Lake Financial: Terms of Service

Effective date: July 24, 2026
Last updated: August 31, 2026

Revision note (August 31, 2026): this revision carries forward the August 21, 2026 pricing update (monthly and annual billing intervals, the 30-day no-card free trial that reverts to the Free plan without charge, and the Lifetime "Founder" tier offered at our discretion) and aligns the product description, data-handling references, disconnection and deletion descriptions, and third-party list with current practice. The July 24, 2026 source and its SHA-256 hash are archived. Review by outside counsel is recommended and pending; publication was directed by the owner.

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are a binding contract between you and Rieper LLC, an Indiana limited liability company doing business as Lake Financial ("Lake," "we," "us," or "our"). They govern your access to and use of the Lake website at www.lakefin.net, the Lake application, and any related services (together, the "Service").

Please read Section 16 carefully. It contains an arbitration agreement and a class action waiver that affect how disputes between you and Lake are resolved. You may opt out of arbitration within 30 days.

By creating an account, clicking to accept these Terms, or using the Service, you agree to these Terms. The sign-up screen states that creating an account constitutes acceptance, and we retain the version of these Terms in effect at each account's creation. If you do not agree to these Terms, do not use the Service.

1. What Lake Is, and What It Is Not

Lake is an automatic spending tracker and personal financial information and organization tool. It connects to financial accounts you choose to link, receives balance, transaction, investment, and liability information from those accounts, and automatically analyzes eligible spending to identify repeat places or categories, estimate the usual amount per visit, and, when a spending limit matches, show the amount remaining and how many similar visits may fit. Depending on your plan, the Service also provides transaction organization, spending limits and budgets, goals, account balances, reports, exports, and other automatically generated observations about your data ("Insights").

Lake is not a financial institution, bank, broker-dealer, investment adviser, tax adviser, accountant, credit counselor, or lender. Lake does not hold your money, move your money, execute transactions, or manage assets on your behalf.

Nothing in the Service is financial, investment, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Insights, projections, forecasts, goal suggestions, budget pacing, peer positioning, anomaly flags, and similar features are automated observations and estimates derived from data as reported by your financial institutions. They are informational only, may be incomplete, delayed, or wrong, and must not be relied on as the basis for any financial decision. You are solely responsible for your financial decisions. We strongly encourage you to consult a qualified professional before acting on anything you see in Lake.

Lake does not hold deposits and is not insured by the FDIC, NCUA, SIPC, or any other insurer. Any insurance applicable to your funds is provided by your own financial institutions, not by Lake.

Your financial institution's records control. Where Lake's display of a balance, transaction, holding, or liability differs from your institution's records, your institution's records govern.

2. Eligibility and Accounts

To use the Service you must be at least 18 years old, be a resident of the United States, and have the legal capacity to enter into a binding contract. The Service is offered only to individuals for personal, non-commercial use. Lake is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we will terminate it.

You must create an account to use the Service. Account authentication is provided through our identity provider, Clerk. You agree to:

• provide accurate and current registration information;
• keep your login credentials confidential and not share your account;
• enable and maintain reasonable security on the devices and email accounts you use to access Lake; and
• notify us promptly at contact@rieper.org if you suspect unauthorized access to your account.

You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account, except to the extent caused by our own failure to meet our obligations under these Terms.

3. Linking Financial Accounts

Lake connects to your financial accounts through Plaid Inc. ("Plaid"), a third-party data aggregation provider.

By linking an account, you:

• represent that you are the owner of, or an authorized user of, each account you link;
• authorize Lake, acting through Plaid, to access, retrieve, and store information from those accounts, including account identifiers, balances, transaction history, investment holdings, and liability details, on an ongoing basis for as long as the connection remains active;
• authorize Lake to act as your agent for the limited purpose of retrieving that information; and
• acknowledge that you enter credentials or authorize access through Plaid Link or your financial institution's OAuth flow, not through Lake, and that Lake never receives, sees, or stores your bank username or password.

