1. About these Terms
These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) govern your access to and use of the Sponsio website and any related online services, applications and APIs we make available (together, the “Service”). In these Terms “Sponsio”, “we”, “us” and “our” mean the operator of the Service, and “you” and “your” mean the natural person who accesses or uses the Service.
By creating an account, signing in, or otherwise accessing the Service you confirm that you have read, understood and agree to be bound by these Terms, our Privacy Notice, our Cookies Notice and our Disclaimer and Terms of Use (the “Disclaimer”). If you do not agree to any of these documents you must not use the Service.
In the event of any inconsistency between these Terms and the Disclaimer, the Disclaimer prevails in respect of the nature of the Service, the absence of professional advice, warranties and limitation of liability; these Terms prevail in respect of accounts, acceptable use, intellectual property, suspension and termination.
2. Eligibility and your account
Age. The Service is offered to individuals researching the United Kingdom labour market and visa system. You may only create an account if you are aged 18 or over and able to enter into a legally binding contract under the laws applicable to you. We do not knowingly allow children under 13 to use the Service and, where you are between 13 and 17, you may only browse the public, unauthenticated pages of the Service with the involvement of a parent or guardian. Further detail on age and personal data is in our Privacy Notice.
Accurate details. When you create an account you agree to provide accurate, current and complete information and to keep it up to date. You must not impersonate another person, misrepresent your identity, or create an account on behalf of anyone other than yourself.
Account security. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your sign-in credentials and for all activity that occurs under your account. You must notify us promptly at security@sponsio.com if you suspect any unauthorised use of, or access to, your account. We may require you to reset your password, re-confirm your email or take other reasonable security steps.
One account per person. Each individual may hold one Sponsio account. Sharing an account, or selling, transferring or sub-licensing access to your account, is not permitted.
3. The Service
Free of charge. Sponsio is currently provided free of charge, including the public GOV.UK sponsor search, the personalised jobs feed, resource pages, the blog, and the ability to create an account and set profile preferences. We may change, limit or withdraw features at any time, including in order to address security, abuse, cost, performance or product considerations. If we introduce paid features in the future we will publish supplementary terms covering pricing, billing, renewals, cancellation and refunds before they go live.
Beta and experimental features. Features clearly labelled “beta”, “experimental” or similar are provided on an “as is” basis for evaluation. They may be unstable, may be withdrawn without notice, and are excluded from any service-level expectations.
4. Acceptable use
You agree that, when accessing or using the Service, you will not, and will not assist or permit any third party to:
- use the Service in any way that breaches any applicable law or regulation, infringes the rights of any person, or is fraudulent or has any fraudulent purpose;
- hold yourself out as, or claim to act on behalf of, Sponsio, the United Kingdom Home Office, UK Visas and Immigration, any UK or non-UK government body, any sponsor, employer, recruiter or regulator;
- represent any algorithmic label produced by the Service (including labels such as “Licensed sponsor”, “Strong licence match”, “Likely licence match”, “Needs review”, “Sponsorship not guaranteed”, or similar) as a guarantee, promise or determination of any employer, vacancy, visa outcome, certificate of sponsorship, role or salary, including when communicating with any third party, employer, recruiter, immigration adviser or government authority;
- provide, offer or hold yourself out as providing immigration advice or immigration services in the United Kingdom in contravention of Part V of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, using materials, labels, scores or outputs obtained from the Service;
- scrape, crawl, harvest, index, mirror, frame, republish or otherwise bulk-extract content from the Service except (i) indexing by mainstream search engines using their public crawlers in accordance with our
robots.txt, and (ii) any lawful exception under sections 29A or 50A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 for text and data analysis for non-commercial research, subject to the limits set out in those sections; - use any automated means (including bots, headless browsers, scripts, API clients, or third-party AI agents) to access the Service in a way that interferes with normal operation, evades rate limits, creates accounts in bulk, or otherwise circumvents technical measures;
- probe, scan, stress, denial-of-service, reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble or attempt to derive the source code, models or training data of any part of the Service, except to the limited extent permitted by mandatory law (including section 50B of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 for decompilation for interoperability);
- upload, transmit or attempt to introduce any virus, worm, trojan, ransomware, time-bomb, key-logger, spyware, adware or other malicious code, or any material containing personal data of a third party that you are not authorised to provide;
- use the Service to contact, profile, qualify or solicit any recruiter, sponsor, employer or other individual whose contact details appear in a third-party job listing for any purpose other than a bona fide job application directly relevant to the advertised role;
- sell, resell, sub-license, rent, time-share, lease, mirror, wrap, white-label or otherwise commercially exploit the Service, your account, or any sponsor data, job listing, ranking, score or label generated by the Service; or
- do anything that may damage, disable, overburden or impair the Service or interfere with any other user’s enjoyment of it.
