Terms of service

1.This agreement

By creating an account or using PebbleYard, you accept these terms. If you are accepting them for a school, kindergarten, childcare centre or other organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and "you" means that organisation.

Our Privacy Policy forms part of these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the service.

2.Who can use PebbleYard

• The billing account holder must be 18 or over. The account that pays, holds the email address and controls the settings belongs to a parent, carer, teacher or other responsible adult.
• Child accounts sit underneath it. A child gets their own space with their own topics and scores, but no billing, no subscription controls and no account settings, and it can only be created or changed from the parent's account above it.
• Keep your own password to yourself. Sign in and hand the device over rather than giving a child your login, since your password is the one thing that would let them reach billing and settings.
• You are responsible for the children you add. By creating a child account you confirm you are that child's parent or carer, or are otherwise authorised by their parent or carer or by your institution to enrol them.
• You must not create a child account for someone else's child without that authority.

3.Your account

• Give accurate details when you sign up, and keep your email address current: it is how we reach you about billing and security.
• Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your login, other than anything caused by a failure on our side.
• Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access to your account.
• A family account is for one household. A school or centre needs an institutional arrangement, so get in touch and we will sort one out.
• Do not share, resell or sublicense access.

4.Free trial, subscription and billing

The free trial

New accounts get a seven-day free trial with full access. We do not ask for a card to start it, and it does not roll into a paid subscription by itself. When it ends, the account keeps working but paid features stop until you subscribe.

Subscribing

• Subscriptions are monthly or yearly, at the price shown on the pricing page when you subscribe. The price and currency are confirmed at checkout before you pay.
• Payment is taken by Stripe. Your card details go to Stripe, not to us.
• Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period, at the then-current price for your plan, until you cancel.
• We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before any price increase affects your renewal, so you can cancel first.

Cancelling and refunds

• Cancel at any time from the billing portal in Settings. You keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for, and are not billed again.
• We do not generally refund part-used periods, since cancelling always leaves you the time you paid for.
• Nothing here limits your rights under the Australian Consumer Law, or the equivalent consumer law where you live. If the service is faulty or not as described, those rights apply regardless of what this section says, including a refund where the law provides one.
• Deleting your account cancels any active subscription at the same time.

Failed payments

If a renewal payment fails, we will retry and email you. If it stays unpaid, paid features pause. Your data is not deleted because of a failed payment. You can subscribe again and pick up where you left off.

5.Acceptable use

Do not:

• Upload or create content that is unlawful, hateful, sexual, violent, or otherwise unsuitable for children. This is a product used by five-year-olds, and we enforce this strictly.
• Use the service to harass, bully, endanger or contact a child.
• Try to break, overload, probe or gain unauthorised access to the service, other accounts, or the systems behind them.
• Scrape, bulk-download or systematically extract our content, or use automated tools against the service other than a well-behaved search engine crawler.
• Manipulate leaderboards, forge results, or interfere with another user's experience.
• Copy, resell or redistribute our lesson content or questions outside your own household or institution.
• Reverse-engineer the service except where the law says you may.
• Impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your relationship to a child.

Report anything that breaches this and we will act on it.

6.Topics we will not write

You can ask PebbleYard to write a topic on almost anything your child is interested in, and we would rather say yes. This section is here so that the small number of times we say no are not a surprise. Please read it before you use Topic Studio: knowing where the line is beforehand is a much better experience than finding it by accident.

Every topic request is checked before it is written, and again before it can appear on a child's screen. A request we will not write is declined, and declining costs you nothing from your monthly allowance.

Subjects we will not write about at all

This is a product used by five-year-olds, and we enforce these strictly. We will not write a topic that involves:

• Hate, contempt or demeaning claims aimed at a race, religion, nationality, gender, sexuality or disability, or that rank groups of people against each other.
• Sexual content of any kind. Anything sexual involving a child is treated as the most serious thing on this page. It is refused, recorded, and where the law requires it, reported.
• Graphic violence, or instructions for making weapons or hurting people.
• Self-harm, suicide or eating disorders presented as something to learn about or try.
• How to commit a crime, take illegal drugs, or gamble.
• Attempts to interfere with the writer, meaning instructions aimed at getting around the rules on this page rather than describing a topic.