Your use of Plaid is separately governed by Plaid's own end user privacy policy and terms, available at plaid.com. Plaid is an independent company; we do not control its practices.

Connections can break. Institutions change their systems, expire access, or require re-authentication. Lake may be unable to refresh your data at any time, without notice, and through no fault of ours. You are responsible for monitoring your accounts directly with your financial institutions.

You may disconnect any linked institution at any time from the Settings page. Lake attempts to remove the corresponding Plaid connection and then deletes the active Lake records associated with it, including accounts, transactions, attachments, investment holdings, and liability details.

4. Plans, Pricing, and Payment

Lake offers the plans below. Paid-plan prices are not fixed in these Terms. The then-current price, currency, and billing cadence displayed in Stripe Checkout immediately before you authorize payment control over conflicting price information elsewhere in the Service.

Payments are processed by Stripe, Inc. You must provide Stripe with a valid payment method. Lake never receives or stores your full card number. Your purchase is also subject to Stripe's terms.

Subscription billing. Lake Premium is a recurring subscription billed monthly or annually, according to the billing interval you select at checkout. By subscribing, you authorize us and Stripe to charge your payment method the then-current fee, plus any applicable taxes, automatically at the start of each billing period, each month for monthly billing, each year for annual billing, until you cancel. Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period. The billing interval and the renewal amount are displayed in Stripe Checkout before you authorize payment.

Free trial. We may offer a free trial of Premium features: currently 30 days, with no payment method required. One trial per person. When a trial ends without a subscription, your account automatically reverts to the Free plan; you are not charged, and your data is not deleted (though features above the Free tier, including access above the Free plan's linked-institution cap, become unavailable until you upgrade). Starting a trial does not create a subscription; a subscription begins only if you complete checkout. We may change the length, availability, or terms of the trial offer at any time for users who have not yet started one.

Cancellation. You may cancel at any time through the billing portal in Settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current paid billing period. You keep Premium features through the end of that period, after which your account reverts to the Free plan. We do not provide prorated refunds for partial billing periods.

Lifetime plan. "Lifetime" means for as long as Lake continues to operate the Service. It is a single, non-recurring charge and does not create a perpetual obligation for us to operate the Service indefinitely. If we permanently discontinue the Service, Section 4's refund provision below is your sole remedy.

Refunds. Except where required by law, all fees are non-refundable. We may, at our sole discretion, issue a refund or credit, for example, for a duplicate charge or a billing error. If we permanently discontinue the Service within twelve (12) months of your Lifetime purchase, we will refund a pro-rata portion of your Lifetime fee based on the unused portion of that twelve-month period.

Failed payments. If a charge fails, we may retry it, and we may downgrade your account to the Free plan until payment succeeds. If you are on the Free plan and have more linked institutions than the Free plan allows, we will not delete your data, but features above the Free tier will be unavailable until you upgrade.

Taxes. Prices are exclusive of taxes. You are responsible for any sales, use, VAT, or similar taxes, other than taxes on our income.

Price changes. We may change our prices. For subscriptions, we will give you at least 30 days' advance notice by a prominent notice in the Service, and by email once we operate a service-email channel, before a price change takes effect, and the change will apply at your next renewal. If you do not agree, you may cancel before the change takes effect.

Free plan. We may modify or discontinue the Free plan, or change what it includes, at any time.

5. Your Content

"Your Content" means anything you create, upload, or submit to the Service, including transaction notes, receipt and document attachments, budget and category names, goal names, custom categorization rules, account nicknames, support messages, and other feedback you send.

You own Your Content. We claim no ownership of it.

You grant Lake a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, process, and display Your Content solely to operate and provide the Service to you, and to comply with law. For Your Content stored in your Lake account, this operating license ends when you delete that content or your account, subject to the backup, provider-retention, and legal exceptions described in our Privacy Policy. Support correspondence and personal information included in feedback are retained and deleted as described in the Privacy Policy and are not necessarily removed by deleting your Lake account.

