Terms of Service

1. Eligibility and Authority

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you are under the age of legal majority where you live, you represent that your parent or legal guardian has reviewed and agreed to these Terms and authorized your use of the Service. A parent or guardian who permits a minor to use the Service is responsible for the minor's use and purchases. You may not use the Service if applicable law prohibits you from doing so.

2. The Service

CollegeSimple provides tools for organizing college applications, drafting and reviewing application materials, exploring colleges and scholarships, practicing tests, and communicating with AI or human counselors. Features may change, improve, or be discontinued. We may impose reasonable technical, storage, usage, or access limits to operate the Service.

CollegeSimple is independent from colleges, testing organizations, scholarship providers, the Common Application, and other third parties unless expressly stated. We do not submit applications, guarantee deadlines, award scholarships, make admissions decisions, or act as an educational institution, admissions office, attorney, financial adviser, or school counselor.

3. Accounts and Security

You must provide accurate information, keep it current, and maintain the confidentiality of your credentials. You are responsible for activity under your account. You may not share, sell, transfer, or allow another person to misuse your account. Contact us promptly if you suspect unauthorized access. We may require email verification or other reasonable checks.

4. Trials, Subscriptions, Billing, and Cancellation

• Pricing. Current prices, billing periods, trial terms, taxes, and included features are shown before purchase and are incorporated into these Terms. Stripe processes payments.
• Renewal. A paid subscription automatically renews for successive billing periods until canceled. You authorize recurring charges to your selected payment method at the price disclosed at checkout, including applicable taxes.
• Trials. Eligibility may be limited to one trial per person or account. Creating duplicate accounts or using false information to obtain additional trials is prohibited. A CollegeSimple trial does not itself authorize a charge; a paid subscription begins when you separately approve checkout.
• Cancellation. You may cancel through the billing portal in Settings. Cancellation stops future renewals, and access ordinarily continues through the paid period unless law requires otherwise. Deleting an account also initiates cancellation, but you should confirm billing status before deletion.
• Refunds. Except where law requires otherwise, charges are nonrefundable. You may request a refund within 24 hours after a charge by emailing team@collegesimple.com. Approval is not guaranteed where the Service was materially used, the request is abusive, or Stripe cannot reverse the payment.
• Price changes. We may change future subscription prices with advance notice required by law. A price change applies no earlier than your next renewal after the notice period.

5. AI and Admissions Results

The Service uses artificial intelligence. AI and counselor outputs may be incomplete, inaccurate, outdated, or unsuitable for your circumstances. Admissions chances are estimates, scholarship matches may omit eligibility conditions, proofreading may miss or introduce errors, and practice questions may not reflect an official exam. You remain responsible for reviewing all outputs, verifying requirements with official sources, meeting deadlines, and deciding what to submit. No output guarantees admission, aid, a scholarship, a test score, or any other result.

You may not present generated content as your own where prohibited by a school, application, scholarship, testing, or academic-integrity policy. CollegeSimple may restrict requests or outputs to protect users, third parties, and the Service.

6. Your Content

You retain ownership of content you submit to the Service. You grant CollegeSimple a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, copy, process, transmit, format, and display that content only as reasonably necessary to operate, secure, support, and improve the Service and provide features you request. This license ends when the content is deleted, except for limited retained copies permitted by the Privacy Policy or law.

You represent that you own or have permission to submit your content and that our permitted use will not violate law or another person's rights. Do not submit highly sensitive information that is unnecessary for college-planning services, such as Social Security numbers, financial-account credentials, medical records, or another person's confidential records.

7. Acceptable Use

You may not use the Service to:

• violate law, academic-integrity rules, or another person's rights;
• submit deceptive applications, impersonate someone, harass others, or distribute harmful or unlawful content;
• probe, disrupt, overload, or bypass security, rate limits, subscriptions, or access controls;
• use bots, scraping, bulk extraction, or automated access without our written permission;
• reverse engineer or attempt to derive source code except where law expressly permits it;
• resell, sublicense, or commercially exploit the Service or its outputs as a competing service; or
• upload malware or use the Service to develop or facilitate harm.

