Terms, in plain English

Effective November 1, 2026. When this page changes, the date changes — and account holders hear about material changes by email.

These are the terms of using Onward — the website and the app at app.onwardlegacy.com. By using either, or by creating an account, you're agreeing to them. They're written to be read.

What Onward is — and isn't

Onward introduces small business owners to the people who might run their business next, and gives both sides tools to prepare. That's the whole service.

• We are not a business broker or agent. We don't represent you or the other side, we don't negotiate, and we don't take a percentage of any sale.
• We are not lawyers, accountants, or financial advisors, and nothing here — articles, estimates, readiness checks, plans, or answers from Chat, our help assistant, or any other AI assistant in Onward — is legal, tax, investment, or financial advice.
• Any deal that happens is between you and the other party. We're not a party to it, and both sides should bring their own professionals before signing anything.

Estimates are estimates

The valuation estimator produces a range from benchmarks and what you typed. It is not an appraisal, not an offer, and not a promise that a business will sell at any price. Use it to get oriented, not to make decisions on its own.

Your account

• You must be at least 18 and able to enter a contract.
• Sign-in links are personal. Whoever holds your email inbox holds your account, so look after it.
• What you tell us should be true. The service runs on owners and buyers being straight with each other, and accounts that fabricate things get suspended.

What you permit us to do

Everything you write here stays yours. To run the service, you give us permission to:

• Store and process what you provide — profile answers, estimates, assessments, listings, messages — as described in the privacy policy;
• Show the parts you've chosen to make visible to the people you've chosen to show them to — the public part of a listing to signed-in buyers, the gated part only as you allow;
• Use what you provide to operate and improve the features you're using, like matching by fit and calibrating the estimator with anonymous entries.

That permission ends where the privacy policy says it does: we don't sell your information and we don't share it for anyone else's use. Marketing email is separate and only ever happens if you expressly opt in.

Confidentiality goes both ways

• Only post information you have the right to share. If it's not your business — literally — it's not yours to describe.
• Details a seller shares with you behind their consent — names, numbers, documents — are for evaluating that opportunity, not for passing around.
• No scraping, no harvesting contact details, no using the platform to market unrelated services.

Records and signatures are electronic

By using Onward, you agree to get records and notices from us electronically, by email or in the app, and to sign documents electronically on Onward. When you type your name and apply it to a document on Onward, that is your signature. It has the same effect as signing by hand, under the federal ESIGN Act and the state law that applies. Anyone can ask to sign a document on paper instead. That document is then signed outside Onward.

What it costs

Creating an account is free. If something is ever going to cost money, you'll see that clearly before you commit to it — nothing here charges you by surprise.

Some things are paid for once rather than by subscription, like a 90-day pass or a pack of extra questions for the Onward Advisor. An Advisor subscription includes a set number of questions each billing month, which start fresh when it renews and don't carry over. A pack's questions are used only once those run out, and last while your Advisor subscription does: if it ends, any questions left in a pack end with it. If we refund a one-time purchase in full, whatever is left of it ends; a partial refund leaves it as it is.

No guarantees, and the limits of what we owe you

We work to keep Onward accurate, available, and useful, but the service is provided as-is. We can't guarantee a business will sell, a buyer will qualify, an estimate will match a market outcome, or the service will be uninterrupted. To the fullest extent the law allows, Onward and Product Detroit aren't liable for the outcome of any transaction, for decisions made in reliance on estimates or content, or for indirect or consequential damages; our total liability for anything arising from the service is capped at the amount you've paid us in the twelve months before the claim — which, while the service is free, is zero.

Ending things

You can stop using Onward whenever you like, and you can have your account and its data deleted by emailing privacy@onwardlegacy.com. We can suspend or close accounts that break these terms or misuse other people's information — quietly listing someone else's business, say, or leaking gated details.

Keep your own copies of your documents and the agreements you sign. That's your responsibility, not ours. When a paid plan ends (you cancel, your subscription lapses, or a 90-day pass runs out), here's what happens:

• That day, we email you a way to download everything: the documents you uploaded and the agreements you signed, like NDAs and letters of intent.
• 30 days later, we delete the documents you uploaded.
• A signed agreement is shared by the two people who signed it. We delete it only once each of them is past their own 30 days or no longer has an account. Until then, the other signer keeps it.
• Renew within the 30 days and nothing is deleted.
• If you've never had a paid plan, your documents stay while your account exists. A plan we gave you at no charge counts as a paid plan.

The privacy policy says the same, with how long we keep everything else.

Housekeeping

• These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Michigan.
• If one part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stand.
• Onward is operated by Product Detroit. Questions about this page go to privacy@onwardlegacy.com.