Terms of use

1. The agreement

These terms are between you and SyllaBuddy, an independent service operated from Ontario, Canada ("SyllaBuddy", "we", "us"). By creating an account or using the service, including the no-account demo, you agree to them.

If you do not agree, do not use the service. If you are unsure about anything here, ask at hello@syllabuddy.ca before you rely on it.

2. Who can use it

You must be at least 16 years old. The service is built for post-secondary students, but anyone 16 or over may use it.

One account per person. You are responsible for keeping your password to yourself and for everything done through your account. Tell us promptly at hello@syllabuddy.ca if you think someone else has access to it.

3. What SyllaBuddy is, and is not

SyllaBuddy reads course documents you give it and turns them into a calendar, a task list, grade tracking and a chat assistant. It is a personal organisation tool.

It is not a source of academic truth. Your course outline, your professor, and your university's own systems are. It is not academic, legal, financial or medical advice. It is not a substitute for reading your syllabus, and it does not do coursework for you.

It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for any university or college. Institution names and logos appear only to describe compatibility.

4. Accuracy, and the limits of it

The service uses artificial intelligence to read documents. It reads each document twice and flags dates it worked out from a rule such as “Week 6” rather than a stated date. It still gets things wrong: it can misread a date, a weight, a policy, or which section a rule applies to.

You are responsible for checking anything that matters against your course outline or your university's systems before relying on it. Missing a deadline, a test, an opt-out date, or a fee because the app was wrong, incomplete or unavailable is not something we can be responsible for, and you should not use SyllaBuddy as your only record of anything important.

5. Your documents and your content

You keep ownership of everything you upload and write. We do not claim it.

By uploading a document, you confirm you have the right to do so, and you give us permission to process it and to store the information extracted from it for the purpose of running the service for you. That permission ends when you delete the course or your account.

Course outlines are usually the copyrighted work of the professor or the institution. Uploading one for your own study use is what this service is for. Do not upload material you are not permitted to have, and do not use the sharing feature to distribute a document or its contents in a way your institution prohibits.

Facts such as dates and weights are not themselves protected by copyright, but verbatim policy wording may be. Share links exist so classmates in your own course can get their dates; they are not a publishing tool.

6. Sharing with classmates

If you create a share link for a course, anyone with that link can see that course's assessments, dates, weights, key dates, class times, and your first name and school. Those pages are not indexed by search engines but they are reachable by anyone holding the URL.

Only share what you are comfortable being seen, and only with people entitled to see it. You cannot recall a link that has already been sent; deleting the course removes what it points to.

7. How you may not use it

• Breaking any law, or your institution's academic integrity or IT policies.
• Uploading material you have no right to, or anyone else's personal information without their consent.
• Trying to break, overload, scrape, reverse engineer or gain unauthorised access to the service or anyone else's account.
• Reselling the service, or using it to build a competing dataset.
• Automated bulk use of the free demo, or evading its limits.
• Using it to harass anyone, or to generate work you present as your own where that is not allowed.

8. Emails

With an account you may receive a weekly briefing, a reminder on the morning of something big, and service messages such as password resets. Every non-essential email carries a one-click unsubscribe that keeps working, and you can turn each type off under You. Password reset and security messages are not optional while you have an account.

9. Price, and changes to it

SyllaBuddy is free today. If we introduce paid features, we will say so clearly in advance, and nothing will ever be charged to you without you actively agreeing to a price first. We will not silently convert a free account into a paid one.

10. Availability

This is a small, independently run service. It may be slow, briefly unavailable, or interrupted for maintenance, and features may change or be removed. We do not promise any level of uptime.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, or is being used in a way that threatens the service or other users. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why and give you a chance to get your data out first.

If we ever shut the service down, we will give at least 30 days' notice by email so you can export your data.

11. Ending it

You can delete your account at any time under You → Your data. It is immediate and permanent, and we cannot restore it afterwards. Export your data first if you want to keep it.

12. Warranties and liability

The service is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement, to the fullest extent the law allows.

To the fullest extent the law allows, SyllaBuddy is not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential losses, or for lost marks, lost opportunities, missed deadlines, missed fees or academic consequences of any kind. Where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or twenty Canadian dollars.

Nothing in these terms takes away rights you have that cannot be waived, including under the Ontario Consumer Protection Act, 2002 or other consumer protection legislation that applies to you. If any part of this section is unenforceable where you live, the rest still applies.

13. Your responsibility to us

If someone brings a claim against us because of something you uploaded or did that broke these terms, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it. This does not apply to anything that was our fault.

14. Copyright complaints

If you believe material on SyllaBuddy infringes your copyright, write to hello@syllabuddy.ca with your contact details, what the work is, where the material is (the exact URL), and a statement that you believe the use is not authorised.

We operate from Canada and our hosting is in the United States, so both Canada's notice-and-notice regime and the United States' notice-and-takedown regime may be relevant. We will act on properly made complaints, which may include forwarding a notice to the user, removing the material, or closing an account for repeat infringement.

15. Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there. Disputes go to the courts of Ontario, except where the law where you live gives you the right to bring a claim somewhere else.

Please write to hello@syllabuddy.ca first. Most things are a misunderstanding and get fixed in a day.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects your rights, we will tell you in the app and by email before it takes effect, and continuing to use the service after that means you accept the new version. The date at the top always reflects the current version.