Terms of Service

Sprouting From The STEM is an online learning platform. These terms cover the website and the student, parent and instructor apps. By creating an account or using any of it, you agree to what is set out here.

They sit alongside our privacy policy, which explains what we collect and who else processes it. Where this page talks about your data, that policy has the detail.

An account is for one person. Keep the details on it true and current.

• Sign in is yours to protect. Whether you use a password or sign in with Google or GitHub, keep it to yourself. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you.
• Tell us if it is not. If you think somebody else has got in, contact us and we will help you shut it down.
• Parent and instructor accounts see student work. That is the point of them. If a parent or a school set your account up, they can see how you are getting on.

The platform is built for grades 6 to 12 and introductory college, so many of the people using it are under 18.

If you are under 18, a parent, guardian or school should set your account up and stay involved in how you use it. If you are a parent or a school doing that, you are agreeing to these terms on behalf of the student as well as yourself.

Do not use the platform to:

• Break the law, or help somebody else break it.
• Harass, bully or threaten anyone, including other students.
• Upload malware, spam, or anything designed to damage the service.
• Get into accounts, data or systems you have not been given access to.
• Scrape, harvest or bulk-download content, by hand or with automated tools.
• Share, resell or rent your account, or sell access to what is inside it.

One more that is your responsibility rather than ours: if your school has rules about using AI in work you hand in, those rules still apply here. A tutor helping you understand something is not the same as it writing your homework.

What you make here is yours. Your notes, notebooks, mind maps, documents, uploaded files and the answers you write stay your property. Nothing on this page transfers ownership of them to us.

To actually run the service we need permission to store your work, show it back to you across your devices, and pass it to the providers that make a feature work. That permission is limited to those purposes and it ends when your content is deleted. The providers are named in the privacy policy.

We do not sell your work, publish it, or use it to advertise to you. There are no ads on the platform.

In return, only upload things you have the right to upload. If you add somebody else's copyrighted material to your workspace, that is on you, and we may remove it if we are told about it.

The courses, lessons, exercises, animations, artwork and software we publish belong to us or to whoever licensed them to us.

While your account is active you may use all of it for your own learning, including downloading content for offline study where your plan allows. What you may not do is copy it out, republish it, resell it, or feed it into another product.

Tutor replies, written-answer feedback, teach-back responses and generated practice material all come from an AI model. It gets things wrong, and it can be wrong confidently.

Check anything that matters before you rely on it. Scores and feedback are generated, not marked by a teacher, and they are not a qualification, an assessment, or advice of any professional kind.

To generate a reply, what you write is sent to Google's Gemini API along with the lesson text it relates to. The privacy policy sets out exactly what leaves and what happens to it.

• The trial is seven days and needs no card. You get full access during it. There is no permanently free tier.
• Paid plans are billed by Stripe, by card. You enter your card on Stripe's own pages. Card numbers never reach our servers. We do not take PayPal.
• You can cancel at any time. Open your subscription page, which takes you to the Stripe billing portal, and switch plan or cancel there. Cancelling stops future payments.
• Some things are one-off purchases. AI credits are bought separately from a subscription. Donations are voluntary and are not a purchase of anything.

Refunds. Ask through the contact form with your account email and what you paid for, and we will look at it. If you think you have been charged in error, tell us and we will sort it out.

We work to keep the platform up and your work safe, but we cannot promise it will never be unavailable. Maintenance happens, and so do outages we did not plan.

Features change. We add things, improve things, and occasionally remove something that is not working. If a change removes something you depend on, we will give notice where we reasonably can.

Except where the law says otherwise, the platform is provided as it is, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.

The platform links out to other websites. We do not control them, and their terms and policies apply once you leave, not ours.

It also runs on services we buy in: Supabase for hosting, sign-in and file storage, Google for the AI tutors, and Stripe for payments. They are listed with what each one receives in the privacy policy.

You can leave whenever you want. Stop using it, cancel any paid plan from the billing portal, and ask us through the contact form if you want the account and its contents deleted.

Deletion is a request handled by a person rather than a button in the app, and once it is done it cannot be undone.

We can suspend or close an account too, if it is being used to break these terms or to put other people at risk. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why first and give you a chance to put it right.

If you have a problem with the service, a charge, or a decision we have made, contact us first. Tell us what happened and what you would like done about it. Most things get sorted out that way, and quickly.

Nothing on this page takes away rights you have under the consumer law where you live.

We update these terms as the platform changes. The date at the top of this page is when the current version was published.

If we make a significant change, we will give notice by email or in the app before it takes effect. Carrying on using the platform after that means you accept the updated terms. If you do not, you can close your account.