Terms of Service

Curbtip gives drivers free NFC tags. A rider taps one with their phone, lands on a web page, and can tip in a few seconds — no app, no rider account. The driver keeps 100% of every tip. We make money from a separate service fee the rider pays on top, never from the tip itself.

We're not a ride-hailing company and we have no relationship with Uber, Lyft, or any platform you drive for. We don't see your trips, your ratings, or your earnings from them.

Curbtip is US-only. To get a kit and receive payouts you must be at least 18, a resident of the United States, and able to pass identity verification through Stripe (our payment processor) — this is required by federal law for anyone receiving electronic payouts, not something we ask for on top.

Every tip carries a service fee: 15% of the tip, with a $0.99 floor and a $3.99 cap. The rider pays it on top of the tip — it is never deducted from what the driver receives, and there is no toggle that shifts it onto the driver.

The fee is shown on screen, as a dollar amount, before the rider taps to pay — never added afterward. Below $6.60 the fee is a flat $0.99 and we say so as a flat amount, not a percentage; above $26.60 it's capped at $3.99, which stops being close to 15%, so we stop calling it that. We hold ourselves to this even though the rule requiring it — the FTC's 2025 rule on total-price disclosure — is written for event tickets and hotel rooms, not tip pages. The same principle (disclose the real total, up front, before the rider is committed) is one we'd want applied to us even where it isn't legally required yet.

We use Stripe to move money. When a rider pays, the payment goes to Stripe, Stripe routes the tip straight to the driver's own Stripe-connected bank account, and our fee is collected separately as our application fee on the same transaction. Curbtip never takes custody of a rider's card number or a driver's bank details — Stripe handles and stores those directly, under its own regulatory license.

Money transmission law is genuinely state-by-state here. Most states recognize an "agent of the payee" exemption that lets a company like ours collect and pass along payment on a payee's (the driver's) behalf without its own money-transmitter license — but that exemption isn't adopted everywhere, and the states that have it don't all define it the same way. We have not yet had a money-transmission lawyer confirm our structure state by state, and that review needs to happen before this is a real business, not a prototype. Nothing above should be read as a legal conclusion that we're exempt everywhere we'd operate.

A tip isn't a purchase, and there's no product to return — so tips are final once sent, the same standard every tipping platform holds. We may refund a tip at our discretion in narrow cases: a duplicate charge, a technical error, or clear fraud.

If a rider's bank reverses a charge after the fact (a chargeback), and the tip was already paid out to the driver, we may recover that disputed amount from the driver's future payouts. What we won't do is pass along our cost of handling the dispute — Stripe charges us a flat fee for every disputed charge regardless of who's at fault, and Connect's rules don't let us bill that fee to the driver, so we don't try to some other way. That fee is ours to eat.

Keep your name, address, and vehicle info accurate — riders use your name and photo to confirm they're tipping the right person, and Stripe uses your identity info to verify you for payouts.

Using Curbtip doesn't make you our employee or contractor. We're a payments and hardware provider, not an employer, and we don't direct how, when, or for whom you drive.

Your sign-in methods are yours to protect. Signing in uses a code texted to your number, or a passkey (Face ID or fingerprint) stored on your device. Anyone who controls your phone number or an unlocked device with your passkey can act as you — so protect your phone, your SIM, and your carrier account, and remove passkeys you don't recognize from Settings right away. If you think someone else has accessed your account, tell us at help@curbtip.com immediately.

We're not responsible for access we couldn't distinguish from you. If someone signs in using your phone number (for example after a SIM swap you didn't report to your carrier or to us), your device, or a passkey registered to your account, we may treat their instructions as yours — and we aren't liable for funds, payouts, or account changes lost that way, except where the law says otherwise or the access resulted from our own security failure. We strongly recommend a passkey: it can't be phished, guessed, or intercepted the way a texted code can.

Tips are taxable income, whether or not anyone sends you a form for them. If your Curbtip tips cross the federal threshold in a calendar year — more than $20,000 and more than 200 transactions — Stripe issues you a 1099-K automatically. That threshold is current as of the 2025 law that restored it; a handful of states set their own, lower thresholds, so you may get a form even if you don't cross the federal number.

A recent federal deduction lets eligible workers deduct up to $25,000 a year in tip income through 2028, but to claim it your tips generally need to show up on a 1099 form in the first place — keeping your own running total is worth doing regardless of whether a form arrives. None of this is tax advice; talk to a tax professional about your specific situation.

The headrest tags and their mounts are free, including shipping, with no purchase or subscription attached. They stay yours even if you close your account — there's nothing to send back and nothing to cancel.

Free has limits, because we pay for every kit: normally one kit per driver — plus free replacements for lost or damaged tags — shipped to the address on your account. Kits are for your own use in your own vehicle. They may not be resold, redistributed, or requested in bulk, and a tag only ever pays the account that activated it, so a bought or secondhand tag would send its tips to a stranger. We may decline, limit, or hold any kit request, or ask for extra verification, where we see signs of farming, resale, or fraud.

You can close your account at any time from Settings. It takes effect immediately and signs you out everywhere. Any balance you've already earned still pays out on the normal timeline — free in 2–3 business days.

Don't tap your own tag to send yourself tips, don't use Curbtip to move money that isn't a genuine tip from a genuine rider, and don't try to get around Stripe's identity checks. We can suspend or close an account we reasonably believe is being used for fraud or to launder funds.

To protect everyone's money, we also rate-limit and monitor the service: repeated sign-in attempts, scripted or automated traffic, requesting kits you don't intend to use, probing other drivers' tags or accounts, and anything that looks like spam, scraping, or an attack can be throttled or blocked without notice, and can be grounds for suspension. Where fraud, chargebacks, or unlawful activity are involved we can hold funds pending review and report to Stripe, card networks, or law enforcement as required.

We don't guarantee any particular tip volume, tap rate, or income — how much a tag earns depends on where you drive, where you place it, and how many riders choose to tap it. The service is provided as-is, and (like most services this size) our liability to you is limited to the fees actually paid through Curbtip in the past 12 months. That's a standard placeholder, not language a lawyer has drafted for this business specifically — a real limitation-of-liability clause, along with any arbitration or class-action terms, still needs one before this goes live.

We haven't chosen a governing state, a dispute-resolution process, or a venue yet — writing one in here that looks official without a lawyer behind it would be worse than leaving the gap visible. Until this section is actually drafted, assume it doesn't exist.

You don't have an account with us, and nothing above about drivers applies to you. When you tap a tag: the fee is shown before you pay, your tip goes to the driver, our service fee goes to us, and Stripe processes the card or wallet you use — we never see or store your full card number.

Tips are final for the reasons in Section 5. If something went wrong — a duplicate tap, a wrong amount — email help@curbtip.com and we'll look at it.

We'll update this page as the product changes, and we expect it to change substantially once this stops being a prototype. We'll update the "Last updated" date above whenever we do.