Terms

Who runs Distill

Distill is operated by Distill Software LLC, 539 W. Commerce St #8337, Dallas, TX 75208, United States. These terms are a contract between you and us.

Accepting these terms

By creating an account or using Distill, you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you don't agree, please don't use Distill.

Who can use Distill

You need to be at least 13 to hold your own Distill account. Between 13 and 16, a parent or guardian has to set the account up and approve it through an emailed link before it works. We ask for a birth year at signup to work this out, and nothing more precise.

You also confirm you're not barred from using our service under the laws that apply to you, and that any information you give us is accurate.

Your account

You can create an account with an email and password, or by signing in with Google. You're responsible for keeping your login credentials secure and for what happens under your account. Tell us at support@studydistill.com if you think someone else has access to it.

Accounts are for one person. Don't share, sell, or transfer yours.

What you may and may not do

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use Distill for studying, for as long as you follow these terms. That license covers our software and the service. Your rights in the course material itself are separate and broader, because they come from the source textbook's license rather than from us. Those are set out below.

Please don't:

• Point bots, crawlers, or automated tools at the service in a way that burdens it. This one is about server load, not about the material: your rights in the course content are set out below and we don't restrict them.
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or try to extract our source code or the prompts behind course generation.
• Work around hearts, paywalls, rate limits, or any other restriction in the product.
• Post anything unlawful, or anything you don't have the right to post.
• Harass anyone, or misuse the report feature against other users or our team.
• Interfere with the service, probe it for vulnerabilities without asking us first, or try to access another person's account or data.

We may remove content or suspend accounts that break these rules.

Subscriptions and billing

Some courses are free for anyone to add to their library. Others are part of the paid catalog and need a subscription to add. Each course says which it is before you add it.

A free account also has a limited number of hearts for practice, which refill over time or can be topped up with coins earned in the app.

A paid subscription removes the heart limit and opens the full catalog. Subscriptions are billed monthly or yearly through Stripe, our payment processor. We don't store your card details.

If a course was free when you added it and later becomes part of the paid catalog, it stays in your library and you keep your progress in it.

Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period, at the plan price then in effect, until you cancel. You can cancel anytime from Settings, and your subscription stays active through the period you have already paid for. Cancel before a period ends to avoid the next charge.

Payments are non-refundable, including for a billing period you have only partly used, unless the law where you live requires otherwise. Canceling stops the next charge rather than refunding the current period, and you keep full access until that period ends.

If you are in the UK or EU, you have a statutory right to cancel a digital purchase within 14 days. Contact us at support@studydistill.com and we will refund it.

If we change prices, the new price applies from your next renewal, and we'll tell you before it takes effect. You are responsible for any taxes that apply to your purchase.

Where the courses come from

Every course is built from a textbook that's public domain or openly licensed: the kind universities publish free for anyone to read, adapt, and share. Each course credits the original work and its license on its page and in the reader.

A Distill course is an adaptation of that book, generated and fact-checked against the source text. It is not the original book itself.

Your rights in the course material

Those source licenses come with the material, and they come with you. Nothing in these terms takes away a right the source license gives you. We couldn't do that even if we wanted to: Creative Commons licenses forbid imposing extra restrictions on the licensed material, so any term of ours that tried would simply be void.

In practice that means you may copy, adapt, and redistribute the underlying material on the license's own terms, with attribution. Every course page names its source and license and links to the original, which is free to download and usually the easier place to get it than reading it off our pages.

Where a course comes from a ShareAlike source, our adaptation carries that same license, so the course text itself is yours to reuse on those terms. Where a course comes from a source that doesn't require ShareAlike, the underlying material is still free under its own license, and the parts we added stay ours.

What the source licenses do not cover: the Distill name and logo, our software, our design, and other people's accounts and data. Those are ours or theirs, and your rights to them are only the ones granted earlier in these terms.

Content you create

Flashcards, notes, and anything else you create in the app stay yours. We don't claim ownership of them.

To actually run the service, you give us permission to store, copy, display, and process your content for the purpose of providing Distill to you: showing your notes back to you, syncing them between your devices, backing things up. This permission is limited to running and improving the service, ends when you delete the content or your account, and doesn't let us sell your content or show it to other users unless you deliberately share it.

You're responsible for what you write in the app, and you confirm you have the rights to it.

If we've published your work wrongly

We choose the textbooks and we publish the courses, so a licensing mistake is ours, not something a user did. Every course records which book it came from, under which license, and when we obtained it. That record is public on our licensing page, so you can check what we claim about a book before writing to us.

If you believe we've used your work without the right to, email support@studydistill.com and tell us which work it is, which course or page it appears on, how to reach you, and why you believe our license is wrong. Please confirm you're the rights holder or authorized to act for them.

What happens then: we check the claim against our acquisition record for that book. If there is real doubt, the course comes down while we check rather than after. If we can't show we had the right to publish it, it stays down and we tell you what we found. There is no user to pass your complaint to and nobody else's account to act on, because the decision to publish was ours.

Newsletter

You can opt in to occasional email updates at signup or from Settings. Every newsletter email includes an unsubscribe link that works immediately, without needing to log in. Service emails, like a receipt or a notice that your account is about to be deleted for inactivity, are sent whatever your newsletter setting, because they're about your account rather than marketing.

Accuracy of course content

Course explanations and questions are generated from source textbooks and fact-checked against them before publishing, but this process isn't infallible. If something looks wrong, use the report button on that item. That's what it's there for. Distill is a study aid, not a substitute for instruction or professional advice in any field a course covers.

Other companies' services

Distill links to and relies on services we don't control, including Stripe for payments, Google for sign-in and ads, and the sites where source textbooks are published. Their own terms and privacy policies govern your use of them, and we're not responsible for them.

Distill is provided as is

We work hard to keep Distill accurate and available, but we provide it “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We don't promise the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that course content will be free of mistakes. Some places don't allow these exclusions, in which case they may not apply to you.

Limits on our liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Distill Software LLC isn't liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or exemplary damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or the cost of substitute services, arising from your use of or inability to use Distill.

Our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or twenty US dollars. Nothing here limits liability that can't be limited by law.

Indemnity

If someone brings a claim against us because of how you used Distill, what you put into it, or because you broke these terms, you agree to cover our reasonable losses and legal costs from it.

Ending your account

You can delete your account at any time from Settings. This removes your progress, content, and personal data from our systems, subject to anything we're legally required to keep. Cancel a paid subscription before deleting, so billing stops.

We may suspend or terminate an account that violates these terms. We also delete accounts that go unused for 2 years, after emailing you a warning first. The Privacy Policy explains how that works.

Sections that by their nature should outlast your account do: the permission you gave us to store content while you used the service, our ownership of Distill itself, the disclaimers, the liability limits, the indemnity, and this paragraph.

Disputes and governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. If you live somewhere whose consumer-protection laws give you rights that a contract can't remove, those rights still apply to you.

If something goes wrong, please email us first at support@studydistill.com. Most things are faster to fix that way than through a court. If we can't resolve it, disputes go to the state or federal courts in Dallas County, Texas, and we each agree to that venue.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the product changes. We'll update the date at the top, and for changes that meaningfully affect your rights we'll give notice in the app or by email before they take effect. Continuing to use Distill after a change means you accept the updated terms.

The small print

These terms, plus the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between you and us about Distill. If any part is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect. If we don't enforce something right away, we haven't given up the right to. You can't transfer these terms to anyone else; we may transfer them to a successor if the business is sold, and we'll tell you if that happens.

Contact

Questions about these terms: support@studydistill.com.

California residents may contact the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs at 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or by phone at (800) 952-5210.