Subjects that are not wrong, but do not work here

This is the one most people meet, and it is worth explaining rather than just stating. A PebbleYard quiz question has exactly one correct answer, and a child who picks a different one is told they are wrong and the result is kept. That works for "which country has the largest population". It does not work for "which is the worst country in the world", because there is no correct answer to mark. If we wrote it, we would invent one and then mark a child wrong for disagreeing with it.

So we decline topics whose answers are a matter of opinion, taste or live dispute: the worst countries, the best or worst politician, which religion is right, who is to blame for a conflict happening now. Where the subject is a real living person, writing it would also mean teaching a child something about them that we cannot show to be true.

The test is not whether a subject is uncomfortable. It is whether a factual question with one right answer can be written about it. Countries by population, the deadliest earthquakes in history, how elections work and what different religions believe are all fine. War, slavery, disease, disasters, extinction and death are all part of what children learn, and we write about them; we simply handle them carefully for the age you chose.

Things that are not a topic

Separately from any of the above, the box asks you to describe a subject. If what you paste in is a piece of writing rather than a description of one, meaning song lyrics, a page from a book, an article, a message meant for our support team, or nothing in particular, we will ask you to tell us the subject instead. This is not a refusal and it is not held against you in any way. It costs you nothing.

The distinction is between a work and a passage from it. A topic about a poem, a novel or a songwriter is an ordinary school subject and we are glad to write it. Reproducing the poem, the chapter or the lyrics is somebody else's copyright, so we do not build content out of pasted text.

If we decline

• It costs you nothing. No topic is taken from your monthly allowance for a request we declined.
• Where we can, we suggest the nearest topic we can write. Most people who type "the worst countries in the world" wanted a geography topic, and we would rather hand them one.
• We do not tell you exactly what triggered it. Not to be unhelpful: a precise explanation is a set of instructions for getting around it, and this is a product for children.
• Repeated declines pause new topics on the account for a while. Everything you have already made keeps working. If it stays paused, get in touch and a person will look at it.

What we record, and why

We keep a record of every topic request and what was decided about it, including the wording you typed. It is used for two things and nothing else: to keep the checks working properly, and so that if an account repeatedly asks for content of the kind listed above, that is something we know rather than something we would have to reconstruct afterwards. Section 3 of the Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is stored and for how long.

We would rather not need any of this. It is here because the alternative is a product where a child could be shown something a parent never agreed to, and that is not a trade we are willing to make.

7.Topics and content you create

Building your own topics is the point of PebbleYard, so this section is deliberately generous.

• You own what you create. Lessons, questions and images you upload remain yours.
• You grant us a licence to host it: a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce and display your content strictly for the purpose of operating the service for you and the children in your account. It ends when you delete the content or your account. We do not use it to promote PebbleYard without asking you first.
• You confirm you have the right to upload it, and that it does not infringe anyone's copyright, trade mark or other rights.
• Do not put personal information about children into topic content. Lesson pages and questions are content, not a place for names, photographs, addresses or anything else identifying a child.
• Editing does not bypass the checks. A topic is checked again at the moment you make it live, so content that would not have been written cannot be typed in afterwards either. Where a check does not pass, the draft is kept rather than deleted, and it simply stays private.
• We may remove content that breaches these terms or the law. Where we can, we will tell you why.

Topics you write or generate are private to your family. They are never added to the public catalogue, never shared with other users, and never appear on a leaderboard.

If you believe content on PebbleYard infringes your copyright, email us with enough detail to identify the material and we will investigate promptly.

8.Our content and brand

The PebbleYard software, design, lesson content, question banks, name and logo belong to us or our licensors. Your subscription grants a personal, non-transferable right to use the service for your household or institution for as long as it is active. It does not transfer ownership of anything.

