Terms of service

PlateRegistry is run by Jahanzaib Majid, a sole proprietor in Florida. There is no company behind it yet: just one person and the software.

Post: 7737 N. University Drive, Suite 104, Tamarac, FL 33321. Email: support@theplateregistry.com. Email is the fastest way to reach us, and it is the address to use for anything in these terms: questions, complaints, or notice of a dispute.

“We” and “us” mean PlateRegistry. “You” means the person with the account. Using the site or paying for a plan means you accept these terms.

You give us a list of Florida personalized plates. We check them against the state’s public availability lookup around the clock and email you when one on your list comes up as available. That is the whole product.

Checks run every minute, but one run works through part of the queue, so a long list takes a few minutes to get all the way round. We do not promise every plate is checked every minute.

Please read this part properly. It is the part people assume wrong.

• We do not reserve, buy, hold or transfer plates. We never touch the state’s ordering system on your behalf. When you get an alert, you reserve the plate yourself at your county tax collector.
• We cannot guarantee a plate will ever become available. Someone else may hold it for years, or forever.
• We cannot guarantee you will get it. A released plate is open to everyone in Florida, not just to you. Someone can take it minutes after your alert lands.
• We cannot guarantee the state registry is right or reachable. We report what the state’s page says. If that page is wrong, down, slow, or changes its wording, we can read it wrong or not at all.
• Alerts can be late, missed or filtered. Email is not a guaranteed channel. An outage at us, at our email provider, or at the state can cost you a release, and a perfectly good alert can land in spam.
• You may not be the only one watching. Other customers can have the same plate on their lists. When it frees up we alert everyone watching it in the same round, and no plan buys a place at the front.

The service is provided as it is. We work at it and we want it to be right, but we do not promise it is faultless or always available.

You must be 18 or over to have an account. The service is aimed at people reserving plates in Florida; we do not knowingly take accounts from under-18s.

One account per person, and the email address on it should be one you actually read: every alert we send goes there, and it is how you sign in.

There are no passwords. You type your email address, we send a one-time link, and tapping it signs you in. The link works once and expires after 15 minutes.

Anyone who can read that email can get into your account, so keep your inbox to yourself. Tell us at support@theplateregistry.com if you think someone else is in your account.

Three sizes, all in US dollars:

• Starter: $3 a month, or $30 a year, up to 3 plates on your list at once.
• Plus: $5 a month, or $50 a year, up to 10 plates on your list at once.
• Pro: $8 a month, or $80 a year, up to 20 plates on your list at once.

You choose how often you pay when you start a plan. A monthly plan renews every month and a yearly plan renews every year, each until you cancel it. The yearly price is 2 months less than paying monthly for a year. Everything else is the same: the size of your list is what you are choosing, not how often you are billed.

Every plan is checked around the clock and alerts the same way; the only difference is how many plates you can watch. You can swap which plates are on your list whenever you like.

We can change prices. If the price of a plan you are paying for is going up, we will email the address on your account at least 30 days before the new price applies to you, and that email will say how to cancel first. A new price never applies to a month, or a year, you have already paid for: it can only start at a renewal. The billing portal shows the plan you are on and every invoice on your account, and cancelling there before a renewal means you are never charged the new price.

Payments are handled by Stripe. Your card details go straight to Stripe and never reach our site. Your plan renews automatically, every month or every year depending on the one you chose, until you cancel it.

Your first 3 days

If you have never had a plan with us before, a monthly plan starts with 3 days free. We take your card details when you start, because that is what lets the plan carry on by itself, but nothing is charged during those 3 days. Your list is switched on and your plates are checked the whole time, exactly as they are on a paid plan. Cancel in the billing portal before the 3 days are up and you are not charged at all. If you do not cancel, your plan starts on the day after, at the price shown when you signed up, and renews from then until you cancel. The free days are once per account, and are not offered on a yearly plan, which is already discounted.

Cancelling

Cancel any time from the billing page in your dashboard, which opens Stripe’s billing portal. Cancelling stops future charges and your list keeps running to the end of the month, or the year, you have already paid for. After that it switches off. Your plates stay saved either way, and starting a plan again switches them back on.

If a payment fails

Your list switches off straight away: no grace period. Your plates are not deleted. Stripe retries the payment, and if one of those retries goes through, your list switches back on by itself. You can also fix the card in the billing portal.

Changing plans

Change plan any time in the billing portal, including switching between paying monthly and paying yearly. Move to a smaller plan and your oldest plates stay switched on up to the new limit; the rest pause. Nothing is deleted, and moving back up switches them on again. When you change plan, Stripe works out the difference for the part of the month, or the year, you have paid for and puts it on your next invoice.

Separately from the plans, we will help you find a plate. You tell us the word or the name you are after, we go looking for spellings that are actually available, and we come back with what we found.

