Terms of Service
These terms cover organizations that use Santa Tracker to run a live holiday tracking page. They are between your organization and Responder MAX, LLC of Ashland, Virginia (“Responder MAX,” “we” or “us”). They do not apply to members of the public who simply visit a tracking page.
On this page
- 1. Who may sign up
- 2. What this costs
- 3. Your account
- 4. Your public address is permanent
- 5. Content you publish
- 6. Letters to Santa
- 7. This is not an emergency or operational system
- 8. Availability
- 9. Suspension and removal
- 10. Branding
- 11. Sales and marketing contact
- 12. Ending your use
- 13. No warranty, and limits of liability
- 14. Governing law
- 15. Changes to these terms
- 16. Contact
1. Who may sign up
Santa Tracker is offered to fire departments, EMS agencies, law enforcement agencies, and combined public safety organizations in the United States.
You must be 18 or older to create or administer an account. By creating an organization you confirm that you are authorized by that organization to do so, and that the organization you name is one you actually represent. Creating a page in the name of a department you do not represent is a misuse of this service and is grounds for immediate removal.
2. What this costs
Santa Tracker is free for the 2026 holiday season. There is no charge, no payment method required, and no trial that converts into a subscription.
To be direct about what that does and does not promise: this is free for this season, not permanently. Responder MAX may introduce pricing for future seasons. If we do, we will tell you before the season it applies to, and you will not be charged for anything without agreeing to it first. Your data will not be held hostage to that decision: whatever we decide, you can ask for a copy of your data, or for its deletion, by emailing santa-help@respondermax.com.
3. Your account
Accounts sign in with a one-time link or code sent to an email address. There is no password. Anyone with access to that mailbox can sign in to your organization’s admin, so treat it accordingly.
Self-serve signup creates one organization per account. If your department needs additional administrators, or needs to transfer control to a different person, contact us at santa-help@respondermax.com and we will set it up manually.
Tracking links
Your admin generates links that let a driver broadcast a position or upload photos without having their own login. Those links authorize by possession: whoever holds one can use it until it expires. They are meant to be sent to a specific person, not posted publicly. You are responsible for who you give them to.
4. Your public address is permanent
The URL you choose at signup — fdsanta.com/your-slug — cannot be changed from the admin dashboard. Every flyer, social post, and text message that points at your page points at that address, and changing it would break all of them at once.
If you make a mistake before sharing the link with anyone, email santa-help@respondermax.com. Once a page has been publicized, assume the address is fixed.
5. Content you publish
You control your organization name, logo, schedule text, sponsor content, and any photos uploaded during a route. All of it appears publicly under the fdsanta.com domain alongside Responder MAX branding, so you agree that content you publish:
- is yours to publish, or you have permission to publish it;
- is suitable for families. Santa Tracker is intended for public safety organizations and adult members of their communities, and its pages are seen by families;
- does not misrepresent your organization, another organization, or a relationship with a sponsor that does not exist;
- is not unlawful, harassing, discriminatory, or deceptive; and
- does not include personal information about identifiable community members without their consent.
Photographs taken during a route may show members of the public, including children. Obtaining any consent your jurisdiction requires before uploading such a photo is your responsibility, not ours.
Permission to show your content
Your content stays yours. You give Responder MAX permission to store, copy, resize and display it only as needed to operate Santa Tracker for you: on your public pages and recaps, in your admin, and in the service’s own backups. This permission ends when the content is deleted, except for copies in backups until those expire.
Sponsors
If you enable a sponsor slot, that content is yours and is always labeled “Sponsored” on the public page. Any arrangement between your organization and your sponsor is entirely between you and them. Responder MAX takes no part in it, receives no share of it, and makes no representation about the sponsor to your community.
6. Letters to Santa
If you enable the letters feature, parents and guardians in your community can send a short letter to Santa on a child’s behalf, optionally with a first name and a neighborhood. In the app, those letters are visible only to your organization’s signed-in administrators. Responder MAX staff can also reach them for support and to run the service, and our service providers store and process them on our behalf, as our Privacy Policy describes. They are never displayed publicly and never shown to other organizations.
Before the letter form opens, the sender confirms that they are a parent or legal guardian sending the letter on behalf of a child and that they will review the letter for personal information before sending it. The page asks them not to include full names, home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, school names, or other identifying information. That confirmation is recorded with each letter. It is a statement made by the sender: neither we nor you verify the sender’s identity, and it is not a verified parental consent.
First names and neighborhoods are automatically erased 60 days after submission (by a daily job, so within about a day of that). That does not change the message: the message text is kept as written, anything it says included, and an anonymized count is kept for your season statistics. You agree not to use letter content for any purpose other than responding to your own community, and not to redistribute it.
7. This is not an emergency or operational system
Santa Tracker is a community engagement tool. It is not dispatch software, not an AVL system, and not a system of record. Positions shown on the map come from a consumer smartphone’s GPS, are throttled and delayed, and can stop updating entirely when a phone loses signal, sleeps, or runs out of battery.
Do not use it to locate apparatus for any operational, safety, or emergency purpose, and do not represent it to your community as a way to reach you in an emergency.
8. Availability
We do not offer an uptime guarantee. This is a seasonal service that carries most of its traffic on a handful of December nights, and we make it as reliable as we reasonably can for those nights.
Non-critical changes are frozen from December 1 through January so that the platform is not being modified underneath you during your season. During that window we address critical problems only.
9. Suspension and removal
We can make an organization’s public page unavailable immediately, without prior notice, if we believe it violates these terms — particularly sections 1 and 5 — or if it presents a legal, safety, or reputational risk. This is a deliberately fast control, because every page carries Responder MAX branding.
Suspension hides your public page. It does not delete your data, and your administrators keep access to the dashboard so they can see what happened and reach us. We will generally tell you why, and we will restore a page suspended in error.
10. Branding
Every public page includes a “Powered by Responder MAX” footer. It is part of the offering and cannot be removed or obscured. Beyond your logo and organization name, the visual theme is shared across all organizations and is not customizable.
11. Sales and marketing contact
Signing up does not opt you into sales contact. The marketing checkbox at signup is separate from accepting these terms, is unchecked by default, and is the only thing that permits us to contact you about other Responder MAX products and services.
If you did not check it, we will not contact you for sales purposes. We will still send you the operational email this service requires — your sign-in links, your welcome message, and notices about the service itself — because without those the product does not work. The phone number you provide at signup is collected to verify that a real organization is signing up and to reach you about your account. It is not a sales lead unless you opt in.
You can change your mind in either direction by emailing santa-help@respondermax.com.
12. Ending your use
You can stop using Santa Tracker at any time. Email santa-help@respondermax.com to have your organization and its data removed. When we remove an organization:
- its data is deleted, including its letters, photos, route history and season statistics, and every administrator’s access to it ends. A sign-in account used only for that organization is deleted. An account that also administers another organization, or belongs to Responder MAX staff, is kept; only its access to the removed organization ends;
- your signup information remains for up to 30 days after removal. After that, only a short record of the agreement remains: your organization’s name, type, state and page address, the contact’s name and email address, and which versions of these terms and our Privacy Policy were accepted, and when. That record is deleted 3 years after removal;
- our team’s email notice of your signup is kept for 3 years after removal, then deleted;
- if you opted in to marketing contact, your name, email address, organization, organization type and state, the services you said you were interested in, and when you opted in, stay on our marketing list until you opt out, whatever happens to the rest. If you opt out, we stop marketing email and keep only your email address on our do-not-email list, so we don’t contact you again. Ask us and we’ll delete it entirely.
Deleted data can remain in our database provider’s backups for up to 8 days, as described in our Privacy Policy.
13. No warranty, and limits of liability
Santa Tracker is provided “as is” and “as available.” To the extent the law allows, Responder MAX makes no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement, and does not promise that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or accurate.
To the extent the law allows, Responder MAX is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data, revenue or goodwill, arising from your use of Santa Tracker. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for it in the 12 months before the claim (nothing, for the 2026 season) and US$100.
14. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, without regard to its rules on conflicts of law. Any dispute about them will be heard in the state courts of Hanover County, Virginia, or in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Richmond Division.
If your organization is a public agency that the law does not allow to accept a term here, such as a limit of liability or a choice of law or court, that term applies to your organization only to the extent the law allows, and the rest of these terms still apply.
15. Changes to these terms
If we change these terms we will publish the updated version here with a new version number and date. The version you accepted at signup is recorded with your organization’s record. Material changes will be emailed to your administrators rather than published quietly.