage places you actually own or are authorized to manage on behalf of the owner - The contact information, role, organization name, and other details you provide are accurate and not misleading - You will not trigger phone or email ownership verification for a business or place you are not authorized to manage - You will keep the account's contact information reasonably current so Stitch and, where relevant, other users can reach you about the place - You are responsible for the accuracy of the place details you submit or edit, including name, category, address, phone number, website, hours, and description - You will respond to suggested edits and photo reports submitted by other users in good faith, and understand Stitch may act on them independently if you do not - If you are an owner or admin, you will only invite members you trust and will remove access promptly when it is no longer appropriate - You are responsible for keeping a Business Account's password confidential and will not share it with employees, contractors, or anyone else as a substitute for inviting them as a member You may not sell or transfer a Places Business Account to bypass these Business Terms, and you may not create additional accounts to evade a suspension of business tools. Stitch may restrict or suspend a Business Account, or a specific member's access to it, for abuse, impersonation, false ownership claims, spam OTP attempts, review fraud, or other violations of this section.
4. Public Business & Place Information
Place profiles on Stitch - including the business/place name, category, address, phone number, website, hours, description, photos, and average rating and review count - are public. They may be visible to other Stitch users, and, where a place profile page is served publicly, to people who are not signed in to Stitch. A Stitch-native rating/review count (from users who wrote a review on Stitch) is always shown separately from, and never combined into, Google's own average rating and review count for a Google-backed place (see Section 9). Because place information is public, do not submit personal information in a place's name, description, hours, or photos unless it is genuinely part of that business's public-facing information (for example, do not add a private individual's home address or personal phone number as if it were a business listing). Owner badges, verification status, and similar signals shown on a place profile reflect that Stitch's verification process (Section 6) was completed for that place - they are not a guarantee of quality, safety, or legitimacy of the underlying business.
5. Google Places / Google Maps Data & Attribution
Many places shown in the Places tab are backed by data from Google Places and Google Maps ("Google-backed places"). Where Stitch displays Google-sourced photos, Street View imagery, ratings, addresses, phone numbers, websites, or other place details, that data is provided by Google and remains owned by Google, its licensors, or the listed authors, subject to Google's applicable terms and policies. Stitch does not own Google-sourced photos or Street View imagery and displays them with attribution to Google as required by Google's terms. Verifying ownership of a place under Section 7 does not transfer to you any ownership of, or rights in, Google-sourced content already shown on that listing - those photos and that Street View imagery remain Google's, even for a verified owner, and Stitch does not grant you any right to copy, download, scrape, reuse, rehost, or redistribute that content outside Stitch. Google-backed place data can be incomplete, outdated, or inaccurate, and not every Google-backed place has photos, Street View coverage, a listed phone number, a website, or complete hours - these gaps come from the underlying Google data, not from a Stitch removal. If you notice incorrect or missing Google-backed information, you can suggest an edit (Section 8) or, if you are the verified owner, correct the Stitch-managed fields for that place directly (Section 7). Suggested edits and owner corrections update how the place is presented on Stitch; they do not necessarily update Google's own listing. Because Google-backed places reflect a real-world location that is independently indexed by Google, Google-backed place records cannot simply be deleted from Stitch by a business owner. If a Google-backed place should not exist at all (for example, it is permanently closed, a duplicate, or fraudulent), verified owners and other users can flag it for review; manually created listings you added yourself can be deleted by you directly (Section 8). Google photos and Street View imagery are fetched live from Google each time you view them and are never stored, cached, or copied by Stitch - Stitch does not keep its own copy of a Google photo file or a permanent link to one. Because these images belong to Google, not Stitch, they cannot be reported, removed, edited, or claimed as your own upload through Stitch's photo tools; a "View on Google Maps" link is provided so you can report a problem with a Google photo directly to Google instead.
