Terms and conditions are the contract between you and the people who use your site or service. Unlike a privacy policy, no law forces most businesses to publish them; you publish them because they are the document that limits your liability, sets the payment rules and gives you the right to close an abusive account. Here is a working structure, based on the terms and conditions examples you see across serious SaaS and commerce sites.
A sample structure for business
- Definitions: who is "we", who is "you", what the "service" covers. Every later clause leans on these.
- Acceptance: how the terms become binding (creating an account, checking a box, using the service).
- Description of the service: what you provide, and crucially what you do not guarantee.
- Accounts: the user's responsibility for credentials and for what happens under their account.
- Prices and billing: currency, taxes, renewal, late payment, refund rules.
- Termination: how each side ends the relationship, and what happens to data afterwards.
- Acceptable use: the behaviors that get an account suspended.
- Intellectual property: you keep your platform; the customer keeps their data.
- Warranties and liability: the "as is" clause and the liability cap, the two clauses your lawyer cares most about.
- Governing law: which courts, which law.
Two example clauses, annotated
Liability cap (example)
"To the extent permitted by law, our total liability arising from the service is limited to the amounts you paid us in the twelve months preceding the claim." Nearly every SaaS contract carries a version of this sentence; without it, a $19-a-month subscription can theoretically expose you to unlimited damages.
Automatic renewal (example)
"Paid subscriptions renew automatically for successive equivalent periods unless cancelled before the end of the current period." Consumer laws in several places require this to be said plainly before purchase, not discovered on the invoice.
For a complete, real-world example, read our own terms and conditions: twenty-six sections covering exactly the structure above, adapted to a consent management platform.
The terms and conditions page itself
Where the document lives matters almost as much as its content. The convention, and what courts have found reasonable: a dedicated page, linked from the footer of every page, presented at signup with an explicit acceptance action, dated, and archived at each revision. Burying the terms in a PDF nobody can find, or changing them silently, both undermine their enforceability.
Not the same document as the privacy policy
The two are often confused and sometimes merged; they should not be. The privacy policy is a legal disclosure about personal data, required by law and addressed to everyone whose data you touch. The terms are a contract about the service, addressed to your users. Different audiences, different obligations, different pages; our privacy policy example guide covers the other half, and if the terms of service versus terms of use naming puzzles you, we untangle that too.