This page is a draft. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer yet and may change.
Optional AI math teaching and parental consent
Accepting these Terms or the Privacy Policy does not by itself enable hosted AI or verify parental consent. Hosted AI math teaching is optional. It requires a signed parent form with a separate optional AI choice reviewed by StudyBuddies, completed provider setup, and the parent enabling it for the learner.
The Privacy Policy identifies OpenAI and Google Firebase, explains the numeric learning data used and shared, and describes Buddy memory retention and the parent’s rights. We do not send the child’s name, account or learner identifiers, contacts, raw chats, pictures, recordings, or signed form to OpenAI. A parent can decline, disable hosted AI, or withdraw consent from Parent → Buddy learning, while continuing local picture lessons. Withdrawal disables hosted AI and remembering and clears Buddy learning memory and cached plans. Other progress and chats have their own controls.
AI teaching is learning support and may be wrong; it does not replace a teacher. Material changes to the processing require a new parent notice and appropriate consent before the changed processing starts.
The short version
- StudyBuddies is for children, and a parent or guardian is responsible for the account.
- Be kind in the chat. Messages are checked, and a flag can be challenged.
- The buddies and the art are ours. What your child writes is theirs.
- It is a help with learning, not a school and not a teacher.
- Plans renew until cancelled. Cancelling keeps what you paid for; there are no refunds on it.
- A parent PIN keeps the parents’ settings and anything that costs money away from children.
1. Agreeing to these terms
These terms are an agreement between you and BTF INTELLIGENCE LLC (“we”, “us”). By making an account, or by using StudyBuddies in the app or on this website, you agree to them, to the subscription terms, and to the privacy policy, which are all part of this agreement. If you do not agree, do not use StudyBuddies.
If you got the app from Apple’s App Store or Google Play, that store’s own terms apply to the download and the payment as well. Where they and these terms say different things about the same matter, the store’s terms win for that matter only.
2. Who can use StudyBuddies
StudyBuddies is made for children in pre-K to 4th grade. A child uses it with the permission of a parent or guardian, who makes the account, agrees to these terms for them, and is responsible for everything done on it.
To make an account you must be 18 or over and the parent or guardian of the child who will use it. You must not let a child under 13 use StudyBuddies without your permission recorded on the account, which the app asks for during setup.
3. Accounts
You make an account with your email address and a password, and confirm a phone number. For a child under 13 we also record your name and email as your permission for them to use it. What you tell us must be true and kept up to date.
Keep your password to yourself. What happens on the account is your responsibility, including a plan bought on it. Tell us at once if you think somebody else has got into it. Keep the parent PIN to yourself too. It is four digits, separate from the password, and the app asks for it before the parents’ area (Settings and the parent page), before a coin pack is bought, and before any link out of the app to our website. Five wrong tries lock it for 15 minutes. A forgotten PIN is never reset inside the app; write to us and we will help.
One account is for one household. Do not sell, lend or transfer an account.
4. The rules
Do not use StudyBuddies to:
- send anything hateful, sexual, violent, threatening, or otherwise unsuitable for a child;
- bully or harass anybody;
- break the law, or get help to;
- get around the checks on messages, the limits on free accounts, or the ceiling on chats;
- copy, take apart, scrape, resell or make something else out of the app, the buddies, the art, the sounds or the words in it;
- use another person’s account, or make many accounts to get an offer more than once;
- use automated tools, bots or scripts against the app or its services;
- upload anything that carries a virus or is meant to harm the service or other people.
Every message is checked before the buddy sees it. One that breaks these rules is not sent on, and is recorded as a flag. Checks make mistakes, so any flag can be challenged from the Flags page, and a flag that was a mistake stops counting at once. Asking the same flagged question again and again, or sending questions faster than answers can be read, pauses the chat for a while.
5. What is yours and what is ours
The StudyBuddies name and logo, the buddies, the games, the art, the sounds, the words and the software belong to BTF INTELLIGENCE LLC or to those who license them to us, and are protected by copyright, trademark and other laws. We give you a limited, personal, non-transferable license to use them to use StudyBuddies, on devices you own or control, and for nothing else. All other rights are kept.
What your child makes - their stories, their flash cards, their questions, any picture they choose to show the buddy - belongs to them. You give us a license to keep, copy and show it only as far as running StudyBuddies for you needs, and that license ends when it is deleted. You are responsible for what you and your child put in: it must be yours to put in, and it must keep to the rules above.
If you send us an idea or a suggestion, we may use it without owing you anything for it.
