Terms of Use

DRAFT — not legal advice. Review with a qualified lawyer before publishing. Every [SQUARE BRACKET] below must be filled in or removed.

Effective date: [DATE] Provided by: [LEGAL NAME], [ADDRESS] Contact: [SUPPORT EMAIL]

Read this first

This is an agreement between you and [LEGAL NAME] covering your use of the Bud Years app. By downloading, installing, or using the app, you accept it. If you do not accept it, do not use the app.

Bud Years is a study aid. It is not a school, not a tutor, and not affiliated with any examining body. Nobody guarantees you a score.

1. Who may use Bud Years

You may use the app if you are old enough to form a binding contract where you live, or if a parent or guardian who is old enough agrees to these terms on your behalf and supervises your use.

Bud Years is intended for students aged 13 and over, from around 8th grade upward. Please do not use it if you are under 13.

The app asks, once, what year you were born. It does this to decide whether to count anonymous usage statistics, and for no other reason: the answer is not kept, no feature depends on it, and a younger student is not shut out of the questions. If the answer puts you under 13, the app simply collects nothing. The Privacy Policy sets this out in full at section 3.3.

If you are under 18, read these terms with a parent or guardian and ask them to agree on your behalf. In most countries a person under 18 cannot form a binding contract alone, so without that agreement this licence has not been granted. A parent or guardian who lets a minor use the app accepts these terms for them.

Nothing in the app requires an account, and we do not ask any user for personal information at any age.

2. Your licence

We grant you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use one copy of Bud Years on devices you own or control, for your own study.

You may not:

• Copy, scrape, bulk-extract, republish, sell, or redistribute the questions, answers, explanations, or diagrams
• Use the content to train a machine learning model, or to build a competing product
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive the source code, except to the extent that law expressly permits despite this restriction
• Circumvent any limit on access to paid content, or help others do so
• Use the app unlawfully, or in a way that damages or overloads our services

The app and its content are protected by copyright and other rights. Except for the licence above, nothing here transfers any ownership to you.

2A. Corrections and suggestions you send us

We ask you throughout these terms to tell us when something looks wrong, and we mean it — a reported error is worth more to us than a five-star review.

If you send us a correction, a suggestion, or any other feedback:

• You keep whatever rights you have in it. We are not claiming ownership of your idea.
• You allow us to use it to fix and improve the app, without payment, attribution, or any obligation to you, and without having to keep it confidential. If you tell us question 412 has the wrong sign, we will change the sign and we will not owe you anything for it.
• Please do not send us anything you are not free to share — nothing confidential, nothing belonging to your school or employer, and nothing copied from a textbook or a real exam paper.

We are under no obligation to act on feedback, to reply, or to tell you what we did with it. In practice we usually will.

3. What Bud Years is, and what it is not

Bud Years provides practice questions, worked explanations, and a daily study plan. It is educational material only.

We make no promise about outcomes. Preparation is one factor among many, and we do not warrant that using the app will improve your score, secure any grade, or lead to any admission, place, prize, or result.

We aim for accuracy and correct errors when we find them, but questions and explanations may contain mistakes, may become outdated as examining bodies change their formats, and should not be relied on as your only source of preparation. Always check the official specification published by the relevant examining body.

No course covers everything its examination can test, and none of them claim to. Bud Years is deliberately built from short standalone questions. That format suits daily practice and it cannot reproduce everything an examination does — long shared reading passages, full-length timed papers, essays, and some question formats are outside what the app offers, and the topic coverage of any course may be uneven, incomplete, or out of date.

Where we know a course leaves something out, we say so on the subject itself, before you start it, and you should read that note. Where we have not said so, do not infer that coverage is complete: absence of a note means we have not identified a gap, not that there is none.

Bud Years is a supplement to preparation, not a substitute for it. Use it alongside the official specification, past papers, and whatever your school or tutor provides. If you use it as your only preparation and something you were tested on was not in it, that is the expected consequence of how the app is built, and it is described here so that it is not a surprise.

3A. How the content is made, and the part AI played

Some of the questions, answers, explanations, and vocabulary entries in Bud Years were drafted with the help of AI tools. Everything is then checked — by automated checks that re-solve mathematics with a computer algebra system, compare stated answers against their own working, and scan for duplicates and spelling errors, and by a person reading it.

Two things follow, and both matter more than the label:

• AI-assisted drafting does not make content correct, and human checking does not make it perfect. Section 3 already says we do not warrant accuracy. That applies to every question regardless of how it was written. If something looks wrong, it may be wrong — tell us at [SUPPORT EMAIL].
• The app does not run AI. There is no chatbot, no generated response, and nothing produced while you use it. Every question you see was written, checked, and published before you opened the app. Nothing you type or mark is sent to an AI system, or to us, or anywhere else.

