Expert Contributor Agreement

Version 2026-10-12 · Effective: October 12, 2026

This Expert Contributor Agreement ("Agreement") governs your participation in the GPO Intel Expert Contributor Program (the "Program"), operated by UltraViolet Holdings, LLC, doing business as GPO Intel ("we," "us," or "our"). It supplements our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which also apply to your use of the Service. By applying to the Program or submitting a contribution, you agree to this Agreement.

1. The Program

Through the Program, approved industry experts contribute answers, corrections, and intelligence ("Contributions") that may be reviewed, edited, synthesized, and surfaced in the Service. Participation is entirely voluntary. Nothing in this Agreement creates an employment, agency, partnership, or joint-venture relationship between you and UltraViolet Holdings, LLC.

Some questions in the Program are commercially sponsored, meaning a third party has paid for the question to be asked. Sponsorship never changes what a truthful answer is. We do not let a sponsor tell you what to say, review your answer before you give it, or edit it afterward, and a sponsor buys no influence over what our record says. You may decline any question, for any reason, without explanation. A sponsor may receive an answer before it becomes available to other users of the Service. We do not disclose your identity to a sponsor except as your stated attribution preference allows, and we do not tell you which questions a particular sponsor paid for.

Change history: version 2026-09-29 added the paragraph above on commercially sponsored questions. No sponsored question had been asked before that date. Contributors who accepted an earlier version are asked to accept this one before their next contribution; contributions made under the earlier version remain governed by it.

2. Eligibility and Conduct

You may contribute only information that is lawful and non-confidential. By submitting a Contribution, you represent and warrant that it does not breach any non-disclosure agreement, employment agreement, or trade-secret law, and that you have the right to share it. In particular, you agree that you will:

• Never disclose your current employer's confidential information
• Never disclose any organization's current confidential pricing or fee terms
• Not submit material that is false, defamatory, or violates any applicable law or third-party right
• Not submit a Contribution generated or substantially drafted by an artificial-intelligence system — Contributions must be your own words, from your own knowledge

We may reject or remove any Contribution, and suspend or remove any contributor from the Program, at our sole discretion.

3. License to Contributions

You grant UltraViolet Holdings, LLC a perpetual, worldwide license — royalty-bearing solely as described in this Agreement — to use, reproduce, edit, synthesize, create derivative works from, and display your Contributions as part of the Service and related materials. Attribution of your Contributions is handled according to your stated attribution preference (named, title-only, or anonymous).

This license includes the right to use your Contributions to train, fine-tune, evaluate, and improve artificial-intelligence and machine-learning systems, whether operated by UltraViolet Holdings, LLC or by third parties under license from it, and to include your Contributions in datasets provided to such third parties for those purposes. Any dataset provided to a third party is de-identified: your name, employer, and contact details are removed and any named attribution is dropped to anonymous, whatever attribution preference you selected for the Service itself. No additional compensation is owed for these uses unless the Program terms in effect at the time of your contribution say otherwise (Section 4). These uses do not expand what you are asked to contribute and never require or permit the disclosure of confidential information (Section 2).

Change history: version 2026-09-21 added the paragraph above on AI training, evaluation, and de-identified dataset licensing. Contributors who accepted an earlier version are asked to accept this one before their next contribution; contributions made under the earlier version remain governed by it.

4. Compensation

Effective October 12, 2026, Program compensation is a payout: a share of the revenue the Service earns, allocated to Contributions according to their use. A Contribution earns each time it is used, rather than once on submission, for the period described below.

Where a Contribution is the first to establish a fact, it earns from the use of that fact. Where a Contributor submitted the question that drew the Contribution out, the Contributor who submitted the question and the Contributor who first established the fact take equal shares of what it earns. Contributions that independently corroborate a fact are not compensated; corroboration is a condition of publication rather than a paid act. The pool from which payouts are made grows with subscription revenue.

A Contribution earns for twelve months from the date it is accepted into the Service, or until the information it contains becomes publicly available, whichever occurs first. After that it remains part of the Service, continues to be attributed to you, and may continue to be used and cited, but it no longer accrues payouts. Compensation accrued before that point is unaffected and remains payable under this Section. We determine when information has become publicly available, acting reasonably, and record the public source where there is one. This period applies to Contributions accepted on or after the effective date of this version.

We may suspend or permanently discontinue payout accrual on any Contribution, or on all of your Contributions, at any time and at our sole discretion, including where we determine that a Contribution discloses confidential information, breaches Section 2, was generated or substantially drafted by an artificial-intelligence system, or is inaccurate. Discontinuation operates prospectively: amounts already accrued remain payable, except that where a Contribution breached Section 2 we may withhold amounts accrued on it.

There is no fixed rate. What a Contribution earns depends on the difficulty of the question, the use the Contribution receives, and the allocation described above. The method in effect is described in the product at the time you contribute.

We decide which questions are offered and how many, and we may withdraw a question or pause the Program at any time. Nothing in this Agreement entitles you to a volume of questions, and answering an available question does not create an entitlement beyond the terms in effect when you answered it. We may limit how many Contributions one Contributor may make in a period.