8. CollegeSimple Materials

The Service, including its software, design, branding, organization, databases, and original content, is owned by CollegeSimple or its licensors and protected by intellectual-property laws. Subject to these Terms, we grant you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Service for your own college-planning purposes. No other rights are granted.

If you send feedback, you grant us a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free right to use it without restriction or compensation, provided we do not identify you publicly without permission.

9. Third-Party Services and Links

The Service may rely on or link to third-party services, colleges, scholarship sponsors, and other sites. We do not control their availability, content, security, eligibility decisions, deadlines, or privacy practices. Your use of a third-party service is governed by that provider's terms. A link or integration does not imply endorsement.

10. Suspension and Termination

You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time. We may suspend, limit, or terminate access if you violate these Terms, create legal or security risk, fail to pay, abuse the Service, or if continued operation is no longer commercially reasonable. Where appropriate, we will provide notice and a reasonable opportunity to cure. Sections that by their nature should survive termination—including ownership, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnity, and dispute terms—will survive.

11. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available." CollegeSimple disclaims all express, implied, and statutory warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, availability, and any warranty arising from course of dealing. We do not warrant uninterrupted or error-free operation or that content, counselors, AI outputs, college data, scholarship data, or test materials will be complete, current, or accurate.

12. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, CollegeSimple and its service providers, licensors, counselors, and representatives will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost opportunities, admissions outcomes, scholarships, financial aid, data, revenue, goodwill, or profits, arising from or related to the Service, even if advised of the possibility. Their aggregate liability for all claims will not exceed the greater of $100 or the amount you paid CollegeSimple during the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.

These limits do not exclude liability that cannot lawfully be limited, and your jurisdiction may give you additional rights. Each limitation is an essential basis of the agreement.

13. Indemnification

To the extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless CollegeSimple and its representatives from third-party claims, losses, and reasonable costs arising from your content, unlawful or unauthorized use of the Service, or material breach of these Terms. This obligation does not apply to the extent a claim was caused by CollegeSimple's own unlawful conduct.

14. Disputes, Arbitration, and Class Waiver

Please read this section carefully; it affects your legal rights. Before filing a claim, you and CollegeSimple agree to send a written notice describing the dispute and requested relief to the other party and attempt in good faith to resolve it for 30 days. Notices to CollegeSimple must be sent to team@collegesimple.com.

Except for eligible small-claims matters or requests for temporary injunctive relief involving misuse of intellectual property or security, any dispute arising from these Terms or the Service will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this provision. Arbitration may occur by video, telephone, written submissions, or in a reasonably convenient location.

You and CollegeSimple waive the right to a jury trial and agree to bring claims only in an individual capacity, not as a plaintiff or class member in a class, collective, consolidated, or representative action.

You may opt out of arbitration by emailing us within 30 days after first accepting these Terms with your account email and a clear statement that you opt out. If you opt out, or if this arbitration provision is found unenforceable, exclusive jurisdiction and venue will lie in the state or federal courts located in Massachusetts, and you consent to their jurisdiction. Nothing in this section prevents either party from reporting concerns to a government agency.

15. Governing Law

Massachusetts law governs these Terms, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles, except that the Federal Arbitration Act governs arbitration. Mandatory consumer protections in your home jurisdiction remain applicable where they cannot be waived.

16. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms to reflect changes to the Service, law, or risk. We will post updated Terms with a new effective date and provide additional notice when required. Material changes apply prospectively. If you do not agree, you must stop using the Service before the changes take effect. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance where permitted by law.

17. General Terms

These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement about the Service and supersede prior statements on that subject. If a provision is unenforceable, it will be modified to the minimum extent necessary and the remainder will continue. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them in connection with a reorganization or sale. Headings are for convenience only. Electronic notices and records satisfy written-notice requirements.

18. Contact

Questions about these Terms may be sent to CollegeSimple at team@collegesimple.com. CollegeSimple is operated from Massachusetts, United States.