We disclose this because you are entitled to know how your study material was made, not because a particular law compels it for an app of this kind. Where disclosure rules do apply to AI-generated content — the EU AI Act’s transparency provisions, and comparable rules elsewhere — they are aimed principally at systems that generate content while you interact with them, and at large providers. This notice is intended to satisfy the spirit of those rules regardless.

3B. Using Bud Years honestly

Bud Years is for study. It is not for use during an examination, a test, or any assessment where materials are not permitted.

You are responsible for knowing and following the rules of your school, your examination board, and any honour code you are subject to. Nothing in this app grants you permission to do anything those rules forbid, and we take no position on what they allow — that is between you and them.

The app marks nothing itself. It shows you a question, you decide whether you knew the answer, and you record that. Marking yourself generously does not help you; it moves your position through the material without moving what you know, which is the one thing the app cannot do for you.

4. Trademarks and independence

[LEGAL NAME] is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to the College Board, ACT Inc., Educational Testing Service, the Graduate Management Admission Council, or any other examining or awarding body.

SAT®, PSAT/NMSQT®, ACT®, AP®, GRE®, GMAT®, TOEFL® and other names used in the app are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners, used only to describe the exams the material prepares you for. No claim is made to any of them.

4A. If you believe our content infringes your rights

Every question, explanation, and vocabulary entry in Bud Years is written for it. We do not host anything uploaded by users, and we do not reproduce published exam papers.

If you nevertheless believe something in the app infringes your copyright or other rights, write to [SUPPORT EMAIL] with enough detail to find it — the course, the subject, and the text or serial number of the item — and what right you say it infringes. We will look at it promptly and remove or rewrite anything we cannot stand behind. We would rather correct a genuine problem than argue about one.

5. Enrolment, purchases, and refunds

Enrolling in a course is free and simply adds it to your study plan.

[REMOVE THE REST OF THIS SECTION UNTIL PAID CONTENT IS ACTUALLY OFFERED.]

Every paid course has a free preview, and you decide after seeing it

Where a category requires a purchase, the first 250 problems of every subject in it are free. That is not a trailer or a sample chapter — it is the same material, in the same order, that a paying student works through, and for most people it is several weeks of study.

By buying, you confirm that the preview was available to you and that you are satisfied the course suits you. That is what the preview is for: judging the material before you pay for it rather than after. We would much rather you studied the free part for a fortnight and decided against buying than bought on the strength of a description.

This does not take away your rights if something is wrong. If a course is faulty, is not what we described, or is materially not what the preview showed, your statutory rights apply whatever you agreed at the moment of purchase. The preview clause is about changing your mind, not about defective goods. See section 10.

Refunds are the store’s to give, not ours

Prices are shown by, and payment is taken by, Apple or Google. We never receive your payment details, and in most territories the store — not us — is the merchant of record.

• Google Play. You can request a refund through Google Play within 48 hours of purchase, and an app purchase can often be refunded instantly within the first 2 hours from the Play Store itself. After 48 hours, Google will point you back to us.
• Apple. Apple handles every App Store refund itself, at its discretion, through reportaproblem.apple.com. There is no fixed window, and we have no ability to issue an App Store refund — not as a policy choice, but because Apple does not give developers that mechanism.

We therefore do not offer a refund window of our own, because on Apple’s platform we could not honour one. Promising three days and then being unable to deliver it would be worse than saying nothing.

What we will do instead: if you bought within the last 14 days, the course was materially not what the preview showed, and the store has declined you, write to [SUPPORT EMAIL] with your receipt. We will put the case to the store ourselves. We cannot promise the outcome, because it is not ours to decide.

Statutory cancellation rights

If you are a consumer in the UK, the EU/EEA, or anywhere else with a legal right to cancel a digital purchase within a cooling-off period, you keep that right and nothing here removes it. In the UK and EU that right normally lasts 14 days, and is lost for digital content only once delivery has begun with your express consent and your acknowledgement that you lose it. The store collects that consent at the point of purchase, so exercise the right through the store.

Other purchase terms

• A purchase unlocks the stated content on accounts and devices permitted by the store’s own rules. Use the store’s “Restore Purchases” mechanism to recover a purchase on a new device.
• Purchases are one-time and do not renew automatically.
• Content in a purchased category may be added to over time. We do not promise any particular quantity of future content, and section 7 applies.

6. Usage analytics

The app can send anonymous statistics about how it is used — how often it is opened, which subjects are studied, how far people get. These are described in full in the Privacy Policy.

They are off unless you enable them. Statistics do not run at all until you have told the app you are old enough, and in the UK and the EU/EEA not until you have also agreed. In India and Canada the test is stricter again: your answer and your device’s operating system must both say you are 18 or over, and you must then agree. Skip the year-of-birth question and nothing is collected anywhere.

