The agreement between your shop and Joshua Tate. Written to be read, not to be survived. The one thing it says over and over is that SquawkShop keeps records and you make determinations.
Last updated 1 September 2026 · version 1.0
SquawkShop is made and sold by Joshua Tate, a sole proprietor and an FAA-certificated airframe and powerplant mechanic with inspection authorisation, trading in the State of Texas, United States. In this document “we” and “us” mean that business, and “you” means the maintenance facility that subscribes.
These terms are the whole agreement between us about SquawkShop. If you subscribe on behalf of a shop, you are telling us you are allowed to commit that shop, and the shop is bound as well as you.
Our order process is conducted by our online reseller Paddle.com. Paddle.com is the Merchant of Record for all our orders. Paddle handles the payment, the tax and the receipt, and its own buyer terms apply to that part. Everything to do with the software itself is between you and us, and is governed by this page.
SquawkShop is a record-keeping tool for aircraft maintenance. It holds checklists, findings, photographs, airworthiness directive research, work authorisations, logbook entries and invoices, and it turns what you record at the aircraft into the paperwork that comes out at the end.
It is not an authority on airworthiness, it does not make determinations, and it cannot. Three things follow from that, and they are the most important sentences on this page.
14 CFR § 43.15(a) requires each person performing an inspection to perform it so as to determine whether the aircraft, or the portion of it under inspection, meets all applicable airworthiness requirements. That person is you. Nothing SquawkShop puts on a screen — a checklist item, a directive it surfaced, a directive it filed away as not applicable, a green tick — is a determination, a substitute for one, or evidence that one was made. The app says this on its own directive screen for the same reason it is said here.
§ 43.9(a)(4) requires the signature, certificate number and kind of certificate of the person approving the work for return to service, and says that signature constitutes approval for return to service only for the work performed. A certificate holder signs. Software does not. When you sign in SquawkShop you are making the same entry you would make in ink, carrying the same weight and the same consequences, and it is your certificate that gives it effect and your certificate that is at risk if it is wrong.
§ 65.85 and § 65.95 set what an A&P and an IA may each approve, and SquawkShop will refuse a sign-off outside the role you hold in the shop. Treat that as a seatbelt, not as permission: staying inside your authority is your duty and stays your duty whether or not the software catches it.
SquawkShop carries the FAA’s own airworthiness directive records on the tablet so that the applicability paragraph is in front of you in a hangar with no signal. It has been checked against the FAA’s Dynamic Regulatory System and is checked again as it is updated. It is still a copy of a database somebody else maintains. It can be behind, and it can be wrong. DRS is free, public and authoritative; if it and SquawkShop disagree, the FAA is right and we are wrong, and we would rather you checked.
Nothing in SquawkShop or on this website is legal advice, tax advice, an FAA determination or an approval of any kind. We are a maintenance shop that writes software.
Each person gets their own sign-in. That is not a formality: the app records who did what, and a shared login makes those records worth less than the paper you were trying to replace. You are responsible for everything done under your shop’s account, including by somebody using a password they should not have.
You must be at least 18 and hold the certificates you claim to hold.
SquawkShop is priced by how many people use it and by nothing else. There is no charge per aircraft, none per inspection, and the aircraft owner is never charged to open the link you send him.
People over your plan’s count are $45 a month each, and you are billed whichever is cheaper: your plan plus those extras, or the next plan up. Growing never costs you more than the plan above would have cost. Six people is $240, eleven is $395, sixteen is $440, forty is $695.
A year up front is exactly twelve times the monthly price. There is no discount for it and no penalty either. It exists because some shops would rather cut one check a year than watch a charge go out every month.
Prices are in US dollars and exclude any sales tax or VAT, which Paddle calculates and adds at checkout as the merchant of record. If we change a price we will tell you by email at least 30 days beforehand, and the new price applies from your next renewal — never mid-term, and never to a year you have already paid for.
Headcount is counted from the people who can sign in to your shop. If it goes up, the extra is billed; if it goes down, the reduction applies at your next renewal.
You get the whole thing for thirty days without entering a card number. Not a cut-down version and not a demonstration account — the software, on your own aircraft, with your own records in it.
If you do nothing at the end of it, nothing is charged then and nothing is charged later. Your records stay where they are for 60 days in case you come back, and you can take the export at any point in that window. After 60 days a trial that was never subscribed is deleted.
Everything you put into SquawkShop — inspections, findings, photographs, logbook entries, invoices, your customers and their aircraft — belongs to you and to the aircraft owners you work for. We claim no ownership of any of it.
You grant us the licence we need to do exactly that and no more: to store your records, back them up, transmit them, and display them to the people you have given access to, including through the link you send an aircraft owner. That licence ends when your data is deleted.
