Terms of service

Pilcrow · effective 2026-09-16

These terms are the agreement between you and Fatih Aktas ("we", "us"), an individual trading under his own name rather than through a company, for the use of Pilcrow. Installing or using the app means you accept them. If you do not, do not use the app.

How we handle your data is in the privacy policy, which is part of this agreement.

What the service does

You photograph a question on a screen. We read the question, look at the passages your phone retrieved from the course material you loaded, and produce an answer with a pointer back to the lecture or page it came from.

It is a study tool. It is meant to be used the way a worked solution or a study group is used: to find out whether you understood something, and to send you back to the part of the lecture you missed. That is why every answer names its source.

Answers are generated, and they can be wrong

Answers are produced by a language model. They are sometimes wrong — confidently, fluently, and in a way that reads exactly like a correct answer. A cited lecture does not prove the answer follows from it.

Check anything that matters. We do not warrant that any answer is correct, complete, current, or suitable for any purpose, and we are not responsible for a grade, a decision or an outcome that rested on one.

Academic integrity — your responsibility

Every school has rules about what help is allowed on what work. Those rules differ between institutions, between courses in one institution, and between a problem set and an exam in one course. You are responsible for knowing your own and following them.

We built a study tool and we describe it as one. We have no way to tell what is on the screen you are photographing — homework you are allowed help with, a graded quiz you are not, a past attempt you are reviewing, or a page of lecture slides. That judgement is yours, every time, and using Pilcrow on work where outside help is prohibited is a breach of these terms as well as of your institution's rules.

Do not use Pilcrow during an exam or any assessment where assistance is not permitted. Do not use it to circumvent proctoring, lockdown browsers, or any other integrity measure. We will not defend an academic misconduct case for you, and we may close an account we believe is being used this way.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

use the service on any assessment where outside assistance is prohibited, as above;
photograph a screen you have no right to photograph, or material belonging to someone who has not agreed to it;
upload material you do not have the right to use — the course material you load is yours to load;
share, sell or resell your account, your session or your scans;
automate, script or resell access to the service, or use it to build a competing product;
attempt to break, overload, probe or circumvent the limits on the service, or to extract the prompts behind it;
use the service for anything unlawful, or to produce content that is illegal, harassing or abusive.

Serious or repeated breaches mean we can suspend or close your account. Where we can do so fairly we will warn you first. If we close a paid account, we will support a refund request to Apple for the unused part of a prepaid term — the money is Apple's to return, not ours (see refunds).

Your account

An account is one email address, and it is personal to you. Anyone who can read that inbox can sign in as you, so keep it secure. Tell us at hello@aktasfatih.com if you think someone else has access.

You must be at least 13 to use Pilcrow, and old enough to agree to these terms where you live — otherwise your parent or guardian must agree to them for you.

You can delete your account at any time in Settings › Delete account. It is immediate and permanent. It does not cancel an Apple subscription — see below.

Subscriptions, renewal and cancellation

Subscriptions and scan packs are sold through Apple in-app purchase, billed to your Apple ID at the price shown before you confirm.
A subscription renews automatically at that price until you cancel. Apple charges the renewal within 24 hours before the current period ends.
Cancel in Settings › your name › Subscriptions on your device, at least 24 hours before the period ends. Cancelling stops the next charge; the current period runs to its end.
A term longer than a month is billed once, up front. The scan allowance still refreshes every month inside that term.
Scan packs are a one-off purchase and do not renew.
Deleting your account does not cancel your subscription. Only Apple can cancel it. Cancel first, then delete.
Unused scans do not carry over to the next month unless the plan says so, and have no cash value.
We can change prices or what a plan includes. A change to an active subscription takes effect at the next renewal, and Apple will ask you to confirm a price increase before it charges you.
A scan that fails before your photograph is read is not charged. Once it has been read the scan is used, whatever the answer turns out to be worth — the support page sets out where that line falls.

Refunds

Apple handles refunds, not us. Everything you paid, you paid to Apple, so a refund can only come from Apple. Request one at reportaproblem.apple.com, or through Settings › your name › Media & Purchases. Apple's decision is Apple's; we cannot overrule it and we cannot issue a refund on their behalf.

If Apple refunds a purchase, we remove what it granted — the subscription or the scans.