6. Adding, Claiming & No Duplicate Listings
Before you can add a new place, Stitch checks for existing places that already match the name, category, and location you entered. If a matching place already exists - whether it was added by another user, created by an owner, or sourced from Google - you cannot create a duplicate listing for it. Instead, you must claim and verify ownership of the existing place, or submit a suggested edit if you are not able to verify ownership. Manually adding a new, owner-managed listing is different from suggesting an edit to an existing place's public information: a suggested edit never requires verification and never claims ownership, while adding a new listing does claim you own or manage that business. Because of that, the exact phone number and email you enter for that listing on the Add Business form must both be verified by one-time code before you can create it - this is separate from your Business Account's own contact email/phone verification (Section 2), which does not by itself satisfy this requirement. If you change the listing's phone or email after verifying it, you must verify the new value before submitting. Stitch enforces this on its servers regardless of what any particular app version's interface does or doesn't show, so it cannot be bypassed. A manually created listing is not automatically verified as a real-world business; you can separately request ownership verification for it the same way you would for a Google-backed place. Do not create a listing for a business you do not own or manage, submit a place that does not exist, or add a listing with a false or misleading name, category, or address in an attempt to mislead customers or manipulate search results. Stitch may remove, dispute, or otherwise review any listing at its discretion, including one you were required to verify your contact email and phone to create, and without prior notice.
7. Ownership Verification
ELIGIBILITY: Before you can attempt to claim any place, the Places Business Account you are acting under must have BOTH its contact email and its contact phone number verified (see Section 2). Verifying only one is not enough - Stitch will not offer the option to attempt ownership verification to an account missing either. This eligibility check confirms the workspace itself is real enough to attempt a claim; it is separate from, and does not substitute for, actually verifying ownership of a specific place as described below. To claim a place - whether it is Google-backed or manually created by another user - you generally need to verify that you control a public point of contact already associated with that business. Stitch currently supports two verification methods: PHONE VERIFICATION: Stitch sends a one-time passcode (OTP) by SMS text message or automated voice call to the public phone number already listed for the place. Entering the code correctly demonstrates that you (or someone you authorized) can receive communications at that public number. EMAIL VERIFICATION: Where the place has an associated website, Stitch sends a one-time passcode to an email address at that website's registrable domain - for example, name@yourbusiness.com, not a subdomain such as name@locations.yourbusiness.com, and never a personal email address at a generic provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, iCloud, and similar). Personal email addresses are never accepted for this method, even where they superficially resemble or contain part of the business's name. Entering the code correctly demonstrates that you can receive email at that specific business domain inbox - it does not, on its own, establish legal ownership of the business. WHAT VERIFICATION DOES AND DOES NOT PROVE: Successfully completing phone or email OTP verification demonstrates control over the public phone number or business-domain email already associated with the place at the time of verification. It is a strong practical signal, but it is not the same as a legal determination of ownership, and it does not prove you have authority to act on behalf of the business for purposes outside Stitch. Someone who has gained unauthorized access to a business's phone line or email domain could, in principle, pass this verification; Stitch relies on the public contact information already associated with the place and on your representations under Section 3. A successful verification attaches the place to whichever Places Business Account you were signed into (and had selected) at the time - Stitch also records which individual member completed the verification for audit purposes. If verification is completed under the wrong Business Account, contact us using Section 14 so we can review re-attaching it. IF NO PUBLIC PHONE OR EMAIL IS AVAILABLE: If a place has no listed phone number or no website/domain to verify against, phone or email verification for that method will not be available, and the claim may require manual review or additional supporting information before Stitch will grant verified status. IF SOMEONE ELSE HAS ALREADY VERIFIED THE BUSINESS: If a place already has a verified owner or manager, a new claim attempt is treated as a takeover request and is subject to additional scrutiny. If you believe you are the rightful owner or manager and someone else has wrongly verified themselves for your business, contact us using Section 14 with details supporting your claim so we can review it. RATE LIMITS: To prevent abuse, Stitch applies anti-spam and rate-limiting controls to OTP requests, applied per claim, per Stitch user, per Places Business Account, and per destination phone number or email address. Phone verification is limited especially tightly, since each request is a real text message or automated call to a business's public number - Stitch may temporarily block further phone verification attempts for a specific business phone number if a code was recently sent to it, regardless of who is requesting or which Places Business Account they are using, until a cooldown period passes. Repeated, rapid, or suspicious verification attempts may be temporarily or permanently blocked. Do not attempt to trigger OTP verification for a business you are not authorized to manage - doing so may result in suspension of your Places Business Account.
