Legal

Terms of Service

Short, and meant to be read. What you agree to when you create an account, what stays yours, and what we ask in return.

Effective: September 13, 2026. Provider: Jamnaytac LLC (doing business as eCollective), 24A Trolley Square #1752, Wilmington, DE 19806-3334. Contact: support@diydegree.org.

These terms cover the DIY Degree app at https://app.diydegree.org and in the iOS and Android stores, and this website. By creating an account or using the app you agree to them and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the app.

Who can use the app

You must be at least 13 years old in the United States, and at least 16 in the EEA and the UK unless your country sets a lower age of digital consent. We ask for your birth year at sign-up and rely on it being true. Family accounts and parental controls are not part of the app today; when they arrive, these terms will say so.

Your account

  • One person, one account. Keep your password to yourself, and tell us at support@diydegree.org if you think someone else has used it.
  • You are responsible for what happens under your account. You can see every active session in Settings and sign out any of them.
  • You can delete your account at any time from Settings. There is a 7-day window to cancel; after that it is gone.

What the app does, and does not, promise

DIY Degree helps you find existing learning material, learn it with an AI guide, and prove what you learned with a short check. The guide is an AI: it can be wrong, and it says so. A mastery record in the app is our assessment of what you demonstrated in the app. It is not an academic degree, a licence, or a credential recognised by any institution or regulator, and we make no such claim. "Degree" in our name describes an ambition, not an accreditation.

Learning material belongs to its creators

Videos, courses and articles you reach through the app are made by other people and platforms and stay under their terms. The app plays them through the provider's own embedded player or opens them in your browser; it never downloads, copies or re-hosts media, blocks advertising, or alters the player. Attribution to the creator, their licence and a link to the source appear wherever their material is shown. When a provider does not allow embedding, the app links out and tells you that you are leaving it.

Content licences

This section is pending review by counsel and may change before the effective date.

  • Your own work stays yours. Answers you write in checks and what you say to the guide are yours. We do not license them to anyone, publish them, contribute them to any open project, or use them to train any AI model. Full stop.
  • The topic graph is open. Topic definitions, prerequisite links, check questions and rubrics written by our curators or generated by AI for the app are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, the same licence as the OpenDegree project the graph is shared with. If you contribute to the graph as a curator, you grant that licence to your contribution.
  • Aggregate evidence is public domain. Per-topic statistics (how many learners attempted a topic, how many passed) are published under CC0, only when at least 50 learners are in the count and never with anything that identifies a person.
  • The app itself is ours. The software, the design and the app's own copy are owned by Jamnaytac LLC (doing business as eCollective) and its licensors, and nothing here grants you rights in them beyond using the app.

Acceptable use

Do not:

  • use the app if you are under the minimum age, or let someone else use your account;
  • try to defeat a check, extract the answer bank, or automate attempts;
  • use the guide to obtain or share content that is illegal, that harms a child, or that harasses another person;
  • probe, scrape, overload or interfere with the app or its back end, or attempt to reach data that is not yours;
  • misrepresent a mastery record as an accredited qualification.

The guide refuses harmful requests and a human reviews flagged conversations. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these rules; you may appeal by writing to support@diydegree.org.

Copyright and takedown

If you believe material reachable through the app infringes your copyright, send a notice to our designated agent, Copyright Agent, at copyright@ecollective.org (by post: Jamnaytac LLC (doing business as eCollective), 24A Trolley Square #1752, Wilmington, DE 19806-3334; by phone: 929-262-1869), with the location of the material, a description of the work, your contact details and a statement of good-faith belief. Valid notices are acted on and routed to a human reviewer. The process is also described in the Privacy Policy.

Repeat infringers. Do not post material you do not have the right to share, such as a profile image or a contribution to a topic. When we remove material you posted because of a valid notice, we record it against your account. In appropriate circumstances we close the accounts of people who repeatedly infringe copyright, and an account that is the subject of repeated valid notices is closed. You may appeal a closure by writing to support@diydegree.org.

Price

The app is free to use. There are no paid tiers, subscriptions or in-app purchases today. If that changes, the terms for paid features will be presented before you buy anything, and nothing you can do today will silently become paid.

Ending the agreement

You can stop using the app and delete your account whenever you like. We can end the agreement if you break these terms, or if we shut the service down, in which case we will give reasonable notice and a way to export your data.

Disclaimers and liability

The app is provided as is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranty that it is error-free or uninterrupted, or that learning material or the guide's statements are accurate, and our total liability to you for any claim arising from the app is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, which today is nothing. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for our own fraud or gross negligence, or affects consumer rights you have under the law where you live.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the State of Delaware, without prejudice to mandatory consumer protections where you live.

Changes

When these terms change in a way that matters we tell you in the app before the change takes effect and update the effective date above. Continuing to use the app after that date means you accept the new terms.