Once an age has been given, statistics can be switched off at any time at Settings → Usage analytics.

The app also sends a report when it crashes, so that faults can be found and fixed. That is separate, it carries nothing about you or what you were studying, and you may switch it off at Settings → Crash reports.

Refusing or disabling either does not limit the app in any way: every feature works identically, and we will not ask repeatedly or make the app harder to use to change your mind.

We may publish totals drawn from these statistics — how many students use Bud Years, how many words or problems have been worked through, how many courses people study at once — to improve the app and to describe or promote it. Those are population figures and nothing else. Nothing about any one person is ever published, sold, or used in a way that could identify them, and we do not publish a figure small enough to point at an individual. Where you have not allowed statistics, nothing of yours is in the total at all.

7. Availability, changes, and content

We may change, suspend, or discontinue the app or any part of its content at any time, including removing courses or questions. We may release updates, and some updates may be required for the app to keep working.

We do not promise the app will be available without interruption or free of errors. Content is delivered from third-party infrastructure whose availability is not within our control.

8. Your device and your data

Your practice history, enrolments, and progress are stored on your device. We do not hold a server-side copy and cannot recover it for you. If you delete the app, reset your device, or lose it, that record is gone. This is a deliberate design choice, described in the Privacy Policy.

9. Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Bud Years is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.

10. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

• We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, opportunity, data, goodwill, or anticipated savings.
• We are not liable for any examination result, grade, admission decision, scholarship, placement, or career outcome, whether or not you used the app.
• We are not responsible for any decision you make, any action you take or do not take, any interpretation you form, or any consequence of any of those, arising from your use of the app or of anything in it. What you do with the material is yours to judge. If an answer or explanation looks wrong, check it before you rely on it — section 3 says we do not warrant that any of it is correct, and that is not a formality.
• We are not liable for loss of your on-device study record.
• Per person, and no more than you paid. Our total aggregate liability to you — meaning to each individual user, across every claim that user brings — arising out of or relating to the app is limited to the amount you actually paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose. This is a cap on what any one person may recover, not a single pot shared between everyone who uses the app.

Most of the app is free, and you choose to use it. Every course published today costs nothing, nobody is required to install it, and you receive it without paying us anything. Where you have paid for a course, your recovery is capped at what you paid for it; where you have paid nothing, this section limits recovery to nothing.

That is a strong limit and we would rather state it plainly than bury it. Two things sit behind it and are not affected by it: the rights listed below that cannot lawfully be excluded, and the fact that if something in the app is faulty or not as described, section 5 and your statutory rights still apply.

This is a deliberate allocation of risk, and both of us are agreeing to it. The app is given away, we make no money from a free user, and we could not offer it at all if using it exposed us to open-ended claims. The exclusions and the cap are the price of it existing. We think that is a fair trade and we are saying so here rather than leaving a court to guess whether we thought about it.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. Depending on where you live, that will include liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and your non-excludable rights as a consumer. In particular:

• Australia. Our services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. Nothing in sections 9 or 10 limits them. Where our liability may be limited rather than excluded, it is limited, at our option, to resupplying the services or paying the cost of doing so.
• Singapore. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot be excluded under the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977.
• India. Nothing here affects your rights under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, including your right to approach a consumer commission.
• Canada. Provincial consumer protection legislation — for example Ontario’s Consumer Protection Act, 2002 and Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act — voids certain exclusions of implied warranties and certain limits on consumer remedies. Nothing here overrides them. In Quebec, article 11.1 of the Consumer Protection Act makes a clause requiring a consumer to arbitrate unenforceable, and Ontario’s section 7 has the same effect; section 14 below is confined to the United States and does not apply to you in any event.
• Mexico. Nothing here affects your rights under the Ley Federal de Protección al Consumidor, including your right to bring a complaint to PROFECO. Article 90 of that Act voids clauses that exempt a supplier from liability, and this section is to be read subject to it.
• United Kingdom, EU and EEA. Nothing here affects your non-excludable statutory rights as a consumer. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties or the limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so parts of sections 9 and 10 may not apply to you.

11. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, losses, and reasonable costs arising from your misuse of the app or your breach of these terms, except to the extent the claim arises from our own act or omission.

12. Termination

You may stop using the app at any time by deleting it. We may suspend or terminate your licence if you materially breach these terms. Sections 2 (restrictions), 4, 9, 10, 11, and 14 survive termination.

13. App store terms

You also agree to the terms of the store you obtained the app from.

