Business Risk Acknowledgment
The key points in plain language
- What WhatTrust is. AI software for research, planning, analysis and running your business — not a business opportunity, franchise, investment or source of guaranteed income. We do not supply customers, accounts or locations.
- Your business is yours. You decide and control your business: decisions, financing, operations, suppliers, communications, licences and taxes.
- No guaranteed results. We do not guarantee revenue, profit, employment, customers, contracts, sales or success. Many new businesses earn little or nothing.
- Research has limits. Sources can be incomplete or out of date. Reports separate verified evidence from assumptions — check both before you decide.
- AI can be wrong. Review every output. Get legal, tax, accounting, financial or licensing advice from a qualified professional where it is required.
- Other companies' services. Connected providers (email, social, stores, payments, domains) have their own approvals, rules, fees and availability, separate from WhatTrust.
- Earnings figures are illustrations. They show possible outcomes under stated assumptions, keep revenue, costs, profit and your own income separate, and can be zero or negative. The optimistic case is conditional, not the expected result.
- What you pay. $89 for the first month, then $149 a month, renewing until you cancel online. Extra research ($19) and optional services are separate and only charged when you choose them.
- Refunds. Explained by category in the refund policy. Paid research has real costs once it starts. Rights your local law gives you, such as a withdrawal period, always apply.
- Limits of responsibility. Our responsibility is limited where the law allows. These limits never cover fraud or anything the law does not let us exclude.
This summary helps you understand the full document below; if they differ, the full document applies, and your rights under local law are never reduced.
1. The acknowledgment (exact English text)
This is the text of message key checkout.c4, copied verbatim. You tick it as a separate box at checkout:
I understand that starting or running a business involves financial and operational risk. WhatTrust research is evidence-based analysis, not a guarantee: an opportunity can fail even after careful research, and results depend on market conditions, my own decisions, capital, execution, competition, regulation and other factors. WhatTrust does not promise profits, revenue, business success or a first paying customer, and I remain responsible for evaluating my own business decisions.
2. What it means in plain language
What WhatTrust is. WhatTrust is AI-powered software with research, planning, analytical and operational tools. It helps you research, compare, plan and organise.
What WhatTrust is not.
- It is not a business opportunity, a franchise or an investment, and it does not provide guaranteed income.
- WhatTrust does not sell you leads or contact lists, does not provide you with customers, clients, accounts, outlets or locations, and does not buy back anything you make or sell.
- Guidance about finding a first customer describes steps you can take. The customer-acquisition tools help you search public business listings and send messages you approve from your own mailbox; the organisations they show have not agreed to buy from you or to hear from you, and whether anyone becomes a customer depends on you and them.
No guaranteed outcomes. WhatTrust does not guarantee revenue, sales, profit, income, employment, customers, contracts, website visitors, enquiries, replies to messages or business success. A well-researched opportunity can still fail, and you may lose money you spend on it.
Your business is yours. You decide whether and how to start or run a business. You control and are responsible for its decisions, financing, operations, suppliers, communications with customers, licences, permits and taxes.
Research has limits. Research uses sources that may be incomplete, out of date or not available for your market. Reports show which findings are verified evidence from a cited source and which are estimates or assumptions. Any price, demand or market figure describes the market or an assumption; it is not a prediction of what you will earn.
AI can be wrong. AI output, including recommendations, website content and drafts from the AI Business Agent, can contain errors, even when it sounds confident. Review it before you rely on it, publish it or send it. WhatTrust does not give legal, tax, accounting, financial or licensing advice. Where your decision needs it, or the law requires it, get advice from a qualified professional or the relevant authority.
Third-party services are separate. Platforms, marketplaces, payment providers and suppliers make their own decisions about approving you, set their own policies and fees, and may change or withdraw their services.
What this acknowledgment does not do.
- It does not stop you relying on your legal rights.
- It does not excuse WhatTrust from any statement WhatTrust makes that is false or misleading, or from providing the Service with reasonable care and skill.
- See Terms of Service sections 3, 6.1A, 9, 10, 11, 11A and 13.
