Terms of Service
Last updated: August 22, 2026
1. Agreement
These Terms are an agreement between you and Sean Gjos, an individual carrying on business as a sole proprietorship in British Columbia, Canada ("Sotto," "we," "us"), governing your use of the Sotto application and sottocollection.com.
By creating an account, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use Sotto.
2. Who may use Sotto
You must be 18 or older. Sotto is not for minors and we do not permit accounts for anyone under 18.
Sotto is by invitation. You may only create an account using an invitation issued by an existing member. Invitations are personal to the recipient — do not forward, publish, or transfer one.
One account per person. You are responsible for what happens under your account. Because sign-in uses a code sent to your email or phone, keep control of that email account or phone number, and tell us at hello@sottocollection.com if you lose it.
3. What Sotto is
Sotto is a private collection of travel recommendations shared among people connected by invitation. Recommendations are contributed by members and shown with the name of the member who contributed them and the chain of invitations connecting you to that person.
Sotto is not a review platform, a booking service, a travel agency, or a guide. We do not select, verify, rank, endorse, inspect, or take responsibility for any place a member recommends. We have no relationship with the places or activities.
4. Cost
Sotto is free. There is no paid tier.
If we ever introduce paid features, we commit that doing so will not remove anything you already have. Contributing your own recommendations, seeing who a recommendation came from, and browsing what your network has shared will remain available without payment. Any paid feature would be an addition, not a gate placed in front of something that was free.
We may change what Sotto costs going forward, but not retroactively, and not in a way that takes away the things listed in this section.
5. Your account and how it ends
You may leave at any time, and ask us to delete your information. What we can and cannot remove is set out in the Privacy Policy — in particular, we retain the structural record of who invited whom, without your name attached, because other members' connections are calculated from it.
We may suspend or close your account if you break these Terms, if you use Sotto in a way that harms other members, or if we are legally required to. Where circumstances allow, we will tell you why and give you an opportunity to respond.
We may discontinue Sotto. If we do, we will give members reasonable notice and an opportunity to retrieve what they have contributed.
6. Invitations
When you invite someone, you are vouching for them to everyone already in the network, because their connection to every other member will be traced through you.
You agree that:
- You will invite only people you know personally and who you reasonably expect will welcome the invitation
- You have their name and contact detail legitimately, and are not taking them from a list, directory, or someone else's records
- You will not invite anyone under 18
- You will not publish an invitation link, post it publicly, or distribute it to people you do not know
Invitations expire 60 days after they are sent if they are not accepted.
We may cancel invitations and restrict your ability to issue them if these expectations are not met.
7. What you contribute
You are responsible for what you contribute. You agree that anything you add — a recommendation, a note, a vouch, a comment, a declared trip — is:
- Yours to share, and does not infringe anyone else's rights
- Honest, reflecting your own experience and opinion
- Not defamatory, harassing, hateful, threatening, or unlawful
- Not commercial: you will not contribute a recommendation in exchange for payment, discount, free goods or services, or any other benefit, and you will disclose any interest you have in a place you recommend
- Not the personal information of another person, beyond what is necessary
The last point matters more here than on most services. Sotto is small and closed, and a recommendation naming or describing a specific individual — a host, a guide, a proprietor — can identify a real person who never agreed to be discussed.
You must not attempt to access other members' information, scrape or bulk-export content, reverse-engineer the service, disrupt it, or use it to build a competing product.
8. Other members' content, and personal use only
Recommendations on Sotto are the personal opinions of the members who contributed them. They are not our opinions, and we do not verify them.
8.1 Sotto is for your personal use
Your access to Sotto is granted for your own personal, non-commercial use only.
You may use what you find on Sotto to plan your own travel and to share informally with people you know personally. You may not use Sotto, or anything you find on it, for any business or commercial purpose. This includes:
- Copying, extracting, compiling, or reproducing recommendations — individually or in bulk — for use in a travel agency, tour operation, concierge service, itinerary-planning business, media publication, newsletter, blog, guidebook, app, or any other commercial product or service
- Using Sotto content to advise, service, or sell to clients or customers, whether or not the content is attributed and whether or not you charge for it separately
- Selling, licensing, syndicating, or otherwise making Sotto content available to any third party
- Using Sotto to conduct market research, gather competitive intelligence, or build a dataset
- Accessing Sotto by automated means, or systematically retrieving content, for any purpose
This restriction applies to the content of recommendations regardless of whether you reproduce them word for word. Rewriting or summarising a member's recommendation for a commercial purpose is still a commercial use of it.
