Terms of Service

Effective date: 4 September 2026 Last revised: 4 September 2026

0. The short version

This box is a summary, not the agreement. If it and the sections below ever disagree, the sections below win.

• CourseLite reads your college course and answers questions about it.
• You must be at least 13 to use it.
• Your course material stays yours. We need permission to process it so the product can work, and that permission ends when you delete it.
• CourseLite writes drafts. You decide what to hand in, and you hand it in. We have no way to submit anything to Canvas and we are not building one.
• AI output is often wrong. Check it before you rely on it.
• Following your school's rules is your responsibility. See the Academic Integrity Policy.
• Paid plans renew automatically until you cancel. Cancelling stops the next charge and lets you keep the plan until the period you already paid for runs out. We do not refund automatically, but you can ask and we will answer.
• Nothing you have made is deleted when you cancel.

1. Who we are, and what this covers

CourseLite ("CourseLite", "we", "us") is an online software service, operated from the United States. We have no public office and do not take enquiries by post; everything in these Terms that needs a reply from us is handled by email at support@courselite.org.

These Terms cover everything we operate: the website at courselite.org, the web application, the CourseLite browser extension, and the API behind them (together, the "Service").

They form an agreement between you and us. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

Other documents are part of this agreement and are incorporated by reference:

1.1 CourseLite is in private beta

CourseLite is currently offered as a private beta to a limited group of invited users. During the beta:

• features can change, break, or be removed at short notice;
• data loss is more likely than it will be later, so keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose;
• support is best-effort; and
• we may end the beta, or your access to it, at any time.

Every other term below applies during the beta as it does afterwards.

2. Eligibility and minimum age

2.1 You must be at least 13

CourseLite is for people aged 13 and over. By creating an account you represent that you are at least 13 years old. If you are not, you may not use the Service, and you must not create an account.

Being accurate about how that is enforced today: sign-up does not yet ask you to confirm your age, so this is a term of this agreement rather than a question on a screen. Adding the question is on the release checklist.

CourseLite is not directed to children under 13, is not marketed to them, and we do not knowingly collect any information from them.

2.2 If we learn a user is under 13

If we become aware that an account belongs to somebody under 13, we will close it and delete the data held under it, without needing a request.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child under 13 has an account, email support@courselite.org with enough detail for us to find it. We will close the account and delete the data, and confirm to you when it is done. You do not need to give a reason.

2.3 If you are between 13 and 18

If you are old enough to use the Service but below the age of majority where you live, you may use it only with the knowledge and agreement of a parent or legal guardian, who accepts these Terms alongside you.

If you are in the EEA or the UK. CourseLite is offered in the United States, and we do not offer it in the EEA or the UK. Under GDPR Article 8 the age for consent-based processing is 16 by default and member states may lower it to as low as 13, so a 13–15 year old there can need verifiable parental consent. CourseLite has no mechanism for obtaining that consent and does not claim one — which is one of the reasons we do not offer the Service in those countries.

2.4 Everything else about eligibility

You may use CourseLite only if all of the following are also true.

1. You are a student, or otherwise a person with your own lawful access to the course material you bring into CourseLite.
2. You are in a country where we offer the Service. CourseLite is offered in the United States.
3. You are not barred from using the Service under any law that applies to you, and you are not on a sanctions list that would make it illegal for us to provide it.
4. We have not previously terminated your account under Section 17.

If you use CourseLite as a student of a school, the school's own agreements with you are separate from this one. We have no agreement with your school, and nothing here creates one.

3. Your account

Sign-in is handled by Clerk, an identity provider. Clerk holds your email address and sign-in method; we never see or store your password.

You are responsible for:

• keeping your sign-in credentials to yourself,
• everything done through your account, and
• telling us promptly at support@courselite.org if you think somebody else has got into it.

One person, one account. Do not share an account, sell access to one, or create more than one account in order to get more free allowance than the Free plan gives. See the Acceptable Use Policy and the free-tier rules described in docs/ABUSE.md.

3.1 Email we send you

We send transactional email only — things like a sign-in link, a receipt, a billing failure, a security notice, or a change to these Terms. These are part of the Service and you cannot unsubscribe from them while you have an account.

We send no marketing email at all today. If that ever changes, this section changes before the first one goes out — with a lawful basis for sending it and an unsubscribe route in every message — not afterwards.

