Terms of Service
These Terms form the agreement between you and SmartKourse for use of our marketplace, learner accounts, creator tools, and related services.
Effective date: July 25, 2026Last updated: July 25, 2026
Published by SmartKourse
1. Counsel review notice
This document is an implementation draft written to match how the SmartKourse product actually behaves. It has not been finalized by qualified counsel, and it is not legal advice. Several provisions — in particular the dispute-resolution, warranty, liability, and indemnity language — are flagged below as requiring attorney review before SmartKourse relies on them publicly. Where this document and the product disagree, please tell us at Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration) so we can correct the discrepancy rather than enforce inaccurate text.
2. Acceptance of these Terms
By creating an account, browsing course listings, purchasing access, publishing a course, or otherwise using SmartKourse, you agree to these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, do not use the service. If you accept these Terms on behalf of an organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization.
These Terms incorporate by reference the Privacy Policy, Refund Policy, Acceptable Use Policy, Content Policy, Copyright and DMCA Policy, Cookie Policy, and Reviews and Endorsements Policy. Instructors are additionally bound by the Instructor Terms and the Payout Disclosure.
You are entering into a contract electronically. Clicking an acceptance control, completing checkout, or continuing to use the service has the same effect as a written signature, to the extent permitted by applicable electronic-signature law.
3. Who we are
The service is operated under the name SmartKourse. The operating legal entity name, entity type, state of formation, and business address are pending owner configuration and will be published here before public launch. Until then, please use the contact form on this website for all correspondence, including legal notices.
A published mailing address is pending owner configuration. Written notices should be sent through the contact form until an address is posted.
4. What SmartKourse is (and is not)
SmartKourse is an online marketplace for digital educational courses. Independent instructors — not SmartKourse — create, describe, price, and are responsible for the courses listed here. SmartKourse provides the storefront, account system, payment integration, access control, and creator tooling that make those listings purchasable and viewable.
- Everything sold is digital. There are no physical goods, no shipping, and no delivery addresses.
- Course delivery is typically streaming video, written lesson material, and links to external resources supplied by the instructor.
- SmartKourse is not a school, university, training provider, accreditor, or employment agency, and does not award academic credit.
- SmartKourse does not author, verify, or endorse instructor course content, and does not independently verify instructor credentials or claims.
5. Eligibility and age requirements
You must be at least 13 years old to hold a SmartKourse account. Users between 13 and 17 may use the service where a parent or legal guardian is involved, consents to these Terms, and is responsible for any purchases made from the account. Payment methods must belong to, or be used with the permission of, an adult account holder.
We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under that age has created an account, contact us at Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration) and we will investigate and remove the account where appropriate.
You may not use SmartKourse if you are barred from doing so under applicable law, or if we have previously terminated your account for policy violations.
6. Accounts and credentials
You agree to provide accurate registration information, to keep it current, and to verify your email address when asked. You are responsible for activity that occurs under your account and for keeping your password confidential. Accounts are personal to you and may not be shared, sold, or transferred.
Authentication tokens are stored in your browser rather than in server-side session cookies, so signing out or clearing site data ends the session on that device. Notify us promptly at Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration) if you suspect unauthorized access.
Unverified accounts may be removed after a period of inactivity. We may refuse registration, reclaim usernames or creator handles, or require re-verification where we reasonably suspect impersonation or abuse.
7. Electronic communications
We send transactional email that is necessary to operate your account: address verification, password resets, purchase and subscription notices, refund decisions, policy changes, and security or service alerts. These messages are part of the service and generally cannot be opted out of while your account is active.
SmartKourse does not currently operate a marketing email program, advertising pixels, or a newsletter platform. If that changes, we will describe it in the Privacy Policy and provide an opt-out.
8. Course access and your license
When you buy access to a course, you receive a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to view that content for your own non-commercial educational use, through the SmartKourse service, for as long as the applicable entitlement is valid. You are not buying ownership of the content or any right to redistribute it.
Access duration depends on the plan shown at checkout. A one-time (lifetime) plan grants access for as long as SmartKourse continues to offer that course and your account remains in good standing. A subscription grants access only while the subscription is paid and active.
Instructors may edit, reorganize, or update lessons over time, and may retire a course. Because lesson video is frequently delivered through third-party embeds controlled by the instructor, availability of any specific lesson can change. We do not guarantee that a particular lesson, file, external link, or feature will remain available indefinitely.
9. Sharing, resale, and circumvention
You agree not to:
- Share your account credentials or course access with anyone else.
- Download, record, screen-capture, mirror, or re-upload course content except where an instructor expressly offers a downloadable file for your personal use.