You represent that you have the rights necessary to submit Your Content and that it does not infringe anyone's rights or violate any law.

Attachments. Files you attach to transactions are limited to 4 MB per file and 5 files per transaction, and to the file types the app accepts. We may enforce these limits and reject files that exceed them.

Feedback. If you send us non-confidential suggestions, feature requests, bug reports, or other ideas about the Service, you grant us an unrestricted, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free right to use the ideas themselves for any purpose without obligation or compensation to you. This does not transfer ownership of your personal information or authorize us to retain personal information contrary to the Privacy Policy.

6. How We Use Your Financial Data

Your financial data is used to provide the Service to you. Specifically, we use it to display linked-account information; organize, categorize, and enrich transactions; derive repeat-place or repeat-category habits, usual amounts, visit frequency, recent-visit history, and matched spending-limit context; calculate budgets and goals; prepare reports and exports; and generate Insights. Investment and liability information may also be retrieved and processed as described in Section 3 and our Privacy Policy.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own advertising or marketing purposes.

We may create and use aggregated and de-identified data, data that cannot reasonably be used to identify you or any individual, to operate, secure, analyze, and improve the Service. Full details of what we collect, who processes it, and your choices are in our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference.

Optional profile data. Lake lets you optionally provide your birth year for an age-group comparison based on published public benchmarks. A legacy gender value may remain if you provided it before that field was removed. Stored profile fields are encrypted at rest, and you can delete them at any time from Settings without affecting the rest of the Service.

7. Acceptable Use

You agree not to, and not to attempt to:

• link, access, or attempt to access any financial account you do not own or are not authorized to use;
• use the Service for any unlawful purpose, or in furtherance of fraud, money laundering, or evasion of sanctions or tax obligations;
• reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or attempt to derive the source code of the Service, except to the extent this restriction is unenforceable under applicable law;
• scrape, crawl, harvest, or use automated means to access or extract data from the Service, or access the Service other than through the interfaces we provide;
• circumvent, disable, or interfere with any usage limit, plan entitlement, paywall, rate limit, authentication, or security feature;
• probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service, or breach or attempt to breach its security or authentication measures, without our prior written permission;
• upload malware, or content that is unlawful, infringing, defamatory, obscene, or that contains another person's personal information without their consent;
• resell, sublicense, rent, or provide the Service to third parties, or use it to build a competing product;
• impersonate any person or misrepresent your affiliation; or
• interfere with or disrupt the integrity or performance of the Service or the data it contains.

Responsible disclosure. If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, please report it to contact@rieper.org. We will not pursue action against good-faith security research that is promptly reported, does not access other users' data, does not degrade the Service, and gives us reasonable time to remediate before disclosure.

8. Availability, Changes, and Support

We aim to keep Lake available and accurate, but we do not guarantee any level of uptime, availability, data freshness, or response time. The Service is provided on an as-available basis and may be interrupted for maintenance, upgrades, third-party outages (including Plaid, Stripe, Clerk, or our hosting and database providers), or causes outside our control.

We may add, change, suspend, or remove features at any time. If we make a change that materially reduces the core functionality of a paid plan, we will give you notice and, if you are a monthly subscriber, you may cancel and receive a prorated refund of your current billing period.

Support is provided on a best-effort basis by email at contact@rieper.org. We do not commit to any response time.

9. Third-Party Services

The Service depends on third parties, including Plaid (account connections), Stripe (payments), Clerk (authentication), Vercel (hosting, scheduled jobs, server and security logs, and route and page-view analytics), Neon (database and backup/restore infrastructure), Trove (transaction enrichment), Logo.dev (merchant logos), Apple iCloud Mail (support email), HubSpot (customer-relationship records and email delivery), Google (site-wide usage analytics), and Meta (advertising measurement on the public funnel pages only). Your financial institutions are also third parties. See the Privacy Policy for the data each provider receives.