4. Your licence to use CourseLite

While your account is in good standing, we give you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the Service for your own studying and your own coursework.

You may not:

• resell, sublicense, rent or redistribute access to the Service,
• use it to build or train a competing product,
• copy, decompile or reverse-engineer any part of it beyond what the law lets you do regardless of this clause, or
• remove or obscure any notice we put in the product.

The Service, its software, its design and its name are ours (or our licensors'). Nothing here transfers any of that to you.

5. Your material stays yours

You own your material. "Your material" means everything you bring into CourseLite or make with it: your course content, your files, the text extracted from them, your questions, your notes, and the drafts, decks, flashcards and practice tests generated for you.

We claim no ownership of any of it. We do not sell it. We do not use it to advertise to you, and we do not use it to train any model of our own.

5.1 The permission we need, and its limits

To make the product work at all, you give us permission to host, copy, transmit, index, analyse and display your material — only for the purposes of running the Service for you, keeping it secure, and complying with the law.

This permission is:

• narrow — it exists so we can store your course, search it, and answer your questions from it,
• non-exclusive and grants us no ownership,
• for you — not for showing your material to any other user, and
• temporary — it ends when you delete the material or your account, except for material already in a routine backup, which ages out on its own.

5.2 The AI provider

To answer a question, draft an assignment or build study material, CourseLite sends the relevant part of your material to a third-party AI provider (currently OpenAI), through that provider's API. What the provider does with what it receives is governed by the provider's own published API terms, not by ours. We describe this in the Privacy Policy and link those terms, rather than making a promise on the provider's behalf.

If you do not want your material sent to an AI provider, do not use the features that generate text — chat, flashcards, practice tests, and assignment drafting. Adding and browsing a course does not require it.

Reference lookups. If you give CourseLite a DOI to build a reference entry from, that identifier alone is sent to Crossref to look the work up. Nothing else goes with it — not your course material, not your writing, not your name. The Privacy Policy lists every third party that receives anything.

5.3 What we do with Google files

If you ask CourseLite to write a draft into a Google Doc or Google Slides deck, it creates that file in your own Drive, under your own Google account. The file is yours. We never share it, never submit it and never delete it — including when you press "Start over", which detaches our reference and leaves your document exactly where it is.

CourseLite asks Google only for access to files it creates or that you specifically pick (drive.file). It cannot see the rest of your Drive, and you can revoke the permission from your Google account at any time.

6. What CourseLite is, and what it is not

CourseLite is a study and drafting assistant. It reads course material you already have access to and generates text from it.

CourseLite is not:

• a learning management system, or a replacement for one,
• affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with Instructure, Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, any other LMS vendor, or any university,
• a source of academic, legal, medical, financial or professional advice,
• a proctored-assessment tool, and
• a way to submit anything to anyone.

We have no relationship with your school. Your access to Canvas is your own, and CourseLite reads it using the session you are already signed into.

7. AI output: what you are actually getting

Read this section. It is the one most likely to matter to you.

1. The output is generated, not verified. CourseLite produces text with a language model. Models invent facts, misread sources, misattribute quotes, get arithmetic wrong, and state wrong answers confidently.
2. Grounding is not correctness. CourseLite answers from your own course material and shows where an answer came from. That makes an answer traceable — it does not make it right. The passage it cites may not support the claim, and it may not be the passage your instructor had in mind.
3. It may miss things. Extraction fails on some files. A scanned page, a handwritten note, an image with no text layer, a file your Canvas account cannot open — any of these can be absent from what CourseLite has read, and the product will still answer as though it read everything available.
4. Two runs can differ. The same question can produce different answers.
5. You must check it before you rely on it. Especially before you hand anything in, sit an exam, or make a decision that costs you something.

No guarantee of grades. Nothing CourseLite produces is a prediction of, a promise about, or a contribution to any grade. We do not guarantee that generated material is accurate, complete, current, original, appropriate for your course, or acceptable to your instructor.

8. Educational use, and your school's rules

CourseLite is a tool. How you use it is your decision and your responsibility.

You agree that:

• you are responsible for knowing and following your instructor's rules, your course's rules, and your institution's academic-integrity policy;
• those rules override anything CourseLite lets you do — the fact that a feature exists is not permission to use it for a particular assignment;
• you will review and revise anything you hand in; and
• you accept the consequences if you submit work that breaks your school's rules.

The full statement is in the Academic Integrity Policy, which you should read before using assignment drafting. We cannot and do not take responsibility for an academic-misconduct finding against you.

