Know a business owner? Earn every month, for life.

This agreement is between you and VM TECH, the business behind SEO AZ. It covers introducing new businesses to SEO AZ and being paid for it.

VM TECH also runs Book AZ and POS AZ. They are separate systems with their own programmes, their own rates and their own agreements — joining this one does not enrol you in those, and a business that uses more than one of our systems is a separate customer on each.

You are joining as an independent participant. This is not employment. You set your own hours and your own methods, you are not our partner, and you cannot make promises, sign anything or speak for us.

You must be at least 18 and able to receive payment in Canada. One agent account per person. You cannot be the agent for a business you own, work at, manage or are otherwise connected to.

There is one programme. A business owner who wants to introduce another business joins as an agent like anyone else, on these same terms — the only difference is that an owner-agent has a bill of their own for the commission to come off first.

We never charge you anything to be an agent — no joining fee, no monthly fee, no fee for materials, training or a "starter pack". If anyone asks you to pay to join, it did not come from us.

You are also never paid for bringing other agents in. Money only ever flows one way: a business pays us for software, and we pay you part of it.

You must have an agent account, with identity and tax verification finished through Stripe, before the businesses you introduce sign up. This is the one rule that catches people out.

If a business signs up before you are verified, you earn nothing for it — not for its first month, not ever, even after it has paid for a year. If you finish verifying later, we will attach those businesses to your account and you start earning from each one's next payment onward, at the rate current on the day you verified. Nothing is ever back-paid.

Verification is handled by Stripe, not by us. Stripe collects your legal name, address and SIN (or your business number if you have one) directly — that information never goes into our system. No verification, no account, and no payment.

A business can be introduced by one person, and only at the moment it signs up. Whoever introduced it stays credited for as long as that business stays with us.

A business that is already with us, or that has already been introduced by someone else, cannot be introduced again — by you or by anyone.

Use your agent link or your agent code. Without one of them a business cannot be credited to you. If two people claim the same business, our record of how it signed up decides it, and our decision is final.

You earn for each month that a business you introduced actually pays us. A month we were not paid for — a business we host at no charge, a demo, or one whose payment failed — earns nothing, because no money came in.

A business's first paid month is a qualifying month and earns nothing. From the second paid month on, you earn every month that business keeps paying. This is so that a business which signs up, pays once and leaves does not carry a commission — we want you introducing businesses that stay.

If a business pauses, cancels or stops paying, the earnings for it stop with it. If it later comes back and you are the one who brought it back, your commission resumes.

If a payment we already paid you commission on is later refunded, reversed or charged back, that commission is reversed too and comes off your next balance. We are only ever sharing money we actually kept.

There is no free trial and no free month for anyone. A business you introduce pays from the day it signs up — which is also why you start earning on it sooner.

The rate is currently $10 per paying business per month, whatever plan that business is on.

We review the rate from time to time so it stays in line with the market — what businesses pay for software and what it costs us to run the service. It can go up as well as down. When it moves, the new rate applies to every agent and to every business from that date, including businesses you introduced earlier: one rate for everybody, never a rate per business.

You will never be surprised by it. We e-mail every agent at least 30 days before any change takes effect, with the reason for it, and a month you have already earned is always paid at the rate it was earned at — a change is never applied backwards.

The current rate is always shown on your agent page and on the public agent page. The programme only works if it stays worth your time, and we intend to keep it that way.

We may also change these terms, with at least 30 days' notice by e-mail. Carrying on as an agent after that means you accept the new terms.

Earnings for a month are worked out at the start of the following month.

If you are also a paying SEO AZ customer, your commission comes off your own bill first, every month, at any amount — there is no minimum for that part. Your full bill and your full commission are both recorded separately; we are not discounting your invoice, we are paying you and you are paying us.

Anything left over after your own bill is sent to you through Stripe every month, whatever the amount. There is no minimum to reach and nothing to wait for.

If you earn nothing new for 12 months, we will close your account and send anything still owing to you.

You are responsible for your own taxes on anything we pay you. If you are registered for GST/HST, give us your number and invoice us, and we will pay the tax on top.

This is a single-level programme. You earn on the businesses you personally introduce, and nothing at all on businesses introduced by people you brought into the programme. There is no second level, no team, no override and no downline.

We are saying this plainly because people assume otherwise. If anyone has told you that you will earn from recruiting other agents, they were wrong.

The monthly commission is pay for looking after the businesses you introduced, not money for nothing. You are their first point of contact: questions, showing them how things work, checking in now and then, and telling us when something is wrong.

The order is: the business asks you first. If it is something you cannot answer or cannot fix — a fault, an outage, a billing problem, anything about their account — pass it to VM TECH rather than guessing. We handle it from there and tell you what happened.

If you do not get back to a business, they can come to us directly, and we would rather they did than have them sit waiting. They can reach VM TECH at [email protected]. A business that has to chase us because its agent went quiet is one we may move to someone else, or handle ourselves.

A business can cancel whenever it likes. It keeps access until the end of the month it has paid for, and there is no refund — that is what it agreed to when it signed up, and it is what you should tell anyone who asks. When a business you introduced cancels, we will let you know, and we would like you to find out why and tell us.

Talk to people you know, and to businesses that would genuinely want this. Canadian anti-spam law applies to you personally: only e-mail or text people who have agreed to hear from you, say who you are, and give them a way to stop.

Do not spam, do not buy ads on our name, do not set up pages, accounts or e-mail addresses that look like they are us, and do not promise anything about what our software does that is not on our own website.

If something you do lands us with a complaint, a penalty or a claim — under anti-spam law or otherwise — you are responsible for it and you will cover our costs of dealing with it.

The business owners you meet through this programme, and their contact details, are ours. Use them to look after those businesses and for nothing else. Do not sell them, pass them on, or add them to a list for anything else.

For twelve months after you stop being an agent, do not approach the businesses you met through us to move them to a competing product.

Anything we tell you that is not public — pricing we have not published, plans, numbers — stays between us.

You cannot sell, transfer or hand your agent account, your code or the businesses attached to it to anyone else.

Introducing yourself, businesses you own or control, or accounts created to collect a commission is not allowed. Any earnings from it are cancelled, and we may close your account.

If we think something like that is going on, we may suspend your account and hold payment while we look into it. We will tell you why.

We may end your participation, and hold unpaid earnings, if you break these rules. Either of us can end this agreement at any time with written notice; commission you have properly earned up to that point is still paid.

We will give every agent at least 30 days' notice by e-mail if we end the programme altogether.

This agreement is governed by the laws of British Columbia, and any dispute is dealt with in the courts of British Columbia.

We provide SEO AZ as it is. Whatever happens, the most VM TECH can ever owe you in total is the commission we paid you over the twelve months before the problem arose. We are not liable for lost profit or lost opportunity.

If one part of this agreement turns out not to hold up, the rest still stands. This is the whole agreement between us about the Agent Program.

Confidentiality, not taking our customers, the limit on what we can owe you, and your responsibility for your own taxes all carry on after this agreement ends.