- Resell, sublicense, rent, or redistribute course access, or use content to build a competing course or training product.
- Circumvent paywalls, entitlement checks, rate limits, or other technical access controls, or use automated tools to scrape the service.
Violations may result in immediate revocation of access without refund, in addition to any other remedies available to us or to the affected instructor.
10. Prices, currency, and taxes
Prices are set by instructors and displayed on the course page and at checkout. The total charged, the billing interval for recurring plans, and the currency are shown before you confirm payment. Prices may change prospectively; a change never alters a charge you have already authorized.
You are responsible for any taxes, duties, bank fees, or foreign-transaction or currency-conversion charges your payment provider applies. Where tax is calculated and collected at checkout, it will be itemized before you pay. The merchant-of-record and tax-collection characterization for this marketplace is one of the items pending counsel and accounting review.
11. One-time purchases
A one-time purchase charges your payment method once and grants the access described on the course page. Access is normally provisioned immediately after Stripe confirms the payment. If payment succeeds but access does not appear, contact Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration) with your account email and the approximate time of purchase so we can reconcile the record.
Cancellation and refund rights for one-time purchases are described in section 15 and in the Refund Policy.
12. Subscriptions and automatic renewal
Some courses and plans are sold as recurring subscriptions. Subscriptions renew automatically at the interval and price disclosed at checkout, and your payment method is charged each period until you cancel.
- You may cancel at any time from your account. Cancellation stops future renewals.
- Cancellation does not automatically refund the billing period you have already paid for. Unless we grant a refund on review, access continues until the end of that paid period and then stops.
- If a renewal payment fails, your subscription may enter a past-due state. Access may be limited or revoked until payment succeeds or the subscription ends.
- Price changes to an ongoing subscription apply only to future billing periods and only after notice.
California and other jurisdictions impose specific automatic-renewal disclosure and cancellation-mechanism requirements. Our compliance with those statutes is part of the pending counsel review noted in section 1.
13. Discount codes and promotions
Discount codes may be limited by expiry date, redemption count, eligible course, or per-account use, and may be withdrawn at any time before redemption. Codes have no cash value, cannot be applied retroactively to a completed purchase, and may not be combined unless expressly stated. We may void discounts obtained through error, automated abuse, or unauthorized distribution, and may reverse the associated access.
14. Payment processing by Stripe
Payments are processed by Stripe. Card details are collected and handled by Stripe; SmartKourse does not receive or store full payment card numbers. We store transaction records and Stripe reference identifiers needed to fulfill access, reconcile accounting, and handle refunds and disputes. Notably, SmartKourse does not store a Stripe Customer ID against your account.
Your use of Stripe is also subject to Stripe’s own terms and privacy policy. If Stripe declines, holds, or reverses a transaction, SmartKourse may be unable to grant or maintain access regardless of your intent to pay.
15. Refunds and cancellations
The Refund Policy governs in full. In summary:
- For one-time (lifetime) purchases, you may file a cancellation or refund request within 30 days of purchase.
- Having already watched lessons does not by itself disqualify a request filed inside that window, though the extent of consumption is one factor in review.
- For subscriptions, cancelling ends future renewals and does not by itself refund the current paid period.
- Approved refunds are returned to the original payment method through Stripe.
16. Chargebacks and payment disputes
If something goes wrong with a purchase, contacting us first is usually faster than a bank dispute, and we would rather fix the problem directly. That said, exercising your chargeback rights is not itself a violation of these Terms, and we do not penalize good-faith disputes.
What a chargeback does cause, mechanically, is a reversal of the payment. While a dispute is open, related access may be suspended, because the underlying funds are no longer with us. If the dispute resolves in your favor, the purchase is treated as refunded. We may restrict accounts only where we identify fraud or a pattern of abuse — for example, disputes filed on payment methods that are not yours, or repeated disputes after full content consumption combined with attempts to repurchase and re-dispute.
17. Certificates of completion
Where an instructor has enabled them, SmartKourse may issue a certificate confirming that you completed the lessons in a course on this platform. A certificate is a record of course completion only. It is not accredited, is not a professional license, diploma, or credential, does not certify competence, and confers no academic or regulatory standing. Whether a course offers a certificate is shown on the course page.
18. Instructors are third-party sellers
Instructors are independent third parties. They are not employees, agents, partners, or joint venturers of SmartKourse, and nothing in these Terms creates an employment or agency relationship. Instructors alone are responsible for the accuracy, quality, legality, and fitness of their content and for statements they make about it.
Disputes about course quality, accuracy, or instructor conduct are primarily between you and the instructor. SmartKourse may assist, apply its policies, remove content, or issue a refund under the Refund Policy, but does not act as guarantor of any instructor’s performance.