You may use the material with the children in your care, including in a classroom. You may not republish it, sell it, or build a competing product out of it.

9.Leaderboards

Leaderboards are opt-in and off by default. If you switch one on for a child, that child's results become visible to other users under the alias you choose. Choose an alias that does not identify the child. The alias exists so a real name never has to appear. You can switch it off at any time, and their results leave the board.

10.Schools and institutions

Institutional use may be covered by a separate written agreement; where it conflicts with these terms, that agreement wins. If you enrol children on behalf of an institution you confirm that the institution has the authority to do so, has met its own notification and consent obligations to families, and will keep pupil details accurate. We will sign a data processing agreement on request.

11.Availability and changes

We work to keep PebbleYard available, but we do not promise uninterrupted service. Maintenance, faults and problems at our providers all happen. We may add, change or remove features as the product develops; where a change materially reduces what you are paying for, we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect.

If we ever discontinue the service, we will give reasonable notice, a way to export your data, and a pro-rata refund of any period paid for and not delivered.

12.Suspension and termination

• You can leave at any time. Delete your account from Settings; it removes your data as described in the Privacy Policy.
• We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, particularly anything that puts a child at risk, or where we are required to by law. Except in serious cases we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right.
• On closure, access ends and data is deleted in line with the Privacy Policy. If we close your account for a reason other than your breach, we will refund the unused part of any period you paid for.

13.Disclaimers

PebbleYard is a learning aid. It supports schooling; it does not replace a teacher, a curriculum or a school. We take care over our lesson content and questions, but we do not warrant that every item is free of error or aligned to any particular curriculum, and content created by other users is theirs rather than ours.

Subject to the paragraph below, the service is provided "as is" and we exclude implied warranties to the fullest extent the law allows.

Our goods and services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law. Nothing in these terms excludes, restricts or modifies those guarantees, or any equivalent non-excludable right you have under the consumer law where you live.

14.Limitation of liability

To the extent the law permits, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of data beyond our reasonable control, or loss arising from your use of, or inability to use, the service.

Where our liability can be limited but not excluded, it is limited to re-supplying the service or refunding the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, whichever we choose. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

15.Your responsibility to us

If a third party brings a claim against us because of content you uploaded, because you enrolled a child without authority, or because you used the service in breach of these terms, you agree to cover the reasonable costs of dealing with it. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and let you take part in the defence.

16.Third-party services

PebbleYard relies on Supabase, Stripe, Google, Meta, Cloudflare, Resend and an AI provider, as set out in the Privacy Policy. Which AI provider we use is a configuration choice we may change; the Privacy Policy names the current one. If you sign in with Google or Facebook, that provider's own terms and privacy policy apply to your use of their account. We are not responsible for those services' own conduct, though we choose them carefully and hold them to contracts that protect your data.

Some plans require you to supply your own AI provider key. On those plans, topics are written using your own account with that provider: you contract with them directly, their terms and their pricing apply to that usage, and you are responsible for keeping the key valid. We pass the request through and do not control what they do with it. Our own safety checks always run on our provider account rather than yours, so they keep working whatever happens to your key.

17.Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top shows the current version. For material changes we will email account holders at least 30 days before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the new terms; if you would rather not, cancel and delete your account, and we will refund the unused part of any period you have paid for.

18.General

• If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
• Not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it.
• You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our consent. We may transfer ours as part of a sale or reorganisation of the business, on the same terms.
• These terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any institutional agreement, are the whole agreement between us.

19.Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Australia, and the courts of Australia have non-exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute. "Non-exclusive" matters if you are overseas: it means you keep any right you have to bring a claim in your own country, and to rely on the mandatory consumer protections that apply where you live.

Before anything formal, please email us. Almost everything is faster to fix that way.

20.Contact

General and legal: hello@pebbleyard.com

Privacy and data requests: privacy@pebbleyard.com