Terms of Service

These terms are the agreement between you and Coast when you use the Coast app (app.coast.academy) and website (www.coast.academy). Please read them before you create an account. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle your personal data.

1. Who we are

Coast is run by Rio Mauss, trading as Coast (a sole proprietorship, eenmanszaak), registered with the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (KvK) under number 42022723, Hoogbrugstraat 11, 6221 CN Maastricht, the Netherlands (“Coast”, “we”). Contact: privacy@coast.academy. Our single point of contact for users and for authorities under the Digital Services Act is privacy@coast.academy; you can write to us in English or Dutch.

2. What Coast is

Coast is a study tool. It turns the study material you upload into lessons, practice questions and answers, taught by Pedro, an AI tutor. Coast is in beta: features change often, and some may be limited, paused or removed. We work hard to keep Coast running, but we can’t promise it will always be available or free of errors.

3. Your account

• You must be at least 16 years old to use Coast.
• Give accurate details, keep your password to yourself and tell us if you think someone else has used your account. Your account is for you alone.
• You can delete your account, and everything in it, at any time under Privacy & account in the app.

4. Pedro is an AI

Pedro’s lessons, answers, practice questions and grading are generated by artificial intelligence. They can be wrong or incomplete. Check important points against your course material, which Pedro cites so that you can. Coast does not replace your lecturers or your institution’s official information, and we can’t promise any particular grade or exam result.

5. What you may upload

You may upload material for your own study that you are allowed to use in this way. For example:

• notes, summaries and other work you created yourself;
• material whose author or licence allows it, such as open educational resources;
• course material your institution has given you, where your institution’s rules allow you to use it with a study tool for your own study. Institutions have different rules on course material and on AI tools; you are responsible for checking and following them.

Do not upload:

• material you are not allowed to use, copy or store in this way;
• anything you received on condition that you keep it confidential, such as exams or answers that are not to be shared;
• other people’s personal data beyond what normal course material contains;
• illegal content, malware, or anything that infringes someone else’s rights.

You are responsible for what you upload and for having the right to upload it.

6. Your content, and the permission you give us

You keep all the rights you have in what you upload and write. You give Coast a non-exclusive, royalty-free permission to store, copy, process and transmit your content only to provide Coast to you: for example to extract its text, build your lessons and practice, answer your questions, and send the necessary parts to the AI providers listed in our Privacy Policy. This permission lasts as long as the content is in your account.

Your uploads are private to you, and they are used only to teach you:

• Coast processes each file automatically, for your account alone, to build your lessons, practice and answers. Nobody at Coast reads it unless you ask us to or a legal notice requires it.
• We do not use your uploads, or anything generated from them, to train, fine-tune or evaluate AI models, and we do not combine them with other users’ material to build datasets, courses or products.
• Our AI providers process your content under business terms that do not allow them to train their models on it.
• We do not publish your uploads or share them with other users. When you delete a file or your account, it is deleted as described in our Privacy Policy.

7. Reporting content that infringes your rights

Coast doesn’t review what students upload: their files are private, and we have no way of knowing whether a particular upload was permitted. We rely on rights holders to tell us. If you are an author, publisher, university or other institution and believe material you own was uploaded to Coast without permission, send a notice to privacy@coast.academy with:

• your name and email address, and who you represent;
• the work concerned (for example the course and the title of the material);
• anything that helps us find it (for example the name of the file or the account, if you know it);
• why you believe it infringes your rights;
• a statement that the notice is accurate and made in good faith.

We review every notice promptly, normally within 5 working days. Where it is justified, we remove the material and permanently delete it from our servers, including the text, figures and search index extracted from it; copies in our encrypted backups expire within 30 days. We tell the user what we did, why, and how they can object, and we tell you what we did. We may suspend or close the accounts of users who repeatedly upload infringing material. Because uploads are private, we do not monitor what users store; we act on specific notices. Misuse of this procedure, for example sending notices that are clearly unfounded, may lead us to stop handling notices from that sender for a period.

8. Use Coast fairly

• Coast is for your own learning. Don’t use it to cheat, for example to answer an exam, test or graded assignment where your institution does not allow AI help. Your institution’s rules on academic integrity always come first.
• Don’t try to access other users’ data, get around plan limits or security, overload the service, or scrape, copy or reverse-engineer Coast, except where the law allows.
• Don’t try to make Pedro produce illegal or harmful content.

9. Plans and limits

During the beta, Coast is free, with monthly limits on lessons, uploads, messages and practice sets. Your current limits are shown under Your plan in the app. We may change the limits; we will tell you in the app before a change that reduces them.

If we introduce paid plans, we will show you the price including VAT and the conditions that apply, including your right of withdrawal, before you buy.

10. Coast’s own content

The Coast software, design, the map and its artwork, Pedro, and the workshops and other material we provide belong to Coast or our licensors. You may use them for your own personal, non-commercial study. Lessons, answers and practice questions generated for you are yours to use for your own study; please don’t present them as official course material. If you send us feedback or ideas, we may use them without obligation to you.

11. Suspending or ending your account

You can stop using Coast and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account, or remove content, if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms, or if the law requires it. Unless the law or an urgent risk prevents it, we will warn you first. We will tell you why and how to object, and we will look at your objection in good faith.

12. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for intent or deliberate recklessness and your mandatory rights as a consumer. Within those limits:

• we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, such as lost study time, grades or opportunities;
• keep your own copies of your files; Coast is not a backup service;
• our total liability to you is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event that caused the loss, or €100, whichever is higher.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms, for example when Coast changes or the law requires it. We will tell you about important changes in the app or by email at least 30 days before they take effect. If you don’t agree, you can stop using Coast and delete your account before then.

14. Complaints and disputes

If something goes wrong, contact us first at privacy@coast.academy; we aim to reply within 14 days. These terms are governed by Dutch law. If you are a consumer living in another EU country, you also keep the protection of the mandatory consumer law of that country. Disputes go to the competent court in the Netherlands, and as a consumer you can also bring a claim before the courts where you live.

15. Contact

Support: privacy@coast.academy. Copyright notices: privacy@coast.academy. Legal and authorities: privacy@coast.academy. Post: Rio Mauss, trading as Coast, Hoogbrugstraat 11, 6221 CN Maastricht.