Why We Don't Put Compliance Reminders Behind the Paywall

The short version

Compliance expiry reminders are not behind our paywall. Every property gets warned before a certificate runs out, whether or not that property is paid for. And a reminder about something that has already gone wrong — a gas safety certificate that expired last week — is never withheld at all, from anyone, for any reason.

That was not the obvious commercial decision, so it is worth explaining why we made it.

The reasoning

We already show you the expiry date. It is on the property page, free, for every property you have added, subscribed or not. You can look at it any time.

So a paywall on the reminder would not be withholding information. It would be withholding it at the only moment it mattered — information we had already given you, quietly not repeated on the one day you needed it repeated. That is not a paywall. It is a trap, and it works precisely because the customer trusted us to be watching.

The second reason is what is actually at stake. A lapsed gas safety certificate is not an administrative untidiness. Regulation 36 of the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 is enforced under health and safety law, which means prosecution, unlimited fines, and in the worst cases imprisonment. An EICR or an EPC that has run out carries civil penalties into the thousands.

Neither of those is ours to gate for £2.99. If we know a landlord is exposed and we choose silence as a sales tactic, the product has stopped being on their side.

Add a property and see what is expiring, before anyone charges you anything. Get started free →

The limit, stated plainly

Being straight about this is what makes the principle worth anything, so here it is without softening.

Reminders about a certificate that has already expired are never limited. If it has run out, we email you. That happens on any property, on any account, however many times it takes. It is never counted against anything.

Advance warnings — the heads-up you get 30 days and 7 days before the expiry date — are limited on unpaid properties. Specifically:

• Your first property is always free, and its advance warnings are unlimited. That does not change.
• Any subscribed property gets unlimited advance warnings.
• Any other property gets three advance warnings, for the lifetime of that property. The allowance belongs to the property, not to each certificate — three warnings in total, however many documents it holds.
• After three, advance warnings stop for that property.

The part that matters most: the third one says so. The subject line tells you it is the last advance reminder, and the email says what happens next. We are not going to trail off and let you assume we are still watching. If we are going to stop, you will hear it from us while we are still speaking.

Subscribing a property removes the limit from the next daily run. Cancelling reinstates it. Reminders already sent still count either way — the record of what we sent is not something that should change retroactively in either direction.

What we do charge for

The boundary is simple, and it is not "free until it is useful".

We charge for documents we produce. A drafted tenancy agreement is £9.99. A Form 4A rent-increase notice is £4.99. A dispute evidence pack is £29.99. The £2.99 per property per month subscription covers inspections, e-signing your own contracts and tenant invites.

We do not charge for telling you something about your own property. Expiry dates, deadlines, what is missing, what is at risk — that is your data, and warning you about it is the least a system that holds it can do.

Put another way: you pay us for work we do, not for silence we agree not to keep. Producing a legally-reviewed agreement is work. Rendering a court-ready evidence bundle is work. Noticing that your EPC expires in three weeks is not work — it is a subtraction we would have to deliberately perform.

Where this leaves the limit

An honest reading of the above is that three advance warnings is still a limit, and a limit is still a commercial decision. It is. The advance warning is the part with genuine commercial value, because it is the part that leaves you time to act, and we are a business.

What we will not do is put that meter on the alert that says a certificate has already run out. The moment the meter could make a landlord miss the fact that they are already exposed, the whole design stops being defensible — and that is the exact line we have drawn in the code, not just in the copy.

If you want to know what you should be tracking regardless of which tool you use, our UK landlord compliance checklist lists the certificates and deadlines that actually carry penalties, and our guide to landlord fines sets out what each one costs. For deposits specifically, the protection rules and the 30-day deadline are set out on GOV.UK, and our deposit protection guide walks through them. Energy performance requirements are covered in the GOV.UK EPC guidance.

This is general information, not legal advice.