We are not responsible for the acts, omissions, availability, accuracy, security practices, or content of third parties, and their services are governed by their own terms. Links to third-party sites are provided for convenience and are not endorsements.

10. Intellectual Property

The Service, including all software, source code, design, user interface, visual elements, text, the Lake and Lake Financial names and logos, and all related intellectual property, is owned by Rieper LLC and is protected by copyright, trademark, and other laws. Nothing in these Terms transfers any of it to you.

Subject to these Terms, we grant you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to access and use the Service for your own personal financial management. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

11. Suspension and Termination

By you. You may stop using the Service at any time. You may delete your account from the Settings page. Deleting your account attempts to remove Lake's Plaid connections, deletes active Lake database records linked to your user, including linked accounts, transactions, notes, attachments, budgets, goals, snapshots, alerts, subscriptions, and in-app Insight feedback, and deletes your Clerk authentication record. The deleted data is no longer available through the active Service and cannot be restored by you. Limited backup copies, support correspondence and related summaries, provider-held records, legally required billing records, and de-identified statistics may follow different retention and deletion rules described in the Privacy Policy. Account deletion does not itself cancel an active Stripe subscription; cancel your subscription before deleting your account, and contact us if you need help.

By us. We may suspend or terminate your access, with or without notice, if we reasonably believe you have violated these Terms, if your account presents a security, legal, or fraud risk, if required by law or by one of our providers, or if we discontinue the Service. Where practical and lawful, we will give you notice and an opportunity to export your data.

Effect of termination. Sections 1, 5 (feedback license), 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 survive termination. Termination does not entitle you to a refund except as expressly stated in Section 4.

Export your data. Premium, Lifetime, and free-trial users can export transactions to CSV at any time from within the app. We recommend exporting before you delete your account.

12. Disclaimer of Warranties

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITH ALL FAULTS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, LAKE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, AND STATUTORY, INCLUDING ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, LAKE DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE; THAT DATA DISPLAYED WILL BE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, CURRENT, OR FREE OF ERROR; THAT INSIGHTS, FORECASTS, OR PROJECTIONS WILL BE ACCURATE OR ACHIEVE ANY RESULT; OR THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so some of the above may not apply to you.

13. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, LAKE AND ITS MEMBER, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, AND AGENTS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, SAVINGS, GOODWILL, INVESTMENT RETURNS, BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY, OR DATA, INCLUDING LOSSES ARISING FROM FINANCIAL DECISIONS MADE IN RELIANCE ON THE SERVICE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

LAKE'S TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNT YOU PAID LAKE IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100).

These limits apply regardless of the theory of liability and even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose. They do not apply to liability that cannot be limited under applicable law, including liability for fraud, willful misconduct, or gross negligence.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations of liability, so some of the above may not apply to you.

14. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Rieper LLC and its member, officers, employees, and agents from any claims, damages, losses, liabilities, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or relating to: (a) your use of the Service; (b) Your Content; (c) your violation of these Terms or applicable law; (d) your violation of any third party's rights; or (e) your linking of any financial account you were not authorized to link.

15. Governing Law

These Terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the laws of the State of Indiana, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

Subject to Section 16, you and Lake consent to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the state and federal courts located in St. Joseph County, Indiana for any dispute not subject to arbitration.

16. Dispute Resolution: Arbitration and Class Action Waiver

PLEASE READ THIS SECTION CAREFULLY. IT AFFECTS YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS, INCLUDING YOUR RIGHT TO FILE A LAWSUIT IN COURT AND TO HAVE A JURY TRIAL.

16.1 Informal resolution first. Before starting arbitration, you agree to contact us at contact@rieper.org with a written description of your claim and to work with us in good faith for 60 days to resolve it informally. This step is a condition to starting arbitration.

