Terms of Service

1. Who we are

Discernly is a service operated by Justin Daniel in Michigan, United States. In these terms, "we" and "us" mean Discernly; "you" means the person or institution holding the account.

Two other pages form part of this agreement: our privacy and data policy, which explains what we keep and how to have it deleted, and our referral program terms, which apply if you take part in that program.

2. Your account

You need an account to create lessons. You're responsible for keeping your login credentials secure and for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access to it.

Students join a lesson without creating an account, using a join code you share with them. You decide who receives that code.

Discernly is built for secondary and higher education, and accounts are for use with students aged 13 and older. It is not directed to children under 13, and you may not use Discernly to run lessons with students under 13.

Some material in our challenge library is written at an elementary reading level. That is there so you can meet an older student at the level they're actually working at, not an invitation to use Discernly with younger children.

3. Credit: what you're buying

Running a lesson costs money, because it calls commercial AI models on your behalf. You pay for that by holding credit on your account.

Credit is a prepayment for Discernly services, not stored value. It is denominated 1:1 in U.S. dollars, redeemable only against AI usage within Discernly, non-transferable, confers no cash rights, and accrues no interest. You can buy it directly, or your institution can buy it and cover your lessons.

Purchased credit does not expire. Free credit may: trial credit granted at signup carries a stated expiry, shown on your billing page while it applies. Promotional and granted credit is consumed before purchased credit, so your paid balance is always the last thing spent.

4. Refunds

Unused purchased credit is refundable at face value when you close your account. Refunds go only to the original payment method, and we handle them through support rather than as a self-serve action, so we can verify the request.

Two things are not refundable. Credit you've already spent is gone, because the AI usage it paid for really happened. Free credit (trial, referral, promotional, or granted) has no cash value and is forfeited when an account closes.

Card networks make refunds harder as charges age. If a charge is more than roughly six months old we may need to settle a refund another way, and we'll work it out with you.

5. Closing your account

You can close your account at any time. What happens to your teaching materials and your students' work is covered in the privacy and data policy, which gives you a choice between de-identification and full erasure. What happens to your money is Section 4 above: tell us if you have unused purchased credit you'd like returned.

We may also close an account for cause. If an account is used for fraud, abuse of the credit or referral systems, or a material breach of these terms, we may suspend or close it, and in that case we are not obliged to refund a remaining balance. This is aimed at people gaming the system, not at good-faith users who make mistakes.

6. Dormant accounts

If an account goes 24 months with no activity, we may close it. Before we do, we'll email the address on the account and give you a reasonable chance to keep it open by simply signing in.

If we close a dormant account, we refund unused purchased credit rather than keeping it. This clause exists so that abandoned accounts don't sit open forever, not to collect balances.

7. If we discontinue Discernly

We have no plans to. But you're trusting a small operation with something that runs in front of a live classroom, so you deserve to know the floor.

If we decide to discontinue the service, we commit to:

• 180 days' notice to the email address on your account, so no announcement can land mid-semester and leave you without a plan.
• An automatic refund of unused purchased credit. You won't have to ask. If we're the ones ending it, returning what you prepaid is on us to initiate.
• Time to export. Your lessons, materials, and student work stay available for download throughout the notice period.

We may still suspend the service temporarily for maintenance, or discontinue individual features, without triggering this section.

8. Your content, and your students'

Nobody signs their work over to us. Three different things are involved here, and they have three different answers:

• Your teaching materials (challenges, prompts, lessons) remain yours. You grant us the permission we need to store, process, and display them in order to run the product for you, and nothing beyond that.
• Student work stays the student's own. Students hold the rights in what they write. We process it to generate feedback and run the lesson, on the instruction of whoever controls the account.
• Aggregate and de-identified information is ours to use. Once content is stripped of identifiers, we may retain and study it to improve Discernly, as described in the privacy policy.

Who controls student records depends on who the customer is. If you use Discernly under an agreement with a school or institution, the institution controls those records and we act on its instructions; that agreement governs, and requests about student data go through the institution. If you signed up on your own and pay for your own credit, you are the one directing us, and you can delete or erase your lessons yourself. Either way we act on your instruction, not on our own account.

You're responsible for having whatever permission your institution requires before using Discernly with a class. We can't know your institution's rules, and this is the one part of the arrangement we can't check for you.

9. AI providers

Discernly generates feedback by sending lesson content, including student answers, to commercial AI providers. We use more than one so that a single provider's outage doesn't stop a class. The current list is published in the privacy and data policy.

We do not use student work to train AI models, and our providers are under business terms that bar them from using it to train theirs. They do hold what we send for a limited period to check for abuse of their own systems, which the privacy policy describes. If any of that changes, we will say so on this page and in the privacy policy before it takes effect.

AI output is generated text. It can be wrong, and it is meant to inform your teaching judgment rather than replace it. Discernly does not assign grades, and you should not treat its feedback as an assessment of a student.

10. Acceptable use

Please don't use Discernly to:

• Break the law, infringe someone's rights, or violate your institution's policies.
• Upload content you don't have the right to use, or personal information beyond what a lesson needs.
• Harass, harm, or single out a student, or attempt to identify individuals in de-identified data.
• Probe, overload, or reverse-engineer the service, or use it through automated means at a scale it wasn't built for.
• Resell access, or use the platform to build a competing product.
• Manipulate the credit or referral systems, including through duplicate or fake accounts.

If something here is being abused in a way we didn't anticipate, we'll say so plainly before acting where we reasonably can.

11. Availability

We work hard to keep Discernly up during class hours, but we don't offer a formal uptime guarantee. The service is provided as it is, without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows.

If a lesson fails because of a problem on our side, tell us. Where our failure caused credit to be consumed without you getting the benefit of it, we'll return that credit.

12. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, or for lost profits or lost data, arising out of these terms.

Our total liability for any claim relating to Discernly is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. When we do, we'll change the effective date at the top of this page, and we'll notify account holders by email of any material change before it takes effect. Continuing to use Discernly after that means you accept the updated terms. If you don't, you can close your account under Section 5, and Section 4's refund applies.

14. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Michigan, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. If you're contracting on behalf of an institution whose procurement rules require different terms, get in touch and we'll work from your agreement instead.