Last updated August 19, 2026
The short of it: Local Letter writes the newsletter, you read it, and you decide whether it goes out. You are the publisher. Your list is your responsibility. Nothing sends without you — and nothing sends without an active plan or trial.
Local Letter is a software tool that drafts and sends a weekly local newsletter for real estate agents and lenders. It is operated by Thomas Gwinn in Indiana. In this document “we” and “us” mean Local Letter, and “you” means the person using it.
You accept these terms by checking the box shown when you first sign in, and using Local Letter means you continue to accept them. Each version of this document carries its date; if a change matters, we will email you before it takes effect, and continuing to use Local Letter after that means you accept the new version.
You need to be at least 18 to use it, and appropriately licensed if you are marketing real estate services.
Local Letter drafts a newsletter about your market using artificial intelligence and public information, shows it to you, and sends it to your contacts once you approve it. It can also publish each issue to a blog page for you, keep your contact list in step with your CRM, and show you how your issues perform.
You are the publisher and the sender. Local Letter is the tool you publish with. Every issue is put in front of you before it goes anywhere, and approving one means you are adopting it as your own message to your own people.
Local Letter is sold as a monthly subscription. The current plans, prices, and what each includes are published on the pricing page, which is part of these terms. Billing is monthly, there are no contracts and no minimum term, and payments are handled by our payment processor, Stripe — we never see or store your card number.
We can change standard prices with at least 30 days' notice by email, for future billing periods only. A price change never reaches backward, and it never touches an active promotional price such as the founding rate, which section 5 governs.
Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial. You add a payment card to begin, and the first charge happens automatically when the trial ends. During the trial every part of Local Letter is available to you, with one limit: trial sending can reach up to 10 recipients in total, so you can test a real issue without mailing your full list. That cap lifts automatically with your first payment. Cancel before the trial ends and you pay nothing at all. A trial that reaches its end without a working payment method is canceled, not charged.
Sending requires an active plan or trial. Signing up is what turns sending on; without it your account can be looked at but nothing goes out.
One detail worth knowing: if you import more contacts than your plan includes during the trial, the extra-contact charge described in section 6 lands on your first invoice. You are always emailed before that happens.
The first 25 paid accounts get the Local plan at the founding price of $49 a month instead of $79. The founding price is locked for as long as that subscription runs, continuously.
If the subscription ends, the founding price is gone for good — however it ends. Cancel it, let a failed payment run out, or finish the trial without paying, and your spot goes back into the count for someone else. You are welcome back any time, at the prices then in effect, but not at $49. This is what makes the founding price honest: it belongs to the people who stayed.
A founding spot is reserved when your checkout opens. If checkout fails or you close it without finishing, the spot is simply returned — no penalty. Whether a spot has been forfeited is determined by our records.
The lock covers the price. The product itself — features, included allowances, extra-contact rates — will keep evolving for every plan, founding included. The founding price is attached to your account, cannot be transferred or sold, has no cash value, and is limited to one per customer.
You are never blocked for growing. If your active contact list goes over what your plan includes, the overage is billed in blocks of 1,000 contacts a month at the rate shown on the pricing page, partial blocks rounded up. It is never charged mid-cycle — it appears on your next invoice — and you are emailed the price the first time you cross into a new block. Drop back under your plan's cap and the charge goes away on its own.
Your newsletter does not stop the day a card fails. There is a 14-day grace period during which everything keeps working and your scheduled issues keep sending; we email you when the payment fails and again before the window closes. A successful payment ends the grace period immediately. After 14 days without payment we may suspend sending — scheduled issues are held, not lost, and nothing is deleted. Sending resumes when payment does.
You can cancel any time, online, from your Settings page or the billing portal — no phone call, no hoops. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing period you have already paid for, and you keep full use of Local Letter until then. You can change your mind and resume any time before the period ends.
There are no refunds; the free trial is the evaluation period. Cancelling deletes nothing — your blog, your contacts, and your history stay, and you can resubscribe whenever you like (a former founding member resubscribes at then-current prices, per section 5).
Plans are priced for the person or team who buys them, and we protect that pricing for everyone who pays it honestly:
If a plan is being used outside these rules, we may move the account to the plan that matches its real use going forward, suspend it, or close it, depending on what we find. Commissions or discounts obtained through misuse are forfeited.
Sign-in happens through a link sent to your email address, so your email account is the key to your Local Letter account. Keep it secure. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you. Tell us quickly if you think someone else has access.
By uploading, importing, or syncing contacts, you confirm that every person on that list gave you permission to email them, or is a client or personal contact who would expect to hear from you. The app asks you to confirm this once before your first send — that checkbox is part of this agreement, and it covers contacts you add later too, including readers who subscribe themselves through your blog. Be ready to show where a contact's permission came from if we ask.
You may not use Local Letter to send to:
Every issue carries an unsubscribe link. Unsubscribes are honored immediately and automatically, and you must not add someone back after they have opted out.