9. No guarantee of availability or compatibility

The Service is provided as it is, when it is available.

• Availability. We do not promise any uptime. There is no service-level agreement. We may take the Service down for maintenance, and it may go down without warning. This is more likely during the private beta.
• Canvas. Canvas is self-hosted differently at every university, changes without telling us, and can be configured in ways CourseLite cannot read. We do not guarantee that CourseLite works with your university's Canvas, or that it will keep working with it. An import can be incomplete, out of date, or fail entirely.
• Google. Google may change its APIs, revoke a permission, or make a file unavailable. We do not guarantee that any Google feature keeps working.
• AI providers. Our provider may change models, rate-limit us, or go down. Model behaviour changes without notice and generated output changes with it.
• The browser extension. It depends on a browser and an extension store we do not control. Either can change the rules or remove the extension.
• Your data on failure. We back up the database, but no backup is a promise. Keep your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose.

If CourseLite is unavailable, that is not by itself a breach of this agreement, and Section 16 limits what we owe you for it.

10. Prohibited behaviour

The full list is in the Acceptable Use Policy, which is part of these Terms. In summary, you must not use CourseLite to attack anything, to reach material or accounts that are not yours, to break the law, to evade our limits, to impersonate anybody, or to do anything your school forbids.

Breaking the Acceptable Use Policy is a breach of these Terms and can end your account under Section 17.

11. Intellectual property and copyright complaints

We respect copyright and we expect you to.

Only bring in material you have lawful access to. By adding a course, you confirm that you have a right to access the material in it, and that having CourseLite process it for your own study does not infringe anyone's rights.

Note the shape of the product: CourseLite reads material through your own account, using the access your institution already gave you. It does not circumvent access controls and it does not publish anything. Generated material is delivered to you and to nobody else.

If you believe material processed through CourseLite infringes your copyright, send a notice to support@courselite.org including:

1. your contact details;
2. identification of the work you say is infringed;
3. identification of the material in question and enough detail for us to find it;
4. a statement that you believe in good faith that the use is not authorised by the rights holder, its agent, or the law;
5. a statement that the information in your notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorised to act for the rights holder; and
6. your physical or electronic signature.

We will act on valid notices, which may include removing material and terminating the account of a repeat infringer. If your material was removed and you think that was wrong, you may send a counter-notice to the same address.

What this process is, and what it is not. The steps above follow the shape of the United States DMCA §512, which is the regime that fits a service operated from the United States, offered in the United States, and governed by California law. CourseLite has not registered a designated agent with the US Copyright Office. So this is a takedown process we operate voluntarily and in good faith; it is not a claim to §512 safe-harbour protection, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise.

12. Paid plans, billing and automatic renewal

CourseLite has a Free plan and three paid plans: Study, Pro and Max. The features and limits of each are shown at courselite.org/pricing and are enforced by the same table the page renders from.

The full billing terms are in the Refund and Cancellation Policy. The essentials:

12.1 Payment is handled by Stripe

All payments go through Stripe. Checkout happens on Stripe's own hosted page and card management happens in Stripe's own Customer Portal. CourseLite never sees, receives or stores your card number, expiry date, security code or billing address. We store a Stripe customer identifier, a subscription identifier, the plan you are on, its status, and when the current period ends.

Your use of Stripe is also subject to Stripe's own terms.

12.2 Subscriptions renew automatically

A paid plan renews by itself, at the interval you chose, at the price shown at checkout, using your saved payment method, until you cancel. Monthly plans renew each month. Annual plans, where offered, renew each year.

You are authorising a recurring charge. There is no separate confirmation before each renewal.

12.3 Prices

The price you pay is the one shown on Stripe's checkout page at the moment you subscribe. Prices are read live from Stripe rather than typed into the app.

Prices are shown in the currency Stripe quotes, which is US dollars. Taxes may be added where the law requires.

On tax, plainly. CourseLite has no tax configuration of its own: no sales tax, VAT or GST is calculated, added or collected by anything we run. If that changes — because of where we sell or what the law requires — the amount will be shown to you at checkout before you are charged, and this section will say so.

We may change our prices. A price change never applies to a period you have already paid for. We will tell you before a changed price applies to a renewal, and you can cancel before it takes effect.