Every job exports as a single file with the photographs inside it, and you can take it at any time, including after you have stopped paying. Please do. § 91.417 puts the duty to keep an aircraft’s maintenance records on its owner and operator, and § 43.9 puts the duty to make the entry on the person who did the work. Those duties are not transferred to us by our holding a copy. SquawkShop is not the record of last resort and you should not run your shop as though it were.
Your customer — the person who owns the aircraft — is not our customer. He does not sign up, he never pays us, and he reaches a read-only page through a link you send him.
Everything on that page came from you. His name, his aircraft, the findings, the photographs, the price and his signature are in our system because you put them there, and it is you who decides what he sees and when. In data-protection language you are the controller of that information and we process it on your instructions. See the privacy policy, which is mostly about this distinction.
That makes three things yours rather than ours:
The page carries your name, your logo and your colours, and a small “powered by SquawkShop” under your name, which you can switch off.
When an owner authorises work he draws a mark, and we file it against a frozen, itemised list of exactly what he approved, deferred and declined at that moment, with any not-to-exceed figure and a SHA-256 hash over the list. If he changes an answer afterwards the page tells him his answers have moved and asks him to sign again, rather than letting the old signature stand for new work.
That is a record of what was authorised. It is not a legal opinion that the authorisation is enforceable, and it is not a certified electronic signature under any particular statute. We have built it to be good evidence. Whether it is enough evidence for your purposes is a question for your own lawyer, and if you need more than this, get a wet signature as well.
No uptime percentage, because a one-man business cannot honestly promise one and a number you cannot enforce is worse than no number. What we will say is what the thing is built to do when it fails.
The parts of the service that need a connection — syncing, publishing an owner’s page, pulling a directive document down — depend on Supabase and Cloudflare, and when they are down we are down. We will say so rather than pretend otherwise.
Short list, and none of it will surprise you.
Cancel whenever you like. Monthly, you keep the service to the end of the month you have paid for and it does not renew. Annual is covered in the refund policy, and the short version is a full refund inside the first 30 days and none after it.
We can end your subscription if payment fails and stays failed after we have told you and given you 14 days, if you break clause 9, or if what you are doing puts other customers at risk. Except where you are actively harming somebody, you get 30 days’ notice and time to export.
If SquawkShop is ever shut down, you get at least 90 days’ notice, the export tools keep working for the whole of it, and any annual payment covering a period after the shutdown is refunded in full. Your records are a file you can already hold today; that is deliberate, and it is the answer to “what if you go under”.
Your records stay for 60 days so you can change your mind, then they are deleted on the schedule in the privacy policy. Clauses 6, 11, 12 and 14 survive the end of this agreement.
This is the clause your lawyer would read first, so it is in the same plain words as the rest.
SquawkShop is provided as it is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, that it will be free of defects, or that the directive library is complete or current. Clause 2 explains why the last of those cannot honestly be warranted by anybody.
The cap. To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for everything arising out of SquawkShop, in aggregate and however it arises, is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or $100.
What we are not liable for at all: lost profits, lost business, lost or corrupted data, cost of substitute software, aircraft downtime, or any indirect or consequential loss — even if we were told it might happen.
What this clause does not do. It caps money. It does not move your regulatory responsibility onto us, and it does not move ours onto you. It does not limit liability for fraud, for wilful misconduct, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence, and it does not apply where the law of your state does not permit it — some states do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties or of incidental damages, in which case the exclusions above apply to you only as far as that state allows.
You are buying a $75-to-$695-a-month tool from one mechanic in Texas. The cap is the honest shape of that trade, and it is why clause 6 tells you to take the export.
If somebody brings a claim against us because of what you recorded, published or authorised through SquawkShop — a customer whose information you had no right to hold, a photograph you should not have taken, a determination you signed for — you will defend us and cover the cost. We will tell you promptly, let you run the defence, and not settle without asking you.
We will post the new version here with a new date at the top, and email every subscriber at least 30 days before anything that materially reduces what you get or increases what you pay takes effect. Carrying on using SquawkShop after that is how you accept it. If you do not, cancel before it starts and clause 10 applies.
Small corrections — a typo, a clearer sentence, a new subprocessor that does the same job as the old one — go in without an email, but the date at the top always moves.
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and the state and federal courts sitting in Ellis County, Texas have exclusive jurisdiction. Both of us agree to that, and both of us give up any objection to it being inconvenient.
The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.
If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. Not enforcing something once does not mean giving it up. You may not transfer this agreement without our consent; we may transfer it if the business is sold, and we will tell you if that happens.
There is one, and it is the mechanic who wrote it.
SquawkShop is Joshua Tate, an A&P/IA in Texas. Write to support@squawkshop.aero or telephone (469) 846-8023.