Terms of Service

Short version: Everything here is free educational content. We work hard to be accurate, but we're not your lawyer, accountant, or financial advisor. Verify anything that matters with a qualified professional before you act on it.

1. What this site is

MainStreetStart provides free educational courses, guides, worksheets, and tools about starting traditional, low-capital businesses. All content is provided for informational and educational purposes only.

2. No professional advice

Nothing on this site constitutes legal, financial, tax, accounting, or professional advice. While we verify our figures and cite our sources, laws change, regulations vary by jurisdiction, and your situation is unique. Always consult a qualified professional (attorney, CPA, licensed insurance agent, etc.) before making decisions that affect your business, taxes, or legal status.

3. Accuracy and currency

We verify figures against cited sources and update them regularly, but we cannot guarantee that every figure is current at the moment you read it. Prices, fees, tax rates, regulations, and platform policies change frequently. Where we know something is time-sensitive, we say so. Where we cannot verify a figure, we mark it as unverified and explain what we know.

Our claims ledger (available in each course's source files) documents the verification status of every figure. We believe this is more transparent than typical business content, but it is not a substitute for professional verification.

4. No guarantee of results

Starting a business involves risk. Course content describes what operators report and what our sources document, but no educational material can guarantee any particular outcome. Your results depend on your effort, market, execution, and factors outside anyone's control.

5. Intellectual property

All original content on MainStreetStart (courses, lessons, scripts, worksheets, guides, blog posts, diagrams) is our property or the property of our contributors. You may use worksheets for your own business; you may not republish, resell, or redistribute our content without permission.

6. Affiliate relationships

Some links on this site are affiliate links. See our Affiliate Disclosure for how this works and our promise that it never influences recommendations.

7. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, MainStreetStart and its operators shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of this site or reliance on its content. The site is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind.

8. Changes

We may update these terms. Material changes will be noted with a new date above. Continued use of the site after changes constitutes acceptance.

9. Contact

Questions about these terms? Use the contact form — it lands directly in our inbox.