12.4 Failed payments

If a renewal payment fails, Stripe will retry it. During those retries you keep your plan — CourseLite does not lock you out the moment a card is declined. If the payment is never recovered, the subscription ends and your account returns to the Free plan.

12.5 Trials and promotions

We do not currently offer a free trial. If we ever do, its terms — how long it lasts, what happens at the end, and whether it becomes a paid subscription automatically — will be shown before you start it, and you will be able to cancel before you are charged.

Promotional codes may be accepted at checkout. Any code is subject to its own stated conditions, applies only as Stripe applies it, has no cash value, and can be withdrawn or expire. A code does not change anything else in these Terms.

12.6 Cancelling

You can cancel at any time, from the settings page in CourseLite or from the Stripe Customer Portal.

Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. You keep your plan and everything in it until that date, and then move to the Free plan. Cancelling is reversible up to that date. Nothing you have created is deleted by cancelling — not a course, not a notebook, not a draft.

12.7 Refunds

We do not issue refunds automatically. Cancelling stops the next charge; it does not refund the period you are in, because you keep the plan for the rest of that period.

You can still ask, and we will answer. Email support@courselite.org and we will consider your request on its own facts — a duplicate charge, a charge after you cancelled, a failure that meant you could not use what you paid for, or anything else that seems unfair. This is a commitment to look at each request and reply, not a promise to grant every one.

Nothing in this section takes away a refund or withdrawal right you have under a consumer-protection law that applies to you. See the Refund and Cancellation Policy for the detail.

12.8 Going back to Free, or down a plan

If you move to a smaller plan, or to Free, you keep everything you have already made. You can still read it, export it and delete it. What you lose is the ability to create more of something while you are above the smaller plan's ceiling — for example, you keep all your notebooks and can open them, but cannot make a new one until you are back under the limit.

Allowances that are spent — such as adding a course — are not given back. See Section 13.

13. Limits and fair use

Every plan has limits. They are shown on the pricing page and enforced by the server.

Two kinds of limit exist and they behave differently:

• What you hold — how many courses are connected, how many notebooks exist, how much material is stored. Deleting something gives the space back immediately.
• What you have spent — such as adding a course, asking a question, or generating a draft. These are not refunded. Deleting the result does not give the allowance back, because the work was already done. Re-adding a course you previously added and deleted does not cost you again.

Free-plan allowances reset at the start of each calendar month. Paid-plan allowances reset on your billing date.

Fair use. Some plans describe a feature as unlimited. Unlimited means we do not meter it against a published number — it does not mean we will serve an automated script. We operate an internal ceiling, set far above what a person studying can reach, that can pause a feature on an account showing usage no human produces. We do not publish that number, because a published ceiling is a target. If you hit it and think that is wrong, contact us and we will sort it out.

14. Changes to the Service

We are building this product, and it changes. We may add, change, or remove features; change limits; change plans; or discontinue the Service entirely.

Where a change materially reduces what a paid plan gives you, we will tell you before it takes effect, and you may cancel. If we discontinue the Service entirely while you have paid for a period that has not run out, we will refund the unused portion of that period.

We may also change these Terms. If we make a material change we will give you notice — by email or in the product — before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after that date means you accept the revised Terms. Every version carries the effective date at the top.

15. Warranty disclaimer

To the fullest extent the law allows:

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.

We disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, and any warranty arising from a course of dealing or trade usage.

Specifically, and without limiting the above, we do not warrant that:

• the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free;
• any output is accurate, complete, current, original, or fit for your course;
• using CourseLite will improve any grade or produce any academic outcome;
• the Service will work with your institution's Canvas, or with any particular file, or with Google; or
• defects will be corrected.

No advice, whether spoken or written and whether from us or from the Service, creates any warranty not stated here.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties. Where that is true, the exclusions above apply only to the extent permitted, and you may have rights that these Terms cannot take away.

16. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

1. We are not liable for indirect damages. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, lost opportunity, or loss of goodwill, however caused and on any theory of liability, even if we were told such damages were possible.

1. We are specifically not liable for academic consequences. This includes a grade, a mark, a failed course, an academic-integrity finding, disciplinary action, suspension, expulsion, a lost scholarship, or a lost place. You decide what to hand in, and Sections 7 and 8 explain why that decision is yours.

1. Our total liability is capped. Our aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms will not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you actually paid us in the twelve months before the event that gave rise to the claim, or (b) USD 50. If you have never paid us anything, our liability is limited to USD 50. (A small fixed sum — see the audit, decision C-1.)