19. Instructor fees and payouts
Learners pay SmartKourse; SmartKourse then transfers the instructor’s share through Stripe Connect using separate charges and transfers. SmartKourse retains a platform fee of 20% of each qualifying charge or $5, whichever is greater. Stripe processing fees are allocated to the creator share in our internal accounting, and a creator’s net for a transaction is never negative.
Instructor transfers are normally held for 30 days after the qualifying sale so that refunds and disputes can settle. Creators outside the United States and Canada should confirm Stripe support for their country on Stripe’s supported currencies list; joining when a corridor is unsupported means the creator pays transfer and conversion fees. Full detail is in the Payout Disclosure and Instructor Terms.
20. Your content and the license you grant
“Your content” means anything you submit: course material, lesson text, uploaded images, profile and creator-profile information, reviews, ratings, comments, and support messages. You keep ownership of your content.
You grant SmartKourse a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, adapt for formatting and delivery, publish, publicly display, and transmit your content for the purpose of operating, securing, and promoting the service and delivering it to the audiences you have chosen. This license lasts as long as your content is on the platform, and survives afterward only to the extent needed for backups, legal retention, dispute records, and copies already distributed to authorized purchasers.
You represent that you have the rights necessary to submit your content and to grant this license, and that your content does not infringe anyone’s rights or violate applicable law.
21. Reviews, ratings, and comments
Reviews must reflect your genuine experience. Incentivized, traded, fabricated, or instructor-authored reviews of their own courses are prohibited, as is suppressing negative reviews. The full rules, including how we handle removal requests, are in the Reviews and Endorsements Policy.
22. Acceptable use
The Acceptable Use Policy is part of these Terms. Among other things, you may not use SmartKourse for unlawful activity, harassment, fraud, malware distribution, unauthorized access, abusive scraping or load, spam, or misrepresentation of identity or payment ownership.
23. Content standards and restricted topics
Course listings must satisfy the Content Policy, which describes prohibited categories, restricted categories that require care and disclosure, and the educational discussion that remains expressly permitted. Payment-network and processor restrictions also apply to what may be sold here.
24. Copyright, DMCA, and repeat infringers
We respond to valid copyright notices and counter-notices under the process in the Copyright and DMCA Policy, and we terminate repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances. Note that designation of our agent with the U.S. Copyright Office is an outstanding owner task; until that registration is complete, our safe-harbor posture should not be treated as fully established. We still accept and act on notices in the meantime.
25. SmartKourse intellectual property
The SmartKourse name, logo, interface, design, source code, and compilation of listings are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by intellectual property law. These Terms grant you no right to use our branding, to copy the interface, or to extract the platform’s data other than the limited access expressly described here.
26. Feedback
If you send us product suggestions, we may use them without restriction, obligation, attribution, or compensation. Please do not send us information you consider confidential.
27. Third-party services, embeds, and links
The service relies on third parties including Stripe for payments, Vercel for hosting and image storage, a managed PostgreSQL database, an SMTP provider for transactional email, and YouTube for embedded lesson video. Courses may also link to external resources chosen by instructors.
We do not control third-party services and are not responsible for their content, availability, or practices. Interacting with an embed or following an outbound link subjects you to that provider’s terms and privacy policy.
28. Privacy, cookies, and data
The Privacy Policy explains what we collect and why, and the Cookie Policy covers browser storage. Authentication uses HttpOnly sk_access / sk_refresh cookies (not localStorage), and lesson progress markers are kept primarily in your browser’s local storage rather than as a server-side learning record. Clearing site data can therefore erase progress markers, though your purchased entitlements remain on our servers.
29. Accessibility
We are working toward WCAG 2.2 Level AA (aspirational target; not a claim of full conformance). We do not claim full conformance. See the Accessibility Statement for our current posture and how to report a barrier.
30. Availability, changes, and beta features
The service is provided on an as-available basis. We do not offer an uptime commitment or service-level guarantee. We may add, change, suspend, or discontinue features, and may release features labeled beta or experimental that can change or be withdrawn without notice. Planned and unplanned downtime, maintenance, and third-party outages will occur.
31. Moderation, enforcement, and appeals
We may review reported content and take action including warning, editing metadata, unpublishing, removing content, limiting features, holding payouts, or suspending accounts. We do not commit to a review timeframe, to reviewing every report, or to any particular moderation outcome, and we do not represent that moderation will catch every violation.
If you believe an enforcement action against your account or content was mistaken, reply to the notice you received or contact Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration) with the details and we will look at it again.
