Terms of service

These terms cover your practice’s use of SmileReply. They are written to be read rather than skimmed past. If anything here is unclear, or does not suit the way your practice works, tell us before you sign up rather than after.

Your practice accepts them, together with our data processing agreement, by ticking the box when you first sign in. Whoever ticks it needs to be authorised to commit the practice, and is confirming that the practice is registered to provide the treatments it offers through SmileReply. We keep a record of who accepted, when, and which version.

Separately there is a privacy notice written for your patients, explaining what happens to the photographs and details they send. It forms part of this agreement, and it is worth reading, because it is the promise your patients are shown.

You remain the clinician

This is the most important thing in this document. SmileReply produces a consultation from findings you have reviewed and approved. It does not diagnose, it does not decide a treatment, and it does not practise dentistry.

Nothing reaches a patient until you send it. You choose the treatments, the estimated timeframes and the price range, and you can change what is said before it goes. The clinical judgement in every consultation is yours, and you remain responsible for it in the same way as anything else you tell a patient.

The consultation tells the patient plainly that it is based on photographs, that it is not a diagnosis, and that a full assessment happens in the chair. You must not present it to patients as anything more than that.

What you are responsible for

• Being registered and insured to practise where your patients are.
• Reviewing each submission properly before sending a consultation.
• The accuracy of the findings, treatments, timeframes and pricing you set.
• The content you upload — your logo, your dentists’ recordings, your before and after photographs — including holding the rights and the patient consent to use it.
• Keeping your team’s logins to the people who should have them, and telling us promptly if one is compromised. What happens under your logins is treated as having been done by you.

Telling patients how the consultation is made

A consultation is generated. Except for recordings your own team uploads, the presenter and the voice are produced by software rather than filmed, the wording is drafted by a model from the findings you approved, and the before‑and‑after image is a simulation — not a photograph, and not a prediction of what treatment will achieve. The consultation says so, and so does your patients’ privacy notice.

You must not present it as a recording of one of your dentists, as a clinical image, or as a promise of a result. If your regulator or the advertising rules where you practise require more than the consultation already says — a disclosure on your own website, a particular consent before you collect photographs — meeting that is yours to do. Tell us if you need wording changed in order to comply and we will look at it.

What you must not do

• Send a consultation you have not actually reviewed.
• Use the service for anyone who is not a prospective patient of your practice.
• Upload photographs that are not yours to use, or your patients’ photographs without their consent to this use.
• Resell, sub‑license or re‑brand the service, or give access to a practice that does not hold its own plan.
• Copy or extract our explainer videos, prompts or models, scrape the service, or take it apart to rebuild it.
• Try to reach another practice’s information, or test our security without asking us in writing first.
• Automate submissions, or use the service in a way that degrades it for other practices.

Plans, consultations and billing

Your plan includes a number of consultations each month. The count is on the send, not on the submission: patients can complete the form as often as they like, and an enquiry you decide not to act on never costs you anything.

Fees are billed monthly in advance and are not refundable for part of a month. We will give you at least 30 days’ notice by email before changing your price. Group plans are billed per location, and the consultation allowance is shared across the account.

Your patients’ information

Your patients’ information belongs to your practice. You decide what is collected and why; we hold and process it on your instructions in order to run the service, and for nothing else. We do not sell it, and we do not use your patients’ photographs to train models.

We delete on a schedule, measured from each patient’s last activity: the consultation video at six months; the simulated smile preview and the patient’s link at twelve months, when contact with them ends. Your patients are told this. If you or a patient asks us to remove something sooner, we will, apart from the record described next.

When your dentist sends a patient a consultation, we keep a record of care for you: what the dentist found, recommended and estimated, the photos they assessed, what the patient was told and the messages exchanged, with the patient’s name and contact details. We keep it for as long as dental records must be kept — ten years from the patient’s last activity, or twenty for a child — and then delete it. You hold that record; we store it for you, and you can look up, download and export it at any time from Patient records in your dashboard.

You decide whether an AI-assisted consultation forms part of your clinical record. If it does, export it into your practice management system as you would any other document.

Where the information is held, and which providers help us process it, is set out in the privacy notice. In the language privacy law uses, your practice is the controller and we are the processor: we act on your instructions, and we will help you answer a patient who asks to see, correct or delete what we hold.

