Terms of Service

These Terms of Service are the agreement between you and GradeBud, Inc. (“GradeBud”, “we”, “us”) for gradebud.com and the GradeBud grading app. You accept them by creating an account or by grading a paper.

If you are accepting on behalf of a school, district or other institution, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and “you” means that institution. Where an institution has a signed order form or data privacy agreement with us, that document governs wherever it conflicts with these Terms.

GradeBud is built for educators. You must be 18 or older to hold an account, and the details you give us — name, school, email — need to be accurate so we can reach you about your grading and your bill.

An account belongs to one educator. Students do not get accounts: their work reaches GradeBud only because you upload it. You are responsible for everything done under your account, including by anyone you share credentials with, and you agree to tell us at security@gradebud.com if you think it has been compromised.

You keep ownership of everything you put into GradeBud: student work, rubrics, class and roster details, assignment instructions, and the grades and comments you approve.

You grant us a limited, non-exclusive licence to store, display and process that content for one purpose — running the service for you. That covers grading a paper, showing the result back to you, supporting you when something breaks, and keeping backups. We do not use your content or your students’ work to train AI models, and we do not sell it.

By uploading student work you confirm you have the authority under your institution’s policies and applicable law — FERPA included — to have it processed by a service provider on the school’s behalf. What we do with it in detail is set out in the Privacy Policy.

GradeBud reads a paper, scores it against your rubric and drafts feedback. That output is a proposal for a teacher to review. The app is built so nothing reaches a student until you approve it, and that division of labour is a term of this agreement, not only a design choice.

• Scores, rubric judgements and margin comments are model output and can be wrong — misread handwriting, working that was missed, a criterion applied too harshly or too kindly.
• The AI-writing likelihood is a statistical signal, not proof of anything. Do not use it as the sole basis for an academic-integrity finding, a disciplinary decision, or a grade of zero.
• You remain responsible for the grades you issue and for your institution’s obligations around grading, appeals, disability accommodations and record-keeping.

GradeBud is not your system of record. Keep grades in your gradebook or SIS as your institution requires.

Grading is metered in credits. A submission costs 4 credits per page, charged when it is queued for grading — so the price is known before the model runs. Current plan prices, credit grants and overage rates are on the pricing page and form part of these Terms.

• Monthly credits included with a plan reset at the start of each billing cycle. Unused monthly credits do not roll over.
• Credit packs you buy separately do not expire while your account is open.
• On plans with overage, grading continues past your monthly grant at the per-credit rate for your tier and is billed in arrears.

Payments are handled by Paddle, our Merchant of Record and authorised reseller. Your purchase is made with Paddle, their terms apply to the transaction, and they are responsible for charging and remitting sales tax and VAT. We never receive or store your card details.

Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel; cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. We may change prices, plan contents or the credits a page costs on at least 30 days’ notice by email, and the change applies from your next renewal.

If grading fails on our side, the credits are returned to your balance automatically — you should never pay for a paper we could not grade. A grade you disagree with is not a failure: re-running a paper is a new grading and is charged again.

For a refund of money rather than credits, write to support@gradebud.com within 14 days of the charge and tell us what went wrong. Approved refunds are processed by Paddle to the original payment method. Statutory rights to a refund, where you have them, are unaffected by anything in this section.

You agree not to:

• upload work or personal data you are not entitled to have processed by a service provider;
• upload categories of data the service is not built for — medical records, government identifiers, payment card details — whether or not they appear on a student’s paper;
• work around credit metering, rate limits or plan boundaries, or share one account across a department in place of paid seats;
• reverse engineer the service, or use it or its output to build or train a competing product or model;
• use GradeBud to harass anyone, to break the law, or for anything other than grading and giving feedback on student work.

We work to keep GradeBud up and fast, especially at the end of term, but we do not promise a particular uptime unless an institutional agreement says otherwise. We may add, change or withdraw features. If we withdraw something you depend on, or make a change that materially reduces the service, we will give you reasonable notice by email.

GradeBud runs on services we do not control: Anthropic for the model that reads and scores papers, Supabase for the database, sign-in and file storage, Paddle for payments, and Google if you choose to sign in with it. Their availability and their handling of data is governed by their own terms. The Privacy Policy lists what each one receives.

The app, the site, the rubric tooling, our prompts and everything else we built stay ours. These Terms give you a limited, revocable, non-transferable right to use GradeBud while your account is in good standing — nothing more. Feedback you send us we may use freely and without obligation.

You can stop using GradeBud at any time; cancel from the app and your plan runs to the end of the paid period. We may suspend or close an account for non-payment, for a breach of the acceptable-use section above, or where we must to comply with the law — with notice unless the situation makes that unreasonable.

Export anything you need before you close an account. After closure we delete your data as described in the Privacy Policy. Unused credits, monthly or purchased, are not refundable on closure except where the law requires it.

Except where the law says otherwise, GradeBud is provided “as is”. We disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, and we do not warrant that grading output will be accurate, complete or suited to a particular assessment. Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions, in which case they apply to you only as far as the law permits.

To the extent the law allows, neither party is liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits, lost data or reputational harm. Our total liability arising out of or relating to GradeBud is limited to the amounts you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

You agree to defend and indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from content you upload without the authority to do so, or from your use of GradeBud in breach of these Terms or of the law. This does not apply to institutions where an indemnity is prohibited by law or by public-body rules.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules, and the courts there have exclusive jurisdiction. Before filing anything, write to legal@gradebud.com and give us 30 days to sort it out — most problems are a billing mistake or a misread paper, and both are faster to fix by email. Public institutions required to litigate in their own jurisdiction may do so.

We will post any update here with a new “last updated” date. For changes that materially affect your rights we will give at least 30 days’ notice by email before they take effect. Continuing to use GradeBud after that means you accept the new version; if you would rather not, cancel and we will refund the unused part of a prepaid subscription period.

GradeBud, Inc. — questions about these Terms go to legal@gradebud.com, anything about your account or bill to support@gradebud.com.

How we handle student work and personal data is covered separately in the Privacy Policy.