8. Editing, Suggested Edits & Deleting a Place
VERIFIED OWNERS: Once you are the verified owner or manager of a place, you can directly edit the Stitch-managed details for that place, including its name, category, description, phone number, website, hours, and photos. You are responsible for keeping this information accurate. SUGGESTED EDITS FROM OTHER USERS: Any user - not only verified owners - can suggest an edit to a place's details if they notice something outdated, incomplete, or incorrect. Suggested edits are queued for the verified owner (if any) to review, and the owner can accept, reject, or partially apply a suggestion. Stitch may also review and act on suggested edits directly, including where a place has no verified owner or where a suggestion appears well-supported and the owner has not responded. DELETING A PLACE: If you manually created a place listing yourself (Section 6) and later determine it should not exist - for example, it was added in error or is a duplicate - you can delete that manually created listing directly. Google-backed places cannot be deleted from Stitch by a business owner, verified or not, because they reflect a real-world location independently indexed by Google; see Section 5 for how to flag a Google-backed place that should not exist. DISPUTES: Where two users dispute a suggested edit, an ownership claim, or the accuracy of place details and cannot resolve it between themselves, Stitch may review the available evidence - such as verification status, account history, and the substance of the dispute - and make a determination at its discretion, including reverting an edit, removing verified status, or requesting additional information from either party. Stitch's determination in a dispute is not a legal finding of ownership and does not prevent either party from pursuing the matter through other lawful means. CLOSING, LEAVING, OR TRANSFERRING A BUSINESS ACCOUNT: An owner can close a Places Business Account once it no longer manages any active places, and any member (including an owner, as long as at least one owner remains) can leave a Business Account at any time. Closing or leaving a Business Account does not automatically delete the public place listings, reviews, ratings, or photos already associated with it - place profiles remain on Stitch and may need a new verified owner over time. Removing a member does not delete the Business Account itself or any content the account manages. None of these actions - signing out of a Business Account, leaving one, or closing one - deletes or signs out of the underlying Stitch account of any member involved.
9. Ratings, Reviews & Photos
Any Stitch user can leave a 1-5 star rating and written review for a place, with optional photos, and can upload photos of a place as a customer. You can have one review per place - leaving another review for the same place edits your existing one rather than creating a second - and you can delete your own review at any time. Verified owners and managers can additionally upload owner photos, which may be labeled to distinguish them from customer photos, review photos, and from Google-sourced photos and Street View imagery. A Stitch-native review and its rating are always kept separate from, and never combined into, any average rating or review count Google provides for a Google-backed place (Section 5). Reviews and ratings should reflect an honest account of a real experience with the business or place. You may not post a review for a place you have no genuine experience with, post multiple reviews for the same place from accounts you control, offer or accept payment or other incentives in exchange for a positive review without clearly disclosing that incentive, or coordinate with others to inflate or deflate a place's rating. Photos you upload must be your own or otherwise ones you have the right to share, must actually depict the place in question, and must not contain content that is sexually explicit, illegal, misleading, or that exposes another person's private information without their consent. Any user can report a photo or a review they believe violates these rules using the report option in the photo viewer or on the review itself; Stitch reviews reports and may remove reported content at its discretion. Business owners and managers may not use the Places Business Tools to harass, threaten, or retaliate against a reviewer, submit fake reviews of their own business, submit negative or fraudulent reviews of a competitor's business, or otherwise attempt to manipulate ratings through means other than genuinely improving the business. A verified owner or manager can hide (and, for Stitch's own review, restore) a review through Stitch's reporting/moderation tools, but can never edit a review's rating, text, or photos - only Stitch, through those same tools, can restore a review that a business hid.
