Terms of Service — Fairgrade LLC

Effective: 1 October 2026
Version: 2026-10-01 (first version)

Before you read

• These Terms are a contract between you and Fairgrade LLC. You accept them by clicking "I accept" when you first sign in, and again when a new version takes effect; using the Service is acceptance too. We record each click.
• If you use Fairgrade through your university or college, your institution is our Customer and you are a user under its account.
• Students: Part C is short, and it is the part that matters to you.
• Our Privacy Notice explains what we do with personal data. It is not part of the contract, but these Terms require us to follow it.

Part A — Everyone

A1. Who we are

Fairgrade LLC ("Fairgrade", "we") exists to make collective intelligence trustworthy. Its engine, the Marciano Method, is original research that weights every judgement by the demonstrated credibility of the person making it. Fairgrade for Education, at app.fairgrade.com (the "Service"), is the method's first deployment: peer assessment in higher education in which students assess one another's work under an instructor's rubric, the method weights the reviews, and the instructor makes every final decision. These Terms cover the Service and the website at www.fairgrade.com.

Fairgrade LLC is a Delaware limited liability company. Contact: info@fairgrade.com.

A2. Who these Terms bind, and how you accept them

• Customer: the institution, department or instructor that holds a Fairgrade account (a "workspace"). On the Free, Instructor and Department plans the instructor who creates the account is the Customer and confirms they are authorised to act for their institution. Organization and Enterprise customers sign an order form; where it conflicts with these Terms, the order form wins.
• Staff users: instructors, teaching assistants and administrators invited into a workspace. They accept Part A and are bound by Part B through the Customer.
• Students: people enrolled in a class. They accept Parts A and C only, and are never party to the Customer's contract.

You accept these Terms by clicking to accept them in the Service, and also by using the Service. We keep a record of each click: the version, the time, and the network address and browser used. When a new version takes effect you are asked to accept it at your next sign-in, and using the Service after the effective date is acceptance of it as well.

You must be at least 16 years old. If you are under the age at which you can enter a contract where you live, your institution's authority to enrol you is what allows your use. We do not knowingly provide the Service to anyone under 13.

A3. Your account

• Sign-in is through our identity provider, using a password, Google, your institution's single sign-on, or a launch from your institution's learning management system ("LMS"). Keep your credentials to yourself and tell us at info@fairgrade.com if you think they have been used by someone else.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account until you tell us otherwise.
• Staff users are unlimited on every paid plan. Adding a teaching assistant or administrator is never a charge.

A4. Acceptable use

You may use the Service only for its educational purpose and only in ways that are lawful where you are. You must not:

• try to identify an anonymous reviewer or author, or help anyone else to;
• share another person's submission, review or grade outside the class it belongs to, except as your institution's rules allow;
• upload content you have no right to upload, including other people's personal data without authority, malware, or material that is unlawful, defamatory or harassing;
• scrape, crawl, mirror or bulk-download the Service, or probe or disrupt it, other than through interfaces we publish for that purpose;
• reverse engineer the Service or the Marciano Method, or use the Service to build a competing product;
• resell access, or use the Service for anyone other than your own institution's classes;
• impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your role or institution.

If we believe an account is being used in breach of this section we may suspend it while we look into it, and we will tell the Customer.

A5. Content and ownership

• Your institution owns its education records. Submissions, reviews, grades and feedback created in a workspace belong to the Customer or, as between the Customer and its students, as the institution's own rules provide. Fairgrade claims no ownership of any of it.
• Instructors keep their materials. Rubrics, assignment briefs and reference files remain the instructor's or the institution's.
• Our licence to operate. You grant Fairgrade the right to host, copy, process, convert, display and transmit content in the Service solely to provide, secure and support it, including sending it to the subprocessors listed in the Privacy Notice. This licence ends when the content is deleted under the retention rules in Part B, except for copies in backups for up to seven days.
• No training on your content. We do not use your content to train AI models, and we contractually forbid our AI providers from doing so.
• De-identified data. We may use data from which every identifier has been removed and which cannot reasonably be linked back to a person, in aggregate, to operate, calibrate and improve the Service and the method, and to publish research about the method. We never publish anything that identifies a person, a class or an institution without written permission. An Enterprise order form may narrow this.
• Fairgrade's property. The Service, the Marciano Method, our software, designs and documentation are ours or our licensors', and are protected by copyright, trade secret and other laws. "Fairgrade" and the Fairgrade logo are registered trademarks of Fairgrade LLC. You receive a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service under these Terms and nothing more.
• Feedback. If you send us suggestions about the Service, we may use them without obligation to you. You keep any rights in them; you give us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use them.