We handle information to the standard of the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 and the Australian Privacy Principles. If you need a separate data processing agreement for your own records, ask and we will provide one; it sits alongside these terms, and where the two differ on how information is handled, it wins.

What we are responsible for

Running the service with reasonable care and skill, keeping your practice’s and your patients’ information secure, and telling you promptly if something goes wrong that affects either.

We do not promise the service will be uninterrupted. We take backups daily and test that we can restore them. If a consultation fails to produce, we retry it automatically, and tell you if it still cannot be sent.

Beyond that care and skill, the service is provided as it stands. We do not warrant that it will suit a particular purpose, that a consultation will win a booking, that a simulation will resemble a treatment outcome, or that everything the software generates will be free of error. Reviewing each consultation before it is sent is what catches the last of those, and it is why that step is yours.

Services we rely on

SmileReply is built on services we do not run: hosting, content delivery, the models that draft the consultation and generate the voice and the simulation, and the providers that deliver email and text messages. We choose them with care and they are named in the privacy notice. We are responsible for how we use them. We are not responsible for their own outages or their own terms.

It works the same way in the other direction: if you connect a booking calendar, or take our webhook into your practice management software, what happens on that side is yours.

Changes to the service

We will keep improving SmileReply, which means it will change. Fixes, security work and small improvements we will simply make. We will not remove something you rely on without at least 30 days’ notice by email, and if a removal does not suit you, you can cancel.

What belongs to whom

The software, the treatment explainer videos and everything else we produce stays ours. Your logo, your recordings, your patient photographs and your practice’s content stay yours — you simply give us permission to use them to produce and deliver consultations for you.

We would like to mention your practice as a customer, and to use anonymised numbers about how the service is used. We will ask first before using your name, your branding, or anything that identifies a patient.

Keeping each other’s information private

Each of us keeps the other’s confidential information to ourselves — your patient records, your pricing and how your practice runs on one side; our software, our pricing arrangements and what we are building on the other. Either of us can share it with the people and providers who need it to do their job, and where the law requires it.

This carries on after the agreement ends, and for patient information it carries on indefinitely.

Ending it

You can cancel whenever you like. There is no minimum term and no notice to give us: your plan stops renewing, you carry on using it until the month you have already paid for runs out, and you are not billed again. You can export your submissions and consultations before you go, and we will help if the export does not cover what you need.

If we ever need to end it from our side, we will give you 30 days’ notice, so you are never cut off without warning. We may suspend an account straight away if it is being used to break the law, to harm someone, or in a way that puts other practices’ information at risk.

After you leave, consultations already sent stay available to those patients until the deletion schedule above removes them, so nobody is cut off part way through deciding.

Limits

Nothing here limits anything that cannot legally be limited, including your rights under the New Zealand Consumer Guarantees Act or the Australian Consumer Law where they apply.

Beyond that, neither of us is liable for indirect or consequential loss, and our total liability in any twelve month period is limited to the fees you paid us in that period. We are not liable for clinical decisions, for treatment outcomes, or for what a patient does with a consultation you approved and sent.

Covering each other’s costs

If someone brings a claim against us over something that was yours to get right — a consultation you approved and sent, content you uploaded without the rights or the consent to use it, treatment you did or did not provide, or use of the service that broke these terms or the law — you cover what it costs us to deal with it. We do the same for you if a claim says our software infringes someone else’s intellectual property.

Whichever of us is on the receiving end tells the other promptly, lets them take part in sorting it out, and does not settle in a way that admits something on the other’s behalf without asking first.

Things outside either of our control

Neither of us is in breach because of a delay or failure caused by something genuinely beyond our control — a network or power outage, a provider we depend on going down, a natural disaster, a change in the law. We will tell you what has happened and what we are doing about it, and if it runs past 30 days either of us can end this straight away. It does not excuse you from paying for a period you did use the service, or us from refunding a month we could not provide at all.

Changes

If we change these terms we will email you at least 30 days beforehand and say what has changed. If a change does not suit you, you can leave before it takes effect.

Which law applies

New Zealand law, and the New Zealand courts — though if your practice is in Australia, nothing here stops you relying on Australian consumer law.

The rest

Getting hold of us

Email [email protected] about anything in these terms, your plan, or your data.