If you work in travel, hospitality, or a related field, you are welcome as a member — you simply may not carry Sotto's content across into your business.
8.2 Keep it inside Sotto
Content on Sotto is shared with you in confidence, within a closed network. Do not republish it outside Sotto — do not post it publicly, share it on social media, or pass it to people who are not members. If you would like to pass a recommendation to a friend, invite them.
9. Rights in what you contribute
You keep ownership of everything you contribute.
You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt, display, and distribute what you contribute, for the following purposes:
(a) Operating Sotto. Displaying your contributions to other members with your name attached, according to your display preference, together with the connection path between you and them. This is how Sotto works and cannot be separated from the service.
(b) Promoting Sotto. Using the content of what you contribute — the text of a recommendation or a note — in material describing or promoting Sotto, such as screenshots, examples, or marketing.
For purpose (b), we will not use your name, your likeness, or details identifying you, and we will not present the content as yours, unless you give us specific permission at the time.
We say "not attributed" rather than "anonymous" deliberately: in a network this small, a recommendation's content may still be recognisable to people who know you. We commit to removing your name — we cannot guarantee that no one could infer it.
Withdrawing content. You may remove a recommendation at any time. Once removed, we will stop using it for purpose (b), except in material already produced and distributed before you removed it, which we cannot always recall.
10. Our rights
Sotto's name, logo, design, and software are ours. These Terms do not give you any right to use them beyond using the service as intended.
11. Privacy
Our handling of personal information is described in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms.
Two points are important enough to repeat here:
Your contributions are attributed. Sotto shows other members your name alongside what you contribute, and shows how you are connected to them. If you do not want that, do not contribute.
Declared trips can reveal when you will be away from home. You control who sees each declared trip and how precisely dates are shown. Consider that before making one visible.
Your information is stored in the United States. The Privacy Policy explains what that means.
12. Recommendations are not advice, and we do not vouch for any place
Read this section.
Sotto exists to encourage you to act on what other members recommend — to go somewhere, eat somewhere, stay somewhere. We think a recommendation from someone you know is better than an anonymous review. It is still someone's opinion.
We do not inspect, verify, licence, insure, or take any responsibility for any place or activity recommended on Sotto. We do not check whether a business is safe, legal, operating, insured, or suitable for you. A member's positive experience is not a prediction of yours.
You are responsible for your own decisions, including checking that a place is open, appropriate for your circumstances, and safe for you, and for any medical, dietary, accessibility, legal, or safety considerations that apply to you. Nothing on Sotto is medical, legal, financial, or safety advice.
Travel carries risk. We are not liable for anything that happens to you at, on the way to, or as a result of visiting a place or undertaking an activity recommended on Sotto.
13. Service provided as-is, and limitation of liability
Sotto is provided as-is and as-available. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that content on it is accurate, complete, or current. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost opportunity, arising from your use of Sotto.
Our total liability to you for all claims relating to Sotto is limited to the greater of one hundred Canadian dollars (CAD $100) and the total amount you have paid us in the twelve months preceding the claim.
Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions. Where that is so, these limitations apply to the fullest extent permitted, and nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded. If you are a consumer in a jurisdiction with mandatory consumer protections — including under British Columbia's Business Practices and Consumer Protection Act — those protections apply regardless of this section.
14. Indemnity
You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, losses, and reasonable legal costs arising from what you contribute, your breach of these Terms, your infringement of anyone's rights, or invitations you issue — except to the extent the claim arises from our own gross negligence or wilful misconduct.
15. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. If a change is material, we will notify members in the application before it takes effect. Continuing to use Sotto after that means you accept the change. If you do not, close your account.
16. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of British Columbia and the federal laws of Canada applicable there. The courts of British Columbia have exclusive jurisdiction, and you and we submit to them.
Nothing in this section removes a consumer's right to bring proceedings in their own jurisdiction where local law provides that right.
Before starting a formal proceeding, please write to hello@sottocollection.com so we can try to resolve the issue directly.
17. General
If any part of these Terms is unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Our not enforcing something is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms; we may transfer ours in connection with a transfer of the business, on notice to you.
These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us regarding Sotto.