Terms of Use

1. Who these terms are between

These Terms of Use are an agreement between you and [OPERATOR LEGAL NAME], which operates ScholarBot (“ScholarBot”, “we”, “us”). They cover the ScholarBot website, the browser extension, and every email and feature we provide.

By creating an account or using ScholarBot, you agree to these terms and to the Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use ScholarBot.

2. Your age, and consent if you are under 18

ScholarBot is built for high-school and university students, so most of the people using it are teenagers. The age rules are therefore not a formality.

• You must be at least 13 years old. If you are under 13, you may not use ScholarBot, and you may not create an account. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13 we will delete it and the data in it.
• If you are 13 to 17, you may use ScholarBot only with the permission of a parent or legal guardian, and only if that parent or guardian has read these terms and agrees to them.
• If you are 18 or over, you agree to these terms for yourself.

Parents and guardians. If you allow a student under 18 to use ScholarBot, you are agreeing to these terms too, as a party to them, for yourself and on behalf of that student. You agree that you are responsible for their use of ScholarBot, including anything they submit to a scholarship sponsor and any payment made through their account. You may contact us at any time to see, correct or delete their data, or to close the account.

In plain English: Under 13: no. 13 to 17: your parent or guardian has to say yes, and they are signing up to these rules alongside you.

We do not ask for your date of birth and we cannot verify your age. We rely on you telling us the truth about it.

3. Your account

• Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
• You need a second factor to sign in. After your password, ScholarBot asks for a six-digit code from an authenticator app on your phone. You set this up the first time you sign in, and you cannot use the account until you do.
• Save your recovery codes. We show you a set of one-time codes when you set up the second factor, and we show them once. If you lose your phone, a recovery code is how you get back in — it removes the old phone from your account so you can set up a new one. Without your phone and without a code, we cannot restore access to your account, and your documents and drafts go with it.
• Give accurate information. Matching is only as good as what you tell it.
• One person per account. Do not share yours, and do not use anyone else’s.
• Tell us promptly if you think someone else has got into your account.

4. No guarantee of any outcome

This is the most important clause on this page, so it is written plainly rather than in capitals.

• We do not promise you will win a scholarship. Not one, not any amount, not ever.
• We do not promise any application will be accepted, considered, read, or replied to.
• We do not promise any listing is accurate, current, still open, or legitimate. Deadlines, amounts and eligibility rules are gathered from sponsors’ own pages and change without telling us. Always confirm the details on the sponsor’s own page before you rely on them. Where our record and their page disagree, their page is right.
• Every award decision belongs entirely to the sponsor. We have no say in who is selected, no influence over it, and no relationship with the sponsor that could give us one.

ScholarBot is a research and organisation tool. It is not an application service, an agent acting for you, a guarantee of anything, and it is not paid by any sponsor to promote any award.

In plain English: We help you find and prepare. Whether you win is entirely up to the people giving out the money.

5. What you submit is yours to stand behind

• You are responsible for the truth of everything submitted under your name — grades, income, essays, eligibility claims, references, everything. Submitting false information to a sponsor can cost you the award, the place it was for, and more besides.
• You must read AI-adapted text before it goes anywhere. Anything ScholarBot drafts or rewrites is a suggestion until you have checked it.
• Submitting is yours by default. Autofill fills the fields and stops; the finished form is yours to review and send.
• There are two settings that let it press submit, and both are off until you turn them on. One is in the extension (“when I press Fill, send it too”). The other is per award, on that award’s own page, and allows a background run to send that one while you are away. Turning on the second one requires turning on automatic applications in general as well, so no single switch sends anything.
• What those settings will still refuse to send. An application only goes automatically if the form needs nothing but facts already in your profile, or text you have approved. It is held back for you if any question is unanswered, if any field is one we never fill, if the form wants a document attached and you have not allowed attachments in Settings, or if any answer is long enough to be an essay that you have not approved. Essays are drafted for you from your own profile and writing samples; each draft waits on your Applications page until you press Approve, and a growing number of sponsors disqualify applications that appear to be AI-written, so read it. There is a separate setting that lets drafts go without your approval; it is off unless you turn it on. Background runs additionally only touch awards whose page a person has checked through our review queue or our verification sweep has read recently, stop within six hours of a deadline, and are capped at five applications per run.
• An application sent this way is still yours. Submitting cannot be undone, and everything in section 5 about standing behind what is submitted under your name applies exactly the same to an application ScholarBot sent because you asked it to. If you would not want something sent without reading it, leave these settings off — that is the default and nothing nags you to change it.
• Some fields are never filled automatically, under any setting — Social Security or other government ID numbers, bank details, payment card details, passwords, signatures and security questions. If a form asks for those, you type them yourself, having decided the form deserves them. Your date of birth is filled from your profile when a form asks for it, and is shown to you before anything is sent.
• Many sponsors ask whether AI was used. Answer honestly. ScholarBot will help you disclose it and will not help you conceal it.