Reports. Where a Contribution is used in a report we sell, the Contributors whose Contributions are used in that report share 20% of what that report sells for, divided in proportion to how much of the report each Contributor answered: your share is the number of the report’s questions you answered, out of all the answers the report used. Answering more of a report’s questions earns a larger share. This share is paid out of the sale and is in addition to anything the Contribution earns under the terms above.

Two things follow from that and we would rather say them plainly than let you discover them. You will not be asked to contribute to every report, because each one needs people whose experience fits the question being asked. And you share only in reports your own Contributions are used in, not in every report we sell. Nothing in this Agreement entitles you to be asked, to a volume of requests, or to a share of a report you did not contribute to. We decide which Contributions a report uses, and we record which ones earned from each sale so you can see it on your record.

Some questions carry no payout. Where a question is unpaid we say so before you answer it, and you may decline it as you may decline any other question. A question not marked unpaid earns under the terms above.

A payout accrues to your Contributor record as it is earned and becomes payable on the schedule and at the minimum balance stated in the product at the time. Accrual is not a present obligation to pay on each use; we settle periodically rather than per citation. Payouts are calculated by us and issued manually at this stage of the Program. We may require the tax forms described in Section 5 before issuing a payout.

This replaces the deep research credit scheme in effect before October 12, 2026. Credit earned under that scheme is honored and remains available to you.

Compensation terms may be modified or discontinued prospectively at our discretion; changes do not apply retroactively, and compensation accrued under the terms in effect at the time of contribution will be honored.

Change history: version 2026-10-12 changed how the report share is divided: in proportion to the report’s questions each Contributor answered, instead of one equal share per Contributor. Reports allocated under an earlier version keep that version’s division. Version 2026-10-05 added the report share — Contributors whose work is used in a report we sell divide 20% of that sale, one share each, and are told plainly that they will not be asked for every report and share only in reports they contributed to. It also made the question submitter and the first establisher equal sharers in what a Contribution earns, provided that corroborating Contributions are not compensated, introduced a twelve-month earning period ending early where the information becomes publicly available, added a right to discontinue accrual, added the prohibition on AI-generated Contributions in Section 2, and added an exception to the permanence of Contributions in Section 6 for confidential, infringing or unlawful material. Contributions accepted under an earlier version keep the earning terms of that version. Version 2026-10-01 replaced deep research credit with a payout — a share of the revenue the Service earns, allocated to Contributions by their use and paid for as long as a Contribution continues to be used. It also set out the first-to-establish and corroboration shares, stated that there is no fixed rate, provided that a payout accrues as it is earned and becomes payable on a stated schedule and minimum balance rather than on each use, provided that a question carrying no payout is marked as such before it is asked, and stating that we decide which questions are offered and how many, may withdraw them or pause the Program, and may limit how many Contributions one Contributor makes in a period. Credit earned under the previous scheme is honored. Contributors who accepted an earlier version are asked to accept this one before their next contribution; contributions made under the earlier version remain governed by it.

5. Taxes

Contributors are independent parties responsible for their own taxes on any compensation received under the Program. We may require you to provide a completed IRS Form W-9 (or W-8 series form for non-U.S. persons) before paying compensation, and we will issue Form 1099s where legally required.

6. Termination

Either party may end participation in the Program at any time, for any reason, by notice to the other (email to harrison@gpointel.com suffices). The license granted in Section 3 survives termination with respect to Contributions already published or incorporated into the Service. Contributions already published are a permanent part of the Service and are not deleted on termination or on deletion of your account; instead we de-identify them — your name and contact details are removed and any named attribution is dropped to anonymous — while the Contribution itself, and any compensation accrued on it, are retained. This does not apply where we determine that a Contribution discloses confidential information, infringes a third-party right, or is unlawful; in those cases we may remove it from the Service entirely, including from any dataset derived from it to the extent we are able.

7. Disclaimers and Limitation of Liability

The Program and the Service are provided "as is" and "as available," and the warranty disclaimers and limitations of liability in our Terms of Service apply to this Agreement. To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Program or this Agreement shall not exceed the greater of (a) $100 or (b) the amounts we paid or credited to you under the Program in the 12 months immediately preceding the event giving rise to the claim. This 12-month period is a measure of past payments only and is unrelated to the earning period in Section 4.

Nothing in this Section limits our obligation to pay amounts properly accrued and payable to you under Section 4, or our liability for fraud, willful misconduct, or any liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law. Compensation you have earned is a debt we owe you rather than a claim subject to the cap above.

Change history: version 2026-10-05 added the paragraph above. The cap as previously written applied to every claim arising under this Agreement, including a claim for unpaid compensation, and because nothing had yet been paid or credited to any Contributor, limb (b) was zero for everyone and the effective cap on unpaid earnings was $100. That was not the intent of a liability cap and it is corrected rather than left to be discovered.

8. Governing Law and Venue

This Agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to conflict of law principles. Any dispute arising out of or relating to this Agreement shall be brought exclusively in the state and federal courts located in Travis County, Texas, and the parties consent to personal jurisdiction and venue in those courts.

9. Contact Us

Questions about this Agreement or the Program? Contact us at harrison@gpointel.com. See also our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

UltraViolet Holdings, LLC · 5900 Balcones Drive, Ste 100, Austin, TX 78731