What this site is, and what it cannot do for you.

This site is operated by Xenco Labs Inc., 4000 Pimlico Dr #114-321, Pleasanton, CA 94588. Reading it means accepting what follows. If you do not accept it, the remedy is simple and costs nothing: stop reading.

Who this is for

This is written for people responsible for commercial buildings — owners, managers, boards, and the professionals advising them. It is not directed at children, and you must be at least 16 to subscribe to the newsletter or to send us a quote to review. There is no account to create and nothing to sign in to, so there are no credentials for you to keep safe.

This is information, not advice

Everything published here is general information about what published standards require, what licence classifications authorize, and how commercial quotes are commonly structured. It is not legal advice, not engineering advice, and not a professional opinion on your building.

We do not inspect buildings. We do not certify, approve, or condemn any installation. We are not a licensed contractor, a licensed engineer, or a law firm, and reading this site does not create a professional relationship of any kind between us.

For a dispute of any size you should have an attorney, and where a life-safety system is involved you should have a licensed professional look at the actual equipment. We say so throughout rather than implying this site is a substitute for either.

Codes and standards are not reproduced here

Fire, building, and life-safety standards are published by their own organisations and are protected by their copyright. We describe what a standard requires, cite the section, and tell you where to read it. We do not republish the text, and our description is not a substitute for the standard itself.

Codes are also amended, and adopted editions differ between jurisdictions. The edition your authority having jurisdiction has adopted governs your building, not the edition discussed here. Anything on this page can be out of date the moment a code cycle turns.

What we say about contractors

Licence data, classifications and disciplinary history are drawn from public regulatory records and are reported as records, not as accusations. A licence in good standing is not our endorsement of a company, and a past disciplinary entry is not our claim that a company is dishonest today.

We name patterns rather than parties. Nothing here should be read as an assertion that any identified contractor has acted unlawfully. If you believe a record shown here is inaccurate, tell us and we will check it against the issuing authority.

Quote reviews

Where we review a quote for you, the terms of that engagement are the ones quoted to you in writing before the work starts, and those terms govern the review. A review reads the documents you supply against the published standard and the licence record. It is only as good as what you send us, and it is not a substitute for inspecting the equipment.

We are paid a flat fee, never a commission from a contractor and never a share of any reduction — the reasoning is on the about page. Whether to accept, question, or reject a quote remains your decision and your commercial risk.

Fees, invoices and refunds

A review is quoted as a flat fee in writing before any work starts, and that written quote is the price — there is no subscription, no retainer, and nothing that renews on its own. An invoice is due on the terms stated on it.

If we have not started work, tell us and there is nothing to pay. If we have delivered the review, the fee is earned, because what you bought was the reading and the reasoning rather than a particular conclusion: a review that says the quote is fair is worth the same as one that finds a problem, and we will not discount the first to imply otherwise. If you think we got something wrong, say so and we will look at it again at no charge.

What you send us stays yours

Quotes, drawings, reports and correspondence you send remain yours. You give us permission to read, store and analyse them for the purpose of doing the review you asked for, and for nothing else. We do not sell that material, and we do not pass it to the contractor it concerns.

By sending it you confirm you are entitled to share it with us. Where we later write about a pattern we saw, it is de-identified — no client, building, or address — as set out on the privacy page.

Accuracy

We try to be right, we cite what we rely on, and we correct errors when we find them or when you point them out. We do not warrant that everything here is accurate, current, or complete, and public licence databases carry their own errors and lags that we cannot see.

Limitation of liability

The site is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. To the fullest extent the law allows, Xenco Labs Inc. is not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential loss, or for lost profits or lost business, arising from your use of this site.

For any paid review, our total liability is limited to the fee you paid for that review. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

If your use of the site causes us a claim

If someone brings a claim against us because of something you did — material you sent us that you had no right to send, a use of this site that breaks the law, or a breach of these terms — you agree to cover the cost of defending and resolving it. This does not apply to a claim about our own work or our own words.

How you may not use the site

Read it, print it, send it to a colleague. What you may not do is scrape it in bulk or run automated collection against it, republish the writing as your own or use it to build a competing directory, use it to train a model, misrepresent what a record here says about a named contractor, try to get into any part of the system that is not public, or interfere with its operation for anyone else.

We publish contractor records so that a building owner can check a licence before signing a contract. Using them to harass a licensee, or to assemble a marketing list, is not that.

Content and reuse

The writing, structure, and analysis on this site belong to Xenco Labs Inc. You may read it, print it, and quote a reasonable extract with attribution and a link. You may not republish it wholesale, and you may not scrape it to train a model or to build a competing directory.

Links to other sites

We link to regulators, standards bodies, and primary sources because you should be able to check us. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for them.

Changes

These terms may change, and the date at the top changes with them. Continuing to use the site after a change means accepting the revised version.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict of law rules. Where a dispute is not resolved in arbitration under the section below, the state and federal courts of Alameda County, California are the venue for it.

How a dispute gets resolved

Talk to us first. Most disagreements are a misreading of a code section or an invoice line, and they get sorted out in an email. If that fails, any dispute arising from these terms or from a review is resolved by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its rules, with the award entered in a court of competent jurisdiction.

Small claims court is exempt — if your claim qualifies there, you can bring it there instead, and so can we. Either of us may also go to court for an injunction to stop misuse of intellectual property.

Disputes are resolved individually. You and we both give up the right to bring or join a class action or class-wide arbitration. If that waiver is held unenforceable for a particular claim, that claim proceeds in court and the rest of this section still applies to everything else.

Ending access

We may decline to serve the site to anyone who is scraping it, attacking it, or otherwise using it as described above, and we may decline a review we do not want to take on. There is no account to close, so ending access means exactly that: you stop reading and we stop publishing to you. Your unsubscribe rights and your rights over material you already sent us are unaffected, and the sections on liability, indemnity, content and disputes survive.

The rest of the agreement

These terms and the privacy page, together with any written quote for a review, are the whole agreement between us and replace anything said beforehand. If a court finds one provision unenforceable, the rest stays in force. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given it up. You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our written agreement; we may transfer ours if the business moves.

Contact

Questions about these terms: legal@licensedfor.com, or by post to Xenco Labs Inc., 4000 Pimlico Dr #114-321, Pleasanton, CA 94588.