1. Nothing here excludes what cannot be excluded. We do not exclude or limit liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that the law applying to you does not allow to be excluded or limited. Some jurisdictions do not allow some of the limits above; where that is so, they apply only as far as permitted, and your statutory consumer rights are unaffected.

17. Suspension and termination

17.1 You can leave at any time

Cancel your subscription from settings or from the Stripe Customer Portal, and delete your account from settings when you want everything gone.

Deleting your account cancels your subscription first. If you have a live paid subscription when you ask us to delete your account, we cancel it with Stripe before anything is deleted. If we cannot reach Stripe at that moment, we refuse the deletion and tell you why, rather than deleting your account and leaving a subscription billing you for a service you can no longer open. Try again, or cancel from the Stripe Customer Portal first.

Deleting your account removes your courses, documents, notebooks, flashcards, practice tests, drafts and settings. What survives, and for how long, is set out in the Privacy Policy.

The cancellation is scheduled for the end of the period you have already paid for, exactly as pressing Cancel would be, so nothing further is charged. Your account still goes today, which means the rest of that period is time you cannot use, and it is not refunded automatically — Section 12.7 is the route if you want to ask. If a payment has already failed and Stripe is still attempting to collect, we cancel outright instead, so that a retry cannot charge you after you asked to be deleted.

A public page explains all of this without requiring you to sign in: courselite.org/legal/delete-account.

Verified against the implementation on 2026-09-03: `functions/api/account.ts` reads the billing row, calls Stripe, writes the result, and only then runs the cascade; `functions/features/privacy/deletion.ts` holds the decision, and `tests/release/privacy/deletion-test.mjs` asserts the ordering.

17.2 We can suspend or end your access

We may do so if you break these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, if we are required to by law, if your payment fails and is not recovered, or if keeping your account open would put the Service or other users at risk. Where it is reasonable and lawful to do so, we will tell you why and give you a chance to fix it first. For serious abuse — attacking the Service, trying to reach data that is not yours, or automated abuse at scale — we may act immediately.

If we end your account for breach, we do not owe you a refund for the remainder of a paid period, except where a consumer-protection law says otherwise. You may still ask under Section 12.7.

Sections 5 (your ownership), 11, 15, 16, 18, 19 and 20 survive termination.

18. Indemnity

Because CourseLite is a consumer product, this clause is deliberately narrow.

You will indemnify and hold us harmless from third-party claims, and from the reasonable costs of defending them, that arise from:

• material you brought into CourseLite that you had no right to bring in; or
• your use of the Service in breach of the Acceptable Use Policy, or in breach of a law.

This clause does not cover anything caused by the Service behaving as we built it, by generated output, or by our own acts or omissions. It does not require you to indemnify us for ordinary use of the product, and it does not apply to the extent a claim arises from our own breach or negligence.

We will tell you promptly about any claim we want covered, let you take part in the defence, and not settle it without your agreement where your money is at stake.

19. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Disputes are resolved in the state and federal courts located in California, United States, and you and we each consent to the jurisdiction of those courts.

There is no arbitration clause and no class-action waiver in these Terms. That is deliberate. Consumer arbitration clauses and class-action waivers are unenforceable or heavily restricted in several of the places students actually live, and an unenforceable clause in a consumer contract can taint more than itself. Courts are the simpler route and the one consumers understand.

Alongside that:

• Talk to us first. Before starting any formal process, contact support@courselite.org and give us 30 days to try to resolve it. Most problems are a billing mistake or a bug.
• Your local consumer rights survive. If you are a consumer, nothing in this section deprives you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the law of the country where you live, or of your right to bring proceedings there where that law gives you one.

20. Everything else

• Entire agreement. These Terms and the documents they incorporate are the whole agreement between us about the Service, and replace anything said before.
• Severability. If a court finds part of these Terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force and that part is narrowed to the minimum extent needed.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce something immediately, that is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your account or your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, and will tell you if we do.
• No third-party beneficiaries. Nobody other than you and us has rights under these Terms.
• Force majeure. We are not liable for failing to perform because of something outside our reasonable control, including provider outages and acts of a third party we depend on.
• Notices. We may reach you by email, or in the product. You reach us at support@courselite.org.

21. Contact

CourseLite is an online service with no public office, so there is no postal address to write to. Email reaches a person and is the route for everything above.

22. Revision history