16.2 Agreement to arbitrate. If we cannot resolve a dispute informally, you and Lake agree that any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association ("AAA") under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, rather than in court. The arbitration will be conducted by a single arbitrator, in English, and, unless you and Lake agree otherwise, by document submission, telephone, or video conference, or in person in St. Joseph County, Indiana. The arbitrator's award may be entered as a judgment in any court of competent jurisdiction. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this Section.

16.3 Exceptions. Either party may bring an individual claim in small claims court if it qualifies. Either party may also seek injunctive or equitable relief in court to protect intellectual property rights or to stop unauthorized access to the Service.

16.4 Class action waiver. YOU AND LAKE AGREE THAT EACH MAY BRING CLAIMS AGAINST THE OTHER ONLY IN AN INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS, COLLECTIVE, CONSOLIDATED, OR REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING. The arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over any form of representative proceeding. If this waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim, and only that claim, must proceed in court, and the rest of this Section still applies.

16.5 Your right to opt out. You may opt out of this arbitration agreement. Send written notice to contact@rieper.org with the subject line "Arbitration Opt-Out," including your name and the email address on your account, within 30 days of first accepting these Terms. Opting out will not affect any other part of these Terms and will not affect your account in any way. If you opt out, disputes will be resolved in the courts identified in Section 15.

A revision of these Terms does not restart or extend this opt-out period for existing users: the 30-day window runs from your first acceptance of these Terms, whichever version that was. A new user's window runs from that user's own first acceptance.

16.6 Costs. AAA's Consumer Arbitration Rules govern the allocation of filing and arbitration fees. Each party bears its own attorneys' fees unless the arbitrator awards them under applicable law.

17. General Terms

Changes to these Terms. We may update these Terms. A change is material if it increases your payment obligations, reduces your rights or remedies, expands your obligations, or changes dispute resolution. For material changes, we will give at least 14 days' advance notice by a prominent notice in the Service, and by email once we operate a service-email channel, before the change takes effect, and the notice will state the effective date; a material change does not restart the arbitration opt-out period in Section 16.5. Non-material changes (clarifications and corrections that do not expand your obligations or reduce your rights) take effect when posted with an updated "Last updated" date. Continuing to use the Service after a change's effective date means you accept it; if you do not accept a change, stop using the Service and delete your account before the effective date. We preserve superseded versions and will provide any prior version on request.

Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any plan terms shown at purchase, are the entire agreement between you and Lake regarding the Service and supersede all prior discussions.

Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, it will be limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary, and the rest of these Terms remain in full force.

No waiver. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of our right to do so later.

Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of substantially all of our assets, on notice to you.

Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay or failure to perform due to causes beyond its reasonable control, including outages of third-party providers, natural disasters, war, labor disputes, or government action.

Notices. We may give you notice by a prominent notice in the Service, by posting to the Service, or by email to the address on your account once we operate a service-email channel, and we retain a record of each notice given. You may give us notice at contact@rieper.org or by mail to the address below.

Relationship. Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, joint venture, employment, agency, or fiduciary relationship between you and Lake, except for the limited data-retrieval agency described in Section 3.

Electronic communications and E-SIGN consent. By creating an account and using the Service, you consent to receive communications from us electronically, including these Terms, changes to them, notices, disclosures, and receipts, by prominent notice in the Service, by posting to the Service, or by email to the address on your account, and you agree that electronic delivery satisfies any legal requirement that such communications be in writing. You may withdraw this consent by deleting your account; withdrawal makes continued use of the Service unavailable, since we cannot operate your account without electronic communications.

18. Contact

Rieper LLC (d/b/a Lake Financial)
c/o Registered Agents Inc
5534 Saint Joe Road
Fort Wayne, IN 46835
United States

Email: contact@rieper.org
Web: www.lakefin.net

Rieper LLC is an Indiana limited liability company, Business ID 202607202020836, operating under the assumed business name Lake Financial.