Terms of Service

1. Agreement to these terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of My Essay Buddy (the "Service"). By creating an account or otherwise using the Service, you agree to be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy. If you don't agree to them, don't use the Service.

2. What the Service does — and doesn't do

My Essay Buddy helps you plan, research, organize, and revise your own written work. Its core rule, which shapes every feature: the Service does not write essay content for you. Outline generation produces structural scaffolding — headings, guiding questions, suggested subpoints — not paragraphs. Grammar, style, voice, and fact-check tools surface targeted suggestions tied to specific spans of text, which you individually accept or reject; nothing is applied automatically, and no feature composes original sentences, paragraphs, or arguments on your behalf. Research tools locate and summarize sources you choose whether to use; they don't decide your thesis or write your analysis. You are the sole author of anything you submit as your own work.

3. Academic integrity

You're solely responsible for complying with your school's or institution's academic integrity, plagiarism, and permitted-tools policies. My Essay Buddy is a study and organization aid, not a substitute for your own thinking and writing, and using it does not guarantee compliance with any institution's rules — some instructors or programs may restrict or prohibit tools like this entirely, and it's on you to check. See our Academic Integrity page for more on how the Service is designed around this.

4. Eligibility

You must be 16 or older to create an account, and you confirm this when you sign up. If you are under 18, you should have the permission of a parent, guardian, or supervising teacher to use the Service. The Service isn't directed at children under 16 and we don't knowingly collect personal information from them; if we learn that we have, we'll delete it.

5. Accounts

You're responsible for keeping your login credentials secure and for all activity that happens under your account. Tell us right away if you suspect unauthorized access. You're responsible for the accuracy of the information you provide when creating an account.

6. Your content

You own everything you write, upload, or otherwise create in the Service — your outlines, drafts, notes, uploaded files, and any other project content ("Your Content"). We don't claim ownership of it. You grant us only the limited license needed to store, process, transmit, and display Your Content back to you (and to anyone you explicitly choose to share a project with) in order to operate the Service — for example, sending relevant text to an AI provider to generate a suggestion, or rendering your manuscript in the editor. We don't use Your Content to train AI models, ours or a third party's, and we don't sell it.

7. Shared and collaborative projects

The Service lets a project owner invite others by sharing a project code, and assign each collaborator a role (viewer, editor, admin) that controls what they can see and change. If you join a project someone else owns, they and any admins can see your contributions to it, adjust your role, or remove you. If you own a project, you're responsible for who you share it with. Any member with the owner role can permanently delete a project — including everyone's contributions to it — from that project's Settings page; this can't be undone, so make sure everyone involved is aware before doing so.

8. Third-party services

The Service can route your research through outside services — academic databases and search indexes, and optionally your school library's access if you configure it. Using any of these is entirely your choice, and each one is governed by that provider's own terms of service and privacy policy in addition to ours. We aren't responsible for the content or availability of a third-party service, and a library link is subject to your institution's own access rules. You can remove a configured library at any time from Account Settings.

9. AI-assisted features

Grammar, style, voice, fact-checking, source discovery, and outline generation are powered in part by third-party AI and language services. These features can be wrong — a fact-check result, a source's credibility assessment, or a suggested correction may be inaccurate or incomplete. You're responsible for evaluating and verifying anything the Service suggests, especially citations and factual claims, before relying on them in your actual work.

10. Plans and pricing

Current plans and pricing are described on our Pricing page and may change over time; we'll give you reasonable notice before a change affects an active subscription. Paid plans are billed through Stripe, renew automatically until cancelled from your account, and can be cancelled at any time with access continuing to the end of the paid period. Instructor accounts are free and may be withdrawn if the account isn't being used for teaching.

Fair use."Unlimited" AI features are unlimited for ordinary individual study use. To keep the Service affordable for everyone, we may slow down or pause AI features for an account that exceeds 500 AI checks, research runs or generations in a calendar month, or that is clearly automated or shared. We'll tell you if that happens.

11. Acceptable use

Don't use the Service to violate any law, infringe anyone's intellectual property or privacy rights, upload malicious files, attempt to access another user's account or project without authorization, or interfere with the Service's normal operation (for example, by attempting to overwhelm it with automated requests).

12. Termination

You can stop using the Service, and delete your projects or account, at any time. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms, and may discontinue or change the Service, with reasonable notice where practical.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied. We don't guarantee the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that AI-generated suggestions, source assessments, or fact-checks will be accurate.

14. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, My Essay Buddy won't be liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from your use of the Service, including academic consequences resulting from your use of AI-assisted suggestions, source recommendations, or fact-checks without independent verification.

15. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms from time to time; we'll update the date at the top of this page when we do. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms.

16. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Reach us through the Contact page.