We may, in our sole and reasonable discretion, investigate any suspected breach of this section 4, including by reviewing relevant logs and account activity. Where appropriate, we may report breaches to the relevant law-enforcement, regulatory or data-protection authority, and we may cooperate with those authorities in any subsequent investigation.
5. Payments
Sponsio is currently provided free of charge and we do not collect payment from you for use of the Service. If we introduce paid features in the future we will publish supplementary terms covering pricing, billing, renewals, cancellation and refunds before they go live, and your continued use of any paid feature will be subject to those supplementary terms in addition to these Terms. Nothing in these Terms or the Disclaimer affects your non-excludable rights as a consumer under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.
6. Intellectual property
Our intellectual property.The Service, including its software, design, user interface, look and feel, text, graphics, logos, page layouts, the “Sponsio” name and mark, the leaf device, the matching algorithm, scoring models, classification labels, taxonomy of sponsor categories, curated resources and original blog content, is owned by Sponsio or its licensors and is protected by copyright, database right, trade-mark and other intellectual property laws of the United Kingdom and other jurisdictions.
Your licence to use the Service. Subject to your compliance with these Terms, we grant you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sub-licensable, revocable licence to access and use the Service for your own personal, non-commercial purposes of researching the UK sponsor landscape and applying for roles for yourself. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.
Open Government Licence content. The UK Register of Licensed Sponsors: Workers and certain other material referenced on the Service are produced by the United Kingdom Home Office and re-used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The Service contains public-sector information licensed under that licence. Sponsio is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Home Office.
Third-party marks. Trade marks, service marks, logos and company names of third parties (including employer names and applicant tracking system providers) are the property of their respective owners and appear on the Service for identification, factual reference and editorial purposes under nominative fair use only. Further detail is in section 8 of the Disclaimer.
Feedback. If you send us suggestions, improvement requests, bug reports or other feedback about the Service, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide, sub-licensable licence to use, modify and incorporate that feedback into the Service without any obligation or attribution.
7. Your content
The Service does not currently allow you to publish or share content with other users. You provide only limited content to us — principally your name, email address, role preferences, visa status or visa goal, and preferred location — for the purpose of operating the Service and personalising results for you (the “User Content”). You warrant that you are entitled to provide the User Content to us and that it is accurate to the best of your knowledge. You grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to host, store, process, analyse, transmit, display and back up the User Content solely as required to provide the Service to you. This licence ends when the User Content is deleted from our systems in accordance with our retention practice, save for short-term retention in encrypted backups.
If we introduce features that allow you to publish content (for example, public profiles, comments or saved-search sharing), we will publish supplementary terms covering those features before they go live.
8. Third-party content and integrations
The Service surfaces and links to content controlled by third parties, including (without limitation) the GOV.UK sponsor register; job listings sourced from the applicant tracking systems operated by individual employers (such as Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, SmartRecruiters, Workable, Teamtailor, Recruitee, Workday, Eightfold and Oracle); company logos retrieved from logo providers; and external resource sites. We do not control, monitor or endorse any such third-party content. Your use of any third-party site or service is governed by that third party’s terms and privacy notice. Further detail and the specific risks attaching to sponsor labels, third-party logos and job listings is set out in sections 3 and 8 of the Disclaimer.
9. Suspension and termination
Your right to close your account. You can terminate these Terms at any time by closing your account from the in-product account settings. Closing your account triggers deletion of your account and profile data in accordance with our Privacy Notice.
Our right to suspend or terminate. We may suspend your access to all or part of the Service, withdraw features from your account, or terminate these Terms (and with them your account) immediately on written notice (which may be by email or in-product notice) if:
- you commit a material or persistent breach of these Terms (including, without limitation, section 4 on acceptable use), or of the Disclaimer or Privacy Notice;
- we reasonably suspect that your account is being used for fraud, abuse, scraping, automated misuse, impersonation, account-sharing, payment fraud, chargeback abuse or any other activity that materially harms the Service, us or our users;
- continued provision of the Service to you would in our reasonable opinion expose us to material legal, regulatory or reputational risk; or
- we cease, in whole or in part, to operate the Service.
Where the breach is capable of remedy and is not, in our reasonable opinion, serious or repeated, we will normally give you a reasonable opportunity to remedy it before terminating.
Effect of termination. On termination by either party: (i) your right to access and use the Service immediately ends; (ii) we will, subject to lawful retention periods, delete your account and profile data in accordance with the Privacy Notice; and (iii) any provisions of these Terms which by their nature are intended to survive termination — including sections 4 (acceptable use), 6 (intellectual property), 10 (disclaimer and liability), 11 (indemnity), 16 (miscellaneous) and 17 (governing law) — shall do so.