A6. Artificial intelligence

AI on Fairgrade is a second opinion beside human judgement, never the source of a grade. Where an instructor enables an AI feature for an assignment, the content described in the Privacy Notice is sent to the AI provider named on our subprocessor page, without any identifier of the student. AI output is labelled as such and may be wrong, incomplete or biased; it is the instructor's responsibility to review it, and no grade on the Service is final until an instructor makes it so. We do not use AI to detect whether a student used AI. The current list of AI features is on our page "How Fairgrade uses AI".

A7. Privacy and data protection

The Privacy Notice at /privacy describes what personal data we collect and why, and we will handle personal data as it says. For Customers, the Data Processing Addendum at /dpa (Part B) is part of the contract. Under the U.S. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) we act as a "school official" under the institution's direct control, with a legitimate educational interest, and we use education records only to provide the Service.

A8. Availability and changes to the Service

We aim to keep the Service available at all times and publish live and historical availability at status.fairgrade.com, but we do not promise uninterrupted service unless an order form says so. We may change, add or remove features; where a change removes something material we will give the Customer reasonable notice. We may suspend the Service to protect it or its users, and will restore it as soon as we reasonably can.

A9. What we do not promise

• Educational outcomes. The Service helps instructors assess and students learn. We make no promise about any grade, academic standing, admission, credential, employment or other outcome, and the Service is not a substitute for an instructor's judgement or an institution's academic advising.
• As is. Except as expressly stated in these Terms or an order form, the Service is provided as it is and as available, and we disclaim all other warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, to the extent the law allows. Some places do not allow this; there, our warranties are limited to the minimum the law requires.

A10. Liability

• What we are not liable for. To the extent the law allows, neither Fairgrade nor its members, officers, employees or suppliers are liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill, arising from these Terms or the Service, however caused.
• The cap. Our total liability under these Terms is limited to the amount the Customer paid us for the Service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or one hundred US dollars if you have paid nothing. An order form may set a different cap.
• What the cap does not touch. Nothing limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything that cannot be limited by law, and nothing in these Terms takes away rights a consumer has under the law of the country where they live.

A11. Indemnities

• By the Customer. The Customer will defend and indemnify Fairgrade against third-party claims arising from content its users upload, from its users' breach of these Terms, or from its lack of authority to provide the personal data it provides.
• By Fairgrade. Fairgrade will defend and indemnify the Customer against third-party claims that the Service, used as permitted, infringes a patent, copyright or trademark, and will pay resulting damages and costs finally awarded or agreed. We may modify or replace the Service to avoid infringement, or, if that is not reasonably possible, end the affected subscription and refund prepaid fees for the unused period.
• Each party will notify the other promptly of a claim and cooperate.

A12. Disputes

1. Talk first. Write to info@fairgrade.com describing the dispute and what you want. We will do the same to you. Both sides will try to resolve it for 30 days before any formal step.
2. Institutions and non-US users. Any dispute not resolved informally goes to the state courts of New Castle County, Delaware, or the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, and both sides accept that jurisdiction. Consumers in the European Union or the United Kingdom keep the right to bring a claim in their own country's courts under their own consumer law.
3. Individuals in the United States who are not acting for an institution. Any dispute not resolved informally is settled by binding individual arbitration under the rules of a nationally recognised arbitration provider, and not in court, except that either side may bring an individual claim in small-claims court or seek an injunction to protect intellectual property. You and Fairgrade each waive any right to a jury trial and to take part in a class or representative action. You may opt out of this arbitration clause by emailing info@fairgrade.com within 30 days of first accepting these Terms.
4. Governing law. The law of the State of Delaware, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, except where the law of your country gives you protections that cannot be taken away.
5. Time limit. A claim must be brought within one year of the event that gives rise to it, where the law allows such a limit.

A13. Changes to these Terms

Each version carries its effective date. For a material change we publish the new version at least 30 days before it takes effect, email every Customer's owners and administrators, and show a notice inside the Service until it is live. You are asked to accept the new version at your next sign-in after the effective date, and using the Service after that date is acceptance as well; if you do not agree, stop using the Service, and a Customer may end its subscription under Part B without penalty. Changes required by law may take effect sooner.

A14. General

• Whole agreement. These Terms, the Data Processing Addendum and any order form are the whole agreement about the Service and replace earlier versions. Order of precedence: order form, Data Processing Addendum, these Terms.
• Assignment. The Customer may not assign the contract without our written consent, not to be unreasonably withheld for a transfer to a successor institution. We may assign it to a successor to our business with notice.
• Severability and waiver. If a clause is unenforceable the rest stands, and a clause is read down to the extent needed. A failure to enforce is not a waiver.
• Notices. To us: info@fairgrade.com. To you: the email on your account.
• Force majeure. Neither side is liable for delay caused by events outside its reasonable control.
• Export and sanctions. You will not use the Service where or in a way that U.S. export or sanctions law forbids.
• Publicity. We will not name a Customer publicly without its written permission.