10. Prohibited Conduct Specific to Places
In addition to the general Acceptable Use rules in the Terms of Service, when using the Places tab or the Places Business Tools you may not: - Create a duplicate listing for a place that already exists on Stitch - Falsely claim ownership or management authority over a place you do not own or manage - Impersonate a business, its owner, staff, or a customer - Post fake, incentivized-but-undisclosed, or coordinated reviews, or otherwise manipulate ratings - Harass, threaten, extort, or attempt to coerce a business owner or a reviewer (for example, threatening a negative review, or threatening to submit false or damaging suggested edits, unless paid or given something of value) - Sabotage a competitor's listing through false suggested edits, fraudulent ownership claims, fake negative reviews, or abuse of the reporting tools - Upload photos that are copyrighted by someone else without permission, sexually explicit, illegal, misleading, or that expose someone's private information without consent - Post another person's private information in a place's name, description, photos, or reviews where it is not genuinely relevant to the business - Attempt to trigger phone or email OTP verification for a business you are not authorized to manage - Abuse the suggested-edit or reporting systems to vandalize, deface, or spam a place's listing We may remove content, reject or revert edits, restrict or suspend access to the Places Business Tools, remove verified status, or terminate a Places Business Account or the underlying Stitch account at our discretion for violations of this section, with or without prior notice, consistent with the Terms of Service.
11. Third-Party Providers
The Places tab and Places Business Tools rely on third-party providers to function, including Google (Google Places / Google Maps data, photos, and Street View imagery), Twilio or a similar provider (SMS and voice delivery for phone OTP verification), and Firebase (application infrastructure, authentication, and data storage). Use of these features is also subject to the applicable terms of those providers where relevant. Stitch is not responsible for outages, inaccuracies, or changes in the data or services provided by these third parties, though we will make reasonable efforts to keep Places working as expected.
12. Business Plus
Business Plus is an optional paid subscription, $9.99 per month, for your Places Business Account as a whole - it is a subscription for the Business Account, not for any single listing. You can purchase Business Plus as soon as a Business Account exists, including before you have added or verified any place under it; unlike ownership verification, which applies to one specific place, Business Plus subscribes the account and its business tools. A place that Business Account manages still needs its own verified ownership (Section 7) before it can use place-specific Business Plus tools such as sponsored placement targeting - Business Plus buys the Business Account's eligibility to use these tools, it does not itself grant or substitute for a specific place's ownership verification, and it cannot be purchased for a random, unclaimed, Google-backed place directly. WHAT BUSINESS PLUS INCLUDES: For each verified place a Business Plus Business Account manages: a "Verified Place" badge (see below), analytics for that place (profile views; call, directions, website, and email taps; and search and sponsored-placement appearances and clicks), sponsored placement in eligible Places search results, and the ability to choose which city and up to three categories that place's sponsored placement targets. Business Plus increases visibility in eligible Places searches; placement depends on relevance, location, targeting, and availability, and is never guaranteed. Business Plus does not guarantee any number of leads, calls, direction requests, or sales, does not guarantee a specific rank or position in search results, and does not guarantee that sponsored placement will appear for every search a customer runs, even one matching a place's targeting. SPONSORED LABELING: Any result surfaced because of Business Plus is always visibly labeled "Sponsored" in the search results - it is never presented as, or mixed in to look like, an ordinary organic result. Business Plus never removes, hides, or replaces another listing's organic search result; it can only add a small number of labeled sponsored placements above organic results for relevant searches. VERIFIED PLACE BADGE: The "Verified Place" badge on a place means that place's own contact phone number or email was verified, or that place's ownership was verified (Section 7) - nothing more. It does not mean the business is a "verified professional," an "official business," "licensed," government-approved, or otherwise legally certified, and it is not created by a Business Plus purchase alone; a place that has not completed its own contact or ownership verification does not display this badge regardless of whether the managing Business Account has Business Plus active. ANALYTICS: Analytics shown for a place under a Business Plus Business Account - profile views; call, directions, website, and email taps; search appearances; sponsored appearances and clicks; and any totals derived from them - are Stitch's own estimates, generated from real user interactions with that place, and may undercount, be delayed, or not perfectly reflect every