10. Disclaimer of warranties and limitation of liability
The Service is provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis. The full disclaimer of warranties, the limitation of liability, the liability that is not excluded, and the description of what Sponsio is and is not (in particular, that Sponsio is not a law firm, immigration adviser, financial adviser, tax adviser, employment agency, employment business or recruiter) are set out in sections 1 to 7 of the Disclaimer. Those sections are incorporated into these Terms by reference and apply in full to your use of the Service under these Terms.
Nothing in these Terms or the Disclaimer excludes or limits any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited under English law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any liability under the non-excludable provisions of the Consumer Rights Act 2015. Nothing in these Terms affects your statutory rights as a consumer.
11. Indemnity
To the fullest extent permitted by law, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless Sponsio, its officers, employees, contractors, agents and licensors from and against any losses, damages, costs, liabilities and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or in connection with: (i) your breach of these Terms or the Disclaimer; (ii) your misuse of the Service in breach of section 4; (iii) your infringement of the rights of any third party (including intellectual property and privacy rights) through your use of the Service; or (iv) any representation or onward use of any algorithmic label or output of the Service in breach of these Terms.
12. Privacy and data protection
Our collection and use of personal data is governed by our Privacy Notice, which forms part of these Terms. By using the Service you acknowledge that you have read the Privacy Notice and the Cookies Notice.
13. Changes to the Service and to these Terms
Changes to the Service. The Service evolves continuously. We may add, modify, remove or restrict features at any time.
Changes to these Terms. We may update these Terms from time to time. The date at the top of these Terms indicates when they were last revised. Where the change is material we will take reasonable steps to bring it to your attention before it takes effect, for example by email to the address on your account or by in-product notice. Your continued use of the Service after a change takes effect constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms. If you do not accept a change, your remedy is to stop using the Service before the change takes effect.
14. Force majeure
We will not be liable for any failure or delay in performing our obligations under these Terms that is caused by an event outside our reasonable control, including (without limitation) acts of God, war, terrorism, civil unrest, pandemics, governmental action, sanctions, internet or telecommunications outages, failures of upstream cloud or hosting providers, denial-of-service attacks, or strikes. We will use reasonable efforts to mitigate any such delay or failure.
15. Notices
We may give you notices under these Terms by email to the address on your account, by in-product notice, or by posting on the Service. You may give us notices under these Terms by email to legal@sponsio.com. Notices given by email are deemed received on the next business day in the recipient’s location.
16. Miscellaneous
Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Notice, the Cookies Notice and the Disclaimer, form the entire agreement between you and us in respect of the Service and supersede any prior agreement, representation or understanding. You confirm that, in accepting these Terms, you have not relied on any statement, representation, assurance or warranty that is not set out in these Terms or in the documents listed above. Nothing in this paragraph limits any liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.
Assignment. You may not assign, transfer, charge, sub-contract or otherwise deal with your rights or obligations under these Terms without our prior written consent. We may assign, transfer, charge, sub-contract or otherwise deal with our rights or obligations under these Terms at any time, including in connection with a merger, sale or re-organisation, provided that your rights under these Terms are not adversely affected.
Severability. If any provision (or part-provision) of these Terms is or becomes invalid, illegal or unenforceable, that provision shall be deemed modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it valid, legal and enforceable; if such modification is not possible, the relevant provision (or part-provision) shall be deemed deleted. Any such modification or deletion shall not affect the validity and enforceability of the rest of these Terms.
Waiver. No failure or delay by either party to exercise any right or remedy under these Terms shall constitute a waiver of that or any other right or remedy.
No partnership or agency. Nothing in these Terms is intended to, or shall be deemed to, establish any partnership, joint venture, employment, agency or employer-employee relationship between you and us.
Third-party rights. A person who is not a party to these Terms has no rights under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 to enforce any of their provisions.
17. Governing law and jurisdiction
These Terms and any dispute or claim (including non-contractual disputes or claims) arising out of or in connection with them, their subject matter or formation, shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the law of England and Wales. You and we agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales to settle any such dispute or claim, save that, where you are a consumer resident in another part of the United Kingdom, you may also bring proceedings in your local courts as required by mandatory law, and where you are a consumer resident in the European Union you may also bring proceedings in the courts of your country of residence as required by Regulation (EU) 1215/2012 and equivalent successor legislation.
18. How to contact us
For questions about these Terms or your account, please email legal@sponsio.com. For data-protection questions, please email privacy@sponsio.com. For security-incident reports, please email security@sponsio.com.