Terms of Service

Last updated August 6, 2026

1. Agreement to these terms

These terms are the agreement between you and Hootly (“Hootly”, “we”, “us”) covering hootly.app and everything in it (the “Service”). By creating an account or using the Service you agree to them. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the Service.

If you are under 18 you may use Hootly only with the involvement of a parent, guardian, or school that agrees to these terms on your behalf. The Service is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly create accounts for them.

2. What Hootly does

You upload course materials — documents, slides, recordings, links, typed notes. Hootly reads them and builds study materials from them: notes with citations, flashcards on a spaced-repetition schedule, quizzes and practice exams, a study plan, and a tutor that answers questions about your materials. Generated content is produced by AI models; section 9 explains what that means for you.

3. Your account

  • You need an account. We use Google sign-in or an emailed magic link, so there is no password to lose or reset.
  • Keep your email account secure — anyone with access to it can access your Hootly account.
  • One account per person. Don’t share logins or resell access.
  • Give us accurate information, including an email address we can actually reach you at.
  • Email support@hootly.app if you think someone else has accessed your account.

4. Plans, limits, and what “free” means

Commitment — published limits

The free plan’s limits are published in full on our pricing page and are metered inside the app before you take any action that would hit one. We will not enforce a limit against you that we have not published.

At the time of writing, the free plan includes: 1 active course (deleting a course frees the slot), 3 file uploads in total, 50 AI-generated flashcards in total, 2 AI quizzes in total, 20 tutor messages per calendar month, and audio or video files up to 30 minutes each. Flashcards you write yourself are unlimited and never count against a limit. The current, authoritative list is always on the pricing page.

If we change free-plan limits, accounts that already exist keep the previous limits for at least 30 days after we email you about the change.

Reaching a limit never deletes anything and never blocks access to work you have already made. Limits gate creating new things only.

5. Paid plans, billing, and cancellation

  • Hootly Plus is $12.99 per month billed monthly, or $83.88 per year billed annually (which works out to $6.99 per month). Prices are in US dollars and exclude any taxes we are required to collect.
  • Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your full card number.
  • Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period until you cancel.
  • Students with a .edu email address get 20% off automatically — we apply it at checkout, and you never have to find or type a code.
  • If a payment fails, everything keeps working for 7 days while Stripe retries, and we email you.
  • There is no free trial that converts into a charge. The free plan is the trial, and it never asks for a card.

Commitment — cancel anytime, effective end of period

You can cancel at any time from Settings → Billing → Manage billing → Cancel subscription. Two clicks. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and you keep Plus until then. There is no retention flow, no phone call, and no email required.

Commitment — 7-day full refund, self-serve

Within 7 days of any charge you can refund that charge yourself from Settings → Billing. It is the full amount, it requires no explanation, and no human has to approve it. See our Refund Policy for the details.

When a paid plan ends, your account returns to the free plan. Nothing you made is locked or deleted — free limits apply to creating new things, never to opening, reading, or reviewing what already exists.

6. Your content

You own your content: the files you upload, the text you paste, and the notes, cards, quizzes and tutor conversations generated from them (together, “Your Content”). We claim no ownership of any of it.

You grant us a limited licence to host, store, copy, transmit and process Your Content — including sending it to the AI providers listed in our Privacy Policy — solely to operate the Service for you. That licence exists so the product can run, and it ends when you delete the content or your account.

Commitment — never used to train AI models

Your Content is never used to train, fine-tune, or improve any AI model — ours or anyone else’s. Our AI providers are contractually bound to the same restriction. We do not sell Your Content and we do not share it with other users. There is no setting to change, because there is no other mode.

You are responsible for having the right to upload what you upload. Please don’t upload material you have no permission to use, and don’t upload other people’s personal or confidential information.

7. Acceptable use

Don’t use Hootly to:

  • break the law, or infringe anyone’s intellectual property or privacy;
  • upload malware, or attempt to breach, overload, scrape, or reverse-engineer the Service;
  • resell, sublicense, or hand the Service to people outside your account;
  • generate content that is unlawful, or that harasses, defrauds, or endangers anyone;
  • circumvent plan limits, usage metering, or payment.

We may suspend accounts doing these things. Where the situation allows, we’ll warn you first and give you a chance to put it right.

8. Academic integrity

Hootly is a study tool and is deliberately not a homework machine. The tutor is built to explain, quiz, and guide rather than to produce work you would hand in, and it redirects requests to write graded work for you. You remain responsible for following your school’s academic-integrity rules. Submitting AI output as your own work may break them, and that is your call and your risk.

9. AI output: what to expect

Notes, cards, quizzes, exams and tutor answers are generated by AI models from your materials. They carry citations to the pages and timestamps they came from, so you can check them — and you should. AI output can still be incomplete or wrong. Hootly flags content it could not verify against your materials, and says so explicitly when an answer comes from general knowledge rather than your uploads. Hootly is not a substitute for your instructor, and it does not provide medical, legal, or financial advice.

10. Deleting content and your account

Commitment — 30 days to change your mind, then it’s gone

Deleted courses, notes, cards, quizzes and materials go to Trash and stay recoverable for 30 days. After 30 days they are permanently deleted from our production systems, and they age out of encrypted backups within a further 30 days. Deleting your account starts the same 30-day grace period for everything in it, and then permanently deletes it.

Commitment — export and delete are self-serve

Settings → Privacy lets you download everything you have made, and Settings → Account lets you delete your account — both without contacting support. Our Privacy Policy explains how this satisfies your rights under the GDPR and the CCPA/CPRA.

11. Our intellectual property

Hootly, the Ollie character, our name, logo, interface, and software are ours. These terms don’t give you the right to copy or reuse them beyond using the Service normally. Feedback and suggestions you send us are something we may use freely and without obligation.

12. Third-party services

The Service runs on third parties for hosting, storage, payments, AI generation, background jobs, email, analytics and error monitoring. They are all listed in our Privacy Policy. We are responsible for choosing them carefully and binding them to protect your data; we are not responsible for their own separate products, or for websites you reach through links inside your own materials.

13. Changes to the Service and these terms

We will keep building, so features may be added, changed, or removed. If we change these terms in a way that materially affects you, we’ll email you at least 30 days before the change takes effect, and you can cancel before it does. Changes to free-plan limits follow section 4.

14. Termination

You can stop using Hootly and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate an account that breaks these terms, that we are legally required to close, or that has been inactive for more than 24 months — and in the last case we’ll email you first. If we terminate an account without cause, we’ll refund the unused portion of the paid period. Sections 6, 9, 11, 15, 16, 17 and 18 survive termination.

15. Disclaimers

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that AI output will be accurate or complete. Some jurisdictions don’t allow these exclusions, in which case they don’t apply to you.

16. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, neither we nor our suppliers are liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or academic outcomes. Our total liability for any claim relating to the Service is limited to the greater of $50 or the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

17. Indemnity

You will defend and indemnify us against third-party claims arising from content you upload or from your use of the Service in breach of these terms.

18. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and the courts located there have exclusive jurisdiction — except where the mandatory consumer-protection law of your home country gives you the right to bring a claim locally, which it may. Before any of that, please email support@hootly.app: we would far rather fix the problem than argue about it.

19. Contact

Hootly — support@hootly.app for anything, privacy@hootly.app for data requests.