Who maintains this tool

This tool makes statements about what state statutes are summarized as requiring. A reader is entitled to know who is behind those summaries before deciding what weight to give them.

Who maintains it

Maintained by: Sam Leaming
Role: Founder
Based in: Oklahoma, United States
Legally qualified?: No. Not a lawyer, and nothing in the rule matrix has been reviewed by one.
Contact: samdesignsoftware@gmail.com

Background

I build and host websites for small businesses. That work is where this came from: checkout and signup pages are something I touch regularly, and I kept running into the fact that the rules governing subscription signups now differ state by state, with no single place to check what a given flow actually shows a customer.

I am not a lawyer and have no legal training. I cannot interpret a statute, and nothing here should be read as though I can. That is the reason this tool reports what it observed on a page rather than whether anything complies — and the reason every statute summary in the rule matrix is marked as unverified secondary-source text that a qualified lawyer needs to check before anyone relies on it.

If you find a rule summary that is wrong, I would rather hear it than not. Corrections go to the contact address and get logged in the changelog with the date.

Why this tool exists

For a moment it looked as though one federal rule would govern automatic renewals online. It does not. The Federal Trade Commission's 2024 Negative Option Rule was vacated in July 2025 before it took effect, and the rule the Commission restored in February 2026 reaches prenotification plans rather than online subscriptions. What is left is a patchwork: the requirements that reach a subscription signup flow today come from state statutes, and they differ by state.

The practical consequence is that a business selling a subscription online has to know what 14 separate state frameworks are summarized as asking for, and has to be able to look at its own checkout and say which of those things a customer can actually see. That second half is what this tool does. It walks a signup flow the way a customer would, stops at the card field, and reports which disclosure signals it could and could not observe, with the screenshot each observation came from.

It exists because that is a tedious thing to do by hand and an easy thing to get wrong from memory — and because a scan produces something a lawyer can actually read: evidence, dated, with the raw values behind it, rather than a verdict.

What it deliberately does not do

It does not decide whether anything meets a legal standard. Whether a disclosure is “clear and conspicuous” is a question a court answers on a full record, and no scanner can stand in for that.
It does not score, grade or certify. There is no badge to display and no pass mark to reach.
It does not treat what it could not see as fine. A check that depends on a signal the scan never observed is reported as could not be determined, never as a pass.
It does not claim users, customers or a track record. There are none, and pages that would normally carry that kind of thing are left out rather than filled in.

How the rule data is maintained

Every statute summary on this site is demo-seed text drafted from public secondary sources. It has not been checked against primary statutory text by counsel. That is stated on every page that renders one, and it is the single most important thing to know about this tool.

What holds the data together in the meantime is that it is all in one place and all dated:

The 9 checks and 20 jurisdiction profiles live in one file, src/rules.ts, as data rather than code. Every page that presents rules is generated from it.
Every check carries the date its summary was last reviewed and the sources it was drafted from. Both are shown on each check, and a summary that has not been looked at in ninety days is marked as overdue rather than left to look current.
Every sentence this site states about the law is registered as a claim carrying its own source and a confidence rating. LEGAL-CLAIMS-TO-VERIFY.md in the repository is generated from that registry, so the list a lawyer would review cannot fall behind the copy.
Changes to the rules and to the scanner are logged with dates in the changelog. The rule matrix carries its own version (2026-08-04) separate from the scanner's (0.15.0), and every report records both, so a report read months later can still be interpreted.

Corrections to the rule data are the most useful thing anyone can send. How to send one.

What this instance is