6. AI built this, AI handles what you put in, and AI gets things wrong

ScholarBot is an AI product in three separate senses. You should know all three before you rely on anything it tells you, so none of them is tucked into a clause somewhere else.

AI was used to build ScholarBot

ScholarBot was built with heavy use of AI coding tools — the pages you are reading, the matching, the browser extension, and these terms themselves were all drafted that way, directed and reviewed by a person who remains responsible for every part of it. We tell you because software written this way can be confidently wrong in places that look finished, and that is a fair thing to know before you trust it with an application.

AI handles the information you put into it

Not everything here touches a model. Matching, eligibility checks, deadline tracking and word counts are ordinary arithmetic run on our own server, with no model call at all. But a great deal does. When you import a CV or a LinkedIn export, an AI model reads it and fills in your profile. When you ask for an essay to be adapted, an application to be prepared, or a message to a sponsor or a referee to be drafted, an AI model writes that text. And the scholarship records you are matched against were themselves read off sponsors’ pages by an AI model — the eligibility rules, the deadlines and the amounts included.

Which providers those are, exactly what is sent to them, and what they are permitted to do with it are set out in the Privacy Policy. Read that part before you put anything sensitive into an AI feature: on one provider’s free tier, content sent to it may be used to improve that provider’s own products and may be reviewed by people.

AI gets things wrong

This is the part that can cost you something, so it is written plainly. AI models make mistakes, invent facts that sound right, and misread instructions — and they do it fluently, so a wrong answer looks exactly like a correct one.

• A match can be wrong. The matching itself is arithmetic, but it runs on eligibility rules an AI model read off a sponsor’s page. Read wrongly, they can show you an award you cannot win — or hide one you could.
• An eligibility reading can be wrong. The state, the field of study, the degree level, the minimum grades, the amount and the deadline are all capable of coming back wrong. Where our record and the sponsor’s own page disagree, their page is right.
• Prepared application text can contain errors. Text drafted, rewritten or filled in for you can misstate your grades, your school, your dates or your circumstances — and it can do it in a form that is otherwise ready to send.
• An imported profile can be wrong. A CV read by a model can land the wrong graduation date or the wrong home state in your profile, and that then feeds everything you are matched to. Check your profile after an import.
• So check anything before you send it. Every application, every email, every essay, and the award’s own rules on the sponsor’s page. It goes out under your name and not ours, section 5 applies to it in full, and a submitted application cannot be recalled.

In plain English: AI helped build this, AI reads what you put into it, and AI is wrong often enough that you have to check. Read anything before it leaves in your name, and confirm an award’s rules on the sponsor’s own page.

What AI output here is not

• Treat every AI output as a draft to check, never as a finished answer.
• Nothing ScholarBot produces is financial, legal, tax, immigration, educational or career advice, and we are not your adviser of any kind. For advice about your situation, speak to a qualified person — for financial aid, start with your school counsellor or the sponsor’s financial aid office.
• AI features may be unavailable, rate-limited, or changed at any time.

The essay coach will not write your essay

The coach asks you questions, points at what is missing, and measures what you have written. It will not produce prose for your essay, and if it starts to, we stop the reply before you see it. That is deliberate.

The reason is yours, not ours. A growing number of scholarship providers screen for AI-written essays and disqualify applications that appear to be one, and some state it as a condition of entry. An essay written for you and submitted under your name puts your application — and in some programmes your eligibility for future rounds — at risk. An essay you wrote with help does not.

You are responsible for what you submit, including checking the provider’s own rules on AI assistance before you use any AI feature here on their application. Where a sponsor’s stated policy is available to us we show it, but we cannot see every rule and we do not warrant that what we show is current or complete.

7. Sponsors, other websites, and scams

• Scholarship listings link out to sites we do not run and do not control. Listing an award is not an endorsement of the sponsor, their terms, their privacy practices or their honesty.
• Once you are on a sponsor’s site, their terms and their privacy policy apply, not ours.
• ScholarBot checks listings for common scam signals and checks links against Google Safe Browsing. Both checks are best-effort and are not a warranty. A link that is not flagged has not been declared safe — new fraudulent pages are usually too recent to be on anyone’s list.
• A legitimate scholarship never asks you to pay to apply. If an award asks for a fee, a deposit, your bank details or your Social Security number, stop, and tell us.

Any dealings you have with a sponsor are between you and them. We are not a party to them and are not responsible for them.