3. Earnings scenarios: how to read them
3.1 The disclosure shown with every scenario
These figures illustrate possible outcomes under the stated assumptions. They are not actual or guaranteed earnings, and they do not predict your personal results. Your outcome depends on your skills, experience, available time, effort, capital, ability to attract customers, market conditions and expenses. Actual results may be lower, zero or negative. The optimistic case is a conditional scenario, not the most likely outcome.
3.2 What a scenario is
Your free results, and some panels in your workspace, show earnings scenarios for a business direction. A scenario is an illustration calculated from assumptions that are shown next to it, for example a price per hour or per sale, the number of paying clients, hours worked, fees and running costs. It is not a forecast of what you will earn, and it is not based on what other WhatTrust customers have earned. We have no data on what typical WhatTrust customers earn.
3.3 The three cases we show
| Case | What it means |
|---|---|
| Base case | The result if the stated, moderate assumptions hold. It is still an illustration, not a prediction. |
| Optimistic case | A conditional upside: what could happen if more favourable assumptions (for example more clients or a higher price) come true. It is not the expected or most likely result. |
| No paying clients | Revenue is zero. Any costs you have already committed to become a loss. This case is always shown, because it is a real possibility. |
3.4 The words we use, and what they mean
We keep these figures separate. We never call a figure "profit" or "income" when the costs needed to calculate it are unknown.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Revenue | Money your customers pay your business, before any costs. Revenue is not what you keep. |
| Business expenses | What the business spends. This includes fees (for example platform, marketplace and payment-processing fees) and running costs (for example software, advertising, materials, travel, insurance and professional fees). |
| Gross profit | Revenue minus the direct cost of delivering what you sold (for example materials, cost of goods and per-sale fees). |
| Operating profit | Revenue minus all business expenses, before income tax. It can be negative. |
| Your income or take-home | What is left for you personally after business expenses and taxes (shown as an after-tax figure where we can estimate the tax). It is usually much lower than revenue, and it can be zero or negative. |
Scenario panels show revenue, fees, running costs, operating profit and after-tax figures as separate lines. Where a cost needed for a line is unknown, that line is not labelled profit or income.
3.5 The starting hourly price
Where a scenario suggests a starting hourly price, it uses the average pay of employees in a broad occupation group in your country, as published by the International Labour Organization (ILO). This is a starting value only. It is not a price you can expect to charge as a freelancer or business owner. Employee pay figures do not reflect unpaid time spent finding clients, gaps between projects, your own costs, missing employer benefits, or differences in skill, specialisation and location. Your achievable price may be lower or higher.
3.6 You can change the assumptions
You can edit the assumptions in a scenario and see the figures change. Each scenario shows its sources, the dates of the data, the geography it relates to and the currency. Figures are shown in US dollars. Where source data is in another currency, it has been converted, and actual exchange rates vary.
4. How the acknowledgment is presented and recorded
Presentation.
- It is a separate checkbox on WhatTrust's own checkout page, before you are sent to Stripe to pay. It is unticked when the page loads, and it is not combined with any other acknowledgment.
- There are four separate boxes, shown in this order:
- automatic renewal;
- the Terms of Service and the Subscription, Refund and Cancellation Policy, including confirmation that you are at least 18 or the age of majority where you live;
- this Business Risk Acknowledgment;
- a request that your access to the Service start immediately after payment.
- The pay button stays disabled until every box is ticked, and our server refuses checkout unless this box was ticked.
- Optional purchases (additional Deep Research, additional websites and AI agent credit top-ups) each have their own separate, unticked box that states the exact charge. They are not part of this acknowledgment. An additional business is a separate subscription and shows the same four boxes, including this acknowledgment.
Records.
- We record the exact text you saw, in the language you saw it and in English, with a fingerprint (SHA-256) of each, the policy versions, your billing region, interface language, IP address, browser user agent, the price shown and the time.
- If the text your browser showed does not match the text on our server, or the policy version has changed, checkout is refused, so the record reflects what was actually shown.
- Records are append-only and cannot be edited or deleted through normal operations. You can see them in Export my data (without IP address and user agent).
5. Translation status
- The acknowledgment is available in all eight interface languages: English, Arabic, French, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Hindi, German and Turkish.
- The seven non-English versions are machine translations, pending native-speaker and legal review. We record the language version you saw.