32. Suspension and termination
You may stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or terminate access for violation of these Terms or incorporated policies, for legal or payment-network risk, for fraud or chargeback abuse, or where required by law.
Where the circumstances reasonably allow it, we will give notice and an opportunity to cure. If we terminate your account without cause, we will refund amounts you paid for access you can no longer use. If we terminate for cause, any refund is handled under the Refund Policy. Provisions that by their nature should survive termination — including licenses granted for distributed content, disclaimers, liability limits, and indemnity — survive.
33. Account deletion and data retention
You can request account deletion. Deleting an account ends access to purchased courses. We retain transaction, tax, dispute, moderation, and security records for as long as needed to meet legal and accounting obligations even after deletion, as described in the Privacy Policy.
34. Disclaimers and no outcome guarantees
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the service and all content are provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, accuracy, and non-infringement.
We specifically make no promise that:
- any course will produce a job, income, promotion, business result, exam pass, certification, or other outcome;
- instructor content is accurate, current, complete, or suitable for you;
- the service will be uninterrupted, timely, error-free, or secure;
- security measures will prevent every unauthorized access — no online service can promise that, and we do not.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.
35. No professional advice or credentialing
Course content is educational information, not professional advice. Nothing on SmartKourse is medical, legal, tax, accounting, financial, investment, engineering, or psychological advice, and no instructor-learner relationship on this platform creates a professional or fiduciary relationship. Consult a qualified licensed professional before acting on anything you learn here, particularly regarding health, safety, money, or legal rights.
36. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, SmartKourse and its owners, officers, and personnel will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost goodwill, or business interruption, arising out of or relating to the service, even if advised of the possibility.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amounts you paid to SmartKourse for the affected transaction in the twelve months before the claim arose, or one hundred U.S. dollars.
Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Counsel review is required for this section.
37. Indemnification
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless SmartKourse and its personnel from claims, damages, liabilities, and reasonable legal costs arising from your content, your use of the service, your violation of these Terms or applicable law, or your infringement of another party’s rights. We will notify you of any such claim and may participate in the defense with counsel of our choosing. Counsel review is required for this section.
38. Dispute resolution (counsel review pending)
Please contact us first at Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration) — most issues are resolved informally, and we ask for a good-faith attempt to resolve a dispute directly before formal proceedings begin.
SmartKourse does not currently impose binding arbitration, a class-action waiver, a jury-trial waiver, or a shortened limitations period. Those provisions are disabled in our configuration and are not in effect. Draft language of that kind must be reviewed and approved by qualified counsel, and any future adoption would be announced as a change to these Terms with an opportunity to review it before it applied. Do not treat this section as agreement to arbitrate.
39. Governing law and venue
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules. The parties submit to the state and federal courts located in the county of our principal place of business (specific county pending owner configuration). Mandatory consumer-protection rights available to you in your place of residence are not displaced by this section.
40. Notices
We give notice to you by email to the address on your account, by in-app notice, or by posting to the service. You give notice to us at Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration). Legal notices sent by post can be delivered to the address published in section 3 once it is posted.
41. Export controls and sanctions
You represent that you are not located in, and are not a national or resident of, a country or territory subject to comprehensive sanctions, and that you are not on any restricted-party list. You may not use the service in violation of export control or sanctions laws. Payment providers may independently block transactions on that basis.
42. Force majeure
Neither party is liable for delay or failure to perform caused by events beyond reasonable control, including natural disasters, war, civil unrest, labor disputes, epidemics, governmental action, network or power failures, and outages at hosting, database, email, video, or payment providers.
43. Assignment
You may not assign or transfer these Terms or your account without our written consent. We may assign these Terms to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets, provided the successor is bound by equivalent obligations.
44. No third-party beneficiaries
These Terms create rights only between you and SmartKourse. No other person may enforce them, except that our payment and infrastructure providers may rely on the protections granted to them where those protections are expressly stated.
45. Severability, waiver, and entire agreement
If a provision is held unenforceable, it is limited or severed to the minimum extent necessary and the remainder stays in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. These Terms, together with the incorporated policies, are the entire agreement between us about the service and replace prior understandings about it. Headings are for convenience only.
46. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. When we do, we will change the “Last updated” date at the top and, for material changes, provide additional notice by email or in-app message before the change takes effect. Changes are prospective. Continued use after the effective date means you accept the updated Terms; if you do not accept them, stop using the service and contact us about your existing purchases.
47. How to contact us
- General and account support: Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration)
- Legal notices: Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration)
- Privacy requests: Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration)
- Copyright notices: Contact form on this website (email address pending owner configuration)
- Or use the contact form, which is monitored by platform staff.