Last updated 2026-08-30. Benchnotes is run by one developer, Nathan, reachable at hello@benchnotes.io. Using this site means these terms apply to you.
The tools are free, and they are yours to use
The appendix builder and the notes sanitizer are free, need no account, and run entirely in your browser. You may use them for client work, commercial work and anything else lawful, including inside a firm you work for. Whatever you put in and whatever comes out is yours. No ownership is claimed over your notes, your indicators, your timeline or the documents these tools produce, and the appendix builder deliberately puts no branding in the file it emits, because that file goes into your deliverable.
The one thing to read twice
The sanitizer is a first pass, not a guarantee. It finds text shaped like a hostname, an address, an account or a name you gave it. It cannot find a client mentioned only in the middle of a sentence unless you tell it the name, and it does not detect phone numbers, postal addresses or GUIDs at all.
You are responsible for reading the output before you send it anywhere. The review table exists so you can check every replacement, and I recommend using it. If the tool misses something and identifying detail leaves your hands, that consequence sits with you, not with this site. Treat it as a tool that saves you an hour of manual work, not as a tool that removes the need to look.
No warranty
The site and the tools are provided as they are, without warranty of any kind, express or implied. That includes no warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or that the tools are error free or always available. This is a small project run by one person. It can be wrong, and it can be offline.
Nothing here is professional advice
These tools format and transform text you supply. They do not perform an investigation, do not make a finding, and do not tell you whether a conclusion is sound. Nothing on this site is legal advice, security advice for your specific situation, or a substitute for the judgment of the person whose name goes on the report. The analyst signs the report. The tool does not.
Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, Benchnotes is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss arising from your use of this site or its tools, including lost work, lost data, lost profit, or disclosure of information the sanitizer did not catch. Because the tools are provided free of charge, total liability for any claim relating to them is limited to nothing paid, which is zero.
Nothing in these terms limits liability where the law does not allow it to be limited, and if you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.
What you agree not to do
- Do not use this site to break the law, or to process material you have no right to process.
- Do not attempt to disrupt the site, overload it, or interfere with anyone else's use of it.
- Do not present the tools as your own product, or resell access to them. Using them inside your own paid work is fine and is the point.
- Do not submit someone else's personal information to the forms, only your own.
Beta access and the study
Asking for beta access is not a contract and does not guarantee access, a timeline, or any particular feature. Nothing is being sold on this site today. Any price shown anywhere is indicative until there is a product to buy, and terms for a paid product will be separate from these and agreed before any payment.
Taking part in the reporting study is voluntary and you can stop at any point. Results will be published in aggregate, and nothing you write is attributed to you, your employer or your client without your written permission first. How your answers are handled is set out in the privacy notice.
Availability and changes
The site may change, move or go offline without notice, and a free tool may be withdrawn. If a tool is withdrawn, I recommend keeping a local copy: both tool pages are a single HTML file with no dependencies, so saving the page to disk gives you a working copy that keeps working offline. That is a deliberate property of how they are built, not an accident.
Governing law
Benchnotes is operated from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States. These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, without regard to its conflict of law rules, and any dispute arising from them goes to the state or federal courts sitting in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
Most of this site's visitors are not in Pennsylvania. If the law where you live gives you the right to bring a claim in your own local courts, or gives you rights that cannot be signed away, this section does not take that away from you. And before any of that: write to hello@benchnotes.io. One person reads it, and almost anything worth disputing is faster to fix than to argue about.
Changes to these terms
If these terms change, the date at the top changes with them, and the previous version stays in the public git history of the site. Continuing to use the site after a change means the new version applies.
Contact
hello@benchnotes.io. If something in these terms gets in the way of you using a tool for real work, say so, because that is a problem worth fixing.