For Apple App Store users: this agreement is between you and [LEGAL NAME] only, not with Apple. Apple is not responsible for the app or its content. Apple has no obligation to provide maintenance or support. If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple and Apple will refund the purchase price, if any; to the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation whatsoever. Apple is not responsible for addressing any claim by you or a third party relating to the app, including product liability, legal or regulatory non-compliance, or consumer protection claims. Apple is not responsible for investigating, defending, or resolving any third-party intellectual property claim. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of this agreement and may enforce it against you. You confirm you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated as terrorist-supporting, and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

For Google Play users: this agreement is between you and [LEGAL NAME] only, not with Google, and Google is not responsible for the app or its content.

14. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of [JURISDICTION], without regard to conflict of laws rules, and the courts of [JURISDICTION] have [exclusive / non-exclusive] jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer resident in the UK, the EEA, or another jurisdiction whose law grants you the right to bring proceedings locally or to rely on mandatory consumer protections, nothing here removes that right.

Talk to us first

Whatever the problem, write to [CONTACT EMAIL] with the subject line “Dispute Notice”. Tell us who you are, what happened, and what you would like us to do about it — a notice that does not say what you want cannot be settled. Neither of us may start a formal proceeding until 30 days after that notice. Most things can be settled this way and we would like the chance.

If you are in the United States

Arbitration. If we cannot resolve it, you and we agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the app will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, rather than in court. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section, and judgment on the award may be entered in any court with jurisdiction.

Individual claims only. Each of us may bring claims only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, or representative proceeding. An arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over any representative proceeding.

What you are giving up. Arbitration has no judge and no jury, discovery is limited, and a court’s power to review the outcome is narrow. You and we both knowingly give up the right to a trial by judge or jury. That is the trade arbitration makes, and you should understand it before agreeing.

Who decides what is arbitrable. The arbitrator decides questions about the scope and enforceability of this section, including whether a particular dispute belongs in arbitration at all.

Small claims. Either of us may instead bring an individual claim in small claims court in [COUNTY, STATE], if it qualifies.

Claims that stay in court. Either of us may go straight to court, without arbitrating, for a claim about copyright, trade marks, trade secrets, or the scraping or bulk extraction of the app’s content. Those are claims about who owns the material rather than about your use of the app, and they belong in front of a judge.

If many identical claims are filed at once. If 25 or more arbitration demands are filed against us that raise substantially the same issues and are brought by the same or coordinated representatives, we may require them to be heard in batches of no more than 25, with one arbitrator and one set of filing fees per batch, and with later batches paused until the first is decided. This is not a way of avoiding claims — every demand still gets heard. It exists because filing fees alone, charged in bulk against a single developer, can exceed the value of every claim combined, and a rule that makes the process unusable is not a fair process.

You can opt out of arbitration. You may reject the arbitration requirement by emailing [CONTACT EMAIL] with the subject line “Arbitration Opt-Out” within 30 days of first using the app, giving your device platform and the date. Opting out costs nothing and does not affect your use of the app.

Opting out does not remove the individual-claims requirement. If you opt out, disputes go to court rather than to an arbitrator, and they still go there individually rather than as a class or representative action.

Severability, and one thing that is not severable. If any part of this section is held unenforceable, the rest of it stands — except the individual-claims requirement. If that is held unenforceable, this entire arbitration section falls with it and the dispute goes to court. Neither of us has agreed to a class arbitration, and neither of us should end up in one by accident.

If you are outside the United States

The arbitration section above does not apply to you, and neither does the individual-claims requirement. Nothing in these terms requires you to arbitrate, prevents you from joining a class, collective, group or representative proceeding, or prevents you from bringing proceedings in the courts of the country where you live, including any consumer forum available to you.

This is deliberate rather than an oversight. Class and representative actions cannot be waived by contract in much of the EU, and India, Australia and Canada each provide consumer or representative routes that a term like this cannot close. A clause purporting to shut them would not work and could take the rest of section 14 down with it.

15. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Material changes will be noted in the app’s release notes and the effective date above will change. Continuing to use the app after a change means you accept the updated terms.

16. General

How we reach you. Bud Years has no accounts and we hold no email address for you, so we cannot write to you. Anything we need to tell you appears in the app — in the release notes, or on the screen it concerns. That is a consequence of collecting nothing about you, and it is the trade we chose.

What survives. If these terms end, for any reason, sections 2A, 3, 3A, 3B, 4, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14 and 16 continue to apply.

Accessibility. We want the app to be usable by as many students as possible, and it is built to respect the text size, contrast, and reduced-motion settings your device already carries. If something is unusable for you, tell us at [SUPPORT EMAIL] and we will treat it as a fault rather than a request.

Things outside our control. We are not responsible for failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including network and platform outages, app store decisions, and acts of government.

The rest. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest remains in force, and that provision is applied to the smallest extent necessary to make it enforceable. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer these terms to anyone else; we may transfer them if the app changes hands. These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us about the app.

17. Contact

[SUPPORT EMAIL] [LEGAL NAME], [ADDRESS]