Interpretation of Internal Use and Own Benefit (MSA)

Off-Topic
1

Hi,

New here and I loved playing around with some scenarios. Now if I wanted to move on and use that for my business, I’d like to know what I can, and what I cannot do re. charging a customer of mine for my services and make automations.

Not a native speaker nor a lawyer, so I’d really love some clarification on these points from the Master Services Agreement:

You may access to and use of the Services solely for Your internal purposes in accordance with the limitations specified on the Platform and not for the benefit of any third parties

and

You shall not: (i) use the Services for the benefit of anyone other than Yourself, unless expressly stated otherwise in the Agreement or the Documentation

If I were to offer my services to customers, the service being:

  • preparing some templates
  • having the customer send their materials via email and I use Make to fetch the email and do 100% of the processing (using my own accounts for Google Docs, Sheets, GCP etc.), then send the result back via email (still with Make) - is that me benefitting (automating my internal process) or is it the customer benefitting? Is this an allowed use of Make or not?

Cheers,
M

2

Hi - Welcome to the Community!

I’m not a lawyer, but I can speak to the intention of the MSA.

Essentially, if you’re setting up connections to your own services (GMail, Docs, Sheets, GCP) then you’re automating an internal process.

If you were connecting to services owned by the client (e.g. connecting directly to their GMail or Google Drive service) then you’d most likely be using the services for the benefit of the client.

There may be some other edge cases, but that’s a pretty good rule of thumb.

What you most definitely can’t legally do is to run scenarios that automate internal processes for a client between client-owned services, and then charge them for the Make usage.

3

Thank you for your reply. Indeed, that rule of thumb seems reasonable. I’ll stick to it unless told otherwise!

1 Like
4

Interesting Post. Thanks for sharing your insights