6. What the buddy is
The buddy is a computer program that uses artificial intelligence to write its replies. It can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, and it may say things a person would not. It helps a child work something out; it does not take the place of a teacher, a tutor or a parent, and you should look over anything that matters, such as homework that will be handed in.
The buddy is not a doctor, a counselor or a lawyer, and nothing it says is medical, mental-health, legal or other professional advice. If a child is in danger, or talks about hurting themselves, speak to somebody who can help right away, or call your local emergency number.
Messages sent to the buddy are sent to the artificial-intelligence provider that writes its replies, as the privacy policy describes.
7. Paying
A free account gets the first 3 worlds, 10 activities a day, and 100 messages with the buddy a week, counting the buddy’s replies. Plans unlock every world, unlimited activities and the buddy’s chat all week. Payment is not switched on yet: until it is, a plan chosen in the app is a preview and nothing is charged. The plans, their prices, first-time offers, renewal, cancelling and refunds are set out in the subscription terms, which are part of these terms. In short: every plan renews on its own until you cancel; cancelling stops the next charge and what you paid for runs to its end; a period already paid for is not refunded except in special circumstances.
Coins are earned by playing and are the only currency in the shop. Coin packs will be sold in the shop as one-time purchases, taken by the app store like a plan, and buying one needs the parent PIN. Coins, whether earned or bought, can only be spent inside StudyBuddies; a coin pack is not refunded once its coins are added, except in the special circumstances the subscription terms describe or where the app store’s own rules give a refund.
Coins, buddies, hats and everything else earned, bought or found inside StudyBuddies have no money value, cannot be cashed out or transferred, and may be changed or withdrawn as the game changes.
8. Ending
You can stop at any time, and delete the account from Settings. Cancel any plan first; deleting the account does not by itself stop a renewal at the app store.
We may pause or close an account that breaks the rules in section 4, that has not been paid for, or that we are required by law to close. We will say why, unless the law stops us. Sections 5, 6, 9, 10, 11 and 14 keep applying after the account is closed.
We may also change or stop StudyBuddies, in whole or in part. If we stop it altogether while you have a plan, the plan ends and the part of the period not yet had is refunded.
9. What we promise, and what we cannot
We work to keep StudyBuddies running, safe and correct. We cannot promise that it will never stop, never be wrong, never lose data, or fit every need. It is provided as it is and as it is available, without any warranty of any kind, expressed or implied, including any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or that it will not infringe anybody’s rights, so far as the law allows.
Stories written in Write a Story are kept only on the device they were written on.
10. Limits on our responsibility
As far as the law allows, BTF INTELLIGENCE LLC, its owners, staff and suppliers are not responsible for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for lost data, lost profits or lost goodwill, that comes from using StudyBuddies or from not being able to, however it is caused. As far as the law allows, our total responsibility to you for anything to do with StudyBuddies is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim and one hundred US dollars.
Nothing in these terms takes away rights the law gives you that cannot be given up, or limits our responsibility for anything the law does not let us limit.
11. If we are sued because of you
If somebody makes a claim against us because of something you or your child did on StudyBuddies against these terms, or because of something you put in that was not yours to put in, you agree to cover our losses, costs and reasonable legal fees that come from it, so far as the law allows.
12. Other people’s services
StudyBuddies uses other companies’ services to run - to keep sign-in details, to send a code by text, to send email, to take payment through the app stores, and to write the buddy’s replies. Their terms and privacy policies apply to what they do. Links to other websites are for your convenience; we do not control them and are not responsible for them.
13. Changes to these terms
We may change these terms. If a change matters, we will say so on this page and, for account holders, by email, at least 30 days before it takes effect. Using StudyBuddies after that date means you accept the change; if you do not, stop using it and delete the account.
14. Disputes and the law
Before starting any claim, write to us at studybuddies.support1@gmail.com with what the problem is and we will try to put it right within 30 days. The law that governs these terms, and where a dispute is heard, will be stated here once settled.
If any part of these terms is found not to be enforceable, the rest still applies. If we do not act on a breach at once, that does not mean we have given up the right to. You may not transfer this agreement to anybody else; we may transfer it to a company that takes over StudyBuddies, and will tell you if we do. These terms, with the subscription terms and the privacy policy, are the whole agreement between us about StudyBuddies.
Getting in touch
Questions about these terms: studybuddies.support1@gmail.com.
BTF INTELLIGENCE LLC
See also the subscription terms and the privacy policy.