8. The browser extension

The optional ScholarBot extension reads the application form on the page you have opened and fills in fields from your profile. It cannot decide for itself what a field means — every judgement about what is sensitive happens on our server, not in the extension.

It submits a form only if you have turned that on, under the conditions in section 5. With the setting off, which is how it ships, it fills the fields and stops.

Separately, if you switch on automatic applications, the extension can run in the background on a schedule rather than only when you press Fill — that is the point of the feature, and it is why the limits in section 5 exist. It only ever visits the application pages of awards already on your own list.

If the extension attaches a document to a form, that attachment is recorded in a log you can read, so you can always find out what was sent where. A background run records what it did the same way, so there is always a record you did not have to be awake for. You remain responsible for the finished form.

9. Email you send through ScholarBot

ScholarBot can help you write to sponsors and to people you are asking for a recommendation letter, and can send from your own connected Gmail account. Those messages come from you, are your responsibility, and must be genuine individual correspondence.

Anyone who asks not to be contacted again goes on a suppression list that cannot be overridden. Sending limits apply, to protect your own email address from being treated as spam.

10. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• scrape, crawl, bulk-download or bulk-export the scholarship catalogue or any other part of ScholarBot;
• use bots, scripts or other automation against the service, or send automated volumes of requests;
• use anyone else’s identity, credentials, documents or personal information, or impersonate anyone;
• resell, sublicense, rent or redistribute ScholarBot or anything you get from it, or use it to run a service for other people;
• work around plan limits, rate limits, paywalls or access controls, or use multiple accounts to get more than one plan’s allowance;
• probe, scan or test the security of the service, or try to reach another user’s data;
• submit false information to a sponsor, or use ScholarBot to help anyone else do so;
• upload anything unlawful, malicious, or that you do not have the right to upload;
• use ScholarBot to break any law, or any sponsor’s own rules.

We may suspend or close an account that does any of this, and we may do so without notice where the conduct is causing harm.

11. Your content stays yours

Your essays, documents, and profile belong to you. You give us only the permission we need to run the service for you: to store your content, show it back to you, adapt it when you ask us to, and send it to the third parties listed in the Privacy Policy so a feature you asked for can work. That permission ends when you delete the content or your account.

We do not sell your content, publish it, show it to other users, or use it to train AI models. Note that the AI providers we send text to have their own terms — see the Privacy Policy, which says plainly what those are.

12. Plans, prices and automatic renewal

ScholarBot has a free plan and three paid plans. Paid plans differ from Free, and from each other, in how much you can do per month and in the size of award you are matched to.

• Free — US$0, and it is a two-month trial rather than an open-ended plan. It runs for two months from the day you create your account, and after that you need a paid plan to keep preparing applications. Nothing you have saved is deleted when it ends. Your first month includes 5 extra prepared applications on top of the monthly allowance.
• Bronze — US$25 per month, or US$300 per year.
• Silver — US$55 per month, or US$605 per year.
• Gold — US$75 per month, or US$750 per year.

Paying for a year does not save the same amount on every plan. Bronze costs the same either way. Silver saves one month and Gold saves two, which is why the yearly prices above are not all the monthly price times the same number.

Three of the four plans limit the size of award you are matched to, and we would rather you heard that from us than discovered it. Free is matched to awards worth up to US$2,500, Bronze up to US$10,000 and Silver up to US$50,000; Gold has no limit. On Free, the 5 extra applications in your first month reach to US$5,000. The exact numbers are on the pricing page and are what the software actually enforces.

Free’s two months are counted from signup, as above.

The current plans, prices and monthly allowances are always the ones shown on the pricing page. Prices are in US dollars and exclude any tax that applies where you are.

Automatic renewal — please read this part

• Paid plans renew automatically. A monthly plan renews every month and a yearly plan renews every year, on the same date, until you cancel.
• Your payment method is charged automatically each time, at the then-current price for your plan, with no further action by you.
• It continues until you cancel. There is no end date and no automatic stop.
• You can cancel at any time, from the billing page in ScholarBot, which opens our payment processor’s own cancellation portal. You can also cancel by emailing us at the address at the bottom of this page. Cancelling takes a couple of clicks and we do not put obstacles in the way.
• Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. You keep the paid features until then, and you are not charged again afterwards.

In plain English: If you buy a paid plan, we keep charging you every month (or every year) until you tell us to stop. You can stop it whenever you like, and you keep what you paid for until that period ends.

Refunds

Payments are generally not refundable, including for a period you have started but not used, and we do not give partial refunds when you cancel mid-period. We will refund a payment that was taken in error, a duplicate charge, or a charge for a period in which the service was substantially unavailable. If the law where you live gives you a refund or cancellation right, that law applies and nothing here takes it away.

