The small print.In plain English first.

About these terms

Lucy Learn is a trading name of Smithies Studio LLP, a limited liability partnership registered in England and Wales with number OC460734, whose registered office is at 27 Finches Close, Chepstow, NP16 5UX. In these terms “we”, “us” and “our” mean Smithies Studio LLP, and “you” means the business that signs up.

These terms, the Acceptable use policy and the Data processing agreement together make up the contract between us. Where they conflict about personal data, the Data processing agreement wins; everywhere else, these terms do.

Lucy Learn is for businesses only. By accepting these terms you confirm that you are acting for the purposes of your tutoring business, not as a consumer, and that you are authorised to bind that business. A sole trader is a business for this purpose.

The service

Lucy Learn is online software for running a tutoring practice: families and students, the timetable, attendance, invoices, payments, documents, email to families and a portal for each family. We provide the software. We do not provide tuition, and we are not a party to any arrangement between you and the families you teach.

Payments from families go to your own Stripe account, which you link from the payments page. Your Stripe account is governed by your own agreement with Stripe, and refunds, disputes, chargebacks and Stripe’s fees on it are yours, as they would be if you took payments without us.

Nothing in Lucy Learn is legal, tax, safeguarding or educational advice. Default wording, templates and settings are a starting point that you are responsible for checking against your own circumstances.

Your account

Each practice has one owner account. You must give us accurate details when you sign up and keep them up to date, particularly your email address, which is where we send anything important about your account.

You must keep your password, your authenticator app and your recovery codes to yourself. You are responsible for everything done with your account unless it was done through a failure of our security. Tell us straight away at the address below if you think someone else has used it.

The trial, your subscription and paying us

The price, the billing interval and the length of the free trial are those shown when you choose your plan. You add a card when you sign up; nothing is taken during the trial, and if you cancel before it ends you pay nothing. Unless you cancel, your subscription starts when the trial ends and renews at the end of each period, and we take payment in advance for each period.

We are not currently registered for VAT, so no VAT is charged. If we register, VAT will be added at the rate in force, and we will tell you at least 30 days before it first applies.

We may change the price of a plan by giving you at least 30 days’ notice by email. The change applies from your first renewal after the notice ends, and you can cancel before then. A price you signed up on otherwise stays yours.

You can move between monthly and yearly billing from Settings, under Subscription. Stripe charges or credits the difference for the part of the period that is left.

If a payment fails, you have seven days from the first failure to pay. After that, your practice is locked until you do: you and your families can reach nothing except, for you, the billing screen and your data. Paying unlocks it at once. Except where the law says otherwise, we do not refund part of a period.

Email sent through Lucy Learn

Lucy Learn sends email to families for you: invoices, receipts, reminders, sign-in links, paperwork and notices about your arrangements with them. It is sent through our email infrastructure, either from our sending address with your practice’s name on it or, once you have verified it, from your own domain.

You are the sender of the email your practice sends, and you are responsible for who it goes to and what it says. You must use it only as the Acceptable use policy allows: to the families you teach or who have asked you about tuition, about your dealings with them, and never for marketing.

To protect every practice’s email from being treated as spam, we may:

• set a limit on how many emails a practice can send in a day, which is lower during the trial;
• stop sending to an email address that has bounced or whose owner has marked your email as spam;
• pause your practice’s email, automatically or by hand, if its bounce or complaint rates are high, or if we reasonably believe it is being used against the Acceptable use policy; and
• refuse or remove wording that would get email from our service blocked.

Acceptable use

You must use the service in line with the Acceptable use policy, which forms part of these terms, and make sure that anyone you let use your account does the same.

Your data and our software

Everything you and your families put into the service is yours. You give us permission to hold, copy and process it only as needed to provide the service to you, and in line with the Data processing agreement. For the personal data of your families and students you are the controller and we are your processor.

The software, its design and everything we provide other than your data belong to us or our licensors. We give you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the service for your practice while your subscription lasts. You must not copy, resell or reverse-engineer it, except as the law allows. If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them freely.

Support

Write to [email protected] for help. We answer during UK working hours and aim to reply within two working days.

We can only see inside your practice if you let us. From your dashboard you can open a support window, which lasts seven days from when you open it, and close it at any time. Everything we do inside your practice while it is open is recorded in your activity log.

Keeping the service running

We will provide the service with reasonable skill and care. We cannot promise that it will always be available or free of faults, and it may be unavailable for maintenance, which we will try to do outside teaching hours and tell you about in advance where we can.

We improve the service over time and may change, add or remove features. We will not make a change that takes away something substantial you rely on without telling you at least 30 days before, and if it does, you may cancel and we will refund any amount you have paid for the time after the change.

Suspension

We may suspend all or part of your access, including your email, straight away if we reasonably believe that you are breaking the Acceptable use policy, that your account has been compromised, that continuing would put other customers, families or the service at risk, or that the law requires it. We will tell you why as soon as we can, unless the law prevents us, and lift the suspension once the reason has gone.

Ending the contract

You can cancel at any time from Settings, under Subscription. Your subscription then ends at the end of the period you have paid for, and is not renewed.

We may end the contract by giving you at least 30 days’ notice by email, and refund any amount you have paid for the time after it ends. We may end it straight away by email if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms or the Acceptable use policy and, where it can be put right, do not do so within 14 days of being asked, or if you become insolvent.

When the contract ends your practice is locked. For 90 days afterwards you can still sign in to the billing screen and take a copy of your data, and we will provide a full copy in a common machine-readable format if you ask. After 90 days we delete your practice and everything in it, as the Data processing agreement sets out. Records the law requires you to keep, such as invoices, are yours to keep; take your copy before the 90 days end.

Our liability

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else the law does not allow to be limited.

Subject to that, we are not liable for loss of profits, revenue, business, goodwill or anticipated savings, or for any indirect or consequential loss, however it arises.

Subject to the same, our total liability to you in each year of the contract, in contract, tort (including negligence) or otherwise, is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim. For a breach of the Data processing agreement or of data protection law, the limit is instead £5,000.

You will reimburse us for any claim, fine or reasonable cost we incur because email your practice sent, or anything else you put into the service, broke the Acceptable use policy or the law.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms, the Acceptable use policy or the Data processing agreement. We will email you at least 30 days before a change that affects you takes effect, and publish the new version here with its version number. If you do not agree, you may cancel before the change takes effect and it will not apply to you. A change the law requires, or one needed to stop abuse of the service, may take effect sooner.

General

We will send notices to the email address on your account, and you may send them to us at the address below. An email is received when it arrives, if it arrives in working hours, and otherwise at the start of the next working day.

Neither of us is responsible for a delay or failure caused by something outside our reasonable control. You may not transfer this contract without our written agreement; we may transfer it to a business that takes over the service, and will tell you if we do.

This contract is the whole agreement between us about the service. Nobody else has any right to enforce it. If a court finds part of it unenforceable, the rest still applies. Not enforcing a right straight away does not mean we have given it up.

This contract is governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.