It is paid, and it is not part of any plan: nothing in a subscription includes it, and paying for one does not include the other. The fee depends on what you are asking for, so we quote you a price before we start and you decide then. No work happens, and nothing is owed, until you have agreed the fee.

What you are paying for is the looking and what we find. It is not a promise of a particular plate, or of any plate: everything in “What it does not do” above applies here too. We do not reserve or order anything on your behalf, and a plate we find free can be taken by somebody else before you get to the tax collector.

A consultation happens by email, not through your account. What you send us for one is handled the way the Privacy Policy describes.

We do not refund part of a month or part of a year. Cancelling stops the next charge, and your list keeps running to the end of the month, or the year, you have already paid for. A yearly plan is paid for the whole year up front, and cancelling it does not bring any of that back, so if you are not sure you want a whole year, pay monthly.

If the service materially failed you (we were down, or we plainly did not check what you were paying us to check), write to support@theplateregistry.com and we will look at it case by case. We are not promising a refund window we do not have, and for the price of a plan we would rather sort it out than argue about it.

Use the site the ordinary way. Do not:

• scrape, crawl or automate the site, or hammer it with scripted requests;
• resell, republish or redistribute our alerts, or run a watching service off the back of this one;
• share one account between several people to get round the plate limit;
• request sign-in links for email addresses that are not yours;
• try to break, probe or get round the site’s security, or anyone else’s account;
• use the service for anything illegal.

If you do any of that we can suspend or close your account and stop your subscription. Where it is reasonable we will tell you why first. Anything that puts the service or the state’s systems at risk counts as serious abuse, and we stop it immediately.

We also rate-limit sign-in emails and plate checks in the plate box on the home page and the spelling ideas page, and there is a daily limit on how many plates one account can add. None of it is a punishment: the first keeps one person from using up everyone’s email quota, and the other two protect the state’s lookup, which those checks and each newly added plate share with the checks paying customers rely on.

Your plates are yours. Remove a plate whenever you like and it stops being watched immediately, which frees the slot for another one.

You can close your account yourself, from your dashboard. Closing deletes your account, the plates on it and your sign-in sessions from our live database, cancels any sign-in links still outstanding, and then tells Stripe to cancel your subscription. There is no fee, nothing to ask us for, and no retention offer. It is immediate and it cannot be undone.

Immediate means the live database. We take a nightly backup copy of the database onto hardware we own and keep each copy for about 30 days, so a closed account ages out of the backups within about 30 days rather than instantly, and the company that hosts the database keeps a recovery history of its own for six hours. The Privacy Policy lists what is left and for how long.

One thing worth knowing: closing cancels the subscription straight away, not at the end of the month, or the year, you have paid for, and the time left on it is not refunded. If you want to use up what you have paid for, cancel in the billing portal instead and close the account when it runs out.

Closing removes you from here, not from Stripe. Stripe keeps its whole customer record (your email address and every payment you made), and we do not delete it for you. Cancelling the subscription is the part we can do, and unless Stripe is unreachable at that moment, we do it there and then.

If Stripe cannot be reached at that moment, we still close the account rather than trap you in it. But we cannot confirm the billing stopped, and your account is already gone from here, so nothing on our side goes back to check. The page you land on says exactly that and asks you to email support@theplateregistry.com; that email is what gets the subscription cancelled by hand. If a charge ever turns up after you have closed your account, email us and we will refund it.

We can also close an account ourselves: if we shut the service down, or under the fair use section above. If we close the service, we will give you notice by email and stop billing you.

PlateRegistry is independent. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, any county tax collector, or any other part of the state of Florida. We read a public page they publish; that is the whole relationship.

Paying us does not pay for a plate. The plate itself, and whatever the state charges for it, is between you and your county tax collector.

If we get something wrong, we will try to fix it. But there is a limit to what a plate watcher at these prices can carry, and it is fair to say so up front.

Our total liability to you, for everything, is capped at the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the claim. We are not liable for a plate you did not get, for what you would have done with it, or for lost profits, lost opportunities or knock-on losses. That includes a missed, late or wrong alert, an outage, or bad information from the state’s page.

None of this cuts out liability that the law does not let us cut out, such as our own fraud. If some part of this section is unenforceable where you live, the rest still stands.

We can update these terms. When we do, the date at the top of this page changes, so you can always see when it last happened. If a change is material, meaning it changes what you pay, what the service does for you, or your rights under these terms, we will also email the address on your account at least 30 days before it applies, and that email will say how to cancel first.

If you do not like a change, cancel before it applies. Carrying on with the service after that date means you accept the new terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute goes to the state or federal courts sitting in Broward County, Florida, and we both agree those courts can hear it. Before anyone files anything, email support@theplateregistry.com. Most things are a misunderstanding about what the service does, and those are cheaper to fix in an email.