Following the law that applies to your sending is your responsibility. That includes CAN-SPAM, your state's email and consumer protection laws, CASL if you email anyone in Canada, fair housing and real estate advertising rules, and whatever your brokerage and MLS require of you.
Your email leaves from a sending domain that Local Letter members share, with your name on it and replies going to you. One member's bad list can hurt every member's delivery, so the platform enforces rules automatically, and these terms are your agreement to them:
Newsletter and blog content is generated by artificial intelligence from live sources. It can be wrong, out of date, or incomplete. We give you every issue to read and edit before it sends, and nothing sends without your approval — an issue you never approve simply expires unsent. Checking what goes out under your name is your job, and an issue you approved and sent is your communication. If we ever offer a standing-approval option that sends without a per-issue review, turning it on is your approval of what it sends.
We do not warrant that generated content is accurate, complete, original, or suitable for any particular purpose. It is not legal, financial, investment, or professional real estate advice — to you or to your readers. Mortgage-rate figures shown to readers are national averages and carry an automatic disclaimer saying so.
Two honest mechanics of how it works: agents in the same market draw on the same local facts, so content across nearby accounts can be similar — generated writing is not guaranteed to be unique. And an approved issue normally sends at its scheduled time, but one held up by a fixable problem sends when the problem clears, up to seven days later, after which it expires rather than sending stale.
Your newsletter must comply with fair housing law. Our writing is instructed to describe places with facts and never to characterize who a neighborhood is “for”, and a final automatic pass reviews wording before sending — but you must not edit content in a way that breaks this, and compliance of what you approve is yours.
Each issue can also become a post on your blog — with its own separate approval; nothing reaches your public blog until you press that button. Your blog pages collect questions, leads, and new subscribers on your behalf: what a visitor submits goes to you and, if connected, to your CRM. Those people are your contacts and your responsibility, same as section 11.
Local Letter records, for each issue, which recipients opened it and which links they followed, and shows you the results as totals. Your blog pages keep a daily count of views. This is part of the service you are buying, and anything you owe your own readers in the way of disclosure is yours to give — our Privacy Policy tells your readers exactly what is and is not recorded.
When you sign up for a paid plan, we may briefly show your first name, your state, and the plan you chose on our own website — “Amy from Kentucky just signed up” — while your signup is recent. Never your last name, email, or anything else. If you would rather not appear, tell us and we will leave you out.
Every member can share a referral link and earn a commission on the payments of people who join through it. The rules, in plain terms:
You may invite one lending partner to share the cost of your plan, up to 50%. They review and approve the arrangement themselves, pay their share directly, and receive clearly labeled sponsorship placements carrying their name and NMLS ID in every sponsored issue and on your blog, plus a copy of each sponsored issue. The share applies to your plan's base price only, never to extra-contact charges. If their payment stops, the placements pause and your bill returns to the plan price; either of you can end the arrangement at any time.
Cost sharing is optional and must reflect the relative benefit and value received by each party. It is not conditioned on referrals, loan applications, closings, or exclusivity. You and your lending partner are each responsible for your own compliance, including any approval your brokerage or their institution requires.
Team accounts are coming. Team pricing and team terms will be published before any team is charged, and nothing in this document sells a team plan today.
You own your brand, your logo, your photos, your contact list, and the issues you send. To the extent generated content is capable of ownership, we assign our interest in your issues and posts to you — with the honest caveat from section 13 that similar content may be generated for other members, and no promise that generated text is unique or protectable.
We own the software, the templates, and the designs that make Local Letter work. While your account is open you have a limited right to use it, and nothing beyond that.
You give us permission to store and process your content for one purpose only: running the service for you. Drafting your issues, sending them, publishing your blog, and helping you when you ask.
We do not sell your contact list. We do not email your contacts for our own purposes. We do not use one customer's contacts to market to another. Your contact list is never sent to an AI provider. The Privacy Policy has the full picture.
We can pause sending or close an account when we see spam complaints, high bounce rates, signs of a purchased list, misuse of the plans under section 9, or any other breach of these terms. When sending is paused, scheduled issues are held rather than lost.
You can close your account whenever you like by asking us. Closing it deletes your content.
The service is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be available, uninterrupted, or free of errors, and we do not promise that any email will be delivered, arrive in an inbox rather than a spam folder, or be counted perfectly — mail systems beyond our control decide those things.
As far as the law allows, we are not liable for lost profits, lost business, lost data, or any indirect or consequential loss. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the fees you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim.
Some states do not allow certain exclusions. Where that is true, the part that is not allowed simply does not apply to you.
You agree to cover us against claims, damages, fines, and reasonable legal costs arising from your contact list, from emailing someone without permission, from content you approved and sent, or from breaking these terms.
We may update this document. Each version carries its date, and if a change matters, we will email you before it takes effect. Carrying on with Local Letter after that means you accept the new version.
These terms are governed by the law of the State of Indiana, and any dispute belongs in the state or federal courts located in Indiana.
Write to thomas@localetter.com. A real person answers.
This version replaces the private-beta terms and is accepted by the checkbox shown at sign-in. Beta account holders were told before it took effect, as the beta version promised.