Part B — Customers: plans, billing, and your data

B1. Plans and what they include

Plans, prices and what each includes are set out on our pricing page and, for Organization and Enterprise, in the order form. The class is the unit of every plan. Each class carries its own allowance of students, AI credits and storage, stated for your plan in the Service; an unused allowance in one class does not offset another. Archiving a class frees its slot from the next billing period. Prices are in US dollars and exclude taxes; where we must collect tax, we add it.

B2. Usage charges

Four things can be charged as usage on paid plans, at the rates shown on the pricing page: students beyond a class's allowance, AI credits beyond it, classes beyond the plan's slots (an on-demand class, which brings its own allowance), and storage beyond a class's allowance. Usage is invoiced monthly on every billing interval. The Service shows each class's position against its allowance, and the workspace receives spend alerts at the thresholds an administrator sets; nothing is stopped by default, and an administrator may opt into a hard ceiling. The Free plan has no usage charges and stops at its allowance.

B3. Payment

• Self-serve plans are paid by card through Stripe, our payment processor, which holds your card; we never see it. Enterprise customers are invoiced under the order form.
• Fees are billed in advance for the interval you choose (monthly, semester or annual) and usage in arrears each month.
• If payment fails we will tell you and retry. While a payment is outstanding we may restrict paid features and new activity in the workspace until it is settled, and after the retention steps in B5 close the workspace. We never delete data because a payment failed.

B4. Changing, cancelling and refunds

• Going up is immediate, prorated for the rest of the interval.
• Coming down waits for renewal. A downgrade or a reduction takes effect at the end of the current interval, and access to features and capacity above the new plan is disabled then; nothing is deleted.
• Cancel any time from Settings. The subscription ends at the end of the paid interval. Usage already incurred is invoiced.
• Refunds. Fees are non-refundable except where these Terms say otherwise, where the law requires, or where we end the contract other than for your breach, in which case we refund prepaid fees for the unused period. The Free plan exists so you can try the Service before paying.

B5. Term, closing a workspace, and what happens to data

• The contract runs while the workspace exists.
• Closing a workspace starts a 30-day window in which the owner can change their mind. The workspace then becomes read-only, and is permanently deleted twelve months after closure, or right after the 30 days if the owner asks. Every member is told where to get an export 30 days before deletion.
• Free workspaces with no activity for twelve months are closed the same way, with notice at eleven months; any sign-in cancels it.
• Downgrades never delete anything.
• We may end the contract for a material breach not cured within 30 days of notice, or immediately for a breach of A4 that endangers other users; and we may close the Service as a whole on 90 days' notice, in which case we refund prepaid fees for the unused period and give you your data first.
• Billing records and legal-acceptance records are kept as long as the law requires.

B6. Your responsibilities

• You confirm you may enrol your students and upload their data, and that you have given them the notices your law and your institution require. We provide the Privacy Notice to help.
• You are responsible for your users' compliance with these Terms, and for the settings you choose: who is enrolled, what is assigned, whether AI features are on, what results students see.
• Your LMS and single sign-on are yours; we connect to them as you configure and are not responsible for what they send or fail to send.

B7. Data Processing Addendum

The Data Processing Addendum at /dpa is part of this contract for every Customer. It sets out our obligations as processor, the security measures we keep, the subprocessors we use and how we tell you about changes, how we help with requests from your students, and what happens to data at the end. Enterprise customers may negotiate its annexes in the order form.

Part C — Students

You are here because your instructor or institution enrolled you. Your institution is responsible for your data on Fairgrade, and we work for it; the Privacy Notice explains what that means and what we collect, which is only what the class needs.

Your part is short:

1. Submit your own work, or work produced as your instructor's rules allow. Your instructor decides whether and how AI may be used in an assignment, and Fairgrade does not try to detect it.
2. Review honestly. Your reviews are weighted by how well they track the eventual outcome, so careless or strategic reviewing lowers your own influence, and your reviewing may count toward your grade as your instructor decides.
3. Keep reviews anonymous. Do not try to work out who reviewed you or whose work you are reviewing, and do not share a peer's work or your review of it outside the class.
4. If your name appears in your work and your instructor has turned on anonymous grading, we warn you before peers see it. Removing it is up to you; the check is a safeguard, not a censor.
5. Your grade is your instructor's. The Service produces a weighted consensus and, if enabled, an AI second opinion; the instructor finalises every grade and is the person to ask about it.
6. Your data rights run through your institution. Write to it first; we will help it answer. You can delete your own login in Settings, which removes your identity from the Service but leaves your work attached to an anonymous record so your class's records stay whole.

Everything in Part A applies to you as well; Part B does not.