Terms of use

These terms govern the use of Couvella, a reservation system for restaurants, operated by Edenroche Sàrl. By creating an account or using the service you agree to them. Effective 17 September 2026.

1. Parties and definitions

Couvella is operated by Edenroche Sàrl, a company registered in Switzerland (canton of Vaud), UID CHE-165.841.442, with its registered office at Avenue Centrale 85, 1884 Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland (“we”, “us”, the “operator”). Full company details are on the company details page.

The “account holder” (“you”) is the business operating the restaurant for which the account is opened. “Users” are the people you add to your team; they act for you and have no contract with us of their own. The “application” is the Couvella software as we make it available online: the diary, seating board, guest records, reviews, statistics, settings, the assistant (“Ask”), the booking page, the embeddable widget, the public interfaces and the messages sent to guests. “Guest data” is personal data about your guests that enters the application through bookings, imports or your team’s entries.

These terms, the data processing agreement, the list of sub-processors, your subscription and the settings you choose in the application form the whole agreement between us. They prevail over any other document unless we both sign something different. The privacy policy says how we handle data about you and your team. Headings are for reading only.

2. The application and its availability

We give you access to the application over the internet, for the monthly fee, for the restaurant named on the account. You need your own devices, an internet connection of adequate quality and a current browser; these are your responsibility and their cost is yours. The application is provided as it stands on the day you use it; we improve it continually, and features may be added, changed or withdrawn. We give at least 30 days’ notice by email before withdrawing something that your restaurant relies on.

We use commercially reasonable efforts to keep the application available and working. Planned maintenance is announced ahead and placed outside service hours wherever we can. Messages to guests are queued and retried so that a provider’s outage does not lose a booking, and the database is backed up regularly with the backups verified. We do not promise uninterrupted availability. Our own staff can see your data where needed to run and support the application, and for nothing else.

3. Support

Contact support by email at hello@couvella.com, in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. We aim to respond within one Swiss working day, and sooner when the diary is unusable during a service. Support covers using the application as designed; it does not cover problems caused by your own devices, network, website or changes you make to the embed code beyond what the application offers. The written answers in the Help section, and Ask, are there for everyday questions.

4. Using the application

You must be at least 18 and authorised to bind the business you register. You create and remove your users, choose their role (owner, staff or view only) and are responsible for everything they do. Keep sign-in links and screen-lock PINs private, and tell us at once if you believe the account has been used without permission. Access is currently by invitation; an invitation may be withdrawn before an account is created.

You set the restaurant’s hours, capacities, areas, tables and reservation rules, and you keep them accurate. The application offers guests only what those settings allow, but it cannot know what you have not told it: you are responsible for overbooking that follows from your own settings, from bookings taken outside the application and not entered, or from a capacity override your team confirms. The widget may be placed on websites you control; its code is ours and may not be altered except through the options the application provides.

Ask is an assistant built on a language model. It may produce incorrect or incomplete answers. It makes no change without your confirmation, and you are responsible for reviewing and confirming any action it proposes.

You agree not to use the application to send messages guests have not asked for, to hold or charge cards outside the conditions you told the guest, to store data you have no right to hold, to interfere with the application or other restaurants’ use of it, to probe or circumvent its security or rate limits, or to break any law.

5. Price and payment

The subscription fee is €129 per month per restaurant and includes every feature of the application, plus VAT or other applicable sales, use or similar taxes. We take no commission on bookings, card guarantees or no-show charges, and there is no charge per cover. Text messages are charged separately: you buy SMS credit in advance, in packs, and each text sent is deducted at the rate shown for the destination country when you buy. Credit does not expire while the account is open and is not refundable except where the law requires it.

The subscription is billed monthly in advance through Stripe, by card; we never see your card details. Invoices are in the billing section of the diary. The subscription renews each month until you cancel it there; it then ends at the end of the period already paid for, without refund for the remainder. We may change the fee with at least 30 days’ notice by email; the new fee applies from your next billing period after that notice, and you may cancel before it does.

For a restaurant in South Africa, the subscription fee is R1,495 per month and message credit is sold in rand. Both are billed through Paystack and collected by Edenroche (Pty) Ltd, Rozenhof Villas, 165 Dorp Street, 7600 Stellenbosch, South Africa, on behalf of Edenroche Sàrl, which remains your contracting party. Where these terms refer to Stripe for the subscription, read Paystack.

If a payment fails, Stripe retries it. If the fee is still unpaid 14 days after Stripe gives up, the diary becomes read-only until it is paid, and we may charge interest at 5% per year on the outstanding amount. Your booking page keeps taking reservations during that time, so that a billing problem between us does not become a guest’s problem overnight; if the fee remains unpaid for a further 30 days we may, after notice by email, suspend the booking page and the widget as well. Neither of us may set off claims against the other without the other’s written agreement.

6. Card guarantees and money from guests

Card guarantees, deposits and no-show charges are taken through your own Stripe account, which you connect to Couvella. The money goes to you; we never hold it and are not a party to those payments. Stripe’s own terms and fees apply to your Stripe account. You decide when a card is required, the amount and the cancellation window, and you are responsible for stating those conditions to guests clearly, for charging only within them, and for any refund, chargeback or dispute.

In South Africa, these payments go through Paystack instead, with your restaurant as a subaccount of the Paystack account of Edenroche (Pty) Ltd. The money is settled to your bank account, we keep none of it, and Paystack’s fees are yours.

7. Data

As between you and us, you retain all rights in and control over the content and data you put into the application or collect through it: bookings, guest data, notes, ratings, settings, logo, images and the wording of your booking page. You grant us a limited, non-exclusive licence to host, copy, process, display and transmit that content solely as necessary to provide the application to you. You can export bookings and consenting guests as CSV at any time.

For guest data you are the controller and we are your processor, under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection and, where they apply, the GDPR and South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), under which you are the responsible party and we are the operator. The data processing agreement is part of these terms and sets out our obligations as processor: processing only on your documented instructions, confidentiality, security, assistance with guests’ rights and with breaches, deletion or return at the end, and the information you need to show compliance. Data about you and your team is processed by us as controller, as described in the privacy policy.

You are responsible for the lawfulness of the guest data you collect, for the privacy notice shown to your guests (the application provides one, which you may link to or replace with your own), for treating the newsletter tick as consent to a newsletter and nothing more, and for choosing a retention period appropriate to your obligations. Guest details are erased automatically after the retention period you set, and on request through the application.

We use the sub-processors on the list of sub-processors, each bound by contract to protect the data. Ask sends to the language model provider only the text of your question and the parts of your diary and settings needed to answer it, under commercial terms that do not permit the provider to train on that data. We tell you by email at least 30 days before a new sub-processor begins processing guest data, or as soon as practicable where a replacement is needed urgently to keep the application running; you may object on reasonable grounds, and if we cannot resolve the objection you may end the agreement without penalty.

8. Confidentiality

Each of us keeps the other’s non-public information confidential, uses it only for this agreement, and discloses it only to people who need it and are bound to keep it confidential. This does not apply to information that is public, already known to the receiving party, or required to be disclosed by law, and it lasts for five years after the agreement ends.

9. Intellectual property and references

The application, its software, design, text, drawings and documentation belong to Edenroche Sàrl and its licensors. You have a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the application for the restaurant on the account while the subscription is active. You may embed the widget on your own websites and point your own domain at your booking page. You may not copy, resell, sublicense, reverse-engineer or build a competing product from it. The name Couvella and its marks are ours; you may say that your reservations run on Couvella. Any use beyond this is a material breach.

With your written agreement, which you may withdraw at any time, we may name your restaurant and show its logo as a reference on our website and in presentations.

10. Warranty and liability

We warrant that we run the application with reasonable skill and care, in accordance with the law that applies to us, and that it contains no malware. Otherwise the application is provided as it stands, and we do not warrant that it meets every need of every restaurant or is free of every error.

Each of us is liable to the other for damage caused in performing this agreement, subject to what follows. Liability for slight negligence is excluded. Our total liability to you in any twelve-month period is limited to the fees you paid us in that period. Neither of us is liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost revenue, lost bookings or lost profit. None of these limits applies to gross negligence, wilful misconduct, or anything Swiss law does not let us exclude. We are not liable for the acts of guests, for charges you take under your card policy, for the content of your booking page, or for the performance of your own website, domain, devices or Stripe account. Claims under this agreement lapse two years after the event giving rise to them.

You indemnify us against claims by guests or third parties arising from your use of the application in breach of these terms or the law, including claims about card charges, messages sent without consent or data you had no right to hold.

11. Suspension and ending

You may close the account at any time. We may suspend access at once if the fee is unpaid past the period in section 5, if you use the application beyond the rights in section 9, or if a breach puts guests, other restaurants or the application at risk. We may end the agreement on 14 days’ notice if any other breach is not put right in that time, and we may end the application as a whole with at least 90 days’ notice.

Before the agreement ends you can export your data from the application, and for 30 days afterwards on request. After that we delete your data, except what we must keep under tax and accounting law and what remains in backups until those expire in the ordinary course. Sections 7 (as to deletion), 8, 9, 10 and 14 survive the end of the agreement.

12. Force majeure

Neither of us is in breach for a failure caused by events outside our reasonable control: natural disaster, war, terrorism, epidemic, power or telecommunications failure beyond our own systems, lawful strikes, or government action. The affected party tells the other promptly what has happened and how long it is expected to last, and does what is technically and economically reasonable to resume.

13. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. We email the account owner at least 30 days before a change takes effect, unless the change is required by law or only makes the terms clearer. If you do not accept the change you may cancel before it takes effect; using the application after that date means you accept it. The current version is always at couvella.com/terms.

14. Law and disputes

Swiss substantive law governs this agreement, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. The courts of the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, have exclusive jurisdiction. If a part of these terms is unenforceable the rest stands, and a gap is filled in the way that comes commercially closest to what the terms intend. This agreement creates no partnership or agency between us. The English text is the binding one; translations are for convenience.

15. Contact

Edenroche Sàrl, Avenue Centrale 85, 1884 Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland. hello@couvella.com.