interaction - for example, a user action is deduplicated per viewer per day, and actions taken by the account's own owners, admins, or managers are intentionally excluded. Where a place has too little activity, or no activity has been recorded yet, we show that plainly rather than an invented or estimated number. BILLING & PAYMENT: On iOS and on the web, Business Plus is purchased and billed securely through Stripe; on Android, through Google Play's billing system. Regardless of which of these you use, Business Plus is billed monthly and renews automatically until canceled. You can cancel at any time through the billing system you used to purchase it (the "Manage Business Plus" option in your Business Plus settings for iOS/Stripe or web purchases, or your Google Play subscriptions for Android purchases) - Stitch cannot process or apply an Android cancellation on your behalf, since only Google can do that for a Google Play purchase. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BUSINESS PLUS ENDS: If you cancel, the Business Account keeps its Business Plus features - across every place it manages - through the end of the period you already paid for, then they turn off. If a payment fails or the subscription otherwise lapses, expires, is refunded, or is reversed as a chargeback, sponsored placement is removed across every place the account manages - immediately for a refund or chargeback, and either immediately or after a short grace period for a failed payment, depending on the payment processor involved - though we may still show that a subscription exists in a payment-issue or grace-period state before fully turning it off. If a specific place is later deleted, closed, suspended, or its ownership is disputed or transferred, sponsored placement for that place is removed or paused regardless of whether the account's subscription itself is still active, and any billing questions in that situation should be directed to the payment processor and to Stitch support (Section 14). Stitch may also suspend sponsored placement for a specific place at its own discretion - for example, for a suspected policy violation - without necessarily canceling the account's underlying subscription; where this happens, billing continues to be handled by the applicable payment processor unless and until the subscription itself is separately canceled or refunded. Refunds for Business Plus purchases are handled by the payment processor you used - Stripe or Google - according to that processor's own refund policies; Stitch does not independently issue refunds for amounts charged by Google.
13. Data Collected for Places Business Accounts
Creating and using a Places Business Account involves additional data collection beyond a standard Stitch account, described in detail in our Privacy Policy. In summary, we collect: the Business Account's contact name, role, organization/business name, contact email, contact phone, website, city/state, its acceptance of these Business Terms, verification status, claim attempts, OTP delivery and verification metadata, rate-limiting metadata; and, because a Business Account is a multi-member workspace, its membership roster and each member's role, invitations sent and accepted, role changes, which member performed a given action, which Business Account you have selected as active in the app, and the relationships between a Business Account and the places it manages. If you set an optional recovery password, we store a one-way cryptographic hash of it (never the password itself) plus failed-attempt metadata used for rate-limiting. We do not collect tax identification numbers, Social Security numbers, EINs, incorporation or formation documents, banking or payment account details, or government-issued identification as part of a Places Business Account. See our Privacy Policy's Places section for full detail on retention and your rights regarding this data.
14. Enforcement, Suspension & Contact
We may, at our discretion, remove or moderate place listings, photos, reviews, or suggested edits; reject or revert an edit; decline or revoke ownership verification; restrict or suspend your access to the Places Business Tools; or terminate your Places Business Account or underlying Stitch account, in each case for actual or suspected violation of these Business Terms, the general Terms of Service, or our Community Guidelines, or where we reasonably believe doing so is necessary to protect users, businesses, or Stitch. If you believe a photo, review, or other listing content that a Stitch user uploaded infringes your copyright or other intellectual property rights, use the Terms of Service's Copyright and IP Complaints section for how to submit a notice. Google-sourced photos, ratings, and Street View imagery should be reported to Google directly, as described in Section 5. For questions about these Business Terms, to dispute an ownership claim or verification outcome, to report a problem with a place listing, or for privacy requests related to your Places Business Account, contact us at support@stitchmessaging.com. Please include your registered email or Stitch username, and, where relevant, the name and location of the place involved, so we can investigate effectively. We may revise these Business Terms from time to time using the same process described in Section 14 of the general Terms of Service ("Changes to These Terms"). The "Last Updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision.