How Reclause works
Reclause is a free, educational tool that helps subscription businesses see where their sign-up and cancellation flows might miss a US auto-renewal (ARL, also called “negative-option”) law. It is built on two commitments: be honest, and be deterministic.
A deterministic engine, not an AI verdict
Your answers are matched against the dataset by plain, inspectable rules. No language model decides whether you have a gap. That is deliberate. A tool like this should never hand you a confident, possibly-wrong legal conclusion. The matching is the same every time you run it, and you can read exactly why each result came out the way it did.
Every result is one of three honest things:
- POTENTIAL GAP — you said you don’t do something a statute that applies to you addresses. Worth a look, with the statute cited so you can check it yourself.
- WORTH REVIEW — the question is a judgment call (like whether a disclosure is “clear and conspicuous”), or you weren’t sure. A questionnaire cannot settle these, so we flag them for you or your counsel.
- LIKELY ADDRESSED — you said you already do it. That is good signal, but it is not the same as “verified compliant.”
An open, cited dataset
Underneath the scanner is a machine-readable dataset of each covered jurisdiction’s auto-renewal requirements. Disclosure before purchase, affirmative consent, post-purchase acknowledgment, easy cancellation, renewal reminders, free-trial conversion notices, and price-change notices. Every requirement is tied to a statute citation and a link to the primary source, so anyone can check our work.
The current dataset covers 11 jurisdictions and 73 requirements, every item cited to its statute. Two states, IL and MD, are held back pending primary-source verification rather than shipped half-checked. The dataset is research-grade as of June 2026. Laws change and citations move, so the right move is always to open the linked statute and confirm it against the current text yourself.
The dataset is public. If you spot something stale or wrong, we want to hear it. View the data on GitHub →
The disclaimer is transparency, not fine print
Reclause never tells you that you are compliant or in violation. It is not a compliance certification and not a substitute for an attorney. Surfacing that plainly, next to a clear description of how the engine works, is the honest version of this tool. It points you at the right questions and the right statutes so your conversation with counsel is a faster, cheaper one. The full version lives on the disclaimer page.
If you want the gaps fixed
Penguin Alley offers an optional, fixed-scope technical engagement. The engineering and UX work to make your sign-up, consent, and cancellation flow match the requirements you or your attorney specify. We build to your spec. We do not provide legal advice or decide your compliance. The scan is free forever, and the build help is optional.
Reclause is a Penguin Alley project. Questions, or a correction to the dataset? We want to hear it.