The First Legal Pages Every SaaS Site Needs
Type: article
Stage: Stage 8: Terms / Trust Proof
Difficulty: beginner
Most founders wait too long to add legal pages. Here are the pages every SaaS site needs, why they matter, and the tools that generate them correctly.
Overview
Most founders wait too long to add legal pages because they assume legal infrastructure belongs to 'real companies.' That is backwards. Legal pages are one of the signals that make the company look real.
The essential pages
A basic SaaS site usually needs: Privacy Policy, Terms of Service / Terms of Use, Cookie Policy or cookie notice where relevant, Refund / cancellation policy, Acceptable Use Policy if users upload content or interact with others, and a Data Processing Addendum if selling B2B into privacy-sensitive accounts. A privacy policy is especially important for software products that collect personal information, run analytics, use cookies, process payments, or integrate with third-party tools. Davis Wright Tremaine's startup guidance notes that a startup with a website or mobile app 'almost certainly needs' a privacy policy describing privacy practices and required disclosures.
What not to do
Do not copy another company's terms. Do not paste an AI-generated document without reviewing whether it matches your product, jurisdiction, data collection, payment model, refund policy, and user behavior. Tools like iubenda and Termly generate customized policies by asking questions about the site or app — iubenda describes its terms generator as lawyer-approved, customizable, multilingual, and kept current by legal experts. Use generators as a starting point, not as a finished document.
Stage 8 rule
A legal page is only useful if it describes what your product actually does.