Terms of Use

1. About HSC Pal

HSC Pal (“HSC Pal”, “we”, “us”) is an adaptive AI study platform for Australian K-12 and HSC students. We provide AI-generated lessons, marking, practice questions, and tutoring mapped to the NESA curriculum.

HSC Pal is operated from Australia. Nothing in these Terms is intended to exclude rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law that cannot be lawfully excluded.

2. Who can use HSC Pal

• You must be at least 13 years old to create an account. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian must agree to these Terms on your behalf and is responsible for your subscription.
• You must provide accurate account information and keep your password secure. You are responsible for activity on your account.
• One account per person. Don't share logins — accounts that look shared may be suspended.

3. Subscription & billing

• HSC Pal is offered on a recurring monthly subscription of A$49 per month (or the price shown at checkout). Payments are processed by Stripe.
• Your subscription renews automatically each month until cancelled. You can cancel any time from your settings; access continues until the end of the current billing period.
• Because our AI services incur costs from the moment you start using them, fees already paid for the current billing period are generally non-refundable, except where required by the Australian Consumer Law or where we agree otherwise in writing.
• We may change pricing for future billing periods. We'll give you reasonable notice by email before any price change takes effect.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Use HSC Pal to cheat in a way that breaches your school's, exam body's, or institution's academic integrity rules. HSC Pal is a study aid — submitting AI-generated work as your own may breach NESA and university policies.
• Upload content you don't have the right to upload, or content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, or invades someone's privacy.
• Reverse-engineer, scrape, or attempt to extract our prompts, models, or training data; resell or redistribute the service; or use it to build a competing product.
• Probe, attack, or interfere with the service or the systems it runs on, or use automated tools to access it beyond ordinary use of the web interface.
• Use HSC Pal to generate content that is illegal, sexual content involving minors, content that promotes self-harm, or content designed to harm others.

5. Your content

You keep ownership of the essays, exams, notes, messages, and other material you upload (“Your Content”). By uploading, you grant us a limited, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, process, and display Your Content for the purpose of providing HSC Pal to you — for example, marking your work, generating lessons, and powering the AI tutor.

We do not use Your Content to train AI models. See our Data & Compliance page for the full picture of how your data is handled.

6. AI output — important limitations

HSC Pal's lessons, marks, band estimates, and tutor responses are generated by AI. They are study support, not official marks. AI can be wrong, miss context, or misinterpret a question. Always cross-check anything important against your teacher, your syllabus, and official NESA materials.

Band estimates are predictions based on the work you upload — they are not a guarantee of any HSC result and don't replace formal school assessment.

7. Intellectual property

HSC Pal, including the software, prompts, lesson templates, marking rubrics we author, and branding, is owned by HSC Pal and protected by copyright and trade-mark laws. You receive a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the service for your own study while your subscription is active.

If you believe content on HSC Pal infringes your intellectual property rights, see our IP Infringement page for how to submit a notice.

8. Third-party services

HSC Pal uses third-party providers to deliver the service, including Supabase (database & auth), Stripe (payments), Anthropic (AI models), Vercel (hosting), and Sentry (error tracking). Your use of the service is also subject to those providers' terms where applicable.

9. Suspension & termination

We may suspend or terminate your account if you breach these Terms, misuse the service, or if we're required to by law. We'll usually contact you first unless the breach is serious or urgent.

You can terminate at any time by cancelling your subscription in settings and emailing us to delete your account.

10. Disclaimer & liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, HSC Pal is provided “as is”. We don't guarantee specific academic results, uninterrupted availability, or that AI output will be accurate or fit for any particular purpose.

Nothing in these Terms excludes consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law. To the extent we can limit our liability for a breach of a non-excludable guarantee, our liability is limited (at our option) to re-supplying the service or refunding the fees you paid for the affected billing period.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost opportunities, or loss of marks, places, or scholarships.

11. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. If a change materially affects your rights, we'll notify you by email or in-app before it takes effect. Continuing to use HSC Pal after the change means you accept the updated Terms.

12. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of New South Wales, Australia. You and HSC Pal submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of New South Wales.

13. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Email support@hscpal.io.