If you are in the UK or the EEA you have a statutory right to cancel a digital purchase within 14 days, which you may lose once you start using it. That right is exercised against Apple, as the seller. Elsewhere, a cancellation or refund right your own consumer law gives you is untouched by anything in these terms — see your rights as a consumer — and where such a right runs against whoever sold you the purchase, that is Apple.

If something on our side went wrong — you were charged and the app gave you nothing — write to hello@aktasfatih.com first. We would rather fix it than have you fight Apple's form.

What is yours, what is ours

Your course material, your photographs and the questions you scan stay yours. We claim no ownership of them and no licence beyond what is needed to run the service for you: to process a photograph and produce an answer for you, as described in the privacy policy.

The app, the server, the prompts and everything else that makes Pilcrow work are ours. Using the service gives you a personal, non-transferable, revocable licence to use it, and nothing else.

Answers are produced for you and you may use them. Given that a model generated them from your own material, do not assume they are original to you or that they can be copyrighted by anyone.

Availability

Pilcrow is one small service, not a utility. It will sometimes be down — for maintenance, because an upstream provider is down, or because something broke. We do not promise any level of uptime. If an outage runs long enough to eat a meaningful part of a paid period, write to hello@aktasfatih.com and we will sort it out.

We may change or discontinue features. If we discontinue the service altogether, we will give at least 30 days' notice by email, stop selling and stop renewing immediately, and support a refund request to Apple for the unused part of any prepaid term.

Liability

The service is provided "as is". To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties that are not written into these terms, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for lost grades, lost marks, academic penalties, lost data, lost profits, or any indirect or consequential loss. Our total liability to you for any claim is capped at whatever you paid for Pilcrow in the 12 months before it arose — and if you paid nothing, at US$100 or its local equivalent.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded: death or personal injury caused by our negligence, fraud, or a right you have as a consumer under mandatory law. Those rights stand whatever this section says, and the next section sets out what that means concretely.

Your rights as a consumer

A clause that takes away a right the law gives a consumer is generally not worth the words it is written in, so rather than leave the two sections above looking absolute, here is where they stop.

If you are a consumer in Ontario, Ontario's consumer protection law applies to this agreement — at the date at the top of this page, the Consumer Protection Act, 2002 — and the substantive and procedural rights it gives you apply despite any agreement or waiver to the contrary. Among other things it deems a supplier to warrant that services supplied under a consumer agreement are of reasonably acceptable quality, and it makes void any term purporting to negate or vary that warranty or the conditions and warranties the Sale of Goods Act implies. So to the extent that the disclaimer and the liability cap above would do either of those things to you, they do not, and the rest of those two sections is read subject to that Act. Nothing in these terms requires you to arbitrate a dispute or stops you joining a class proceeding; that Act does not let such a term bind a consumer, and we have not written one.

Wherever else you are, the same principle applies with your own law in place of Ontario's: a right you have as a consumer under the mandatory law of the place you live is untouched by anything here, and where that law and these terms disagree about something it covers, that law wins.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The current version is always on this page with the date it took effect. A material change is emailed to everyone with an account at least 14 days beforehand, at the email address on their account. If you do not accept a change, stop using the service and delete your account before it takes effect; if the change materially disadvantages you mid-term, we will support a refund request to Apple for the unused part.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable therein, and the courts of Ontario have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute — except that if you are a consumer, you keep the right to bring proceedings in the courts of the place you live, and the mandatory consumer law of that place still applies to you. See your rights as a consumer, which also covers what Ontario's own consumer law does to these terms.

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

Apple

Apple is not a party to this agreement and has no obligation to support the app. This agreement is between you and us alone. Apple's own Licensed Application End User License Agreement also applies to your use of the app from the App Store; where it conflicts with these terms on a matter it covers, Apple's terms win. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of this agreement and may enforce it against you.

Contact and notices

Fatih Aktas · hello@aktasfatih.com · pilcrow.aktasfatih.com

We are in Ontario, Canada. That is whose law governs these terms and whose courts hear a dispute — see governing law.

Notices under these terms travel by email. Ours to you go to the email address on your account, so keep it one you can read. Yours to us go to hello@aktasfatih.com, and count as given when we receive them. Nothing here limits a right you have to contact us, or a regulator, some other way.