Price changes

We may change prices. If the price of your plan changes, we will tell you by email at least 30 days before the change applies to you, and the new price only takes effect at your next renewal. If you do not want to pay it, cancel before that date.

Failed payments

If a renewal payment fails, we keep your paid features for a short grace period while the payment is retried, rather than cutting you off at the first failure. If it keeps failing, the account moves back to the Free plan.

If payments are unavailable

Paid plans are switched on. If our payment processor is ever unconfigured or unreachable on this deployment, no card is collected and nothing is charged, and the Free plan is the whole product until it is working again.

13. Availability and changes to the service

We may change, add or remove features, and we may set or change usage limits. We try to keep ScholarBot running but we do not promise any level of uptime, and it may be unavailable at any time, including during a deadline.

Do not rely on ScholarBot as your only record of a deadline that matters to you. Keep your own copy of anything you would be upset to lose.

14. Ending things

You can stop using ScholarBot at any time, and you can delete your account and its data from Settings. Deleting removes your uploaded files and your data as described in the Privacy Policy, and it cannot be undone.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you break these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we stop offering the service. If we shut ScholarBot down, we will give you reasonable notice and a chance to get your essays and documents out first, unless circumstances make that impossible.

Sections 4 through 7 and 15 through 20 survive the end of this agreement.

15. Disclaimer of warranties

ScholarBot is provided “as is” and “as available”, with all faults and without warranty of any kind. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express, implied and statutory, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, accuracy, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that ScholarBot will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that any listing, deadline, eligibility rule, match, scam check, link check or AI output is accurate, complete or current.

In plain English: We give you the tool as it is. We are not promising it is perfect, always up, or always right — because no honest person could.

16. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost opportunities, lost or missed scholarships or awards, lost data, loss of goodwill, or the cost of substitute services — whether or not we were told such damages were possible, and regardless of the legal theory.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to ScholarBot is limited to the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) US$50.

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages, so parts of the two sections above may not apply to you. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

In plain English: If something goes wrong and it is our fault, what you can recover is capped at what you paid us in the past year, or US$50 — whichever is larger. A missed scholarship is not something we can be made to pay for.

17. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend and hold harmless [OPERATOR LEGAL NAME] and anyone working with it from any claim, loss, liability, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your use of ScholarBot, anything you submit through it, your breach of these terms, or your violation of any law or of anyone else’s rights. If you are a parent or guardian agreeing to these terms for a student under 18, this applies to their use as well as your own.

In plain English: If someone sues us because of something you did with ScholarBot, you cover our costs.

18. Governing law and where disputes are heard

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of [STATE], United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Subject to the arbitration section below, any dispute that is not arbitrated must be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in [COUNTY, STATE], and you and we each consent to those courts.

19. Arbitration, and giving up class actions

Please read this section carefully. It affects how disputes between you and us are resolved, and it limits your right to go to court or to take part in a class action.

• Arbitration. Except as set out below, you and we agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to ScholarBot or these terms will be resolved by binding individual arbitration, not in court and not before a jury. The arbitration will be administered by [ARBITRATION PROVIDER] under its consumer rules, and may be conducted by documents, by phone or video, or in the county where you live.
• Class action waiver. You and we each agree to bring claims only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, consolidated, collective or representative action. An arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over any form of class proceeding.
• Small claims. Either of us may bring an individual claim in a small-claims court instead, if it qualifies there.
• Talk to us first. Before starting arbitration, email us a description of the dispute and give us 30 days to try to resolve it. Most things are fixable this way.
• You can opt out, and it costs you nothing. If you do not want to be bound by arbitration or the class action waiver, email us at the address at the bottom of this page within 30 days of first agreeing to these terms, saying that you opt out and giving the email address on your account. Opting out changes nothing else about your account, and we will not treat you differently for it.
• If the class action waiver is found unenforceable, the whole of this arbitration section does not apply and disputes go to the courts named in section 18.

In plain English: If we fall out, we sort it out one-on-one through arbitration rather than in court, and not as part of a group lawsuit. You can say no to this within your first 30 days by sending us one email, and nothing bad happens if you do.

20. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change is material, we will change the effective date at the top and tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use ScholarBot after that date means you accept the new terms. If you do not accept them, stop using ScholarBot and delete your account.

21. The rest

• Severability. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, that part is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your account or these terms to anyone else. We may transfer them to a successor if the service changes hands, and will tell you if that happens.
• Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about ScholarBot, and replace anything said earlier about it.
• Notices. We will contact you at the email address on your account. You can contact us at the address below.